Apple, for environmental reasons, replaced its leather iPhone cases with ones made of FineWoven, a manmade "luxurious and durable microtwill" with a cool texture. iPhone users rushed online to say they hate it; it stains, it holds grease, cleaning it makes it worse, etc. — Read the rest

California is set to pass only the second substantive right-to-repair bill in the U.S. after its state House and Senate each unanimously approved it. A procedural vote and the governor's pen are all that stands between the Right to Repair Act and becoming law. — Read the rest

The ice cream machines at McDonald's restaurants are famously frustrating. At any given time, about 10% of them are broken. The damn things almost never work, for reasons that should be within the company's control.

Now, the right-to-repair activists at iFixIt have gotten their hands on one of the Taylor-manufactured machines and figured out precisely how it works—and why it keeps causing problems. — Read the rest

Nokia's G22 is a budget Android smartphone that comes with an iFixit repair kit—spudgers, screwdrivers and even a wee sucker for the touchscreen—and instructions on how to perform maintenance and get parts.

Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing at HMD Global, said that this process would cost on average 30% less than replacing an old phone with a new one.

New York's right-to-repair law, approved by the state's House and Senate, landed on Governor Kathy Hochul's desk weeks ago. She's not signing it, reports Ars Technica, to please tech lobbyists hired by firms such as Apple and Microsoft—and time is running out for her to do so. — Read the rest

The folks at iFixit put together this video about battery safety that looks frighteningly similar to the home experiments my friends and I used to do in high school. But they do with better safety precautions and more deliberate intentions than "hey what if we fucked with this." — Read the rest

Apple AirPod Pros "may have the potential to be a hearing assistive device for adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss," according to a new scientific study. The researchers from Taipei Veterans General Hospital and colleagues compared the electroacoustic features of hearing aids with AirPods and found that in some situations, AirPod Pros matched prescription hearing aids on four out of five industry standard metrics for personal sound amplification products (PSAPs). — Read the rest

After sailing through New York's legislature, America's first right-to-repair bill may soon head to governor Kathy Hochul for approval. The law obliges technology manufacturers to make tools and parts available to independent repair shops. Spectrum Local News:

Supporters of the bill, including [assemblywoman] Fahy, said the bill will allow for economic growth in this sector and could help the "tinkerers of today" become the "inventors of the future."

The already chaotic scene yesterday at Boston Logan International Airport blew up even more after TSA spotted a suspicious electronic item in a piece of checked luggage. The entire terminal was evacuated and the bomb squad called in. Turns out, it was an old Sony PlayStation console. — Read the rest

For those of us who've been repairing our devices using iFixIt's excellent guides and parts, Apple's announcement today that it will begin offering self-service repair parts, tools, and manuals comes as welcome news. For years Apple has been making it hard for users and indy repair shops to do straightforward things like replacing batteries and broken displays or adding memory and storage. — Read the rest

Our friends at iFixIt did a tear down of Apple's new $29 AirTag tracking device. They also identified three safe place to drill a keyring hole if you don't want to buy a bulky and expensive holster.

While Apple sells an AirTag holder for $13, and cheaper third-party models are already filling up online store listings, a DIY hole gets an AirTag onto a keyring or loop with as little extra space and mass as possible.

Our friends at iFixIt purchased the new AirPods Max so they could X-ray and disassemble it.

We wanted to do more than just strip these Pods down to their Digital Crown, truly odd Lightning Port, and micron-scale screws. With time to really explore the space, we enlisted the help of Creative Electron to work them over with X-rays.

Congrats to Cairo maker, Dina Amin. She has been awarded Best of the Year in the "Made for Social: Small Business" category by Vimeo for her stop motion animation piece, "What's Inside."

If you don't know Dina's work, she is a product designer who does the coolest stop motion animations featuring products and technology. — Read the rest

If you've bought a premium smartphone handset over the past few years,  it's a safe bet that it came equipped with wireless charging technology baked into it. Wireless charging is wicked cool! In the Long, Long Ago, we had to carry one of the many USB cables most of us had kicking around our home if we wanted to charge our phone. — Read the rest

In this fun episode of Mark Frauenfelder and Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools podcast, they talk with Lux Sparks-Pescovitz, 14, about his passion for GameBoys, cassettes, DIY sushi, and his new iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit. He's quite an interesting young man; I'd like to meet his parents someday. — Read the rest

I'm reading Matt Alt's fantastic new book, Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. Early on in the book, he points to Sony's TR-63 transistor radio (introduced in 1957) as the beginning of Japan's gargantuan influence on the world through consumer electronics, toys, entertainment, and other aspects of popular culture. — Read the rest

"Activation Lock" is a tool that uses Apple's trusted computing hardware to render systems inoperable if you don't have a login/password; nominally, this is used for theft-deterrence, but when Apple product owners fail to disable Activation Lock when they dispose of their equipment, it becomes effectively impossible to refurbish or repair, dooming it to become e-waste.

Apple's response to the Congressional committee investigating monopolistic behavior by tech giants contains a chapter on Right to Repair, whose greatest enemy is Apple — the company led successful campaigns to kill 20 state level Right to Repair bills last year.

Our friends at iFixIt took apart the new AirPods Pro to see what's inside. An awful lot is stuffed into a very small package. Unfortunately, IFIxIt deems the AirPods Pro to be non-user-repairable: "While theoretically semi-serviceable, the non-modular, glued-together design and lack of replacement parts makes repair both impractical and uneconomical." — Read the rest

How can a single, ill-conceived law wreak havoc in so many ways? It prevents you from making remix videos. It blocks computer security research. It keeps those with print disabilities from reading ebooks. It makes it illegal to repair people's cars. It — Read the rest