The high price of going small

THIN (AND LIGHT) IS MOST DEFINITELY ‘IN’ WHEN IT COMES TO TECH, BUT THAT CAN INVOLVE A BIG HIDDEN COST WHEN IT COMES TO SUPPORT — FROM SOME MANUFACTURERS, AT LEAST.

THE AGE OF the smartphone has ushered in a lot of positive effects for the technology industry as a whole and launched numerous new segments and categories, from tablets to smart speakers to Internet of Things gear to hackable delights like the Raspberry Pi, and much more besides.

One thing it hasn’t improved, however, is general repairability. Most TechLife readers will likely know that, in a desktop PC, if your CPU fan, graphics card or other component up and dies, provided you’ve got a bit of technical know-how (or just good Google skills), you can usually just whip the side off the case and swap the dud part out for a replacement.

While mobile devices (and I’m including laptops under that classification) have always been a trickier affair, the super-slim gear that’s now commonplace in the market is nigh impossible for end-users to fix. And most of us are likely OK with that — provided we know this going in and, moreover, that device-makers have reasonably-priced repair schemes in place.

No matter how you feel about the actual repairability of its products, it’s hard to deny that Apple is the industry-leader when it comes to the latter, particularly when fixing the most common killer of smartphones, tablets and laptops — a dead battery. Even in Apple devices that can’t have their batteries easily replaced — like newer iPads, iPhones and MacBooks, for example — Apple will usually exchange your dead or dying device for a flat fee, ranging from $119 to $289. That information is openly disclosed on Apple’s website.

Microsoft, by comparison, doesn’t openly state the cost of an out-of-warranty Surface Pro battery replacement on any of its sites — and, as with iPads, Microsoft’s policy is to exchange dead Surfaces for refurbished ones, rather than actually fixing them — but owners who’ve had it done quote it as costing around US$350 to US$500.

That’ll undoubtedly make some shoppers think twice about who they buy a device from. If companies are going to follow Apple down the tough-to-repair road, they need to do a better job of taking care their customers when it comes to long-term service, particularly battery replacements.