Apple customers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden and Poland can now use the company’s iPhone self repair program, launched in the United States last year. After years of resisting user repairs, Apple has finally moved to accommodate anyone who wants to fix devices themselves, and now it’s welcoming even more do-it-yourself repairers into its program.
European countries have been added as drop-down options on the company selfservicerepair.com website, such as the Keeper reported on Tuesday. It’s unclear at this point if and when Apple plans to add more countries.
The program allows users to order certified genuine replacement parts and repair tools for their Apple products (currently limited to iPhones and Macs), and offers free manuals to help them perform repairs. The company also encourages users to return used and damaged parts to be reused if possible and recycled if not.
The launch of the Self Service Repair program followed years of lobbying by the Right To Repair campaign and was initially met with widespread positivity. It quickly became apparent, however, that it didn’t offer the kind of welcoming, intuitive user experience we’ve grown accustomed to from Cupertino: rather, as YouTube host and human guinea pig Luke Miani discovered, the tools were expensive and intimidating and the manuals they were confused.
The whole thing, we suspect, will cost you even more time and stress than moneyand we’re not the only media wondering if Apple has decided to do it deliberately sabotage its program to nudge users into more profitable first-party and third-party repairs.
Still, it’s nice to have the option, and some of our readers outside the US can now try the program for themselves.
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