No surprises here. Just like the lockdown on iPhone screen and part replacements, Macbooks suffer from the same Apple’s anti-repair and anti-consumer bullshit. Battery glued, ssd soldered in and can’t even swap parts with other official parts. 6000$ laptop and you don’t even own it.
Without knowing how many are in a batch this is irrelevant though. Do we have any idea on their batch size or sales figures?
Though they haven’t released any information to the public regarding their sales figures, chances are the numbers are higher than you might expect.
The best source I have is the factory tour video from LTT, where it’s stated that the production line shown in the video targets 35-50 devices an hour. Which comes down to 30k devices a month if we’re being conservative. Batches are shipped every quarter, so that would mean the world supply comes down to around 90k devices per batch.
But we can’t say for sure if that is the full extent of their production capacity.
While the brand is currently mostly popular with tech enthousiasts, it does show that there is a market for devices which are servicable. It is only a matter of time before less tech-savy consumers are convinced that being able to repair your device is a financial advantage. Anything save for a fried SoC or a broken display will not set you back much more than $100, and if any standard components happen to break you’re just paying market rates for replacing them.
An open supply chain (both in spare parts and being able to use your own choice of components that are to spec) is what allows any kind of repair to be a viable business model. Wether it is the manufacturer or a third party providing the servives should not matter.