Apple customers in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, and Poland can now use the company’s iPhone self-repair program, which launched in the U.S. last year. After years of resistance to user repairs, Apple finally moved to offer some accommodation for anyone who wishes to fix devices themselves, and it is now welcoming even more DIY repairers into its program.
The European countries have been added as dropdown menu options on the company’s selfservicerepair.com website, as the Guardian reported Tuesday. It’s not clear at this point if and when Apple plans to add more countries.
The program lets users order certified genuine replacement parts and repair tools for their Apple products (limited to the iPhone and Mac at present), and offers free manuals to help them perform the 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 pressure from the Right To Repair campaign and was initially greeted with widespread positivity. It quickly became apparent, however, that it did not offer the sort of intuitive, welcoming user experience we have grown used to from Cupertino: rather, as YouTube host and human guinea pig Luke Miani discovered, the tools were expensive and intimidating and the manuals were confusing.
The whole thing, we suspect, will cost you even more time and stress than money, and we’re not the only media outlet to wonder if Apple decided to deliberately sabotage its own program to push users into more lucrative first- and third-party repairs.
Still, it’s nice to have the option, and some of our readers from outside the US can now try the program for themselves.
