iPhone

Much ado about nothing… Apple’s PR stunt of offering “self-service repair” sure got a lot of positive press.

The New York Times called Apple’s Nov. 17 announcement “an early holiday gift” to the eco-conscious and do-it-yourselfers.

The Wall Street Journal noted that “customers will be able to fix their own devices, starting with the mobile-phone display, battery and camera, using genuine Apple parts.”

Despite the media cheering, few consumers are going to order any of the more than 200 parts and tools needed to do the most common repairs on iPhone 12 & iPhone 13.

Apple’s release made it plain that self-repair is intended only “for customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs.”

It noted that for “the vast majority of customers, visiting a professional repair provider with certified technicians who use genuine Apple parts is the safest and more reliable way to get a repair.”

Who is going to risk botching a repair job on a $700 iPhone? A replacement screen at an authorized dealer goes for about $235.

You can bet that Apple, which hasn’t announced repair pricing, will demand top dollar for its parts and tools.

The company has the gumption to charge $19 for a “polishing cloth” to clean displays. It does feature the company’s logo to make it official in the minds of Apple fanatics.

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s self-repair launch does serve the purpose of currying favor with federal regulators.

The Biden administration wants the Federal Trade Commission to issue rules barring electronics companies from restricting people from fixing their devices.

Smart move, Tim.

Charles Dickens would recognize America's dysfunctional House of Representatives. The House censured the Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar for posting a photoshopped video that featured him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Joe Biden.

Dickens, a chronicler of the unruly US House of Representatives, would understand crazed knuckleheads like Gosar and his good buddy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments for spreading malicious conspiracy theories.

The People’s House from 1830 to 1860 featured more than 100 violent incidents between members, including brawls, fights on the floor and duels on the street, according to Jill Lepore, author of the US history masterpiece, "These Truths."

In his “American Notes,” which was published in 1842, Dickens wrote that the House was “the meanest perversion of virtuous political machinery that the worst tools ever wrought.”

He said the goal of Congressmen was “to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.” Doesn't that sound familar?

Lepore wrote that Dickens “knew a rogue when he heard one and a circus when he saw one.”

One wonders how Dickens would profile the spineless Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has promised to give Gosar and Greene better assignments, if the Republicans flip the House.