When you walk into an Apple Store to repair something on your device, you are given a fairly high quote. Even as high as the price of a new computer. What do you do? We recorded with a hidden camera what the Apple ‘Genius’ had recommended, then visited an ‘unauthorised’ repair shop to get a second opinion. The results were very telling and we discovered a pattern. This is a film about Apple’s business practices and those who are fighting them. We had heard a lot of complaints about how difficult it is to get anything fixed at the Apple Store, and decided to put this to the test as well as to hear the views of those in the business. The hidden camera encounter in the store is interesting, but we also hear from two key people: Louis Rossmann who operates an ‘unauthorised’ repair shop in Manhattan and Kyle Wiens who runs a website that helps customers fix Apple devices on their own. A big part of the story is how Apple gets in the way of anyone who wants to repair Apple products outside the Apple ecosystem. Finally we examine the issue of planned obsolescence - how problems with the life of batteries led Apple to decide to slow down iPhones without communicating this properly to customers.
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