Apple expands iPhone and Mac self-repair programme to Europe

Customers in the UK and seven other European countries can now buy replacement parts and repair kits from Apple. David Price reports

Apple customers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden and Poland can now use the company’s iPhone self-repair programme, which launched in the US in 2021. 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 programme. The European countries have been added as drop-down menu options on the company’s selfservicerepair.com website. It’s not clear at this point if and when Apple plans to add more countries.

The programme 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 programme 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.