Working for a small phone repair shop allowed me to have an inside look into the third-party repair industry. What I saw was honestly horrifying. High-quality parts were really hard if not impossible to come by. Often even if we had identified a great source for quality parts, they would change factories and the part quality would plummet. This often left shops constantly scrambling to find part providers who could meet their demand at a quality that would satisfy their customers. Apple is a little bold to claim the Independent Repair Provider Program is a “new” program as upon further inspection they have been doing this all along.

This isn’t to say that these part shops were unable to obtain official parts from Apple, but they had no incentive. Apple’s previous program for obtaining parts was Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP). The requirements for this program were huge and severely limited repair shops. For example, an AASP had to commit to only providing services and repairs that they had acquired certification for. This meant if I was an AASP who only had gone through the certification for repairing iPhone’s I could under no circumstances buy third party parts and offer repairs on Mac’s.

Obtaining a certification involved going through hours of tedious training and at the end, there was a $150 certification test that had to be taken at an authorized location. The closest one to me, when I was initially looking, was a 2-hour drive away. That was the cost per test as well. To be a full-service AASP you would have to go through several tests.

What the Independent Repair Provider Program Is