My recent experience showed me the importance of right to repair laws.

I took an 8yo MacBook Pro to an Apple Store to have the battery replaced. They did the service, but when I got the device back, the MagSafe charging port would overheat substantially while recharging.

I brought it back to an Apple Store and asked them to take a look at the DC-in board under warranty because something obviously got messed up during the replacement battery installation. They gave it back to me several days later without having so much as cycled the battery to recreate the problem.

I ferried the laptop to another Apple Store and they replaced the thermal paste and gave it back to me with the screws in the wrong place. They claimed the overheating issue was a pre-existing problem because the SMC had thrown an error due to my third-party SSD during the pre-repair diagnostic. At the time of dropoff, they also demanded that I wipe down the LCD with an isopropyl pad despite the Apple website saying to use a dry cloth or water.

I returned to the second Apple Store and they finally ordered the DC-in board (part cost less than $3). The guy there tried to convince me that the SMC is not a chip, but just a theoretical concept that Apple uses to diagnose problems. They replaced it, but they told me over the phone that they had reversed the repair because it didn't work. When I went to pick up the laptop (they didn't offer to FedEx it out to me as the other store had), I saw that they had indeed replaced the DC-in board and that this solved the problem, but they tried to pass off the problem as a software issue for some reason. Also, they had forgotten to remove the plastic film from the part before installing so I had to open the laptop up and reinstall the DC-in board anyway.

It turns out the DC-in board should be installed with the (unplugged) charging cable magnetically attached, so that it orients correctly and makes good contact when you tighten it down.

I live two hours from the nearest Apple Store so this was a total pain in the butt. Apple could have simply sold me a DC-in board -- or at less than $3, they could have given it to me for free under warranty -- and I would have been happy. I had to do this song and dance to get a genuine replacement part, and in retrospect I could have paid ten times as much to get the part from iFixit instead of paying for gas and taking the time to drive out to the Apple Store.

Apple's stranglehold on the parts supply only worsens the ownership experience for their devices. Almost every person I dealt with seemed unqualified to work on computer repair, yet I wasn't able to buy genuine parts to do the repair myself. If you're not going to let me buy the parts, then your staff should know to remove plastic film from parts before installing them. They should know what screws to place where. They should know what the SMC is. They should know that under Magnuson-Moss, a third-party SSD doesn't invalidate the warranty on a battery replacement. They should refrain from saying "it's an eight-year-old old laptop so we may not be able to repair it." But they don't. Either Apple has to train these people or they have to let us buy parts and circumvent their ignorance.