“A 19th Century labour model behind a 21st Century logo”. David Tyler investigates the iPhone and Apple’s planned obsolescence racket.
“Of course it’s expensive,” chant the Apple faithful, polishing the virtual halo, “but it just works.” Until it doesn’t work, of course, which is not a bug but a design feature as we will see later.
It just works? And others don’t? The Mac mantra may be the most successful four-word con in consumer branding. Certainly, as with all the best cons, the mark repeats it for free. Endlessly.
What just works, in fact, is the business model,
a trillion-dollar churn engine dressed up as a lifestyle, in which the device in your pocket is designed to die politely, on schedule, and be buried in a drawer beside its ancestors.
We all know the drawer. Most Australians have one, a reliquary of retired handsets, each a king’s ransom in today’s money, entombed with its knot of proprietary cables. And unused ear-buds.
Mine currently has a vacancy, because the newest candidate, a six-year-old iPhone 12 Pro Max, is in Sydney, where Apple’s repair team has spent twelve days performing a forty-minute battery replacement.
Online, all is sublime bliss. The status page even serves up the corporate haiku: “Repair in progress.” Progress towards what? When do I get it back? That’s above the repair team clerk’s pay grade. Yet somehow, you are made to feel should be grateful for the favour.
Busted. The battery is the plan
Who would sabotage its own product? Apple was caught red-handed. Whilst the fanbase treats planned obsolescence as a conspiracy theory,
our courts pretend to take it a little more seriously.
In 2017, Apple admitted it had been quietly throttling the processors of iPhones with ageing batteries. Not telling anyone, mind. Just letting millions of users conclude their phones had grown old and slow. Time to rock on down to the Apple Store for a newie, when a modest battery swap would have got your Centrelink app working again.
Battery-gate cost Apple a settlement of up to $US500 million in the United States and a 25 million euro fine in France, where regulators hate companies who degrade products by stealth. Apple admitted no wrongdoing, naturally.
A Companies never do.
They merely pay nine figures for the privilege of not having done it. Yet nine figures is not even a slap on the wrist for a company which has pocketed four billion dollars in profit in the twelve days it has had my iPhone.
Even at the arse-end of the world, as Paul Keating quipped, we’d already seen the house style. In 2018 the Federal Court fined Apple $9 million after the ACCC caught it telling hundreds of Australians that letting a third-party repairer touch their iPhone, even to fix a cracked screen, voided their right to a remedy when Apple’s own software update bricked the device.
“Error 53,” the company called it. The Australian Consumer Law called it something else, and the court agreed. Your statutory rights, it turns out, don’t evaporate because a technician in Parramatta rather than Cupertino held the screwdriver.
It takes Apple thirty-nine minutes to make nine billion dollars.
The upgrade treadmill
Best of all is the way your iPhone is carefully crafted to fail you in a few years. It’s also a standover sales tactic: the operating system “upgrade,” an offer you can’t refuse, delivered free, insistent, and calibrated for hardware you don’t own yet. Or ever really afford.
Each new OS runs like a hot knife through butter on this year’s chip and like cold treacle on a four-year-old one. Apps follow the OS; the OS follows the silicon; and one morning your perfectly functional device can no longer open your banking app.
The choice architecture has done its work. Nobody forced you to upgrade. The environment simply became uninhabitable, the digital equivalent of a landlord who never evicts you, just turns off the heating floor by floor.
Apple, which won’t ship chargers in the box to save the planet, reckons it will be carbon neutral by 2030. The world generates over 60 million tonnes of electronic waste a year (the drawer, multiplied by civilisation) and the company whose design philosophy is all glued-up, serialised and DIY repair-proof would like credit for the missing wall plug.
FIFA should give them a Trump prize for their world-beating BS.
What the phone actually costs
Now for the arithmetic the marketing conceals. The current top-of-the-line confession box, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, starts at A$2,199 and runs to A$3,799 if you want the big storage. Sign up through a telco and the payment plan quietly walks the total past A$3,100 over two years.
Apple’s own site will happily Afterpay you into one from around $92 a month, which is the modern way of saying you cannot afford it.
Economists call the real price “opportunity cost”.
Householders call it the stuff you went without. At A$2,199, the mug customer has traded away roughly ten weeks of groceries for a family; or the dental crown they have been postponing for two years while chewing on the other side; or an entire year of electricity bills, paid in full, heater guilt-free through a Victorian winter.
That is the real transaction: molars, dinners and warmth, exchanged for a slab of glass whose headline feature over last year’s slab is a camera bump you will use to photograph your cat.
And this is not a luxury purchase made by people with luxury money. It is a mass product, where we are herded into payment plans and buy-now-pay-later schemes precisely because most of us cannot pay now. The genius of the operation is that going without the phone feels impossible while going without the crown feels normal.
The repair theatre
But surely the service makes up for it? The marble stores, the Geniuses, the promise of expert care? Here is what the promise looks like from the customer’s end: $109 to $169 for an official battery job, a prepaid box, and then silence. The phone doesn’t go to a Genius. It goes to a depot: an industrial repair mill of the kind Apple and every other electronics giant contracts globally, where devices are units, units are quotas, and quotas are king.
Read the workers’ own testimony. Peek at life inside the global depot-repair contractors, and the marble evaporates. Technicians describe workforces built on temp labour hired at low “training” wages, some waiting years for the permanent Plum jobs dangled at interview. Read about managers who care about one number: units per shift.
One reviewer put it bluntly, reporting that quantity is praised more than quality. Others tell of being pushed to keep the line moving whatever the job actually needs, standing all shift, buying their own tools. This is not a workshop; it is piecework with an electric poker; a soldering iron.
It’s a nineteenth-century labour model behind a twenty-first-century logo,
staffed almost totally by the young, the migrant and the replaceable: the workers least placed to push back.
That, dear reader, is where your two-thousand-dollar phone spends its spa retreat: in a queue governed by quota mathematics, awaiting a worker paid to be fast, not careful, who may well fit your six-year-old handset with a part that has itself lived a previous life.
“Repair in progress.” Twelve days and counting. In that time, Shenzhen could have built the phone from sand.
The cult, and the children
Which brings us to the last ugly fact, the one polite technology journalism tiptoes around. Apple is a cult. Not a cult in the loose sense of a club of keen customers; a cult in the operational sense.
It has scripture (the keynote, delivered twice yearly from a stage lit like a tabernacle), a martyred founder whose turtleneck relics adorn a thousand hagiographies, pilgrimage (the launch-day queue, camped overnight on concrete for the privilege of paying first), and, most tellingly, the cult’s signature move: it marks the outsider.
Ask any teenager about the green bubble. In Apple’s messaging system, texts between the faithful glow a serene blue; a message from an Android user arrives stained green, stripped of the read receipts and effects that signal full membership.
In American surveys, close to nine in ten teenagers now carry iPhones, and researchers and reporters have documented what every school corridor already knows: the green bubble is a caste mark. Kids are mocked for it, dropped from group chats over it, and they beg their parents accordingly. Apple understands this perfectly; when pressed years ago about the interoperability problem, its executives’ answer, in substance, was to buy your mum an iPhone.
The playground does the marketing, and the playground works for free.
The pipeline runs younger still. iPads in prep classrooms, seeded through education discounts, so the first computer a child ever touches bears the logo and the lock-in. Family Sharing, which tethers a household’s photos, purchases and subscriptions to the mothership so thoroughly that leaving feels like divorce.
By the time the child is old enough to compare prices, there is nothing to compare; there is only the ecosystem, and the ecosystem is home. Every cult in history has known that converting adults can be hard work. And expensive, but children are a totally different market sector.
The Jesuits’ maxim, attributed to Ignatius of Loyola is famous. Give me the child for the first seven years, and I will give you the man. Apple improved on it. Give Apple the child at prep, via an education-discounted iPad, and they’ll give you a customer with a lifetime value of six figures, who will queue around the block for the privilege.”
The mug customer
Add it up. An extortionate purchase price, justified by longevity the software is engineered to foreclose. A repair system priced like craftsmanship and run like a chicken processor. Or Amazon. Environmental piety from the high altar, e-waste from the loading dock. A recruitment strategy that runs through the school gate. And underneath it all, the quiet contempt of a company that fought right-to-repair for years, while our own Productivity Commission was politely pointing out that Australians deserve choices Apple’s serialised parts are built to deny, before discovering, with the zeal of the converted, that repairability made a lovely press release.
The Australian Consumer Law remains the mug customer’s best friend:
goods must be of acceptable quality and durable for a reasonable time, and repairs must be done in a reasonable time. Commit those phrases to memory and deploy them, in writing, when the status page starts composing haiku. The one thing the churn machine fears is a customer who knows the machine exists.
Because the truth behind the slogan was always a bait and switch. It just works, for Apple: the trillion-dollar valuation, the services rake-off, the drawer full of dead devices amortising guilt into nostalgia. The rest of us are not customers of a technology company. We are the feedstock of an upgrade cycle, politely thanked at the checkout, our children pre-sold in the playground.
My phone, I’m told, is in progress. So is the column. Only one of them had a deadline anyone intended to keep.
Tyler is a semi-retired teacher and political writer with an MA (Hons) in History. Writing under the nom-de-plume “Urban Wronski,” David has been writing political commentary and analysis for many years. His writing aims to connect institutional analysis with accessible, vernacular-rich prose that speaks to intelligent readers seeking fearless, independent commentary on Australian political, social, and economic issues.