Living in Shenzhen, it’s shocking how easy it is to go out and repair stuff. Living in Palo Alto, it’s frustrating how hard it is.
I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, introducing repairability laws won’t solve the problem.
I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station rather than swapping out some dims if it means my laptop is half as thick and twice as rugged. I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet (WeChat/Taobao) or find someone to do the repair for me for $40 on the Chinese street markets (Huaqiangnan in Shenzhen). When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
The reason it can be done in China is because those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so.
This situation is both good and bad. Stolen parts are good, in the sense that this grey market at least allows consumers to repair devices cost-effectively. It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
Repairability laws would actually help here. You would get the same repair shops in the US if Apple was forced to provide schematics & parts at a reasonable cost, with no risk of counterfeits or bad parts.
This is a big deal, and the reason there's so much opposition to right to repair, even beyond Apple. If R2R was a stupid, niche, geeky idea that doesn't bother anyone it would quietly get passed and that would be it, but the reason people are bothered by it and oppose it is because device manufacturers (whether computers or cars or farm equipment) actually make a lot of money off the status-quo.
> those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so.
This situation is both good and bad. Stolen parts are good
I really doubt that many of those genuine repair parts for iphones and macbooks are stolen, in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying. Apple doesn't manufacture most of these things, particularly the ICs and screens, and relies on a whole ecosystem of vendors and subcontractors.
If a third party is paying a reasonably agreed upon market price to a factory to buy extra factory run of stock (example: DRAM ICs, or touchscreens), that's not theft.
You would think that those factories would engage Chinese law enforcement if a significant percentage of their output was literally being stolen without payment, since that sort of thing affects their bottom line and is clearly a crime in their mainland china location.
For people interested in this general topic (parent poster here mentioned living in Shenzhen), go read through all the historical content of Bunnie Huang's blog...
My understanding is that a person with decision making power at these factories are negotiating with third party repair shops, agreeing on a price, and selling authentic Apple badged components or Apple schematics to them. In that sense, it is not theft.
My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those factories do not have a de jure legal right to sell those parts. In that sense, it is intellectual property theft.
If and when these factories put those components on a palette, put that palette into a container, and put that container onto a ship, and that ship sails to a Western country with intellectual property protections, Apple has reported the shipments to customs authorities and gotten them seized as counterfeit parts, despite the fact that they were manufactured as part of the same batches as parts that became devices that were sold in Apple stores. Apple's problem is that China doesn't give a shit about any objections Apple might have to two CCP sanctioned Chinese businesses doing (illegal) business with each other.
It shouldn't be intellectual property theft- Apple ought to be obliged to make these components and schematics available at fair prices to shops like Rossman's. But that's the way it ought to be- in the mean time, it is theft, and those parts are stolen. Hopefully we'll be able to get the laws fixed someday.
No IP violation is a theft unless it involves "a person intentionally takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use".
It's a violation of copyright, trademark, trade secrets, counterfeiting or patent, but it is not theft. The usage of the verbiage "theft" started in the late eighties to early nineties as part of a campaign to make intellectual property violation sound more severe than it actually is.
The key difference is that, by depriving another person of their property, you are preventing them from using it, where in intellectual property violations, you are merely gaining use without denying use to the creator.
>No IP violation is a theft unless it involves "a person intentionally takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use".
How does selling physical parts that were manufactured for someone else in violation of a contract not fall under this definition? Is the seller paying for the manufacture of these parts, or is Apple?
> Is the seller paying for the manufacture of these parts, or is Apple.
I don't know the actual
situation, but let's say for the sake of argument;
- Apple pays $1M to make 1M chips, with the contract that forbids making these parts to sell third parties.
- A Shenzhen shop pays $15K to make 10K of the same parts, the manufacturer breaches the contract, violates Apple's IP and makes extra parts for the shop.
None of this involves "theft" in any meaningful sense of the world.
If the design of the chips is created abd owned by apple, using that same design to manufacture chips for someone else, is theft of design. Apple spend a lot of time and money creating that design.
The amount of time it takes to make anything is not relevant to the question of whether something can be stolen or not. Parent poster is being pedantic, probably for the sake of making an old point about IP piracy, but let's keep things grounded.
This sort of scenario is a clear breach of contract, regardless of laws surrounding IP. Apple seems substantially unable or unwilling to retaliate for breach of contract against their own Chinese manufacturing partners. This is a substantial loss of control that sooner or later will come home to roost - because if this can happen to the richest company on the planet, it likely happens to anybody who manufactures anything in China. Simply put, China is the Far West when it comes to civil disputes; "we" ignore this state of things because the margins are still good enough to go there anyway. It's like running a supermarket in a bad part of town: as long as the profit it makes is higher than losses from vandalism and theft, it will stay open. At some point this might stop being the case.
So all of the senses of theft that do apply, which have been in use for millenia, are not "meaningful" because they do not meet the cause of your morality.
Of course when Prometheus "stole" the fire from Mount Olympus he did not deny Zeus anything, but it was called theft. The fire that he brought to athens was the intellectual property of the Gods.
I think you are both right:
I think the act of stealing is the act of taking something (an idea, an object) without permission from someone else. It doesn't matter how much this "something" costs to make in time, money or effort. In that sense, taking designs without permission and creating electronic parts is theft. However, having said this, I don't believe theft is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a good thing (to a certain point) that the government steals your money (takes it without permission) as taxation. I also believe that where there is a limited supply - either by design or the nature of the thing - the owner of this supply should be coerced into doing what is not only good for themselves but also for the whole of society. I might be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but in my eyes you don't have the right as a home owner to leave your house empty when there is a shortage of housing. Squatting should be legal in such circumstances. This forces homeowners to keep rent affordable.
I also believe that apple keeps these parts off the market to make more profits in a way that is not beneficial for the environment and society as a whole. This makes it a moral imperative to steal these parts and make them available for the general public.
IP theft easily satisfies the quoted definition in your first paragraph. That’s why you had to add an additional “key difference” in your last paragraph.
That “key difference” is what got invented in the early 2000s as part of a concerted effort to justify IP theft. It was never part of the definition of theft before, and indeed it makes no sense; if you steal a Snickers bar from a store, you have not deprived them of the use of the Snickers bar because they never intended to use it themselves. What you have really deprived them of is the opportunity to sell it. So does stealing IP.
> Stealing a part made in a shop isn't stealing IP. Stealing schematics and methods would be, but not finished products.
Actually, all of that is stealing physical, not intellectual property. Intellectual property is not the right to physical possession, so even to the extent that it can be said to be “stolen” (violation of IP rights are more like trespass than theft) taking physical objects in which it is in one form or another embodied into one’s possession isn’t it.
How is this not stealing ... Its like i gave you money/raw materials to do something for me. you skim off it and sell it off it is stealing. May not be a legally valid term, but it is stealing.
> My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those factories do not have a de-jure legal right to sell those parts. In that sense, it is intellectual property theft.
I am not sure breach of contract/license agreements is IP theft. I bet IP theft has a very specific legal definition that draws a fine line between theft and breach of contract. Apple can of course try to bring these factories to court to seek damages.
>in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying.
Pay is involved, and its Apple authorized recyclers who are selling parts on the black market breaching Apple contract stating everything needs to go into Shredder and get pulverized into dust.
So not just making repairs as hard as possible but paying people to shred perfectly serviceable hardware to prevent that! Wow, that's beyond evil, for so many reasons!
> If a third party is paying a reasonably agreed upon market price to a factory to buy extra factory run of stock (example: DRAM ICs, or touchscreens), that's not theft.
In the case this is a misunderstanding of the US perspective, and not a deliberate misinterpretation, the context taken here by Apple is based on US intellectual property law.
In that context, this would be a criminal offense and would very likely be pursued in court by Apple, leading to punitive damages, loss of contract, or both (e.g., the GEEP lawsuit). Third-shift manufacturing [0] is seen as a serious issue by many large corporations who have their production based in China for this reason.
If the schematics or other intellectual property were transferred to a third party (e.g. another factory) for production, then this would be IP theft, if the use of the word `theft` specifically is the crux of your objection.
I'm not saying the current situation is "right" or "correct", just clarifying the terminology so everyone is on the same page semantically.
>I really doubt that many of those genuine repair parts for iphones and macbooks are stolen, in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying. Apple doesn't manufacture most of these things, particularly the ICs and screens, and relies on a whole ecosystem of vendors and subcontractors.
Theft is much broader than that. When apple receives devices that it cannot repair anymore it will just recycle the materials and throw the rest away, there are employees that will take out functioning chips or broken circuit boards and throw them in a publicly accessible garbage container only to come back at night to take the parts out of the trash to resell them.
It's not theft. But still it's most likely a contract violation of the contract between the production company and Apple. Apple would never in a million years allow any of their suppliers to sell Apple specific parts to the aftermarket.
> It's not theft. But still it's most likely a contract violation of the contract between the production company and Apple. Apple would never in a million years allow any of their suppliers to sell Apple specific parts to the aftermarket.
Then it only concerns those parties and it's literally not our business to worry about.
It is our business to worry about. Such gross violation would be stamped out hard in the US and EU. This is one of the reasons it's hard/expensive to finds parts if you are not in Shenzhen. There should be laws that disallow exclusivity of parts.
I think you missed my point. I was saying the violation isn't our business and by its nature it is in no way comparable to theft or other crimes. i.e. private parties have a dispute that they need to settle privately. It's not on us to police whether they stick to their contracts.
Whether that type of contract is allowed by the government/law in the first place is an entirely different discussion about commerce and regulation; I wasn't opining on that.
By volume, the chips on the open market aren’t stolen and most aren’t counterfeit. Most are legitimate and a fair amount of the suspiciously cheap parts are binned or older revisions. The scale of the chip marketplace is more akin to sum of the agricultural output of California’s Central Valley - not your weekend farmers market. No one is messing around with stolen parts in these kind of quantities.
The reason companies are kicking and screaming about right to repair is because reverse logistics (how you deal broken/returned goods) is already a huge cost center and the legislation as proposed would make it more so. No one is making massive profit off repair parts - they’re offsetting massive losses.
Right to repair would actually ease this burden: Apple manufactures very few components on its devices. Apple prevents its suppliers from selling to third parties (which wouldn’t necessarily be a repair shop but someone like digikey or mouser) of some pretty basic components that do not contain any real secret sauce (we are talking about things like voltage regulators here)
The auto industry has widespread part available for decades with no ill effects.
It's really unforunate, since repair is a good value in terms of reducing externalities like e-waste and natural resource use, not to mention a potential way to develop electronics skills in our workforce with low-barrier-to-entry jobs.
I don't mean chips per-se, I mean complete assemblies like iPhone displays. As far as I know, there's no "legitimate" source for those, it's all either outright stolen, counterfeit or bad/rejected parts.
> because reverse logistics (how you deal broken/returned goods) is already a huge cost center and the legislation as proposed would make it more so
How would right to repair affect that? And if it wasn't profit-motivated how do you explain the extreme efforts some manufacturers do to prevent people from repairing their own devices (like iPhone cameras being associated with the logic board and not being usable in any other phone of the same model)?
My buddy buys broken Iphones/screens and sells them to China where all the underlying parts are stripped and used for repairing Iphones. This is legitamite not shady at all.
Ships hundreds at a time. A lof of the parts used for repair in China are coming from US/EU broken phones.
> it's all either outright stolen, counterfeit or bad/rejected parts
The other very common possibility is that it's what's called a "ghost shift" where the factory runs a whole production run on a possibly overnight work shift, creates a batch of product for sale to third parties, and then resumes their legit-for-transfer-to-apple production run the next morning. Happens with all sorts of electronics manufacturing in mainland china.
This does not necessarily mean that the ghost shift products go through absolutely the same level of QC that the main production run gets, but I wouldn't call them counterfeit.
"ghost shift" production with the trademarks is counterfeit, but isn't without the trademarks. Regardless of marking it's still likely unauthorized use of intellectual property.
I mentally make a distinction between "counterfeit" products which are actually authentic and good quality, unlikely to hurt the consumer, but arguably cause some harm to apple's IP, and "counterfeit" products which are actually poor quality clones made by inferior production lines. It's unfortunate that the same term is used for both.
Presumably a high volume and skilled third party repair shop and its purchasing people will be a crucial role in buying and distinguishing between the two types of hardware.
The term counterfeit is here being used by some people to mean 'genuine parts sold off-license', which is much more like a bootleg copy[1]. That is, it's the same item sold off-license.
To some extent words mean what people who use them intend to mean, but in my opinion we shouldn't be calling parts from the same production line counterfeit, because the word implies forgery.[2]
> To some extent words mean what people who use them intend to mean, but in my opinion we shouldn't be calling parts from the same production line counterfeit, because the word implies forgery.[2]
If they had a particular QC standard marking, but had not been manufactured in accordance with that level of QC, that would be forgery, right?
If they bear the trademark of a company that demands certain QC standards, but were produced without those checks, it seems like the same thing in a way.
I'm straining to rationalise my own position tbh. I'm not going out of my way to disagree with you, this kind of practice feels viscerally counterfeit-like to me and I'm trying to work through why I think that.
That's a way more honest response than I expected.
I respect that a lot.
In the absence of a legal after market or licensed / genuine / third party parts ecosystem, this is, or should be, the expected natural response: off license / bootleg / counterfeit parts ecosystem.
In my opinion, then, the fault lies with Apple, and / or the absence of a regulated market for those parts and the necessary documentation.
People will find a way to source what they want. How you approach or deal with those problems is probably a political / ideological thing.
That seems like an orthogonal question. Maybe Apple has set up their system in a way that (intentionally or not) encourages or necessitates counterfeiting. But those parts may still be counterfeit in the ways that matter to the end user (e.g. not necessarily as safe as they appear to be certified to be).
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it should be a legal requirement that all OEMs allow 3rd parties to manufacture these parts to provide as replacements.
Saving the planet is far more important than protecting the profits for replacement parts. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to sell complete phones but selling screens is good.
Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to sell complete phones but selling screens is good.
For an interesting contrast, look at the automotive industry, where (with the exception of perhaps some newer companies/models, like Tesla et.al.) there is a thriving aftermarket which is so complete that for certain models of cars, you can likely build an entire powertrain and even rolling chassis using zero original parts. Entire engine blocks, internals, transmissions, axles, suspension, brakes, even frame rails, can be bought from the aftermarket. Of course a lot of these parts are enhanced and marked with different manufacturer's names, but the OEMs themselves have in general not minded and sometimes even encouraged the aftermarket.
They could also be recycled from units with other damaged parts, which is also "legitimate", whatever that means (although I'm sure Apple et.al. don't want that.)
In much the same way that salvage yards are a source of car parts, yet companies like Tesla are trying to stop that.
Not sure if it's the case for Apple, but for other phones, there's definitely plenty of parts recycling happening.
I replaced my broken Galaxy S4 screen when in Shenzhen in 2015, and bought a replacement screen for Galaxy S3 for my wife (to have a spare I could use to perform the repair myself back home). My repair was dirt-cheap - I paid something like $10 to get a whole new screen assembly and a new back camera (I broke mine), the whole repair done in front of me in under 5 minutes. The extra screen for my wife was much more expensive - ~$50, IIRC. The difference is, with my phone, they kept the broken parts. They presumably replaced the broken glass in it at their own pace, and put it back on the market.
I also saw plenty of work being done on phone components, as well as people unloading and sorting through big bags of broken phones. There's lots of e-waste recycling going on there.
> I mean complete assemblies like iPhone displays. As far as I know, there's no "legitimate" source for those
So how are legitimate high street shops in the west doing it? You can’t convince me every town in the UK has a criminal operation working in the open doing screen replacements?
That seems like a basic consumer protection issue that's mostly already solved in the developed world. When I get my car serviced, it's understood that I will hold the mechanic responsible for everything so they don't even bother trying to put sketchy parts in my car.
yet Prius catalytic convertors are apparently a big market, so much so that it is a regularly stolen item. so someone is buying these parts to install when a car is serviced.
> The thieves make about £300 to £500 from every converter stolen, fenced through scrap metal dealers, with car manufacturers warning that a gap in the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013 enables dodgy dealers to buy them without checks required on where they came from.
Catalytic converters are filled with valuable metals (platinum, palladium, among others). They're torn apart and the expensive metals are resold. The cat isn't being put on other peoples cars.
>Some counterfeit parts can be worse than waste, they can be dangerous. Like batteries that catch fire and glass that shatters into sharp fragments.
The real issue is not the part, it's the company doing the service. Legitimate service centers will source parts that are high quality - just like any other industry. People still repair cars (including brakes) on their own - to give you one example.
The only bad part is some of these parts are stolen from users. Because the main board on an iPhone is account locked, crime groups will strip the phone down for parts and sell these on eBay to people looking to fix their phones.
This is why I think Apple should account lock all parts on the iPhone and tell the user this but if the original owner unlinks the phone, the parts will work again.
Why else would we still have phone theft and how do these preowned parts end up on eBay? Less skilled people steal them and then list them on eBay as “account locked iPhone” Then more skilled people strip them for parts and will sell just the camera, battery, etc.
It's a signal when humans will do something against the law - and generally it seems to be a fair response to excessive control or at minimum a counterweight to the actions of a selfish for-profit or industry. Piracy comes to mind as well: if content becomes too expensive, requiring monthly subscriptions to too many places or then unreasonable cost to buy a specific film or series - then more people will pirate, and more reasonable people willing to pay will start to pirate - the more friction and unfairness in the balance of everything, the more piracy. The ability to pirate or repair by third-party both I believe are necessary to keep organizations in check.
Edit to add: makes me think of Bitcoin too, people certainly have reason to be unhappy with local-global financial systems which have heavy-matured regulatory capture and overall corruption whether it's printing excessive money or being deceptive to foreign players so it's an uneven playing field.
I can think of societies with massive tax evasion, from all economic classes of people and where bribes are normal. Is there something wrong with laws requiring tax payments and banning bribes?
Sure, when people aren't getting reasonable ROI from that tax money - e.g. it's invested poorly and not invested in a way that's improving enough of their own community.
Imagine if paying tax was voluntary - how relatively quickly communities of people who valued and understood the value of that pooling and who voted in competent politicians to manage their community would thrive/grow vs. the free-for-all and deterioration of infrastructure in areas where people opted not to pay; mind you private businesses may provide better services and people using them is them voting for their existence (voluntary payment) - though arguably initially before enough wealth was generated it would have been impossible to borrow the $100s of billions needed to start massive infrastructure projects; from my understanding there's a bit of this, along with more or less corrupting, in Democratic vs. Republican leaning states.
Re: bribes - I'd argue that amount of people wouldn't fit within the definition of following the spirit of the mechanism - you need a foundation with integrity to start for it to be an honest signal; or it's the reverse, the anti, bribery a sign of a lack of integrity and accountability in the system.
Take a look at economist C. Northcote Parkinson's books. He points out that when tax rates are 10%, people happily pay their taxes as their duty to live in society. People who cheat get ostracized. Various things start going awry at 20% and 30%, and at 40% tax evasion becomes the national pastime. People regard as fools people who don't evade taxes.
Think about the people who are running away from California due to their confiscatory taxes, and then California goes after them claiming they still are residents. Think about the people in government who openly want to dismantle the wealthy - like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
That’s a separate issue. I was talking about countries that lack the tribal trust between its members such that it is presumed it’s every man or sub tribe for themselves.
This lack of trust is an unquantifiable cost in the progress of that society, one that the US was blessed to not be burdened with, and to which I credit the strength of the nation.
But that’s beside the point, which is I don’t think a simple statement like “if everyone breaks the law then the law is bad” is valid.
> It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
People are not stealing macbooks and sending them to chop shops... they steal them and try to flog them so unsuspecting consumers. What grey market parts really mean is dead macbooks and phones that Apple would prefer to see shredded rather than used for spares.
RE counterfeits: I don't know how to seriously answer this, beyond saying: stop being so fucking precious about Apple electronics, no other computer manufacturer has this problem but Apple has to be fully vertically integrated - and the argument for quality has been thrown out of the window, deeo down everyone knows why Apple want this level of control over device life cycle, it's the same as their App store.
> It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft
Nobody stole parts from Apple's warehouses.
So "essentially", it is not theft. Unless "essentially" means "by some outlandish, ridiculous, anti-popular and pro-corporate international legal fiction".
Nope I mean theft from the official factory. Given the working conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if the workers were smuggling out parts or were doing a whole "night run" for the secondary market (at higher prices than what Apple pays) in addition to the normal run.
>It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
If they actually stole the parts they'd be in jail in no time.
What they do is merely copyright infringe - if that.
>The reason it can be done in China is because those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so.
There is of course a market of Apple devices stolen for parts, but majority of spare parts are coming from used donor devices, obtained at discount, I believe big shops may also buy new ones solely for parts
There are plenty of differing qualities of parts, but they're not all official while some are the same.
If R2R were a thing in the US and parts were commonly-available, there wouldn't be a need for white-, gray-, and black- marketplaces. Sure, there could be lower-quality ones when someone wants to do it cheaper, like there are right now. The problem is the giant corporation locking-up the schematics, the tools, the guides, and the parts to be able to repair their shit at a sane cost and reasonable effort.
Right to Repair isn’t demanding manufacturers make all memory socketed: but if a RAM chip goes bad they are asking that a new one can be purchased legally and soldered in place. Right now, there are many 40-cent components in laptops a repair shop cannot purchase from component manufacturers because Apple, or Asus or whenever told them not to sell it to 3rd parties. Or proprietary firmware flashing tools, or what have you. None of this impacts the physical form factor of a machine.
And some parts are can't even be swapped from one genuine device to another - home buttons used to be like that. But in newer iPhones that applies for other components too. IIRC some of them can be reprogrammed somehow but it is additional difficulty not nornally seen in other brands.
> I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station rather than swapping out some dims if it means my laptop is half as thick and twice as rugged
The right to repair laws Louis Rossmann advocates for do not require manufacturers to change their designs to make repairs easier. Apple would still be allowed to solder memory on their devices without any repercussions.
> I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
Louis Rossmann owns and operates the kind of "corner shop" you're referring to. He certainly isn't demanding everyone repairs their own devices. He's just advocating for the ability for owners and third parties to repair devices without interference from manufacturers.
> When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
That's because US shops cannot legally acquire parts and schematics necessary to perform component-level repair. Technicians in Chinese street markets aren't worried about legal retaliation from US-based companies. Right to repair would ensure owners and third parties could legally acquire the parts and schematics for repairs. They don't even need the manufacturer to provide the parts and schematics; they just need to be protected from legal retaliation.
> I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station
Probably 0.01% of Apple product owners in North America also own a hot air reflow station and have the skills/practice to use it safely on a very densely populated laptop or phone motherboard.
I would also wager that if you were to look at the pay scale for skilled electronics repair people capable of safely doing so with little risk of killing the board, the market rate for a person running a hot air reflow station to do that work, in a big city in north america (chicago, SF, seattle, NY, etc) might be $200/hour. By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.
One of the things that seems to be much more common in mainland China is that random small phone/laptop repair shops have the technical capability in house to do this sort of work. In the USA the same shops' technical abilities are limited to what can be done with some tweezers, a set of precision screwdrivers, prying tools/spudgers, etc.
Note that I am not excusing apple's terrible repair parts availability or pricing, or other practices which make it difficult for a trained third party to acquire and install legit parts.
> By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.
Louis Rossmann proves that such a business does work and is profitable while remaining significantly cheaper for customers (otherwise he wouldn't get any business).
I think this works by volume of customers in the NYC metro, but might not be viable for a repair shop in a smaller city. I would be very interested to see if a similar specialist could financially support the salaries of a few full time techs in a much smaller metro on the scale of, for example, Spokane WA.
But in this case the market would balance itself; this isn't an argument against the right to repair. If there's indeed no market for this then nothing will change, but it doesn't mean parts/schematics shouldn't be available in case people do want to repair devices.
>I would be very interested to see if a similar specialist could financially support the salaries of a few full time techs in a much smaller metro on the scale of, for example, Spokane WA.
You can have a B2B business model where local stores replace phones for customers and then mail the broken phones in bulk to a repair center.
He has stated many times that the majority of his board repair business is Mail in, not local. In fact because of this he stated in a recent video to be considering leaving NYC because of the high costs but since he employee's have strong ties to the area is may not be an option
Yea but you also have to take into account that he's internet famous. Probably the most well known person in the computer repair industry says his shop with 16 people is taking in between 1 and 2 million a year.
So that's somewhere between 62.5k and 125k per employee annually in revenue. He's doing well enough but its not exactly a money printing machine and you would assume a person at the top of his industry is doing significantly better than anyone else could.
I do think its quite possible to make a living doing this in most places, but there's easier ways for people with that level of technical skills to make more money so it remains to be seen how many will choose to do it.
That being said I'm 100% supportive of right to repair and I'm a fan of Louis's content.
I don't think he's really at the top of his industry, financially/size-wise speaking, he's just more prominent on the internet. There's huge repair companies, he's still "just" a small business owner
That's a good point there are probably corporate electronics repair companies out there that have a much larger operation. Perhaps the guys that PC manufacturers contract warranty repair work to. However, I still think its fair to assume that when you take small businesses into account a guy that's as well known and liked as much as Louis is going to be getting way more business than he would if he wasn't famous.
The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.
And the fact that these repairers will charge per repair rather than a flat fee for partial replacements of entire boards like OEMs do means they can be cost effective while profitable.
-
Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
Between the 40 cent cost of the component and labor, there's a lot of meat left for individual repairers left to make money.
>The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.
I wasn't suggesting it did matter in regards to his mail-in business. Someone else mentioned that living in a large city makes it easier to maintain a high volume of work locally.
>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
This is true. My point was that when a large computer repair shop run by arguably the most famous person in the electronics repair industry is only attracting enough work to have an annual revenue of 1-2 million a year, it could be entirely possible that a regular, non-famous person in a smaller electronics business might struggle to stay busy enough to earn enough of a living, even if certain repairs like the one you described are very profitable on their own.
>>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.
That is not the only consideration either, data recovery is as well, since most of the time that $475 also means your device is wiped and all data lost, an independent shop could even charge someone that same $475 but retain the data and it would be worth it to the customer.
> I would also wager that if you were to look at the pay scale for skilled electronics repair people capable of safely doing so with little risk of killing the board, the market rate for a person running a hot air reflow station to do that work, in a big city in north america (chicago, SF, seattle, NY, etc) might be $200/hour. By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.
You are really overestimating the value of those skills. You don't need a college degree to run a hot air reflow station. It's a valuable skill but I'd be shocked if it was worth even a quarter of your estimate, even in NYC.
Even if running a hot air reflow station were a supremely difficult skill which required decades to master, the market value of a skill like that depends on the employee's ability to demand better compensation from competing employers. How many repair shops even have equipment like that? It's a very specific skill set, particular to an industry which is struggling due to lack of right to repair protections.
Not at all - pointing out that very few people have the technical capability to do some of these repairs (PCB level work that is anything more complicated than replacing outright an entire module) is a fact.
I actually have a high degreee of distaste for apple phones, their app store walled garden ecosystem, et cetera. The last iphone I owned was an original iphone 2G I purchased new for some absurd price in 2007. I own a Macbook Air because it's a good thin, light terminal that I can use to remotely control my other stuff, and I was fully aware of the fact that the RAM and SSD are soldered onto the all-in-one motherboard when I bought it. The odds of having a laptop motherboard failure are low enough that I chose to roll the dice. Everything else of mine is x86-64 whitebox that I built myself.
I remember in the 80s, devices would all come with the complete schematics right there in the box. I remember poring over them after buying something, I thought it was fascinating. Like my TV, computer etc. Everything.
This should really be brought back, even though component-level fixing is not nearly as easy as it was back then.
In the 1960s DIY TV repair was such a big thing that there were self-service kiosks in supermarkets that sold vacuum tubes and included a tube tester.
When your TV stopped working, you took the back panel off with the TV turned on and looked to see which tube was not glowing. You would then turn the TV off, pull that tube from its socket, take it down to the supermarket, stick it into the correct socket on the kiosk, and press the "test" button. A meter or lights on the kiosk would tell you if the tube was dead.
If it was, you looked up the tube in a book that was attached to the kiosk. The book would list the part number of an equivalent tube sold at the kiosk. You'd grab the right tube from the racks of tubes in the kiosk, go pay for it at the checkout stand, take it home, put it on the socket, and 99% of the time that fixed your TV.
If that didn't you might take the rest of the tubes in and test them just in case the problem was a tube failure other than a burned out filament.
Only if that didn't do it did you call the TV repair shop.
Wow, I would so not do that without rubber gloves or something. I've always been pretty hesitant working on CRTs knowing the voltages present in there (and they could linger for a long time due to charged capacitors).
Was the failure mode of tubes always such that it would stop glowing? I'm surprised they always failed in that way. I suppose the main issue would be that the heater filament would burn out and stop emitting electrons. Just like the filament in a light bulb.
When I was young tubes were already becoming uncommon. If a device still used them it was only for some high-power stuff like an amp final. Though of course the CRT itself lingered much longer.
Vacuum tubes have other failure modes besides the filament burning out, but the filament burning out was by far the most common.
A tube might have a filament life of many thousands of hours, but a TV might have a dozen or so tubes so the odds were highest for filament burnout when your TV suddenly stopped working.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese electric cooker just for fun. The instruction "manual" was a flimsy piece of paper. Yet it still contained schematics, as simple as it was.
The reason why you can get any device fixed is the availability of parts, yes. But also all of the highly specialized tools available combined with the skill of people in there.
Even if someone in the US could get the exact same parts, they wouldn't be as able to fix the devices due to the lack of devices and necessary skills. This is also the reason why most electronics are made there, it's a staggering concentration of skilled electronics workers.
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet
Exactly. And we need legislation to make it happen. In India, I remember someone started a multi-brand service centre for cars. The automobile industry ganged up on him and refused to supply original parts to him. He had to go to the courts, and the courts ruled for him and in favour of consumer rights and made it very clear that the automobile industry had to supply parts to any mechanic shop that asked for it.
We now need a similar legislation for every other industry too.
Would hope such legislation articulates exactly what parts of a "phone" would need to be made available. There are hundreds of parts in an iPhone. It's unreasonable to expect that Apple or any vendor have the resources to make sure every single part, large and small, is available to 3rd party repair shops.
It is not about making them available. It is about not not making them available. Right now if you email a factory that has the parts they will say they are not allowed to sell them to you for any price even if they have them because Apple/etc said so. It is about removing that gag.
I worry that believing the jobs are not coming back is a self-fulfilling prophecy – one with dangerous consequences of locking its believers into perpetual dependence on supply from places that act essentially as sin externalization depots.
If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering). Or if not one of those, then some other untried thing.
Edit: as sibling comments mention, if in fact the main limitation is not labor prices but exclusive-supply agreements for certain consumable parts, then this seems easily within the scope of Antitrust to address.
> If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering).
That incentive is the $x per hour. And the low $x per hour relative to quality of life is what causes the status lowering. Status is not lowered by a couple words. A doctor spends a ton of time in “vocational education”.
I think you've misunderstood what I meant; I mean incentives for businesses to pay their people more (or to offer something like apprenticeships).
As for status not being lowered by words, we'll have to agree to disagree. No one in practice (in the US) calls medical school "vocational school" precisely because it is a phrase associated with lower status work in the trades.
Yes, people use vocational school to refer to schooling that requires less time, cost, and generally has lower barriers to entry. This results in a higher supply relative to demand, resulting in lower prices for the labor, and that is the causative factor for lower “status”.
You can change the name from vocational school to Nobel school or whatever, but as long as people are not earning high wages, it is not going to change any perceptions of “status”.
>My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
They do - they just do it upstream of you. The people you want to swap the parts can't get them, or if they do the parts are expensive, or don't pass the security checks of your device and now there's reduced functionality.
The lack of repairability laws affects you but its up stream of you directly.
louis rossman, the man from the article, does do component level board repair. A lot of right to repair is about being able to obtain these parts to enable this type of repair, without having to go through dodgy channels
The repair cost isn't dominated by the cost of parts, but operation cost such as labour and rent.
If your concern are the $100+ for repair, then it will be the same regardless Apple provide the parts or not. Not to mention knowing Apple, they will definitely sell you an iPhone battery for $20+. Earning the same Gross Margin as their product.
I don't know what to say about that. HP wanted to charge me the price of a new laptop motherboard for a forgotten BIOS password(around £650). A guy, in the phone repair shop on the high street replaced the BIOS chips for £112 and my laptop runs like a champ. It's a pretty big difference for a laptop worth around £1500.
Apple's fight against right to repair while pushing materials to the public that state they are trying to reduce their carbon footprint is the absolute peak of hypocrisy. I understand the closed off design of their products is a result of the Steve Jobs era, but why can't the current leadership make a change?
Why can't Apple make their products easily repairable while making them aesthetically pleasing? The typical "private companies must satisfy the shareholders" answer is just a scapegoat. Truly innovative companies (and companies of Apple's size and worth) should be able to solve these problems. Doing anything else is just fucking laziness.
Apple’s business and design philosophies revolve around control. In exchange for locking down everything, they promise you a seamless, high-performance, safe experience. That extends to designing products in a way that end-user repair is not a consideration, to locking down access to the App Store (see the Epic trial), and more.
I personally think it’s a bad direction to go in, especially with the outsized power Apple has over the industry, but they have clearly found willing audiences for it.
They are focused on the users - not the developers. We already have a sense of the insane dark patterns developers can deliver on the web. Pop up and under ads with unhittable close boxes, recurring subscriptions that can only be cancelled in narrow windows by calling a UK phone number.
Seriously - look at the coalition Epic put together for their trial. Almost everyone on there has some sort of abusive billing process / history.
> They are focused on the users - not the developers.
I'm a former Mac dev--I think Apple likes to use this argument to justify a lot of their choices, but in reality their design decisions often make life difficult for developers in ways that aren't beneficial to the customers.
My former company produced screen recording software, and since I started in 2018 to when I left at the end of 2020 each MacOS release required us to spend a good 3 months fixing our apps to run under the new OSes. Notarization required us to change how we signed our libraries and integrated them across the 3 applications we produced; the permissions paradigm for mic and webcam was beautiful, and easy to develop around, but when they added screen recording permissions it was truly awful, and they broke their own patterns. APIs would be deprecated with no replacement, documentation was sparse at best, with header files often being more useful than the examples provided on developer.apple.com....
My point being, we often spent more time bending our app to Apple's will than fixing bugs or adding much-requested features. Apple's argument was that these changes they forced us to make was net-beneficial for end users: less malware with notarization, better privacy controls with permissions--but when it really came down to it, they just want more control over distribution of apps and "special treatment" for their own tooling.
They're focused on making money and fuck all else.
Apple is the literal definition of "insane dark patterns" if you happen to be a developer.
Made a profitable app on the app store? Oh look! Apple used your market data to clone it, shoved their product to the top of the "marketplace" they happen to own, and now you have no business.
Want to improve your user experience by shipping a compliant browser rendering engine? Oh... we're so sorry, only Apple can "safely" let the user view the web, using safari, where they hoover up more data.
Want to debug on a variety of hardware/software combinations to better support users? Oh... sadly the licensing agreement forbids virtualization - Go spend 10k on physical devices.
Basically - Apple is a shit company that happens to have interests that are currently aligned with customer value (in some places). They will not remain that company.
Benevolent dictatorships are by far the best form of government you can get - as long as you're in the in group. The problem is you never stay there forever: Either you will change, or the company will change. See the turmoil happening now around Google products. See the backlash MS got in the 90/2000s.
They are definitely not optimizing for developers.
BUT when developers complain about apple "hoovering" up data I laugh. I mean, is this a joke? App developers are at the forefont of privacy protection? When I'm on my PC browsing the web and that game site wants to install that browser toolbar they are looking out for me?
The problem is - as I said, developers have almost no credibility anymore.
Seriously loot boxes, pay to win etc etc.
Apple has realized that doing something quasi right by their users means they can charge big premiums and a lot more. So they are going to rake in the cash on that basis - fantastic.
Paying doesn’t magically make them not want to extract all of your value. Apple could sell iPhones at a loss just because of the AppStore theft, and still survive.
It was such a different philosophy back then even just 10 years ago. The RAM modules were easy to access and work with. The battery could be accessed with your finger and a latch, because it was assumed users would need a new battery in a few years. The HD was also accessible from this same door, because it was assumed users would be upgrading to an SSD in a few years. Users were given all the IO Apple thought they would possibly need.
Then Tim Cook came to power and let Jony Ive have free reign of the glue and the solder iron, and Macbooks became disposable.
It's because they can see the bigger picture, beyond these 2010s-era complaints of 'user-upgradable RAM.' This is totally irrelevant in a SOC world.
Apple is indeed reducing the carbon footprint of computer manufacturing, by consolidating more and more components on a single chip (SOC) with M1, and creating smaller and smaller hardware.
There's a ridiculous amount of carbon footprint saved by not having to source, ship, and assemble separate RAM, GPUs, Processors, etc from separate suppliers located all across the world.
10 years from now when your entire motherboard and all its components sit inside a chip small enough to fit inside a single AirPod...and 20 years from now when the need for physical LCD/OLED panels disappears...does it really matter how repairable it is? Even 100 million of them won't fill a single average-sized landfill.
Hell, we've already broke 1nm [1]. This means hardware will continue to get smaller and smaller for years to come.
Hardware consolidation and physical size reduction is the bigger gain, and the goal we all should be focused on if we actually care about sustainability.
The fact is, only a tiny minority of consumers would even entertain the idea of replacing computer components in the first place. This has been true for the 4 decades PCs have been around with easily replaceable hardware, so I don't think Apple changing to Philips head screws is going to change that.
Yeah no that's bullshit. (and a change of subject)
We're not asking for modular connectors (although those are nice) or larger competents. we're asking Apple (and everyone imitating them) to stop artificially preventing people from replacing parts (either via deals with suppliers that prevent people from buying them or via software lockouts.)
People do surface mount rework all the time (I think the guy TFA is talking about is the same that inspired me to learn how to do it.)
Not having to throw stuff away because a single component that could otherwise be replaced is a huge gain for the environment (especially people in places that ewaste accumulates) and doesn't have to come at the expense of size reduction.
What percentage of Apple customers are doing surface mount rework, or even hiring other people to do this, in your estimation?
My guess is less than .01%.
And how much could that really be increased if Apple were forced to make their parts accessible and available in the aftermarket? Vs the carbon footprint of the extra manufacturing effort and having to set up distribution channels for these parts?
I just don’t see the sustainability argument. I don’t think any large number of people would suddenly say they want to keep their slow, heat-generating Intel MBPs if they were more repairable. The upgrade cycle will always be the upgrade cycle.
It’s disingenuous to play the “green” card here. I’d be more on the side of the right to repair Apple critics if they would just be honest and say “hey, this is a hobby for us and we want to save money and we just want to be able to do this stuff because it’s fun!”
Because it's prohibitively expensive vs the cost of a new device due to the policies being discussed in this thread.
There was a time I could get a screen replaced in a phone for $40-50. Today, Apple literally bricks the device for swapping out a broken button, even if the part is an authentic Apple component. The trend has been getting progressively worse, and while this thread is mostly about Apple it affects far more industries (Farming being a big example).
> And how much could that really be increased if Apple were forced to make their parts accessible and available in the aftermarket?
I'd reckon a pretty high % of people with cracked screens would happily get them repaired if it were not either ludicrously expensive to do so, or if they felt that they could get it done by 'professionals' instead at some random corner store. These shops can't source parts and schematics "legitimately" and the whole process feels very grey market which drives people away.
I spent 3 months researching how to build a SFF gaming PC and a year after I was done, Apple came out with the M1 Mac Mini which covers 90% my PC's use case (And beats it on many dimensions). PC repair is a dying trade, let's not regulate to keep it alive.
In the beginning it is theorized that humans were a hunter gatherer species. We dedicated 100% of our time to collecting food. At some point we learned about farming and cultivating livestock. People could now generate more food then they would need. This enabled something magical: one person could generate the food required for a group of people and that group of people could do other things! This formation of a group and their social dynamics are sometimes called a "society". Soon people figured out you could do the same thing we did with food production with other things: building things, making cloths, cooking, etc.
I think, even if .01% of Apple customers worked in the repair industry you'd see this same exact effect!
For example: 1 Louis Rossman can fix ~10 MacBooks/day or 3650/year.
There's about 5 Billion internet users and 20% of them are Mac users.
.01% of Mac users would be ~100k globally. That means, if everyone of these people became interested in repair as a profession were as fast as Rossman we could fix all 1 billion Apple user's devices within 3 years. This is about the rate people buy and throw out an Apple product due to some breakage. This would essentially keep the market full of low cost devices for people who couldn't normally afford a Mac.
The vast majority of those 5 billion internet users are exclusively accessing the internet through smartphones (cheap android ones), and do not even own a desktop PC/laptop. Android and iOS account for most internet traffic. Android alone is 40% of all internet users. [1]
If the 0.01% number I threw out is correct, then that's not 100,000 Mac users. That would mean there's over a billion people with Macbooks, which is off by a factor of 10. Apple only sells 20 million of them a year. 0.01% would mean more like 5-10,000.
There's not enough demand for MacBook repair for Rossman-types to make a living setting up repair shops anywhere outside of NYC/SF.
And again, this would have no affect on the upgrade cycle. Most people do not throw away their computers because they are broken, they throw them away because they are old tech.
I too am nostalgic for the days of building PC towers for my family, however, when I think about it, all of those towers I built ended up in a landfill.
They were all super easy to repair and upgrade, and yet, nobody did.
>There's not enough demand for MacBook repair for Rossman-types to make a living setting up repair shops anywhere outside of NYC/SF and MAYBE Seattle.
That's an odd thing to say considering the I've seen half a dozen of those kinds of repair shops in the small city near my home town (I never went out of my way to find them.)
The grocery store near where I live now has one inside it. If someone's backlight/screen/camera suddenly stopped working and they could either pay $100 to fix it or $1000 they're probably going to pick the cheaper option. There absolutely is demand for it. Even if there wasn't taking away people's options for no good reason is kind of terrible anyway.
How many people would actually fix a broken suspension on their car by themselves at home? 0.001%, or whatnot.
Now imagine that you have to scrap your car when suspension breaks, instead of bringing it to a car repair shop and fix it at the 20% of the cost of a new one. Especially if you bought the car just 6 months ago.
But now, if you break the screen protection glass of an iPhone, nobody can legally replace it but Apple, to say nothing if the trickier parts like the battery or the screen.
Vechicles have a lot of propiatiary information in them. We are dumping vechicles because Independant mechanics don't have access to repair information.
I believe only one state, which I can't spell, has a Vechicle Right to Repair law.
I went to automotive school, and have been a part time mechanic. The amount of vechicles going to the scrap yard over relatively minor problems I find disheartening.
I agree with your statement emphatically. I just wanted to add vechicles to the Right to Repair debate.
> It’s disingenuous to play the “green” card here.
No it is actually disingenuous to act like this is about "tinkering with apple devices". Actually it is hard to express how disingenuous the whole spin of "If people are able to repair products they will become worse, I don't want my product to become worse" truly is.
Especially so when we start talking about devices that actually would be repairable if companies didn't spent some truly petty amount of effort to stop it, using DRM and crippling via detection.
Besides that there is a market for refurbished iPhones, actually there are shops that specialize in selling nothing besides them, and the ones buying from it are hardly the evil hacker/tinker people you describe, that want to take away your shiny apple elegance by forcing different product designs...
> I don’t think any large number of people would suddenly say they want to keep their slow, heat-generating Intel MBPs if they were more repairable.
What about the concept of a device being sold used instead of sitting in a box until it gets thrown into the trash? The whole "people just want the new and shiny anyway" is a very priviliged way of thinking. Being able to repair something is more than you keeping your device and repairing it yourself, it also means that suddenly a device still has use instead of contributing to the pollution just because some company rather wants to see you burn that thing in your backyard than seeing it get any use in the hands of someone else.
Besides that: There is more technology than Apple, not everybody has to care what the Apple fan bubble thinks. Apple (and the people that defend this mess when it comes to repairability) just reaches critical levels of hypocrisy when it comes to the "we are doing good for the environment" advertisement.
The Right to Repair Movement is bigger than Apple.
It's all electronics, vechicles, Swiss watch parts (I repair watches, and a few years ago Rolex, and The Swatch Group decided to nix all Independant Watch Repairers Parts Accounts.), appliances, John Deere Tractors, etc.)
I guarantee more people would look to repair their broken devises.
The Right to Repair movement is all encompancing.
My biggest gripe isn't even with electronics, it's these pricy vechicles we are buying with priority repair information.
If we could keep cars on the road longer, and my washing machine spinning a bit longer, we could lesson our Carbon footprint. I do see by repairing our stuff, we would be greener in the long run.
I'm kinda with you on the "green card" strategy a bit, but on a different level.
I noticed California trying to pass Right to Repair bills these last few years. They are using E-waste as the selling point. I would rather they just lay it out for their constituents.
Like these companies do not want anyone working on their products because they make more money by repairing the broken products themselfs (Vertical integration), or force you to buy a newer version of their product when that day comes.
I guess they feel using Green, e-waste, carbon footprint is an easier sell? (I don't feel that is the right direction though.)
I wish they would just be honest, and tell the truth.
You bought the devise (Car, computer, washing machine, tractor, blah, etc), and you should have a reasonable way to repair it when it breaks down.
(California has failed to pass two Right to Repair bills. Let's get vocal with our representatives. Email those loafers. Whenever I think about Right to Repair I picture a small farmer trying to replace a priority sensor on that shiney Deere tractor in the middle of a humid field. Bugs sticking to his perspiring skin. He replaces the sensor, and gets in the cab. The tractor is bricked, and won't do anything. Ouch!)
On the one hand we have people arguing for the right to repair so we can increase that number.
And on the other hand there's people who go "meh, the screen is cracked, now I have an excuse to buy new toy, I'll chuck this one in the river since its prohibitively expensive to repair cosmetic defect why the fuck would anyone want it."
You even admit to disagreeing predominantly because you think some of us are being dishonest, and it's probably true that some people want to tinker.
But some people just want to be able to pay a service tech a reasonable fee to fix minor damage or fit a new battery, and have parts and guides etc available.
>Apple were forced to make their parts accessible and available in the aftermarket?Vs the carbon footprint of the extra manufacturing effort and having to set up distribution channels for these parts?
This is not accurate. Apple doesn't make the parts. Apple doesn't "set up distribution channels" for parts. These already exist. Apple buys it on the market. What Apple then does is force the parts suppliers to only sell to them via exclusivity arrangements. We would like for repair shops to also purchase be able to purchase these parts so they can extend the life-time of these devices.
>I just don’t see the sustainability argument. I don’t think any large number of people would suddenly say they want to keep their slow, heat-generating Intel MBPs if they were more repairable. The upgrade cycle will always be the upgrade cycle.
Phones, like other consumer electronics get dropped, bumped, damaged. This can happen in the first week of ownership, in the second week, or at anytime after that. The idea that you should just scrap it and buy the next model is ridiculous.
>I’d be more on the side of the right to repair Apple critics if they would just be honest and say “hey, this is a hobby for us and we want to save money and we just want to be able to do this stuff because it’s fun!”
This is nowhere even close to what most people are talking about in this thread. I hate to have to say it, but you really seem to be arguing in bad-faith here.
I wasn't doing it until I had to replace the backlight chip (in a computer where there was already at least one module on the mother board, so there absolutely was room to put the backlight circuit on a module but I think Apple keeps it on the motherboard to save money which means lots of dead macs.)
Also you only need 0.1%. The computer I worked on wasn't mine.
There's quite clearly a market for other people to do it as a service, and I'd bet you that percentage is pretty much everyone who doesn't buy a new laptop when they see the edge of their AppleCare plan, which may be on the order of half the market.
>>What percentage of Apple customers are doing surface mount rework, or even hiring other people to do this, in your estimation? My guess is less than .01%.
This is a terrible argument. Apple has Teams of lawyers, and engineers doing to best to make sure board level repair is technically and legally unfeasible as possible, and in your circular logic their success is prohibiting repair is justification for continued or increased anti-repair actions
Wow...
The better question is "How man Apple Customers would like to have the option of repair vs replace"
idk what you are on about, you wanna defend throwing away a whole laptop when the battery's dead or the LCD is broken? You don't think "right to repair" is all about replacing IC's on a PCB, right? There are a ton of vital components in a modern laptop that would easily be replacable by either a dedicated layman or an unlicenced professional. E.g. the webcam, SSD, battery, cables between these and the MB, the LCD, keyboard, touchpad, power button, speakers, screen bezel, digitizer, daughterboards, lid sensor, the list goes on and on and on.
And remember that "right to repair" does not only entail end users, but also local repair shops and IT service companies who simply are not licensed with a specific brand.
What do you think reduces the carbon footprint of a company more:
A) Company consolidates hardware into a single unrepairable resin block
B) All customers are able to use their devices 50% longer because stuff is repairable
As someone who designes PCBs you could save the world by doing the math here for me and convince me how this is better for the planet than e.g. my fairphone where I can swap out my battery when it is broken instead of throwing the whole assembly away or trying to source parts and removing a glued in battery.
Replacing some component in a computer/phone is something every member of my extended family did within the last 3 years. Usually it was a screen, a battery, a home button, a headphone jack, a hard drive, ... Every instance where they did this they used a piece of electronics longer and thus reduced the carbon footprint more than any single engineering change Apple could have come up with.
Clearly A is better. Because those resin blocks will be made smaller and smaller in the next decade or so to the point that arguments like "Landfills!" become irrelevant.
B isn't even a possibility. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology upgrade/purchase cycle, and of consumer behavior in general.
Most people don't throw away their computers because they "break and can't be repaired." They throw them away because newer hardware is more powerful and smaller and uses less energy.
When I went home last year my parents had 4 old PC towers of various generations sitting in their basement, they recently took them all to the local dump. All of them were still completely functional. Literally nothing was broken.
Why did they throw them away? Because they were 1/10th the processing power of a modern MacBook and impossible to move around the house. Nobody was using them.
There's mountains of giant plastic PC towers sitting in landfills that were built with the easy to repair/upgrade mindset everybody here is so nostalgic about. It did nothing to save the environment.
I mean before you call it hypocritical you need to take a holistic view of the supply chain. Electronics manufacturing is incredibly wasteful, even if you're making something that can be repaired!
Apple is at least working towards more sustainable technologies than traditional manufacturing. Photolithography is fucking awful for the planet and yet foundational to many devices, just for example.
Some devices like the Magic Mouse become paperweights after the battery fails and cannot be repaired at all.
I think one part of the problem is all of the encouragement and virtue signaling around recycling. A friend told me “Apple is the best tech company for the environment because they recycle more than any others”.
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
The fact that Apple peripherals are not user repairable is an absolute environmental disaster.
I used to work as a civil service engineer for the Navy in technology development for future weapons. The brass would often complain about how expensive fully-integrated solutions were. We investigated and found that the main cause was vendor lock-in to buy the all up rounds. We couldn’t compete for lowest cost on the power cards, or signal processing cards, rocket motors, etc., because the government didn’t have data rights to the design in order to hold down development costs. (Side note: as a contracting necessity, we’d also put the whole purchase on one huge contract to be managed by the so-called prime contractor and negotiate a profit fee explicitly in the contract itself. The total cost of the prime contract included “pass through” funding for subcontracts that the prime contractor would handle. In some cases the prime would let a subcontract to a vendor who would contract _back_ to a subsidiary of the prime, and we’d pay guaranteed profit margin explicitly on the prime and the subcontract amounts, so we’d pay a profit markup to the prime on the profit they would make from their subsidiary. And folks around here gripe about the 30% app “tax”.)
Anyway, vendor lock-in means we can’t compete subcomponents and our long term maintenance costs are really high because we always have to go back to the vendor for service. (Sounding familiar…?) The brass started dreaming up “modular weapons systems” where we maybe develop things like universal power modules, guidance modules, and other components, then we could compete for low cost production and long-term maintenance and achieve utopia.
I spent quite a while on this, and what we found is that it wouldn’t work (at least not for weapons). Universal components aren’t well-suited to different platforms (3” rocket vs 14” missile, etc.), the modular design adds weight, reduces efficiency for the electronics systems, increases part count to make them all interoperable, and so on. The engineering trades that you have to make for modular designs are incompatible with optimizing performance as measured by the end user. Ironically perhaps, one of the major case studies that helped argue that point was based around Apple products.
Which is perhaps a long way to say that most consumers don’t seem to care about modular computers, and in the worst case many of the changes that modularity would require are counterproductive to the things consumers _do_ seem to care about.
It’s one thing to argue that we should use governmental regulation to push negative externalities back onto firms so that they reconsider the design and engineering constraints they prioritize, but it’s not like firms are being irrational or irresponsible by giving people what they want—some combination of smaller, lighter, faster, longer battery life, and cheaper devices. There would be some negative impact on some (or all) of those characteristics if Apple, Samsung, or anyone else switched to fully modular designs—and I think most consumers would choose the cheaper, faster, smaller, lighter, or longer battery life models than to buy a modular one either on principle or because they expect to repair or upgrade it for significantly longer than they expect to own them today.
That might apply to very complex, high reliability systems like those in the military. But a battery is very basic and it's a consumable more than a modularize-able component like an engine or turbo. I think batteries are easily replaceable in most military equipment.
Consumables in the very least should be replaceable for consumer products, or the price for its replacement capped, otherwise we're throwing away electronics that hasn't reached even a third of its lifetime just because the battery's lifetime is over, it's like buying a new car everytime the tires are worn out. It's an incredible waste of resources.
Same thing for connectors like USB, audio jack, buttons and joysticks.
Most egregious is the chip signature-checking and exclusive buyer rights on same chip, that should be outlawed, heavily fined and easily reported and checked. It's like adding a chip with a serial number for each tire and if you install one not from your car manufacturer then your car refuses to move. It's just a scam.
I think batteries are easily replaceable in most military equipment.
The irony is that a lot of military equipment is designed to destroy and be destroyed, yet is probably designed with serviceability in mind more than consumer electronics.
> I think batteries are easily replaceable in most military equipment.
The _actual_ irony here is that batteries are often not easily replaceable in lots of military equipment, and especially not always in weapons. It may require a very extensive tear down and replacement of entire sub assemblies to replace something as mundane as a coin cell battery. And don’t even start with thermal batteries…
The Israeli Iron Dome project did it differently. From the references in the Wikipedia article I found this gem:
"As scientists we dream to sit in our offices without limitations of time and budget and to develop perfect products. But the reality is different, and these constraints forced us to think hard. There are parts in the system forty times cheaper than the parts we buy normally. I can give you even a scoop—it contains the world's only missile components from Toys R Us... One day I brought to work my sons toy car. We Passed it among us, and we saw that there were actually components suitable for us. More than that I can not tell.".
It’s very common to use commercial off the shelf (COTS) components in military gear. It’s actually preferable to use COTS than building something new. That doesn’t necessarily make the overall end item modular or serviceable by anyone except the OEM.
> because the government didn’t have data rights to the design in order to hold down development costs
Isn't this the very problem? These kinds of contracts should be illegal, not just in the military, but across the whole public sector. Not getting full designs along with a custom product makes the public agency dependent on a commercial vendor. Might as well put a neon sign above should provision that says "a loophole for defrauding the public".
Yes. They should have data rights. It very quickly becomes false economy.
On a similar topic, a lot of LRUs (Line Replaceable Unit) in aircraft such as the F-35, the front-line maintainers, or even squadron/wing level avionics shops, can't even do basic diagnostics on the LRU. They either have to get a manufacturer tech representative to do it, or send the box back to the manufacture for repair. They are routinely returned "No fault found" with a significant cost attached.
Wasn't the Aegis system designed with this very kind of modularity, though at a higher level? Want different missiles on your ship, no need to build a different ship: just lift the module out and put a new one in.
I genuinely do not want repairability anywhere near the top of the list of performance and design trade offs.
Ruggedness, longevity, sure. Avoiding need to repair, definitely. Repairability? Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
Spent too many years as a full service PC network support small business to ever again want to deal with parts that aren’t actually attached to each other. Connection issues (especially on heating and cooling, so intermittent) were essentially all the problems except a vanishingly small proportion that were components.
The thing is, the repair shops get what’s left after the design is iterated until other problems are gone. So maybe only these component failures are left. Reverting to the old methods of replaceable components would likely re-introduce a massive class of problems that have by and large been eliminated.
Only the remaining problems have a voice, who is advocating on behalf of all the problems that the last 20 years of more solid design eliminated?
// Apologies for the HN trope, but see also Chesterson’s Fence, a tech version of “get off my lawn”.
The repairability Rossmann is talking about is not user-replaceable components. His repairs usually require soldering to replace components.
One of his main critique points is that Apple makes it hard to repair their products, even for electronics professionals. In the past, Apple has also altered designs so that small electrical problems suddenly fry the most expensive component on the board, the CPU. Either this is an embarrassing, junior-level oversight or a deliberate anti-repair-buy-new-hardware tactic.
> I don't personally have the time to watch a 20-minute video to see what the hell he's talking about,
I personally find your reply in bad faith because both Greek0 and 8bitsrule took the time to find and share the video with you as well as explain the context around it.
That's not even considering the time that Louis Rossman went through to make that "20 minute video" because it takes much longer to film, edit and publish the damn thing.
This is like an extreme form of trolling to derail the conversation, usually it's "please provide a source", which someone did but you hand waved it away with "I don't have time to watch it". It legitimately upset me.
I had the time to watch the video. He demonstrates (schematics and images) that a common anti-boneheaded design consideration Apple had adhered to in the past - spacing high-voltage traces away from very-low-voltage traces - disappeared in a more recent model (making it easy for 40+ volts to reach the CPU).
One professional EE would absolutely notice this. So there's no 'maybe' here.
Why do you argue against something you don't want to take the time to understand? It's clear from you comment you didn't watch the video - even if you hadn't said so yourself. If you watch it you might both understand it better and have something interesting to add. I don't get why people comment on articles (and videos) they didn't look at.
Right to repair isn't "obligation to repair devices yourself", or "force manufacturers to redesign hardware so repair shops jobs are easier".
It's about preventing certain business practices that hinder the repair industry. Like when Apple forces their suppliers to not sell components to anyone but them.
"Component level repair" is a thing that's done today. It involves replacing individual components on a motherboard with a microscope and soldering iron, special equipment, and smart and well-trained people. That's what Rossman does regularly on his Youtube channel.
But even if you have the skills and tools to replace a tiny burned out IC on a motherboard, where do you get a replacement? Apple doesn't allow suppliers to sell them to anyone.
I don’t think your first sentence is accurate - there is no single standard definition for right to repair, and I have absolutely seen people saying that right to repair includes an obligation for manufacturers to redesign hardware so repairs are easier. I’ve also seen people say it’s only about allowing schematic access and nothing else. I’ve seen people say it includes unlocking bootloaders. IMO this is one of the biggest problems with the right to repair movement: the goals are fairly poorly defined.
Louis Rossmann made a video giving his definition, which is that parts are available. However, that is only his definition, there is still broader community lack of focus on what it means.
Some people think it means that Apple must make their products easy to repair. Others think it means Apple must every single chip available for independent purchase. Others think it means Apple must only make available the parts that they would provide their AASPs with (only finished boards and displays, not individual chips).
Repairability doesn’t make products fragile or unreliable, poor design and quality control does. Source: spent the last 18 months building a highly repairable product and putting it through the same reliability tests less repairable products go through.
A lot of repairability just comes down to making replacement parts readily available too, which is orthogonal to the design.
I respectfully disagree. I’ve worked on products where field serviceability is a design goal. It absolutely can add complexity and cost - after all, it’s another design constraint. Rivets and glue are faster, cheaper, smaller, and often more reliable than screws. Soldered-on connectors are more vibration resistant and smaller than pluggable ones. Access panels can introduce structural weakness. Gluing or welding cases shut provides environmental protection that’s difficult to achieve with screws.
Even making parts available can be a pain. I might want to spin a new rev on a product where the old parts aren’t compatible with the new - but now I have to warehouse the old in case anybody wants them. I might not actually warehouse anything myself (contract manufacturer ships directly to retailers), but now I have to find a way of warehousing spares of everything. I might not have any good way of packing/shipping some of these loose parts.
That’s not to say R2R is a bad idea or anything (rather, I think it’s generally a good idea) - but it is not free, and we should be realistic about that.
You don't have to warehouse the old parts if you don't want to. When you deprecate them, you can simply license someone else to do so. They'd jump at the chance; parts are a profitable business.
Automakers have been warehousing parts for decades. Here's Toyota's catalog entry for a starter motor that fits a 1974 Corolla Coupe 1.6L A/T, which is available for under $200 via my local dealership: https://parts.toyota.com/p/Toyota_1974_Corolla-Coupe-16L-AT/...
The only reason to be anti-repair is if you want old devices to become useless so that more new devices get sold at retail. Automakers can't do this because if Toyota screws me on parts, I can buy a Honda next time. Apple is relatively peerless in many ways, and they also do their best to keep people locked in to the MacOS/iOS ecosystem.
Your point about packing and shipping is ludicrous, considering that all of the component manufacturers do that for all of their products. How do you think a device gets built? How does it get repaired under warranty? You just put the component in a bag, put the bag in a box with some foam, and voila. Electronic parts are fairly robust and there's a huge market for them (Newegg, Mouser, Digikey, etc).
When you say R2R "is not free," what you really mean is that repair is more economical for the user. The manufacturer isn't entitled to recurring revenue from replacement of potentially reparable devices, and shouldn't bake that revenue into their business model. That is an entirely anti-consumer practice whose existence is a very valid justification for regulators to open up a can of whoop-ass on device manufacturers.
I upvoted you because you presented an alternate view I hadn't heard before, but I disagree.
After a few years, a laptop's battery degrades. In well under a decade, Wirth's Law kicks in to make devices seem slow.
This attitude unintentionally suggests that people should turn their entire computers into e-waste instead of just swapping the battery or upgrading the RAM.
Nobody's saying that companies should have to make design tradeoffs to make things easier to repair (e.g., making devices bigger to fit sockets so components can be replaced without soldering). We're just saying they should stop going out of their way to make things harder to repair (e.g., withholding schematics and service manuals that they already did the work to write, and forcing suppliers to not sell their parts to independent repair shops).
Rossmann is not advocating for companies to change how they design stuff. Primarily, he just wants companies to release schematics (that they already have and aren't really proprietary) and to stop making deals with manufacturers to only sell custom parts to that company (which is what apple is doing with one of their charge chips).
I agree I dont care about reparability by third party as long as the devices is literally made indestructible. But If it cant be made that way, why the trade offs?
Why should I loss all my Data on MacBook when its CPU, GPU, or logic board has a problem?
Why does repairing a keyboard require replacing the half of the laptop.
And why are these repair so expensive.
It is all about balance. And a lot of these balance in Apple seems to be disintegrating since Steve Jobs passed away.
> Repairability? Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
I don't think repariability is something you need to put effort into build into a product, it's something you put effort into taking out of a product. Apple's engineers definitely have things like what Louis uses for his repairs: board views, schematics, diagnostics software. Louis gets these things from illegal vendors in other countries who obtain them from Apple workers. If Apple just sold these things to him he'd be willing to pay but that's not in Apple's best interest.
Also, Apple prevents Louis from buying replacement parts because they make their vendors agree to never sell the components they use to anyone but apple.
> Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
This avoids another massive externality: recycling and the environment. Right now Apple's recycling program takes old mostly working systems and shreds them. There's a reason we should: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle in that order.
> So maybe only these component failures are left. Reverting to the old methods of replaceable components would likely re-introduce a massive class of problems that have by and large been eliminated.
The macbook repair community was at one point fixing a very common issue by replacing a component with a slightly higher spec part. The difference was 1/1000 th of a cent to 2/1000 th of a cent in cost or something like that. Multiple iterations of macbooks came out with this flaw until Apple employed a similar fix.
I think another thing that's important to look at is how other industries handle similar things. If you found something that was:
1. In a different industry.
2. Had a similar experience ruining issue.
3. Said issue was resolved by a consumer.
4. Rather than ignoring the issue for years they very quickly create a patch that takes the feedback from the end user.
We could then conclude that this adversarial relationship between repair professionals is: not required to run a profitable business, can lead to better products, and can make everyone happy.
We can conclude then that Apple explicitly does not do this out of their own will. Apple doesn't have a hardware bug bounty. Apple does not acknowledge when a community member derives a fix for their product that works better then them.
I couldn't begin to imagine why Apple doesn't behave more like this. It just seems to make more sense for everyone.
Are you also against being able to upgrade a device, like adding memory or a larger hard drive? Why can't repairability be at the top of the list with performance and design?
Apple doesn't want you to fix its devices, it wants to force you to either have them fix it or buy a new one. It's a business decision not a technical one.
How much of this, I'm curious, is changing now that Jony Ive is gone?
Think about it. Since he left, Apple is bringing color back to their designs, bringing back ports other than Thunderbolt, abandoned the Butterfly keyboard, made the MacBook Pro 16" thicker to improve battery life and cooling, added the discounted business rate to the App Store...
Now, this doesn't mean Apple will continue improving or will make Right to Repair happen. However, I think that with Jony's departure, something may have, just may have, snapped within the company, and they seem to be looking at changing their ways just a little bit.
I wrote a book for O'Reilly that did really poorly in sales.
I added content to show the places I made mistakes in my assumptions about the process, and put in sections in chapters that showed how I troubleshot those errors, and corrected the code.
My editors asked me to remove that code. O'Reilly's brand, IMHO, is having the smartest people in the room talking to you. They don't want content that shows the author making mistakes. I felt like there was an audience for people who want a different voice, but who was I to argue with O'Reilly's success?
Rossman seems like he is talking to that audience, people who aren't experts, and still courageous enough to get something fixed on their own.
YouTube permits him to monetize that audience. I still think there is a huge gap in talking to people who are not experts and intimidated by the experts. There is a massive market for publishing there.
I just did my first surface mount repair this morning and it 100% happened because of Rossmann's channel. It was so easy that I feel like I should have been doing it much sooner. The things I've thrown away over the years..
Tip: if you're curious enough to watch a video of Rossmann's, do that in the incognito mode. Otherwise you'll be pestered with recommendations of the other two thousand of his videos, until the end of your days. Perhaps you'll even be able to follow the epic of his fight by the titles of new videos.
Sorta loath to do that, because I don't want YT to stop suggesting stuff related to that channel and its general topics. I just don't need more Louis Rossmann in my life, the rants don't do me any good—possibly aside from keeping my heart strong from pumping against the pressure, I guess. But the stress snacks will kill me. I'd like the algo to take a gentle hint already, it was like a year since the last watching.
I did some digging in the innards of a Macbook Pro, years earlier, and have a couple leftover screws as a result. I think I'll leave the next endeavor to people with better hands, especially since putting in an extra hard drive isn't an option anymore.
You can remove your history of viewed videos in whole or in part. I've found that the most effective way to stop YouTube's manic obsession for any topic I've viewed once.
There is a Chrome ext that allows you to quickly open a link/video in incognito by clicking it while holding a meta key like shift, highly recommend for avoiding the Youtube recommendation hell [0].
I always watch YouTube in incognito mode, otherwise it pigeonholes you and you don't get to experience all of the breadth of the site. (If you're going to put up with Google you might as well make the most of it.)
Rossmann is seriously a national treasure. Along with Lex Fridman the two Youtube personalities irrefutably prove fair mindedness, humility & sincerity is valued. My fears that content online would eventually consist of nothing but selfies, food pics & competitive victimhood are somewhat reduced. I'd like to see Rossmann on Fridman's podcast.
I find Rossman insufferable due to his hyperbolic approach to shaming Apple and having a bone to pick with just about everyone- he's the definition of a narcissist. I agree in principle to "right to repair", but Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting. I've watched over 100 hours of his content and realized that his audience is primarily made up of anti-apple PC Master Race fanatics that just want to hear Louis troll apple for an hour.
Rossman always presents himself as the ultimate victim. Apple has it out for him, NY has it out for him, people less successful than him have it out for him. When you've watched as much of his content as I have, you start to see where his head is, and it's not a pretty place. Anyway, I have found other repair guys that are better than Rossman and don't have so much negativity on their channels. I can get a deeper understanding of repairing tech without the hyperbolic commentary.
It’s a shame to see this downvoted because even if it’s against what many people believe (we all have “hero’s” and “villains” I suppose, and our hero’s do no wrong) it’s something I also see.
I used to watch a lot of Rossman and glossed over his Apple hate because ultimately Apple are putting him and people like him out of a job, so it’s fair to be salty.
But a large portion of his content (a few years ago at least) is just hour long rants which are unsubstantiated opinion, he does not see nuance or doesn’t want to try steel-manning the things he disagrees with. Which is something Linus Sebastian is incredibly good at.
It does come off almost narcissistic at times, to me at least.
But at the end of the day explaining how computers are constructed is great content.
The entire hour is nothing BUT substantiating the opinion.
...in excruciating exhaustive detail that covers every possible excuse and addresses every possible disingenuous argument, exactly because people will try anything to avoid recognizing something they don't want to think about or admit or deal with.
He doesn't say "I don't like Apple because I don't know why, I just don't like their face." He says Apple did X, and here is the evidence that Ape did X, and here is exactly why X is bad. Exactly specifically and explicitly so that no one can possibly even try to say that the statement is just subjective and open to be disregarded.
And here you are proving how even such exhaustive extremes of thoroughness and correctness and see-for-yourselfness don't matter. That is incredibly disheartening to see. It proves once again that right and wrong don't matter. People use the words to suit their own opinions and wants, but they don't actaully matter.
You don't have to like his style or personality, but to say his statements are unsubstantiated opinion is just incredible.
It's funny to see this analysis, because in my mind Rossman is simply being a New Yorker and doing things exactly as I'd expect a New Yorker to do them. The mentality that city forces on people to survive produces a narrow personality outcome and Rossman's personality is one of those.
I don't think being a New Yorker means you are destined to be as asshole. I'm from Jersey and generally don't care for people that meet the NY/NJ stereotypes. Maybe that's why guys like Rossman don't impress me.
There’s a line between being frank/brash and being an asshole - and often what side of the line someone falls on depends on how well you know/trust that the person has your best interests at heart.
Well said. I certainly liked him for a while, but eventually he just went too far. I understand he has a "base" that loves his schtick, but it's not for me.
Completely agree. He spews contempt, anger and vile, brings out the worst of people and this is what makes him very appealing. It’s a reality show. Same way how Reddit hooks people in to outrage and justice gifs.
With regards to arrogance, it’s difficult to see his arguments for R2R while he is showing off his desoldering skills for a 170 pin BGA.
If you want to promote R2R, look at iFixit and EFFs efforts. If HN thinks Rossmann is the hero we should be looking upto, I think we’ve stooped really far down.
I’ve learned more about commercial real estate from Louis than I would have from other sources. There are disincentives for commercial real estate owners to lower their leasing rates, as it can drive a re-evaluation of loan criteria by the banks, forcing the owner to immediately increase equity. Banks don’t want this to happen, as it makes their books look bad.
Watching his business struggle through Covid fills me with great respect for the small business owner and the difficult choices which must be made. Did NY have it out for him? They were far from business friendly with their Covid restrictions. Recently, his shop was fined for not registering used laptops that his customers had abandoned for repair. Sure, NYC is attempting to prevent stolen laptops from being resold, but the level of bureaucratic idiocy turns Rossman’s channel into a Shakespearen comedy.
As for his specific gripes about repeated Apple design failures, he makes a good argument. Two stand out. First, liquid intolerance. Thinkpads from years ago used to tolerate coffee spilt on the keyboard. It flowed right through. From the number of water damaged MacBooks Louis repairs, it appears Apples can’t take a drop. If Apple is upset with Rossman’s criticism, they can easily apply board level coating to solve the problem.
Second, he’s critical of the connectors being soldered directly to the motherboard instead of going into a daughterboard and connecting via a flex connector.
And, yes, the above design decisions are made by Apple for a number of different, possibly valid reasons. To hit a price point, to fit within a form factor, to deliver in a required timeframe. But Louis brings up the point that Apple may be making these decisions for less than consumer friendly reasons. Planned obsolescence? Could Apple change the design of their connectors so they won’t break? Yes, but maybe they didn’t because they expect 5.8% of the connectors to fail and not be economical to repair in the Apple store, driving 5.8% greater revenue.
All that being said, yes, Louis takes the above points, which can be read in a minute, and rehashes them 50 different ways.
I've had three 12" Macbook main boards, two screens, and two keyboards replaced free under Australian Consumer Law because of broken components. Connectors that should have been replaceable onsite in seconds instead requiring depot maintenance and hundreds of dollars in couriers and staff interactions. 10c LVDS cables soldered on instead of replaceable, unrepairable even to Apple, have sent two high quality display panels straight to landfill.
Building things to a certain price is always going to yield accusations of doing that to make it more breakable. But it's probably one of those cases where you can spend thousands of dollars for only 1% more reliability. Stuff that you bend open, throw in your backpack twice a day, touch for 14 hours a day, eat your meals over, etc. is going to break no matter how expensive the components are. I used to work on embedded systems and was always impressed by the quality of eval boards we got. Name brand components all over -- Coilcraft inductors, Vishay resistors, etc. They still flaked out, had bugs, broke, and required manual rework. The performance of the $10,000 reference board was the same as the $100 production units with decidedly non-name-brand components.
We'll never know for sure if Apple is making the right trade-offs, because you can't buy any other machines that run OS X to compare to, but they probably are. People who just spilled coffee on their keyboard really want a laptop that weighs 3x as much to have a keyboard drainage system. The 99% of users that don't spill coffee on their keyboard but do carry their laptop to and from work twice a day probably appreciate the weight savings. (You can kind of infer whether or not Apple is making the right decisions by looking at the PC market. Not a lot of laptops with roll cages and keyboard drainage anymore. People want specs per dollar, not the ability to run their laptop over with a car. When they do run their laptop over with a car or drop it into a pool, they're sad. But if those parts were standard issue, they wouldn't be able to afford a laptop to begin with. Such is the way of the market, I suppose.)
Apple probably doesn't have any good reason to make repairing their laptops so painful for skilled professionals. As far as I can tell, even their own repair service is garbage. That is probably a conscious decision -- paying someone to write repair guides, train technicians, and maintain a fulfillment network for spare parts cuts into new computer sales, so it's spending money to lose money, which nobody will ever do. Maybe government intervention is the right answer, but it's probably a cost the market can't bear. PC manufacturers compete ruthlessly, and all the laptops are junk too. There is probably a maximum amount of money consumers will pay for a certain amount of specs, and it isn't enough to make a reliable mobile computer. The downside is that you'll never have a computer you can spill coffee on. The upside is that even someone without a lot of money can afford a personal computer. That's the tradeoff.
I use a desktop and keep it where I can't spill my coffee on it. Works well.
This is the number one thing that fails for me I hate these ribbon cables. Don't blame him for soldering though the connectors can be 5 to $6 a piece ugh hirose...
> Recently, his shop was fined for not registering used laptops that his customers had abandoned for repair. Sure, NYC is attempting to prevent stolen laptops from being resold, but the level of bureaucratic idiocy turns Rossman’s channel into a Shakespearen comedy.
I saw this complaint and didn't follow what NYC did wrong. If one isn't allowed to sell "unregistered" laptops or whatever, why would abandoned customer laptops get a pass? Did the law state they should? I gather he is still allowed to repair them for people, even potentially thieves, just never "launder" them.
He actually tried calling the city to ask what he should do with abandoned laptops. He was transferred multiple times, told to call multiple numbers, and tried leaving voicemail messages to find an answer. He got nowhere, and the closest he got was "That's a good question".
The law explicitly states purchased laptops, which he did not. Now we can say "But that's not the purpose of the law, just the letter!" But the purpose of the law is to make selling stolen laptops non-profitable to thieves - and abandoning them does not turn a profit. Meaning Louis runs afoul of neither letter nor spirit of the law.
And so I'm legitimately asking, if you think he's in the wrong: what is he to do, when he can't properly fill out LEADS online without a purchase price? He tried calling the city, he tried calling would-be customers to collect their things. The former couldn't tell him, and the latter told him it wasn't worth their time.
But can't every thief claim the laptop they picked up was "abandoned" too? I mean it was there on the table and no one was around at the moment..
If the customer owes him money and he is selling the laptop to get that money because the customer is choosing that outcome, then in a sense he is selling the laptop on behalf of the customer. For this option to be available to the customer, it seems they should still need to prove it was properly purchased. It still seems like this creates a loophole otherwise. What happens if a theft victim spots their laptop being used by someone who purchased it legitimately from a shop like this?
He should recycle them. These machines are usually pawned off on seniors in very shady "deal of the century" sales schticks. My 72 year old father in law bought a complete pos laptop for $200 that was an abandoned machine from a repair shop. It didn't have any drivers installed, it was running Vista and it could not connect to the internet.
Rossman may not be selling under such shady circumstances, but this is how most of these machines are moved. I don't think any good comes out of selling these machines.
I think you make clients pay a deposit, and if they don't pick up the laptops, send them to the state's lost property department. If that isn't possible, I guess you buy the laptop from the customer for some token small amount of money, and then sell it back to them when they come to pick it up. If they don't show up, it's legally your laptop.
> If they don't show up, it's legally your laptop.
That's the whole problem. He tries for a couple of months to contact them (calls, emails, etc) and if they don't even respond, after around 9 months they get put into the resale bin.
His policy is "no fix, no fee" so I would presume there's no deposit. If there is no transfer of money it seems difficult to make even a weak legal argument that the laptops were "purchased". That is why Rossmann found the whole situation ridiculous.
When you can’t attack their arguments, resort to personal attacks.
The amount of childish personal attacks about Rossman in this thread I think is a good indicator of how right he is. Makes me feel good about that money I donated to his Gofundme.
I'm not sure why you would say that. Some critics on this thread have given pretty good reasons for why they "dislike" Rossman. while it may seem like some (not most) of those points are attacking Rossmans character, I don't see how some of his character doesn't have a direct impact on his arguments. If he always goes for clickbait titles, has a tendency to exaggerate, prefers to perpetually rant/glorify himself or likes to talk about things that he clearly does not know a lot about that can obviously taint the core of his message to some.
FWIW, personally I've watched Louis since the very beginning and he knows a lot about repairing electronics. But I also think the way he kept getting more and more attention as he ranted about Apple really changed the channel and his character at least on video.
Also, I honestly think it's more childish to use the "if x is getting criticized it means it's probably right" trope here than it is to criticize the personality of a public figure.
> Look, I think Bob is a smart person and knows a lot about math, but personally I don't like him. He's balding, he collects plastic folding chairs in his garage, and he has a Youtube channel with clickbaity titles.
Why does that matter? He's right, `2 + 2 == 4`. Why are you posting personal attacks instead of debating his argument? It's impossible to have a productive discussion like that, and it's childish.
> I'm not sure why you would say that. Some critics on this thread have given pretty good reasons for why they "dislike" Bob. while it may seem like some (not most) of those points are attacking Bob's character, I don't see how some of his character doesn't have a direct impact on his arguments. If he always goes for clickbait titles, has a tendency to exaggerate, prefers to perpetually rant/glorify himself or likes to talk about things that he clearly does not know a lot about that can obviously taint the core of his message to some.
> FWIW, personally I've watched Bob since the very beginning and he knows a lot about repairing electronics. But I also think the way he kept getting more and more attention as he ranted about Apple really changed the channel and his character at least on video.
> Also, I honestly think it's more childish to use the "if x is getting criticized it means it's probably right" trope here than it is to criticize the personality of a public figure.
Even in this situation, a lot of people don't like Bob, and want to express that. The main post doesn't dismiss right to repair because of rossman's character, they simply state " I can get a deeper understanding of repairing tech without the hyperbolic commentary". They're upset that this guy is who's pushing right to repair instead of someone more grounded and polite.
Reducing a complicated situation to a mathematical fact is basically strawman argument. If a an expert is talking about a complicated area with a lot of nuance and no concrete right answer, then that expert's credibility matters.
> I agree in principle to "right to repair", but Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.
It’s pretty clear he had built a business on repairing electronics. But that doesn’t invalidate his points. If you own something, you should be able to get it repaired to a reasonable degree. Apple goes out of their way to frustrate even consumables like batteries from being swapped, and I say that as someone that still uses apple products.
For him, it makes sense hes more passionate than most, not only is it a passion for him to do this type of work (repairing electronics, not youtubing) but its also his livelyhood, so it makes sense that he would call out companies that make design changes that serve little other purpose than to frustrate repairs and decrease longevity to bolster their sales (and increase e-waste in the process)
> I've watched over 100 hours of his content and realized that his audience is primarily made up of anti-apple PC Master Race fanatics that just want to hear Louis troll apple for an hour.
Gonna disagree. Regardless of the type of people attracted to his content. It doesn’t invalidate the points he makes there. I don't watch his stuff religiously, and probably haven't viewed as much as you purport to have, but he has a clear schtick (which is basically mandatory for youtubers) but is definitely less negative than many I have seen. The good seems to outweigh the bad.
The article starts out saying this was a way for him to vent in a healthy and cathartic way, as a direct substitute to therapy. And it seems to work for him and he has said it before and it shows in the stuff he posts. I wont judge him solely on that just as I wouldn't judge other others who prefer something different, like fishing or hunting and escaping people (myself), or hobbies like music (also myself) or maintaining a garden or yard to work out frustrations. Some even go on the internet to criticize others I guess.
What other YouTube channels are showing people to cleanup or swap individual chips, or what part of a board does what? [1][2] I haven’t seen one that compares. It’s pretty neat and a display of a skill set definately don't posses. Even though I work with tech on a daily basis in my own right.
I could not have said it better. This apple employee (BTW - making $20/hr) didn't detect this weird thing I did to scrw up this laptop and so was going to send it to Apple tech people.
Dude, if you can find folks to work for $20 / hr with the people skills to fix stuff day in and day out for while dealing with insane repair volume - you could manage your own apple store.
Here's the bottom line as an actual customer. I have NEVER been disappointed in the reliability of my iphone. The one time I broke it I walked in an AppleCare had me out same day with a new device. They are also surprisingly waterproof (I know, just resistant supposedly).
Does any of this have to do with gluing everything down? How do I know. But my phone has kept on going through some rediculous stuff, so I don't care. Solder everything, glue on top. And USB-C on my laptop keeps on flaking out while lightning seems to seat more reliably.
AND my "non repairable" junk iphone seems to have INCREDIBLE re-sale value in comparison to whatever else is out there. So apple IS designing for the long haul, and market rewards that. My wife has an old iphone still getting updates for some reason (in android land this is crazy talk).
And I've had motherboards replaced by Toshiba, Fujitsu and just about everyone else whenever there's a major problem with an electronic device under warranty. Seems like the default "nuclear option" they use whenever the problem is non-obvious. And it didn't fix the problem more often than not.
Also I have a few ancient apple devices that work fine as ever. Though my wife does have a solid track record in destroying them (or any other brand).
Rossman's complaints didn't really bother me though. It's like a car mechanic griping at the manufacturer for making their life difficult, or a patent lawyer bashing the USPTO. Just the kind of thing you'd expect.
I think he just understood how YouTube and social media works. New content is more rant and less repair. Anyone can enjoy a good rant troubleshooting motherboards and soldering components is less accessible.
Makes me think of Thunderf00t. This guy is a massive troll with, from time to time, great scientific content. He has a lot of followers just here to enjoy the trolling, as evidenced by the fact he is never questioned by his fans even though it is what his channel is supposed to teach.
I do not understand how or why people prefer spending time listening or watching people talk to each other. Is it not much quicker to read transcripts? And why would I want all the noise that happens in the conversation? Reading a summary of the meat and pickles is far more efficient.
“YouTube culture” puzzles me. I love it for instructional videos though.
Intonation, body language, etc... Generally transcripts don't make good reads. Well written articles/stories are a different thing.
As for summaries, long form / short form is an endless debate. Some people say summaries are worthless because you don't get the context and nuances. Others say long form articles (and videos) are a waste of time. Most people are somewhere between these two extremes.
If your largest problem is "negativity" and not about wether it's true the problem is somewhere between your chair and the keyboard. People can have very good reasons to be negative.
He makes very valid arguments, how is this "financial and self promoting"? Dont lie about someone's intentions just because you don't agree with their reasoning.
It is fair that you might not like his personality and sometimes he presents things like the Apple engineers are idiots to design such fragile stuff(probably the fragility is by design) BUT all the facts he presents are true and you can confirm by googling things like all the class action lawsuit that were required to force Apple to admit mistakes, or how Apple "geniuses" are incompetent and will not correctly diagnose your issue but instead offer you a new product or just replace the entire motherboard etc.
Though I think it would be best to have more people leading the right to repair just for this reason of avoiding people that hate someone personality then opposing this movement.
I agree with your characterization but don’t think that it makes him insufferable or have questionable motives. He’s authentic to himself and shows it on YouTube warts and all. Have to respect that. Take his videos as 50-75% opinion and it’s all good.
From the videos I’ve seen there are very few where he doesn’t come off as insufferable. My favourite one is when he starts trashing the Genius Bar for not being able to diagnose an issue with a specific component on the motherboard like he does, and instead they recommend replacing the whole board. I don’t think Dell/HP/Lenovo support is going to bother inspecting a mobo with a microscope and checking voltage levels either.
Yea, he seems to be willfully oblivious to the fact that it's not in any way feasible to have every Apple Store staffed with people who have the skills to reflow surface mount components and debug issues with oscilloscopes.
It's orders of magnitude easier to just swap whole boards and ship the broken ones to a central place to be either recycled or repaired.
> I agree in principle to "right to repair", but Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.
Self-promoting maybe but if Apple made better products how Rossman would benefit? Isn't it currently the opposite? Rossman does well due to Apple refusing to fix the smallest of issues with their products. And fighting anyone who does whether a customer or repairman.
> Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.
How does he benefit by teaching others on how to repair stuff for free. You can start your own repair business by watching and learning from his videos.
Lex Fridman misrepresents his role at MIT to make himself sound more accomplished than he really is, and the way he went about putting out his self driving car research directly to the press instead of going through peer review is shady. The guy is a cringeworthy grifter. He’s trying to be viewed as some AI expert but he’s totally full of shit.
I’ve also had a really hard time understanding why people praise him so much, I’ve tried multiple times to listen to his stuff and it’s just super disappointing. Worse than most lay people in depth. For people interested in AGI there are many better sources (MIRI, Yudkowsky), for people interested in self-driving: Andrej Karpathy. Max Tegmark also has some great public facing physics writing.
There’s so much great stuff out there, Friedman seems to get disproportionate attention. Personal attacks aside, I find him tedious to listen to and he often comes across as if he hasn’t done even cursory reading of his guest’s work. It often feels like a sophomore in college waxing about “big ideas” with little substance to back them up. Even at 2x speed I found the talks low signal.
The one aspect of Friedman I really enjoy is the quality of his guests. I don’t know how he does it, but he seems to attract a lot of guests who I’ve never heard of, and yet are super interesting to listen to. For example, I loved his interviews with Joshua Bach and Jim Keller. I’d never heard of either of those guys before they went on Lex Friedman’s podcast and they’re both brilliant.
I'm a moderate consumer of DIY engineering/repair/tech and science content on YouTube and I haven't heard of nearly any of the names in this thread. I don't aggressively seek out content. There's a lot out there to weed through.
Most of my YouTube comes from mainstream pop science like Veritasium and Arvin Ash; science hackers like Nile Red and CodysLab; geeky DIY like Ben Eater; repair porn like My Mechanics; and whatever YouTube's recommendation engine throws my way based on those entry points.
Yes, he is not an expert on most of the things he talks about. Also you can almost predict what he will be going to ask to the guests.
But nonetheless as a podcast, I judge more on the basis of the conversation and the guest he had, and in both the metrics he is really great. He is really good in making the guests speak in easy and intuitive terms and making them speak the idea behind the discovery/invention. He sometimes even irritates the people in asking question behind the intuition when many guests are more accustomed with saying strictly provable statements in other places. And that is a part that is really missing in the world and that gives the sense of what's going on, instead of talking just formally provable sentences and terse description of their work.
This is unfair. He is a podcaster now that spans many disciplines. There is no way one can learn and be an expert at all of this.
Lex is a humble, open minded podcaster that tries to bring all sorts of topics on the table. Even uncomfortable ones like Anarchy and Religion. This is exactly what we need in times of a massive echo chambers of left and right.
I consider Lex to be one of the best, polite, and cordial interviewer that doesn’t inject too much of their personal agenda into the interviewee’s space (like Joe Rogan).
One of the best interviews was with Jim Keller where it gets a little confrontational and see how he deals with it.
I’ll second this - I work in ai and have been pretty disappointed by many of his interviews. I also hardly think that ‘humility’ comes to mind as OP suggests, he argues (often incorrectly) with guests on some of the most trivial facts. It’s one thing to not be an expert and ask poor questions due to lack of knowledge, it’s another to pretend to be all knowledgeable and still make baffling arguments.
Completely agree and very interesting how shallow the bar to praiseworthiness has become. Just put the words MIT, AI and self-driving car research on your bio line and you can sell snake oil to millions on Youtube.
I can't agree with respect to Lex Fridman, who began humbly hosting the MIT AI Podcast until he saw a payday by riding AI hype to being a techno-Joe Rogan.
Like who you want to like, but "irrefutably...sincer[e]" does not apply.
A major problem with Rossmann I have is that he leaned into a strong anti-Apple PCMasterRace crowd. For them, listening to him rant against Apple gives them a fun confirmation bias that they were right to buy PCs. They enjoy listening to that, but his very long rants aren't very interesting to newcomers or for spreading right to repair to new audiences. Does my mom have time for a 45-minute rant full of complex technical details about how Apple is bad and we need Right to Repair?
The other problem I have with him is that he always assumes Apple is nefarious because Apple is nefarious. He never addresses ulterior motives that Apple may have had for a decision, nor attempts to consult with engineers about why Apple's engineering might have some reason to it. Apple is anti-repair because they're a big company and because Apple hates noble honest people like him, not because there are any other logical explanations.
Finally, my last sticking point with Rossmann as a Right to Repair leader is that he is constantly missing the forest for the trees. He constantly picks on Apple because that gets clicks, but he mostly ignores all the BS that other PC manufacturers are doing or experiencing. When's the last time you saw him talk about a Surface Laptop 3, a laptop with a repair program because the screen was spontaneously cracking? Or the Surface Pro 4 with the battery inflating issue? Or a Razer Blade that spontaneously died on Linus Tech Tips after only a year of use?
What do you mean by that? Rossmann talks about what he doesn't know all the time. He's not an engineer, yet he thinks he can proclaim that Apple is terrible at engineering and runs with it as a foregone conclusion, without ever having an actual engineer take a look or play Devil's Advocate. This seems irresponsible considering the size of his platform, weakens his argument, and is also odd considering many engineers would happily do a guest appearance.
Also, Rossmann clearly views himself as a Right to Repair leader. Fair enough. But if you are going to be a leader of a broad movement, you have to be willing to speak about issues that plague broader computing, not laser-focus on one company when others are doing similar or even worse faux pas.
Have you been actually paying attention to the actual right to repair content? It is still relatively Apple heavy, because that's his business, but he's had medical device repair people on, and he's talked about the much broader scope of the issue basically every single time. I'm very confused by this criticism tbh.
Yes, he talks about John Deere, or medical devices, but he never talks about HP, Lenovo, Dell, Surface, Acer, or any PC manufacturer flaws, many of which have flaws worse than Apple's. This is what makes him look dishonest because laptop repair is his specialty - he should be awesome at detecting or pointing out how they have problems too, but he caters to the PC crowd and says nothing.
That's not what I was talking about. I was talking about how if your Surface has a problem with screens spontaneously cracking, will Rossmann even mention it? He won't. He knows his crowd, and he keeps quiet about criticizing his crowd's products.
Also, this myth that Apple storage prices are inflated needs to die. The SSD speeds are unlike PC SSD speeds on all but the most expensive PCs, and Microsoft charges more for their SSDs on the Surface line.
"Yes, he talks about John Deere, or medical devices, but he never talks about HP, Lenovo, Dell, Surface, Acer, or any PC manufacturer flaws, many of which have flaws worse than Apple's. This is what makes him look dishonest because laptop repair is his specialty - he should be awesome at detecting or pointing out how they have problems too, but he caters to the PC crowd and says nothing." - gjsman-1000 [1]
"He won't. He knows his crowd, and he keeps quiet about criticizing his crowd's products." - gjsman-1000 [2]
"Alright, so today we're going to be taking a look at the new Surface and by taking a look at I mean watching somebody else's YouTube video on the new Surface because hell if I'm going to be walking in to buy one of these pieces of crap." - Louis Rossman [3]
Rossman's video continues for a half hour to bash the Surface Laptop's lack of repair-ability and general poor design...
Why would that happen? There's more great content than ever (and a lot of it is completely free). Of course, the amount of garbage has also increased, but the ratio seems to be staying steady.
my opinion is that device makers should be allowed to make things unrepairable in design, but not in post-sale scarcity. The new macbook airs probably could have been just a tad thicker if they included modular ram and a m.2 ssd, but some consumers (and reviewers) really do like to chase thinness and will chastise Apple to continue to try to make their products as thin as a sheet of paper.
Right to repair is not about countering the thinness fetish but countering anti-consumer business practices such as using security screw instead of normal screws, making deals with vendors to hinder ability of shops to buy components for repair and so forth.
Out of chip interconnect is always going to be lower performance than having everything on the same die. Apple could technically use DDR4 and NVMe over PCI-e, but the modularity comes at the cost of a performance decrease.
Personally, I've always thought that it's pretty weird that my NVMe SSD has a CPU and DRAM that I can't use for my own computing purposes -- I have that silicon there and I can't use it. It's kind of a waste unless you are doing something I/O heavy that the proprietary software running on that CPU thinks it can optimize. Imagine if the NAND flash was directly connected to your CPU; you could change how garbage collection, error correction, and redundancy works, right in your OS software. (This isn't really a pipe dream; it's common on embedded systems and Linux has lots of code exactly for this case. Code you can edit, code that has tests. Your off-the-shelf SSD is just a black box. Maybe there's not a bug that corrupts all your data under certain circumstances. But if there is, there is nothing you can do about it. And, that inflexibility and reliability on unauditable proprietary software comes at the cost of lower performance. Makes very little sense to me.)
I feel like there is a strong push from the right to repair movement to have the government mandate obsolete technology, because of its ubiquity and interchangeability at a particular point in time. (For example, forcing Apple to use an NVMe M.2 SSD.) We've seen that in action before; look at things like FIPS. FIPS is behind the modern standards, so if you are required to use FIPS, your users are less safe. Doing the same with hardware means that it's easier to repair, but also slower. I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.
Finally, I'm not even sure that mandating connectors instead of soldering is a great idea. Look at things like the connectors between WiFi modules and antennas; they are rated for a maximum of 30 cycles, with most vendors recommending that you use them once. Not that repairable.
The "thinness" fad was started by a Motorola phone. Apple studies such fads before launching a device and latched on it. And it makes sense for phones, to a certain extent, because nobody likes a bulky phone in their pocket. For a laptop you'd actually be more concerned about the weight than its thickness.
Sure, the ~5"×2"×2" 1997 Motorola Whatever was a little unwieldy in your jeans. But after Nokia had brought the thickness down under 0.8" with the 6210 a few years later, that really wasn't a problem any more.
I agree. Today, mobile phones are lighter and thinner than before, and users are more concerned about larger screen size that make phones bulky and uncomfortable in your pocket or hand. The point I was trying to make is that Apple is obsessed about marketing fads to sell their devices, and the Motorola Razr - https://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-how-the-... - was a game changer in this field in terms of both marketing and technology.
The right to repair won't in any way affect the thickness of new products. This isn't what the fight is for (or against). And there's no reason to think something in this matter would change after right to repair is passed. It has nothing to do with RAM or disk connections.
> The VAIO® TZ model incorporates the power of a larger PC into a small, portable form factor. Luxuriously sleek, it weighs just 2.65 pounds and measures less than 1-inch thin.
> It's generally reckoned that there are four categories of laptop. Desktop replacements weigh in at 4kg, mainstream models are closer to 3kg, thin and light models weigh 2kg to 3kg and then you get the really desirable models called ultraportables that weigh less than 2kg.
> Sony actually took a shot at such a system with its Sony VAIO X505 notebook introduced in May 2004 as a limited experiment. It was thin like the MacBook Air, tapering from 0.8" at the back hinge to 0.38" at the front, and smaller, with a 10.4" screen (so it fits comfortably in a regular 8 1/2 x 11 envelope). As a result, the X505 weighed just 1.84 lbs, so carrying it really was like a thick magazine. The price at that time started at a hefty $2999, and the power and storage were limited to a Intel Pentium M 1.10 GHz processor, with 512 MB memory, and 20 GB hard disk (with an external CD/DVD drive, and a dongle connector for video and network).
----
The chase for having the thinnest laptop was already in full swing when Apple came out with the Air in '08.
The part of the laptop area is the "ultra portable" laptop and the key criteria there is indeed the "how much does it weigh". When optimizing for that, the dimensions of the device are influenced. One way to get a lighter device is to make a smaller one.
Apple went with making it smaller in one dimension and larger in others.
So, Apple wanted a full size keyboard, larger display, and more performance. To get that set of targets, they needed to make the overall device thinner.
yeah, but what looks better ? our device is 1mm thinner then previous version or our device is 50g less in weight? PR pushes hard on this thinness numbers and camera megapixels at least this is my observations and I could be wrong (I might been hit with different kind of ads and reviews)...
My point is that it is very likely that reviewers did not forced Apple to do anything (like what is the chance) but Apple pushed reviewers to focus on whatever they wanted to show(how many reviewers will tell you on how hard or impossible it is to change a battery on your device, or that you can't upgrade the disk or RAM as you did in the past)
My eyes roll through the back of my skull any time I see a company talk about being "carbon neutral". At what point do we call it what it is: false advertising? They haven't done hardly anything to reduce carbon emissions. What they've really done is come up with lame excuses for why the emissions they create shouldn't count towards their net carbon output. Apple is just one of many companies who do this, and they'll keep doing it until we introduce legal repercussions.
Right to repair needs to be preserved if we want to have the next generation of hackers and engineers. A good chunk of learning happens when you break apart devices and put them back together, or fix them yourself. You screw up, and learn during the entire process.
It would be God awful if the next Tesla can't buy some chips he wants to solder onto his broken Mac because Apple prevents chip manufacturers from selling them.
I am in the market for a new laptop. The new M1 MacBook Air appeals to me so much but the lack of any ability to repair/upgrade it over time is just no longer acceptable to me.
I expect to replace the RAM, Battery, and maybe even the processor over time. I really value this optionality and it will be much better for the environment as well.
I feel like a lot of the comments here are strawmanning a bit (or a lot).
Apple and most big manufacturers (in all sectors and industries) who see what they can get away with are purposely abusing copyright law and making deliberate choices in their design and policy that do nothing except hinder the repair of their devices.
The right-to-repair people like Luis Rossmann want legislation to stop these practices.
Some people in the comments are extending that to mean that they want manufacturers to only create modular and bulky devices with yesterdays technology when it seems clear (at least to me) that what they actually want is the ability to legitimately purchase replacement parts from OEMs and legitimate access to the sort of manuals and schematics that are available to their internal refurbishers and technicians.
I don't think it's reasonable to require that manufacturers design their devices to be repairable at the cost of other considerations that are more important to the end user.
I do think it's reasonable to require manufacturers to stop these practices that don't benefit the end user or even harm their experience in order to keep a tight grip on the device that they supposedly purchased and should own completely.
There are still people having 7+ years old Macbooks with easily replaceable HDD and sometimes RAM. And people buying new devices every release. Maybe attitude of society towards right to repair and Apple fanaticism will change over time as their pile of irreparable, damaged beyond economic repair, lost screws and parts over time garbage will start taking significant space in their homes.
Apple can do a lot to make their hardware more repairable. But also I've seen Rossman outright demand their hardware changes just so it's easier to repair, without regard to things like weight, water resistance, and overall UX.
> Apple can do a lot to make their hardware more repairable. But also I've seen Rossman outright demand their hardware changes just so it's easier to repair, without regard to things like weight, water resistance, and overall UX.
Source? He released a video recently where he basically said that it doesn’t matter if they’re easy to repair. As technology gets more advanced, so do repair shops.
It’ll be harder for the average Joe at home, but that’s precisely why independent repair shops that can offer competitive prices are so important.
Plus, I just want to point out (in case it isn’t clear to anyone reading your comment) that right to repair has absolutely nothing to do with making changes to the hardware, or about making repairs “easier”.
It’s about supply chains; about making it possible to buy replacement parts. Currently, Apple tells their suppliers that they’re not allowed to sell parts to anyone else. A common example he cites in his videos is where Apple takes a commodity chip they didn’t invent, makes a tiny change to it, and then place a custom order where the contract states that the manufacturer can’t sell it to anyone else.
So if that chip breaks, customers can’t replace it with the common version, and they can’t buy it from the only manufacturer that makes the “custom” version.
The only alternative is trying to find a clone from China, or taking it from a “donor board” (which is not a sustainable or cost-effective practice)
> He released a video recently where he basically said that it doesn’t matter if they’re easy to repair. As technology gets more advanced, so do repair shops.
> It’ll be harder for the average Joe at home, but that’s precisely why independent repair shops that can offer competitive prices are so important.
So you'd really recommend that Joe at home should repair their own Windows laptop or Android phone? Sorry but "gullible" is the word that comes to mind.
Rossman is fighting for his right to do his own job. He has that right, but he also wants to be viral. To be viral, he needs to reframe his fight as the fight for the little guy to resolder a Wi-Fi modem at home on their MacBook. Which is frankly ridiculous.
Technology, especially mobile, is at a stage where repairing at home is impossible due to integration and miniaturization.
Maybe you could install your own RAM on a laptop. Well now that RAM is in the CPU, because it has to be there. So what do we do? Complain until technology goes back a decade or a few?
> So you'd really recommend that Joe at home should repair their own Windows laptop or Android phone?
>> As technology gets more advanced, so do repair shops. It’ll be harder for the average Joe at home, but that’s precisely why independent repair shops that can offer competitive prices are so important.
By "average Joe" I'm not referring to someone like my grandma or you, I mean someone who isn't a professional repair shop with specialized equipment, but still knows a few things about technology.
I've repaired tons of my own devices over the years. The most "hardcore" repair I've done was replacing a blown capacitor in a Samsung monitor. The monitor was like $200, and the new capacitor cost less than a dollar. I'm terrible at soldering, and have zero skill in that category. That soldering job I did came out really bad, but that monitor still works ~8 years later, and it's sitting on my desk right now as I'm typing this.
> Technology, especially mobile, is at a stage where repairing at home is impossible due to integration and miniaturization.
> Maybe you could install your own RAM on a laptop. Well now that RAM is in the CPU, because it has to be there. So what do we do? Complain until technology goes back a decade or a few?
Neither "right to repair" nor my original comment advocate for being able to repair your own devices at home. I said that, because new devices are impossible to repair at home, it's critical that independent repair shops can exist, because they have expertise and equipment most people don't have to home. Without those independent repair shops, customers are forced to pay the manufacturer for repairs. Apple charges $300 to "fix" a broken screen (they actually just send you a new phone), even though the displays are nowhere near that expensive and Apple can get them at cost (or close to it).
And right to repair has NOTHING to do with changing devices, making them go back "a decade or two", or any bullshit FUD like that. Seriously, go to https://www.fighttorepair.org/ and educate yourself on it so that you see it's 100% in your interests as a consumer.
Honestly, re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27255427 and have another think about whether the GP is "assassinat [ing your] character with generalizations" or just simply posting the plain truth. Your debating style, at least judging from what I've seen of it here, does indeed seem to blithely disregard valid responses.
It's honestly hard to understand what our discussion is about at this point. I stated initially Rossman is fighting about his ability to buy working parts and doing repair. Now turns out you agree with that. So, I guess that's all.
The disagreement is over whether your point changes anything at all about the right to repair movement.
Okay, let's say Rossman is fighting for his own ability to do repair. So? That's what we want. Every consumer benefits if there's a competitive repair industry. In particular the people who can't do their own repairs at home benefit from a competitive 3rd-party repair industry.
Giving Apple a monopoly over its repair process is bad for consumers. It's bad overall no matter what Apple devices look like, but it's particularly bad if the devices are difficult or impossible to repair at home. The fact that consumer devices are getting harder to repair is exactly why third-party repair shops are so important, and exactly why Rossman's goals align with those of the average consumer. Because as devices get harder to repair, it becomes more important that consumers have access to a wide range of professionals that can do those repairs.
I think you're getting pushback because you keep refusing to engage with the arguments that people are making, repeating "the age of generic parts is over", and then acting like that changes something about the current situation. It doesn't. You seem to be missing the connecting logic between your own point and the surrounding debate about right to repair.
> But also I've seen Rossman outright demand their hardware changes just so it's easier to repair, without regard to things like weight, water resistance, and overall UX.
This is just a blatant lie and in fact complete opposite of what he is saying:
"The Mać Shop" in Wilmington DE thought it had the right to repair macbooks too. They also believed they had a right to recycle personal data on hard drives that got replaced whereas apple would have likely just tossed it in the shredder. Be careful about who you trust with valuable things.
It's absurd how difficult it's to repair a MacBook. I have a 2009 MacBook that needed to have its keyboard replaced after my mother dropped coffee on it. Not only I had to disassemble the ENTIRE MacBook to reach the keyboard, the keyboard itself is covered by a plastic sheet that is super glued to both the MacBook and the keyboard. It took an enormous amount of time to remove the glue, and not only the keyboard was completely destroyed in the process, the case itself cracked a little bit due to the amount of force needed to remove said plastic sheet. And that's without even mentioning that there was at least 3 different types of security screws before even reaching this point.
Yes and look at Macbook 12 retina [1] and remember.. keyboard is one of the things to worn out quickly and can also be easily damaged by liquid spill. Also notice the video is fast-forwarded many times during the procedure.
I don't understand why people are so hostile to the idea of reparability with electronics while we have enjoyed just that with cars forever. Much of what Apple and every other electronics company does with their products would be explicitly illegal it they were selling cars instead of gadgets. Why should those be any different?
For example, requiring repair/replacement at authorized repair centers is considered "tying" and illegal in the automotive industry. Same with denying warranty coverage for opening your devices. This is actually illegal already for electronic devices but its rarely enforced because who wants to go to court for a $500 phone for $1500 laptop?
I bought the domain applesupportfails.com out of anger at getting poor customer service from apple but have so far failed to get it off the ground.
Perhaps I need to reach out to Rossmann to get some support....
This is another symptom of the sickness in our current implementation of Intellectual Property law. IP is being allowed to eat all other forms of ownership, even as whatever is left is being eroded away.
I'm not sure where I heard "In 50 years nobody will own anything, and everyone will be happy about it." to which I respond with two possibilities: 1. We are happy; great. 2. We are unhappy; and able to do fuck all about it because we own nothing.
Maybe we should sacrifice option 1 to dodge option 2.
Or 4. We are "happy", but only because expressing unhappiness is against the TOS and in response you are banned from society with as little fanfare as google can ban your account for no reason.
My guess is that companies are opposed to the right to repair less for the loss of revenue which is likely relatively minor but more for the constraints it puts on design and manufacture. Regulating how something is made to make repair a priority will require more lawyers to interpret the mountains of regulations thst will sure to follow, severely cramping design and the pace of development.
I'm all for right to repair, but Rossman rubs me the wrong way. He's too much of a Youtube celeb right now for me to still take seriously. They always become caricatures of themselves because their popularity depends on them doing what people know them for: In his case anger at Apple. It makes a balanced discussion impossible.
I don't like what Apple do, I think current Macs are very poor in terms of hardware (ports/keyboards). And in fact I have stopped buying Macs for this reason. But he's a bit too extreme sometimes IMO. Like he's looking for things to complain about, just because that's what 'his thing' is.
With the amount of publicity Rossmann gets how is he not a multi-millionaire already? It's interesting that he is literally still fixing Macbooks, one Macbook at a time.
For me I have boiled down my computing to a set of easily repeatable steps to get going again if anything ever happens to my device. All my most important data is in the cloud, so if a device is stolen, I can log back into everything and continue my computing. I just buy a new device and log back into everything, which takes 30 mins tops. This actually works out cheaper than getting it repaired!
Sadly, you and I watch a different YouTube than probably 95% of people. Almost nobody I've talked to has heard of Lex or Louis, or Bret Weinstein, or Sean Carroll, and so forth. Just open youtube.com in a private window and you'll understand.
Even if the average person watched some of Louis Rossmann's videos on the right to repair, I just don't think the importance of the issue would compute with them. Almost nobody my age fixes any of their own things, whether they're electronics or other household items. The concept of repair may be totally antiquated in another 20 years.
EDIT: By the way, I sent my Macbook to Louis for repair last year. His team did a great job! Easy to communicate with too. I got it back in the mail really fast once the repair was complete.
> Just open youtube.com in a private window and you'll understand.
I often don't notice I've been logged out of my Google account until I visit YouTube. It's a bit frightening how dumbed down and scammy the content they recommend by default is.
> Just open youtube.com in a private window and you'll understand
Eh it doesn't work like that. Youtube is actually very good at reliably determining it's you who's in that private window and Youtube is even known to track you with WebGL fingerprinting tactics to determine it's the same device. Doing things like spoofing your IP and useragent and using private mode browsing doesn't work.
(I still get recommendations in incognito windows for videos I recently played no matter how much I tweak Firefox and mess with the browser to defeat tracking!)
Edit: Since Youtube fingerprints your device with WebGL[0], it builds a shadow profile tied to that device, so that even in incognito/private sessions, you will get recommended videos that you recently watched, despite the anecdotal claims of others that they don't encounter this.
The only way to defeat that is to use an entirely separate device on a separate network that has a different fingerprint.
I find that strange, I use Firefox as well, along with containers, ublock origin, and privacy badger (if those might make a difference) but my private browsing YouTube looks nothing like my non-private browsing youtube
Same. I've got uBlock and the whole kit and kaboodle and my private window YouTube experience is nothing like my signed in one in any way. If I knew it was about my add-ons I would have rephrased it, but it's too late.
My point still stands. If someone went to YouTube having never seen it before and they created an account, what they are introduced to is half mainstream drivel and half animal videos, reactions, viral videos, etc. Unless you are already interested in intellectual content, I doubt that most people are ever exposed to content that's... more meaningful. I'm not saying average Joe and Jane should be watching Lex Fridman, but it they at least knew that these kinds of conversations were taking place on social media then their perspective of the world might be different.
In incognito, I get nothing similar to what I would actually watch. Nothing is even remotely similar. It's scarily different, and none of it interests me.
> In incognito, I get nothing similar to what I would actually watch. Nothing is even remotely similar. It's scarily different, and none of it interests me.
Same here. 100% generic clickbait crap and exactly the same stuff that shows in a Ungoogled Chromium incognito window. I hardly ever use Chromium.
I use Cookie AutoDelete, uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and a VPN for casual surfing though.
Watch a single video that's even remotely related to the topics you watched before and your entire suggestion history will be back (even those unrelated to the single video you watched).
When they see a new profile they are basically testing the waters. They suspect it's you, but leave the benefit of the doubt in case it's a legitimately new user. But just giving them a few "fuzzy" data points like watching a video or two will give them enough confidence to fully link your previous activity to the new session despite never providing any concrete evidence such as logging in with the same account.
This is conspiracy-tier thinking. It's far more likely that once you click one video you like, other videos you like appear because they are topically similar or the target demographics are the same.
1) I've noticed this behavior and at the time some of the videos I watched on my main profile had nothing to do with my normal watching patterns (and were completely unrelated topic-wise) and yet after watching a single video fitting my regular patterns on a new profile I ended up getting suggestions for the "outlier" videos despite it being very unlikely that there are enough people out there watching both that and the outlier videos for it to be suggested "organically".
2) This is what I would do if I had no morals, and the people working for Google are smarter and are paid way more money than me, and Google itself has an incentive to stalk people across different sessions, so if I can think of this and implement it then so can they and you'd be foolish to believe they wouldn't do it.
You'd think this is conspiracy-level thinking (and I would've agreed with you 10 years ago), but so far, when it comes to online tracking, everything that's been considered a far-fetched conspiracy in the past ended up being true, so better safe than sorry? Given the money at stake in adtech and lack of morals and respect for the law (Google still ignores the GDPR), if it's technically possible, you should assume someone's doing it.
> Youtube is actually very good at reliably determining it's you who's in that private window
Maybe, but it respects the "private" mode far enough to create a separate profile for that. Browsing in private windows is like starting with a fresh account, and over time it'll adapt to the videos there provided you don't switch the device/reinstall the OS etc. (the latter is the reason I know that...I did a lot of distro-hopping for a while)
Since Youtube fingerprints your device, it builds a shadow profile tied to that device, so that even in incognito/private sessions, you will get recommended videos that you recently watched, despite the anecdotal claims of others that they don't encounter this.
The only way to defeat that is to use an entirely separate device on a separate network that has a different fingerprint.
On non-incognito I get a page full of 6 second twitch clips. On incognito I get a page full of 6 second soccer clips and Turkish music videos (I live in a partly Turkish-speaking country, in my whole life I have never clicked on a single Turkish video)
Fingerprinting is used almost exclusively for anti-spam/anti-fraud. If a company wanted to use it for anything else they'd have to deal with a whole bunch of legal and pr trouble for relatively little gain. While you will be able to see WebGL Fingerprinting in the javascript of most every large website, if you scan for it dynamically you will often find it's only ran on a failed login attempt, for example. (Granted, I haven't scanned youtube in a while)
Since Youtube fingerprints your device with WebGL[0], it builds a shadow profile tied to that device, so that even in incognito/private sessions, you will get recommended videos that you recently watched, despite the anecdotal claims of others that they don't encounter this.
The only way to defeat that is to use an entirely separate device on a separate network that has a different fingerprint.
An experiment by me, I went into incognito mode and none of the recommended was what I usually get. I then fully watched a video that was recommended to me on my main account, and even after that, youtube failed to recognize me, instead, it only proceeded to recommend videos specifically in the category of the one video I had watched.
I'm surprised when people don't even know more mainstream science YouTubers like vsauce or veritasium.
I've asked a class of ~20 college students whether they know vsauce and I was surprised no one knows him.
I think a factor is overestimating just how many people 'get into' YouTube culture. Only roughly 74% of American Adults use YouTube[0], and the average daily watch time is only 42 minutes[1], not much time to explore and watch videos outside of your own interests. Vsauce's videos are great (including the recent ones), but they're mostly a remnant of YouTube culture past, and 10-20 million views a video[2] is not a lot in the grand scheme of YouTube's 2 billion strong user base[3].
Exactly.. i watch youtube for "whatever i'm searching for", which has never been a science video. Cars, computers, music, other random interests sure, but not science.
Generally, I'm the same and I'm also probably only on YouTube a few days a week and often just to watch one or two short things, e.g. to see if there's a review of something that would benefit from watching a video.
Ya, I’m a heavy YouTube watcher (a couple of hours a day maybe?). I’m aware of vsauce and clearly I retested in tech but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a full video. I mostly watch conference talks when it comes to tech videos.
For me, vsauce exists in the mental zone I have assigned to things that are clickbaity popular science. Sort of the same place as the "I fucking love science" network. Likewise, I've never actually seen a single video, so I suppose it's possible that I'm just inferring that it's bad on the basis of the fact that it's popular. I don't know that I've ever seen a really good Youtube channel with more than a few million subscribers: to be that popular, you have to paint with too broad a brush. Even 3Blue1Brown has fewer than 4 million.
> I mostly watch conference talks when it comes to tech videos.
I think I have watched literally >30 hrs of programming talks during the last month. Conferences just are more entertaining than most other content lately.
To be fair, I think vsauce is one of the 'old guard' (heh, being like 5-10 years old as a channel gets you there).
Those channels are loved/hated (or at least known) by most of us who were on YouTube in earlier years (2010s), but YouTube has grown and grown, and even the most popular channels like Mr. Beast and Pewdiepie are unknown to many.
Take my wife; she watches her subset of videos, YouTube promotes similar videos, and she'll never hear of any of the 'pop' YouTube channels unless she accidentally goes to the trending page.
And even then, Youtube has so many sub communities. For example, in some parts of the internet, people like Jeffree Star, James Charles and the rest are huge, but I'd wager most people here don't know them.
Similarly, a lot of people here may be familiar with English edutubers, but did you know there are a ton of massive creators in other non-English countries? How many of these [0] do you know?
I had literally never heard of James Charles, despite the ridiculous view numbers he got and constant placement on the Trending page, until the grooming incident.
The problem is that discovery is broken. This random post on HN led me to more subscribe worthy channels than months of looking at Youtube recommendations has.
Just a few, there's definitely a lot more like CGPGrey, a bunch of PBS channels, 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium (the production quality on his recent videos!), Mark Rober, Tom Scott, Johnny Harris, Legal Eagle, etc
Also, not really HN content but if you like cooking, check out Adam Ragusea and Ethan Chlebowski, much better than the more popular cooking channels imo.
Even Legal Eagle has had a lot of political clickbait of late, especially with his shorts. He'll talk about the riots, or matt gaetz or whatever, but the format is too short to allow any analysis, and his longer videos have a lot of "reacts" type content. Leonard French/Lawful Masses is the other extreme though, where he tends to just go through entire legal documents and splice in the relevant background occasionally.
I associate general consumers who don’t repair things and instead purchase to replace with the poor. It is a matter of the ability to command of labor. Repairing is cheaper. The loss of the ability to do so is the loss of the ability to command labor. So yes, perhaps in 20 years when manufacturing practices are so common as to relinquish control from the purchaser everyone will be all the more poor, because the idea that the common man be able to flourish is becoming antiquated.
Steve Lehto had a video on this - When you explain the law and such peoples eyes glaze over, but when you put it into the context that this does affect them, then they generally 'get it'.
In my view if you need to get your dell laptop fixed, you can get it fixed by someone else when dell wants to charge you for a whole new laptop, or refuses to fix it. That's what right to repair is for.
At least the US has personalities like this. In Germany we have all the YT clickbait BS and very few truly brilliant minds that go against the mainstream.
German 3D printing channels are the best. Whereas others will simply say "let's see if we can put sawdust in a resin print to make it stronger", German channels tend to ask "let's see if adding sawdust makes resin prints stronger".
Oh yeah, the niche channels are pretty good, but we don’t have personalities like Sam Harris, Joe Rogan etc. the closest that comes to mind is maiLab but she’s not exactly polarizing or unconventional.
Maybe the German version of kurzgesagt or Technikfaultier for some tech reviews , other than that I don’t really sorry. The other German youtubers I occasionally watch all speak English in their videos (Sabine hossenfelder for example).
How come? Got a link to any article on this? Because as far as "IDW" characters are (and I agree most of them are either shady or outright shallow intellectual frauds) Brett seemed to be pretty genuine and less full of himself. But it wouldn't surprise me considering just how intense and widespread political gifting is (across pretty much the entire political spectrum though to be honest).
Bret’s claim to fame is making a novel discovery about telomeres that was supposedly stolen by another author after an email exchange. He, of course, has yet to show any proof of this claim (a simple email would do).
See also: Eric’s Theory of Everything that he won’t publish for some reason, claiming the entire system of peer review is rigged against him.
> By the way, I sent my Macbook to Louis for repair last year. His team did a great job! Easy to communicate with too. I got it back in the mail really fast once the repair was complete.
Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of what you’re claiming to want?
Or is the guy you’re talking about more interested in this for his own reasons: wanting the repair money, not wanting to have to actually get certified to do authorised repairs.
Right to Repair is not just about repairing things yourself, it’s about the freedom to choose who you would like to repair something for you. I can’t repair my own MacBook but I don’t think I should be forced to pay outlandish prices to Apple for the privilege if I don’t want to.
They are doing their damndest to make it almost impossible to find someone that can. They want my only options to be a) pay their ridiculous repair fees because there is no other option that can do it for less, or b) just outright buy another macbook because they want to sell more computers.
> not wanting to have to actually get certified to do authorised repairs
There is no such thing as "authorized repair" when it comes to Apple. It's authorized "overpriced parts-changing" at best. Their "independent repair programme" is a bullshit PR tactic that thankfully seems to have failed.
Apple's IRP is absolutely not viable for a repair shop. You can't even stock parts in advance (so the minimum turnaround time becomes the parts delivery time), have to provide customer details to Apple and the prices don't work for either your or the customer's favour (in essence, it becomes just as expensive as an "authorized" repair at an Apple Store).
I'll bet the following happened, which Louis is actively fighting against...
1) you didn't get your data back if it was a hard drive issue
2) the service center replaced an entire part, not a .50cent component, and may have charged you for the full part.
3) it was not really authorized, because the third party authorized service center is new within 18months, and you can only replace screens and in few cases, batteries.
With today's devices, it's really just about getting your data back. If the machine can be repaired enough for even 15min with just a simple popped capacitor change, that's enough to rescue your latest photos, and that's what Louis is fighting for. While publishing schematics would be a bonus, the big thing is don't strongarm manufacturers with legal constraints so they can't sell that 50 cent part to other parties so repair shops/individuals can get those 15min.
My point is, none of it is repair. It's blindly replacing parts, the same thing that the Apple Store would do, at the exact same prices.
Given that Louis Rossmann appears to have made a successful business out of his "unauthorized" repair, consumers demand more cost-efficient options, which also happens to be better for the planet as it's less wasteful.
So your logic is: if a part is replaced, the thing isn't actually repaired.
> It's blindly replacing parts
Blindly? Really? Every repair I've had done - even the ones where the tech doesn't speak the same fucking language as me - have clearly identified what's at fault, and told me what's being done. Hardly seems "blind".
> at the exact same prices.
If the genuine parts cost the same, why are you surprised the labour costs the same?
> which also happens to be better for the planet as it's less wasteful
Based on what? Have you really never heard of Repair/Refurbish for sale?
> So your logic is: if a part is replaced, the thing isn't actually repaired.
If you have a flat tire and the garage replaces the entire car, both you and I wouldn't call that repair. If you have a problem caused by a $0.01 resistor on the logic board and they replace the entire board I wouldn't call that repair either, and that's exactly what Apple is doing.
> have clearly identified what's at fault, and told me what's being done
So let me guess, the fault was the logic board, which is basically the entire computer, and what would be done is to replace it (which again is equivalent to replacing the entire computer, and costs about the same)?
This is the main problem with Apple's repair. Outside of physical, visible damage to the computer, everything else will basically be a logic board fault, regardless of whether the entire board is burnt or broken in half (in which case a replacement is justified) or a 1c passive component being defective (in which case a replacement is overkill, but Apple's monopoly allows them to do it and extract a generous profit out of it).
> If the genuine parts cost the same, why are you surprised the labour costs the same?
2 problems here:
1) I have a problem with paying for whole new mainboard (=entire computer) when the problem is a single resistor or broken trace on the existing board.
2) The retail price of an Apple computer includes a significant margin to account for R&D and software development. The actual cost of the hardware is probably 30% and the rest is essentially a "license". When repairing an existing device, I expect the parts to be sold at-cost (as I've already paid the "license" when originally buying the machine) instead of costing basically the same as buying a new machine.
> Based on what?
Common sense. Between repairing the device on-site by replacing a 1c faulty part and returning it to the customer immediately, or shipping parts across the globe back and forth, what's the most efficient, both in terms of time, money and carbon footprint?
Apple Authorized Service Provider - the existing one, which has significant barriers to entry and doesn't seem profitable on its own (most of the ones I see around town either sell refurbished computers on the side or provide IT support), though I believe they can at least stock parts as they advertise same-day turnaround on some common repairs. This is the one you're talking about.
The Independent Repair Program, for smaller shops to be able to obtain genuine parts and perform authorized repairs on Apple devices. These don't allow you to stock parts and have a lot of ridiculous restrictions (Louis did a video on it) and is purely a PR thing when the whole "right to repair" idea started taking off and regulators were started to look closer.
It's the same kind of tragedy that happens with free software. I once spent an entire year using nothing but free software, all the way down to the peripheral firmware. It's still important to me, but as I grow older I get more and more important things competing for time, money and attention. Especially things you do outside, away from technology, with other people.
It's all subject to the same FUD too. If every proprietary EULA was replaced with the GPL overnight, and if a webshop where you could buy all the parts to repair anything was to spring up overnight, everybody would still use the same software and devices they know and love, and would not be any worse off than before. But the opponents of either try to make it about protecting the consumers.
Rossmann is an important voice in the right to repair, however I do feel like he leaned into a certain audience, pandering to them a bit as a reliable target for ad impressions, and it has undermined his credibility. I hear about Rossmann most now when some vicious Apple detractor uses him as an authority on things having nothing to do with repair.
For instance Rossmann did a video titled "Apple watching & logging EVERY APP YOU OPEN with new OS." (which is interesting given that another of his videos is "Why I don't use Apple products", "The horrible truth about Apple's repeated engineering failures", "Is Apple using sweatshop labor in the US", etc -- there are dozens of these things) This is so ridiculously outside of his wheelhouse or expertise, but it panders to an audience that lines up to get fed that anti-Apple pablum.
When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. Instead you'll find someone who has spent years calling Apple users sheep and boasting about their Windows Phone.
The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.
And last week he released a video titled “The myth & fallacy that one brand is the problem”.
3 days ago “ASUS becomes a meme” with the thumbnail text “ASUS ARE YOU KIDDING”.
The guy runs a Mac repair store. That’s his day business. It doesn’t sound inauthentic that he would have more complaints about Apple products.
Further, as far as right to repair is concerned, it’s undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot, and has used its massive market driving ability to move other companies in that direction as well (although you can still find complete hardware manuals for a Lenovo, HP, etc, which was never possible with Apple).
"it's undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot"
Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops. Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something.
> Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops.
Others are now going in this direction following Apple's lead. Did you forget Apple literally goes so far as to make the screws nonstandard just deliberately out of spite for repair? Did you forget about Error 53? And mind you, Apple charges a premium. If Apple was charging $500 he would be taking that into account too. It's quite undeniable Apple has stood out like a sore thumb for a long time. He literally has hours (days? weeks?) of rants about shenanigans unique to Apple going back for years so please don't make us rehash them all here.
> Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something.
I thought the discussion was about hardware manuals. Not product quality.
"Others are now going in this direction following Apple's lead. Did you forget Apple literally goes so far as to make the screws nonstandard just deliberately out of spite for repair?"
How do you know that it is to spite repair? Apple certainly knows that you can buy those screwdrivers for less than $10 from iFixit for the last 6 years. If it was to purely spite us, you'd think they'd make them more complicated or change them every year.
Instead, a more likely scenario is that it is to prevent people who have no idea what they are doing from following a YouTube tutorial, being overconfident in their abilities, opening a machine, doing more damage, and then having a more expensive repair. Or to prevent my curious 10-year-old from opening the machine just because he wants to have a look and then breaking something. Which is a whole argument entirely as to whether that is warranted, but it isn't necessarily spite.
Error 53? Another example where the actions may be excessive, but it isn't necessarily spite. Can you imagine what a hacked fingerprint sensor could do? If I was a scammer, I'd set up my booth in the mall and swap all my client's fingerprint scanners with fake ones. Yes, Error 53 was an extreme reaction to that risk, but you can't say it was sheer spite.
> Instead, a more likely scenario is that it is to prevent people who have no idea what they are doing from opening a machine, doing more damage, and then having a more expensive repair.
Oh no! So Apple is trying to save people money through all this? We've been so blind to their goodwill...
I like how you change the discussion topic so easily. We went from discussing whether Apple is the worst R2R offender to discussing the quality of their products and now the discussion is about my assessment of precisely what percentage of what Apple does is out of spite instead of other lame excuses to prevent people repairing their products.
The entire discussion is about bad patterns of behavior that have emerged over the years from a particular company called Apple. The history of Apple's behavior is long and people are not going to waste time rehashing it all over again here, especially not when you're already aware of past events and yet only begrudgingly acknowledge their existence as isolated events when others force you to. That makes having a genuine conversation about the topic pretty infeasible.
Yes, Apple has bad behavior. Sorry, the conversation is sometimes unclear from my Hacker News reader app and so my changing the conversation is probably unintentional as I didn't realize I was doing it, I apologize.
Yes, there is long history of behavior, but I think that there could be more discussion about why Apple does things than just assuming bad behavior. I was trying to give alternative explanations than just "apple is being bad as usual."
The history is absolutely crucial here because the lack of people's interests in "alternative explanations" at this point in time is literally the history. There was room for it in the past, people gave the benefit of the doubt, and then year after year Apple kept debunking it through more and more consistent bad behavior. The ship has sailed already. At some point you gotta realize the doubt that you're so generously trying to give them the benefit of has been vanishing.
Really tiny Torx screws are easy to strip the head on. I've done it more than once, to my considerable regret.
Pentalobes are harder to strip, because a pentagon is less like a circle than a hexagon is.
Are they the Platonic ideal of a screw head for the exact size used in iPhones? No idea, I'm not a mechanical engineer. Just a klutz who has stripped a few tiny Torx screws with my big ol' meat hands.
Isn't Torx basically a hexagram rather than a hexagon? To me, pentalobe looks closer to circular than Torx does. Also, how much have you worked with tiny pentalobe screws compared to tiny Torx screws? Is it possible you've seen the latter strip more just because you've used them more?
I agree with you in large part, but you are forgetting that pentalobe tools are not easy to find in some countries. In Chile, which is a relatively developed country compared to its neighbors, I went to a shop to buy a pentalobe screwdriver. It took me a couple of afternoons to find the shop. They quoted me something like $35 for a set of screwdrivers (they didn't sell them individually), or $30 to do the service for me.
Curious how we are going to determine most here but Lenovo and Dell make their service manuals easily available with the service tag/serial. HP has service manuals available with some Google fu (eg. http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c06148960.pdf). There are a lot of manufacturers who could do better but saying "my parents 500$ HP laptop had no repair manual available so it's not so bad that a 2000$ Apple machine does not have one either" just sounds weird to me. If I have to disassemble an Apple laptop I have to check iFixit, I also need to own weird screwdrivers and if I had the repair schematics (they do exist) I may be violating a copyright or at least a ToU.
Like I said earlier, one thing that bugs me about Louis Rossmann is that he never examines possible ulterior motives for Apple's decision making other than that they are evil.
For example, a MacBook. Perhaps it's because China clones everything and would happily clone a MacBook board and sell that to unsuspecting people, so Apple doesn't want to share info on where they got parts or the schematics. You might disagree, and I do wish Apple would share this info, but Louis could at least examine this possible argument.
Louis' biggest issue is he can't buy parts because apple stops their suppliers from selling parts to other people, and apple now designs devices so even authentic screens/etc from other devices will cause errors.
The schematics are already out there. The issue is its impossible to find parts. You can't take your 2 year old apple to him to get its screen replaced, because there are no screens available to buy for him to replace it with. Apple doesn't let the manufacturers sell them, apple doesn't sell them, and there aren't enough 'donor' screens from devices broken in other ways to satisfy demand.
Louis has done more examining than you give him credit for, while you ignore a lot of the real issues at hand.
Locking down car repair to protect car IP and having no parts available because your car manufacturer wants you to buy a new car or pay for a refurbished car directly...
Ah, so it's about board schematics and your parents HP was just a sidenote. Yes, it would be nice if every manufacturer would publish board schematics so performing component level repairs would be easier.
Louis runs an Apple repair shop, so he complains about the availability of Apple schematics. Seems reasonable. It's not like the schematics aren't available, it's mostly the hoops you/he has to jump through to get them and even if he/you has them he might not be legally allowed to use them.
And this all ignores the aspect of you complaining about not having a service manual for a 500$ machine and Louis complaining about not being able to service a 1700$ logic board (which, if he can't repair it, might mean you have to pay full price to replace a 3000$ laptop).
I had that happen on my Dell Vostro laptop just after 25 months with 2 y warranty. A hinge of the lid broke. I was able to contact support and order the new lid for about 35 euros and replaced it myself. Repairing was not super easy because I had to remove so many components & the screen was partly glued but it worked. After another year and a half the new part broke in exactly the same way.
That was circa 2012. I'm not sure it would be possible with 2021 Dells. We had lots more of miniaturization. And maybe this actually made laptops also a little stronger!!
A character assassination would be something like "He does something morally reprehensible (cheating, selling ads to three year olds, etc". The above post is more like "He harps on multiple things he maybe shouldn't, and has an outraged user-base he keeps stoked, so that should be taken into account."
If I said, "I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him" that isn't a character assassination- just my opinion he is unlikeable.
> If I said, "I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him" that isn't a character assassination- just my opinion he is unlikeable.
How does that quote remotely imply there is something "wrong" with it (aside from it obviously factoring into credibility)? Another person took the exact same quote and declared that it betrayed jealousy. This borders on parody.
If that doesn't "remotely" imply anything to you, have you considered whether you're perhaps just a little less sensitive to linguistic nuance than others? And that this doesn't necessarily mean that it is they who are overly sensitive?
> If I said, "I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him" that isn't a character assassination- just my opinion he is unlikeable.
If you were in court for an act you didn't commit and the prosecutor said:
"I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him"
What would you said to this?
This commenthas noting to do with anything. Its a pointless opinion nothing to do with given case. And its a vague ad-hominem attack.
OP seemed quite open that he sees his right to repair work as important and is simply commenting on the direction his YouTube channel is taking. Not sure what goal posts are being shifted exactly and I can't see what "personal characteristics" are being attacked in any way in what reads as a simple personal opinion.
Strange how it's still the top comment in this thread, even though it's a personal attack that has nothing to do with the actual topic, or make any attempt to discuss his arguments.
Seems like the type of tactic you'd see from those lobbyist groups that pay money to release commercials claiming right to repair will lead to rape: https://youtu.be/EozPi1qmH44?t=59
If a comment is sitting at the top of the thread that you feel is off-topic in an unhelpful way, the one thing you can do that will make the most difference is let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for more explanation.
Posting insinuations about "lobbyist groups" is singularly unhelpful; as I've written about ad nauseum in recent years, the overwhelming majority of such perceptions are based on zero evidence. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Top comments on HN are usually ones that counter the post itself or are self-congratulatory in some congratulatory/celebration post. It's pretty obvious as to why. For people who want to read something that could have any sense of controversy - people who don't like the person or some of their content then others will read the comments and upvote the comment that aligns with them (which is counter to the content). Whereas people who upvoted the story (and maybe align with the story) will not upvote all the comments supporting the story - they might upvote one or two but might spread it out. Dissent isn't universal. It takes more effort and isn't relevant to them - also more people might just read the content and upvote it and not participate in the discussion. Upvotes are basically finite resource and tend to be spread out over majority positions, whereas minority positions are spread over fewer posts... Thus, they get to the top easier even if they're a minority.
It's not really surprising at all if you're on here enough. It's standard practice. It's not like it takes as many upvotes as the story gets to be the top comment on the page. Usually 20-40 is enough even for modestly popular posts like this. Larger ones will require over 50. A few people don't like some of his content or thumbnails and there you go - easy to reach the top.
Personal attack, character assassination, apparently it's astroturfing (something something rape), another guy saying it's "NSA tactics". Amazing.
Pretty rabid fanbase. Anything other than adulation must have nefarious origins. It certainly can't be organic.
I think it was upvoted (after a lot of downvotes) because a lot of people have experienced the same thing. Rossmann started as a Mac/Apple repair guy elbowing to try to keep his business going, which no one can contest and was admirable and sympathetic. He had a credible argument about right to repair.
Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension. He has a whole plethora of anti-Apple opinions, and he seems to be a cult of personality not for repair people, but rather for people who still harbor a grudge that their Lumia prophecies didn't come true.
So I just said what I thought, and clearly a lot of people have the same impression, which was that once I'd see his name and think credible repair arguments, and now I see his name and just click past because it's going to be some new anti-Apple screed appealing to a base. Eh.
I have sub his channel years before the R2R stuff.
One thing that can be said about him is that he supports R2R fro a selfish reason of being able to keep his business afloat.
> Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension. (...)
WHO CARES? Who cares? I want my phone to be sum of more then 1 parts. I don't care if Rossman kicks puppies for fun. I don't give a fuck about that. I don't care if someone is supporting R2R because their turtle choked on an apple. Its as irrelevant as this example.
What I care about is clear pattern of slow creep of anti-consumer practices lately serialisation of parts is abhorrent. Before that - parts exclusively sold to the makes of the phones, design choices made with intention of making repairs harder.
And this is not only scourge of phones, if car manufactures could they would be renting you cars. If they could the car computers would lock your car till you pay them to fix 0x4525828 error.
I think most people are against supporting bad people just because they do something good. You can like Right to repair and can support it even financially (assuming the gofundme funds will be dedicated to the direct ballot and not other endeavors), but I and many others don't like that Rossman is the one who is harboring this when he has moved from well-done repair videos to rants about anything that can be ranted about.
> I think most people are against supporting bad people just because they do something good
> I and many others don't like that Rossman is the one who is harboring this when he has moved from well-done repair videos to rants about anything that can be ranted about.
He rants on random topics that's what his audience likes to watch. And mind you, they're often quite educational and make you think. Even when he's wrong.
It's ludicrous to say he's a bad person because he rants about something other than R2R in some of his videos. It's like you cannot fathom a good person can have more than one topic he's interested in?
> Rossmann started as a Mac/Apple repair guy elbowing to try to keep his business going, which no one can contest and was admirable and sympathetic. He had a credible argument about right to repair.
> Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension.
So after being persecuted by Apple he became generally anti-Apple? Wow, go figure, how utterly weird.
(And clearly shows he's the bad guy and Apple the good ones.)
Agreed, it's a bit weird to see the replies here. If anything I'd have expected that the very... glorifying? title of the article would get more comments like yours that would put things into perspective. Rossman is good at repairing electronics and his channel can be very useful, but it's very obvious he also likes the big audience that he gets from going full on anti-Apple. I'm not sure why people think Rossman would be immune to incentives.
And FWIW I've rarely seen outright accusations of character assassination on here, even against wildly cynical comments, insults or when wild allegations are made. So again it's weird that your pretty moderate/balanced take on a guy directly relevant to the article is getting so many of those.
The article is “One Man’s Fight for the Right to Repair”, so it indeed is focusing squarely on Rossman and his involvement in R2R. If it were just an article about R2R that briefly mentioned Rossman, your comment would be true.
> “The horrible truth about Apple’s repeated engineering failures”
This is totally in his wheelhouse and expertise since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices. You can thank YouTube’s algorithm for the inflammatory title.
> since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices.
And thus, the insight comes from someone who only repairs the components, not someone who knows about designing them. I wouldn't trust my mechanic to tell me that my car's engine was designed badly because chances are that opinion is solely based on how easy/cheap it is to repair.
A mechanic is well-positioned to notice that a particular car engine has an unusually high rate of a certain type of failure, and very often to identify the root cause of said failure. If Subaru head gaskets fail because they're bathed in fluids when the engine isn't running, and Ford Tritons spit out spark plugs because they only used 3.5 threads in an aluminum head, mechanics who work on them will notice. Rossmann is in an equivalent position.
Of course there may be good explanations for design decisions that negatively impact reliability, but it's reasonable for owners to be grumpy about it. It also wouldn't completely shock me if there's a former Ford engineer out there somewhere collecting a paycheck from Helicoil, a manufacturer of threaded inserts used to repair stripped spark plug holes, with no current job duties.
A mechanic is in a good position to notice that when a car fails, it tends to fail in certain ways. Far too often, though, they then generalize to claims that the car is likely to fail in that way, but that is not necessarily the case. It may be that they fail 1% as often as competitors and due to a relatively fewer number of causes. Without being in a position to see the absolute failure rate, a mechanic may incorrectly conclude that those parts they see failing are especially badly designed even if they are more reliable than the industry average.
I get your point, but even your car mechanic would be able to tell if a component they worked with previously has changed only to make it more difficult to replace. You might argue "how do you know that was the only reason" - well, Rossman has a video on a USB-C charging controller embedded into the macbooks, previously if that burnt out(and they do burn out) he could just buy the chip itself online for a dollar. But after one iteration of macbooks, apple replaced it with identical chip with a changed pin layout and model number incremented by one - and they have secured exclusive production of this chip, so you can't buy this for a dollar any more. There is no hidden design reason here - it was clearly changed to stop people like him from repairing macbooks, because their specific chip revision is not available on the open market.
For the little it’s worth: cars are mostly computer now.
I come from a family of mechanics, my grandfather lamented new cars and their electronics because it’s harder to repair, he doesn’t try to understand the reason why, just that it’s harder now because the manufacturers “did it to him” to prevent third party repairs.
You can argue that the electronics are to prevent cheaper repairs, but there is another truth there: the ECU is an almost required component for decent fuel efficiency.
Perhaps. But it was a deliberate design decision to place certain sensors and actuators that may need repair in inaccessible locations. Pumps, spark plugs and chains need to be removable without major disassembly of the engine.
Shift solenoids are a nasty problem that I've run into. They don't need to be hidden inside the transmission. And the transmission doesn't require the entire engine to be dropped to remove it. This was done to be consumer hostile and to maximize dealer shop hours. Batteries in most german cars are also deliberately placed under major engine components, whereas my Mazda 3 requires two minutes and one socket to replace. Shop hours.
This all needs to be stopped. Major components need to be able to be replaced, for all appliances and machines. Laws need to be changed to force this.
> "Batteries in most german cars are also deliberately placed under major engine components"
Source? I used to own a 2000 Audi S4 (bought in 2005), and the battery was easy to access and didn't take much labor to to replace. I now own and drive a 2006 Mercedes-Benz C55 AMG that I bought in 2009. One of the very few issues that the car has had was a parasitic battery drain, which went unnoticed for a long time, until I started a new job in which I was able to work from home, and, therefore, I didn't drive the car very often during that time span of around 4 years. Before I eventually determined what the problem was (the passenger power seat control module continued to draw current when the car was turned off), I had to replace the battery ~7 times (which usually didn't cost me anything since the since the batteries were still under warranty when they finally went dead). The battery in my car is very easy to access (it's not located under any major engine components) and is also very easy to remove, requiring little more than a socket wrench and no more than 15 minutes of labor.
For what it's worth - I've had a 2016 GLA45 AMG, and that car was a piece of cake to work on. Did majority of maintenance by myself and everything was nicely laid out and accessible, haven't ran into any issues where something felt like it was intentionally placed in an awkward place. I'd bet a person who has never worked on cars could change the turbo on that engine.
Shift solenoids do need to be inside the transmission, although I'm not sure what you mean by "hidden" -- does dropping the pan and possibly removing the valve body count as "hidden"? I don't think so.
I have a car whose spark plugs are a pain in the ass to change. You have to disconnect a number of things^[1], unbolt the engine, and lift it to get to them^[2][3]. The thing is this is a modding friendly car, most everything is easily accessible and user serviceable.
So why are the spark plugs so hard to get to? I doubt it had anything to do with hostility towards repairability because this car is easily repairable. This came down to the design requirements for the car and particularly the engine they wanted to use to satisfy those design requirements.
Long gone are the days when you could sit in an engine bay to work on it because there was that much free room. Modern vehicles have to comply with many regulations, e.g. emissions and safety, whilst simultaneously meeting consumer demands at a price point people will accept. Without knowing the exact model of car you have, I'd say your shift solenoid problem almost certainly comes down to component sourcing - the manufacturer either uses this transmission in a number of vehicles or it's procured from someone else - and manufacturability/supply chain optimization - it's easier to integrate an already integrated solution^[4]. There might also be other considerations such as space availability, weight distribution (since you said you had to pull the engine to get to it), environmental, and efficiency. Again I don't know your exact vehicle, but engineering is a ton of trade-offs and sometimes the trade-offs suck in a particular case while overall satisfying the design constraints.
By the way I agree that German cars suck to work on, but that has largely been the case for every German car I've personally worked on going back to the 80s.
I am 100% certain there are decisions made during the design of various products which are solely or partially predicated on the inability for the end user to repair the product. I also know from first hand experience that many products never have some Machiavellian product manager who dictates designs expressly to be unrepairable; rather due to consumer demands, economics, regulatory and safety compliance, etc the end result is a product that is hostile towards repairability.
I feel this differentiator is rarely brought up in these right to repair comments and yet should be a critical talking point. Rather, everyone frustrated by a lack of repairability immediately assumes corporate shenanigans. This seems related to Hanlon's razor but for product design.
^[1] Under trays, battery, strut bars, fuel lines, air intake, etc.
^[2] The engine doesn't need to be fully pulled, it just needs to be lifted to where there's room to access the spark plugs.
^[3] People have managed to do this without hoisting the engine, hoisting actually seems easier if you have the tools.
^[4] This is the same reason why SiPs, SoMs, and microcontrollers with an ever expanding repertoire of peripherals exist. It's easier - from a hardware perspective - to integrate a single component that 'does it all' rather than pulling in multiple components and doing the integration yourself.
To echo your point: Going back decades it's been a real PITA to repair dash components on many vehicles, and this is primarily a manufacturing artifact that in the factory the whole assembly of the dash is brought into the car on a specialty arm made for that task.
It's made to go in as a whole component at some point in the assembly and streamline that step for first cost reasons vs for serviceability of sub components after the warranty has expired.
The right to repair complaint would be that if your evaporator core fails you have to replace your car because that sub component wouldn't be allowed to be sold by sake of making the pipe connectors a drm copywriting mess, not that it's a pain to get to it.
Rossman has also made it clear that right to repair is concerned with things like access to replacement parts, and has stated that it is not about things being more difficult to repair due to technological change. An example he gave is that he may grumble about having to reball a chip, but people can still do that. On the other hand, there is very little they can do if they need a repacement chip they are denied access to. (Their only recourse are doner boards, and even that has limits.)
I understand about the frustration of not being able to source the part, but a change in a single IC or connector’s pin mapping absolutely can be a performance improvement alone.
I’m lobbying at work now for one such case. Sometimes the existing pin assignments are just bad, and that can destroy signal integrity, increase layout complexity (and thus board cost) and negatively affect EMC performance. I don’t know whether that is the case here but I wouldn’t automatically trust someone’s judgment on it without knowing their level of expertise on high speed layout design.
But don't forget this part of the post: "and they have secured exclusive production of this chip, so you can't buy this for a dollar any more". There may have been a legitimate reason to change the pinout, but there was no reason other than greed to prohibit the vendor from selling the new chip to anyone else.
Absolutely agree, but that’s a whole new can of worms and outside the point I was making (which was that it is not obvious that they made this change for the SOLE purpose of preventing repairs). Do we force them to sell the M1 module as well? Individual chips from that module? I’m all for that, personally, but good luck getting that passed. And assuming we can’t make them do that, what is the line between those parts and the less special ones like this one?
> There is no hidden design reason here - it was clearly changed to stop people like him from repairing macbooks, because their specific chip revision is not available on the open market.
This is an assumption. It's an assumption based on the assumption that designers would put time and effort into making a simple replacement operation somewhat more difficult. I can make an assumption too: that the designers wanted a new chip revision to fix some small errata, to have a custom pinout to ease routing, or to break out an additional pin or two to allow more reliable testing. This assumption is based on the assumption that Apple wants to make good quality products and puts time and money into DFT/DFM.
Except they don't make this chip - it's made by an external 3rd party. And that third party sells all revisions of this chip, except for the one used in MacBooks now. Rossman asserts that it's because Apple bound them contractually to do so - why would they sell every other revision openly to anyone with money, except for the one used in MacBooks?
This happens a lot, I have done it myself. When you buy enough volume you can buy custom packaging, or custom chips from these vendors. The license can be exclusive, for example if Apple asked for some development that cost them some NRE fees, or it can be non-exclusive, and the vendor can decide not to sell the custom version due to insufficient demand or some other non-technical reason.
Fair enough, but the final result of that change is that what used to be a 50c + labour repair is now a full motherboard replacement because you can't buy the chip separately.
Also, something that put me off about him is that he always assumes that Apple is doing this because they are nefarious, so he sometimes fails to see the bigger picture.
If I was a big company for example, protecting the chip I may have helped design from being used in other products is boilerplate legal agreement. I don't have an evil motive or want to stop repair and screw Louis, it's just one of the default things I throw in my legal agreements so Huawei doesn't make their Matebooks or whatever with the same chip I helped improve.
Louis always assumes Apple hates repair and is fighting actively against him but doesn't take a look to see some of the broader reasons why. He doesn't make a video explaining, for example, some of the more logical less-diabolical reasons Apple might do something.
This doesn't mean you have to agree with Apple. I just think Louis would be far better off if he just gave some logical reasons why Apple might have done something and tried to rebut those instead of assuming Apple is evil, because that's an easy straw-man to fight.
> If I was a big company for example, protecting the chip I may have helped design from being used in other products is boilerplate legal agreement. I don't have an evil motive or want to stop repair and screw Louis, it's just one of the default things I throw in my legal agreements so Huawei doesn't make their Matebooks or whatever with the same chip I helped improve.
That just means that you wrote evil into your default contract.
I agree, but I think it's much more likely that Apple simply did not consider this case, rather than actively working against having commonly-available replacement components on every board. Apple does not replace components, they replace motherboards. I think you'll find that as volume increases, this kind of practice becomes more common, as a way to reduce cost, increase yield, reduce board size, etc. And, that this will be true for even lower volumes in the future as customized silicon becomes more feasible at lower volumes, such as 10k or 100k units, as we're seeing with companies like SiFive popping up.
It's an assumption based on the assumption that designers would put time and effort into making a simple replacement operation somewhat more difficult.
However, if you take a look, Apple does perhaps the least planned obsolescence of any tech company, period. iOS updates are now going, like, 6+ years back on phones while Android flagships were lucky to get 2 years or any at all, for example.
The iPhone 6s was released September 25, 2015. This is mainly still supported because it's a very popular phone in India and other low-income countries, but it's there.
They do provide updates, but the devices also become slower either by design (batterygate) and / or through software bloat. Moreover, it doesn't at all excuse their hardwares deliberately designed to be hard to repair.
What I've noticed from "right of repair" types of complaints is that they're often missing any search for ulterior motives regarding those decisions beyond "well obviously the only reason they did this was because they wanted to make it hard to repair". I need to reserve judgment until I see what Rossman has to say about the specific instance you mention - but is it possible the chip is actually not identical, and Apple has made customisations that change how it works beyond merely making it hard to repair? And Apple would not want competitors to be able to purchase these chips because they're somehow superior to the standard ones, at least for the use case Apple has custom-ordered them for?
In these kind of scenarios I really don't see how a trillion dollar company would be worried about squeezing a few extra dollars by putting an extra dependency in their logistical pipeline by ordering a very specific chip whose sole purpose is to put a relatively insignificant hurdle for repair shops to repair a device. I say relatively insignificant, because I'm guessing the impact shouldn't be that much - not many repair shops would order all possible chips, find defective ones, and solder the chip in/out as a service or do it cost-effectively, and of those that do, most will probably just salvage those chips from other broken devices, meaning the decrease in repaired devices is very small in terms of value for Apple, but the extra work it generates for them would be immense and, I believe, disproportional.
I'm watching this video[0] here where he's complaining about 4 charging chips, and if one of them breaks none of them work. Rossman mentions it's "completely asinine engineering design". He completely fails to think about whether there'd be any reason for this behaviour. Maybe Apple engineers aren't as dumb as he portrays them to be, and actually have made that decision for a very good reason. Maybe the failure modes of those chips actually involves a possibility of damaging the battery on the output side, and the output side is not separated - e.g. the output lines of those chips all come together on the same bus towards the battery, and thus if one chip is broken it could easily put the wrong kind of energy on those lines, causing damage to the battery and possibly it exploding. For this reason, Apple decided to keep things safe and as soon as one part of that system is malfunctioning, not to try and work through it in order to avoid a 1 in a million "battery explodes" kind of situation.
I'm not an electrical engineer and know next to nothing about how these systems work internally, but I believe there's too little nuance in Rossman's opinions and that impacts his credibility to me.
This. He always assumes Apple is evil, Apple is screwing repair because they like screwing repair. Most companies aren't like that - companies are made of engineers, and do they like fighting repair for the sake of fighting repair? He never addresses what ulterior motives there may be.
This might actually be why he complains he's been in many legislatures, testified, and they haven't gone further. The lack of willingness to give some perspective from Apple's side hurts his credibility.
I agree that Apple isn't necessarily evil, but they sure would rather you buy a phone than repair it.
That makes me wonder... is there any example where the newer model of an iPhone was easier to repair than the previous one? I'm still rocking my 6s and I had to have the front-glass replaced twice (clumsy!). Thankfully I haven't needed any other repairs.
iPhone have the longest life of all the smartphones out there. Very old phones still get software updates. They even throttle CPU to make sure an expired battery doesn't necessarily mean a broken phone.
If they really wanted you to rather buy a new phone, they'd stop providing software updates much sooner, and they'd just let the phone die as soon as the battery is broken.
Yes, I do appreciate the updates. But we're talking about repair here, so I'd like to discuss that. Repairs could be needed at any time during the lifetime of a phone. Its not just about being able to repair 10 year old phones.
A 50 cent component needs to be replaced on the main-board of an Apple product. Lets say I have found a qualified repair shop willing to do the repair at a price that I agree with. Why does Apple actively block the supply of parts?
If it's a publicly available component, then Apple would not be able to block the supply.
If it's not a publicly available component, then how do you know it costs 50 cents, if Apple is the only one manufacturing it and they're not selling it? It's not because Apple is paying 50 cent to the manufacturer, that this means the component doesn't involve Apple-specific IP, which they obviously do not pay for. Maybe Apple doesn't want to set up appropriately priced pipelines to sell these all five thousand of the parts that they order just so repair shops can purchase them at cost.
Hypothetical scenario: imagine the iPhone is 2 components, each costs $1 to produce at TSMC, but the IP to produce them is what makes the components so valuable, and this is owned by Apple. So Apple pays $2 to TSMC for both parts, assembles them, and then sells the iPhone for $1000.
Now a repair shop complains that they don't have access to these two $1 parts, but that's only logical. The value of the parts is much higher than what Apple is paying the manufacturer. And if Apple would provide these parts available at cost, someone could build their own iPhone for $2 instead and circumvent all their IP licensing.
You have a low opinion of your mechanic. Operational knowledge is very important and designs that look good at design time sometimes deal poorly with the world. The iPhone 6 and the butterfly keyboard show designs that were not good in actual operation. Mechanics worth their salt know great engine design beyond easy/cheap to repair.
Please don't take this attitude as a developer towards your operations / support staff.
I agree with your comment/sentiment, but to be a little more nuanced: I can tell you that butterfly keyboards suck but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed.
My point is that some people try to and want right to repair to force companies to make their computers more modular in order to make them repairable, when that might stifle innovation.
Mechanics are generally pretty knowledgeable about reliability of various vehicles and their components generally; many are genuinely interested in these things and not just repairability as it relates to their job. I would imagine something similar is true here
Mechanics can get a slightly biased view on things - for example, they’re more likely to like less reliable vehicle that’s dead simple to work on compared to a more reliable vehicle that’s harder to repair (or they rarely see).
I would argue that, the harder/more expensive it is to repair a consumer car, the worse it is designed. It's not the only factor, but it is an important one to a LOT of people.
If your mechanic tells you not to buy a model of car because he keeps seeing them come in with engine failure at low mileage you'd be a fool not to listen to him.
I think you’re not giving him his due credit. He may only be fixing there devices, but that gives him a unique perspective on how the design behaves in the field.
Having watched quite a lot of his videos, he is, at the very least a competent electrical engineer, if not a formally trained one. On top of explaining a problem, he narrates why the problem is happening, which is indicative of solid understanding.
> I wouldn't trust my mechanic to tell me that my car's engine was designed badly
Um, I would. Easiness of repair is a part of a car lifecycle.
When buying a new car, my first stop is my mechanic. They know all the failure modes of the new cars. They also know which cars don't have common failure modes.
There are engines where you have to drop the whole thing to do basic things like change spark plugs. There are engines where if you lose the timing belt the engine will eat itself. etc.
Or other things. Brought in my dad's car to a local mechanic because the driver's side door handle was broken. He told me its too damn common on that manufacturers cars from a range of years. Came back later in the day and he showed me the plastic part that had broken. He replaced it with an aluminum part he made.
It’s not really. There’s a big gap between knowing how to repair circuit boards (which is mostly about part sourcing and being good with a hot air station) and understanding the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex. He has loud opinions about laptop design, but it’s worth bearing in mind that he’s never designed even a simple piece of electronics in his life.
I've seen very little of him, and didn't know he was 'The Right To Repair Guy', but I saw him freak out over an Apple laptop because he took the back off and the fan was not directly over the chip like in gamer PCs.
This, in a machine that's been designed for generations to have a fan pull air aggressively THROUGH a channel, the only path the air can go, that goes directly across the CPU heatsink. This is not a 'circulating the air' situation: a laptop can't do that. It's an overall system with many considerations (turbulence, air handling noise) that is no longer a system at all if you take the top of the duct off. You cannot run that sort of machine with the case taken apart, it's part of the ducting.
Either he's dishonest for effect (and clicks), or he's considerably dumber than a drummer and college dropout (yours truly! derp!) about cooling airflow in a constrained duct inside a laptop. At face value, he's dumber. For his sake I hope he's dishonest.
I don’t think he’s ‘dumb’. Just not an engineer. He unscrews computers and replaces parts and puts them back together. I’m disappointed he doesn’t concentrate on the important topic of right to repair and finds things to criticise that seem like they’re chosen to play to the lowest common denominator.
Sounds like you misunderstood the criticisms of that laptops cooling design (which was abysmal to the point where it pretty much had to be deliberate). I would suggest refraining from calling people dumber than yourself, until you're totally sure how dumb you actually are.
Unfortunately Rossman’s critique of the cooling design really is as silly as Applejinx suggests. For some reason he seems to think that fans need to be next to the things that they are cooling.
As someone who was a mechanic, and later became an engineer, this is the main reason why I find Rossman's videos insufferable. He is constantly making assumptions about how electronics are designed based on his views as a repair man. As a mechanic I made the same assumptions, but I was later able to learn that every decision an engineer makes is one of compromise, based on hundreds of variables that the mechanic does not know about because of the narrow view that any technician has concerning the product that they are servicing: observing the hard shell of an egg and assuming that the contents must be equally hard.
> the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex
The design of a modern motherboard is far from complex since all the complexity has pretty much been hidden inside the black boxes of highly integrated circuits. You as a designer do not in general need to concern yourself with the implementation details and just need to understand the interfaces, similar to, for example, using python's numpy as opposed to writing BLAS or LAPACK from scratch.
What knowledge and experience do you have of designing motherboards or other similarly complex PCBs?
Getting GHz frequency circuits to work requires much more than just understanding the digital interfaces.
If you think designing and laying out a modern motherboard is “easy”, then there’s a 1% chance that you’re a highly experienced and capable electronic engineer, and a 99% chance that you just have no idea about the existence of entire classes of problems that need to be solved to make a motherboard work.
Would not call myself an experienced electronics engineer (have only gotten into RF lately, but yes I know about signal integrity and EMI problems), but getting GHz circuits to work on a modern motherboard is not as big of a deal as you might think mainly because it is a "solved problem" with best practices and design tools, and there are just not really that many things to connect together.
I am not saying it is trivial or that Rossmann could do it with his knowledge (no, he could not) or that anyone could do it. I just claimed that in the grand scheme of things it is not "highly complex" (as opposed to pretty much anything analog, or proper RF, or getting the actual implementation inside the chips correct).
It seems that we agree then. Rossman is operating well outside his knowledge and expertise when critiquing the design of a motherboard. As far as I know the guy has never so much as blinked an LED with an Arduino, or designed a simple two-sided low frequency PCB. A motherboard is way more complex than anything a hobbyist electronics enthusiast will ever work on.
If you haven’t actually been involved in designing a motherboard yourself, I’m also inclined to believe that there might well be complexities that you’re unaware of. Power management is complex. Routing hundreds of length-matched high frequency traces is complex. Low power circuits are complex. Safely charging LiPo batteries is complex. If you can show me something similarly complex that you’ve done yourself, then I’ll be willing to believe your claim that all of this is not really very difficult.
I think it depends on what he is specifically criticizing.
I have not designed a motherboard, but plenty of smaller digital IC-based schematics and PCBs and in my experience the most problematic part has been either erroneous or lack of proper documentation or bugs in ICs which there are plenty of.
What I recommend you to do is to compare the schematics of, for example, Thinkpad T420 and Keithley 2001 both of which should be available with a search. What you will find is that the former is a collection of specialized chips (including one for battery charging) with mostly datasheet reference design based implementations + bunch of mosfets for enabling/disabling/routing signals, whereas the latter has almost none of that and plenty of analog "cleverness" and "raw" digital design, let alone the power input, which in my opinion was totally overdesigned. Or take any oscilloscope, where you need to design not only a computer but also an analog front-end + high frequency signal processing, not only routing. And I'm not even going into the actual RF board designs which you are probably well aware of is more physics than electronics.
Again I am not saying that it is easy for any guy on the street, but "relatively easy" to understand what is going on on the motherboard as opposed to the actual complex stuff. So if you see a common fault among many motherboards you can probably conclude that that specific area of the design was bad and criticize that. Whether the criticism is valid might be another question, but I would not automatically dismiss it.
Edit: I will put designing a motherboard on my todo list.
If only everyone on the HN really adhered to the "ne sutor supra crepidam" principle, I bet an entry with a dozen comments would be considered crowded.
I’d hope that the person debugging my code had written at least one program of their own. If not, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in their opinions on software architecture.
Apple tracking what apps you launch, when you launch them and using a plain text protocol is fucking disgusting, anyone has the right to feel this disgust and share it , many non technical people will nit have the chance to hear the truth about Apple (how many iOS users know about the malware issue , about the CPU down-clocking behind your back or other true facts about Apple)...
Except everything you just listed is mostly _not_ true or unique to Apple.
The apps that you launch? That was the developer certificate, not the app, over the same protocol for verifying certificates that is used in Windows SmartScreen and other systems.
The malware issue? Every statistic shows iOS has less malware than Android, so why exactly is that a complaint?
CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness, a battery repair is like $50 or so, and it does that so that the thing doesn't crash and restart randomly just as Android phones will also do if their batteries are old.
Sure dude, it was not the app name sent in plain text but the app certificate, what is the difference ? Either Apple does not care about your privacy or they really care but are incompetent, chose one or other or both OR impress me with some mental gymnastics that makes Apple look good.
>(malware...)so why exactly is that a complaint?
Because some good people at Apple prepared emails to sent tot he victims but Tim decided that is bad for PR so fuck the victims. Aka people need to know that if Apple has to chose between PR or the customer PR is on top.
>CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness,
You are the problem, Apple only does this after a class action lawsuit, you either are very misinformed or you are intentionally misinforming people. It is not an isolated incident where Apple is doing something fair for the user only when forced(similar cases with bad GPUs, keyboards,batteries)
"Sure dude, it was not the app name sent in plain text but the app certificate, what is the difference?"
Every OS on the planet will verify developer certificates to ensure that the app you are using is genuine. Windows uses SmartScreen, for example. Like I said, it's the same protocol (OCSP - Online Certificate Status Protocol) Windows and other apps use for certificate verification, so Apple is hardly doing anything wrong or being incompetent by not reinventing the wheel.
"Because some good people at Apple prepared emails to sent tot he victims but Tim decided that is bad for PR so fuck the victims. Aka people need to know that if Apple has to chose between PR or the customer PR is on top."
Understandable for three reasons:
1. It would cause major unwarranted panic that could cause additional attacks. I.e. A phishing scam saying "click here to be protected from the iPhone attack!"
2. The malware in question did not have any known function and didn't actually do anything or send anything to anyone. In other words, despite being prevalent, it was completely harmless.
3. The malware would be automatically removed from the device after a restart or software update, which most customers were likely enough to do naturally.
"You are the problem, Apple only does this after a class action lawsuit,"
Android quickly copied Apple and added warnings because Android never notified the user up to that lawsuit either. To the end user, even though Android didn't typically slow the device down, the Android phone would just crash and restart randomly when under too much CPU load.
>Every OS on the planet will verify developer certificates ...
In plain text? I know how this shit works, I digitally signed things before, and for this verification there is no need for internet. So copy pasted a lot of tech stuff there but it is complexly wrong. I could explain it how it works and why intenet is not needed but you could use google and figure it out, then find out what exactly Apple was checking(it was not the developer signiture).
>Understandable for three reasons: 1. It would cause major unwarranted panic that could cause additional attacks. I.e. A phishing scam saying "click here to be protected from the iPhone attack!"
Tim could hire some competent guy to write a clear email to prevent this. Also your point insinuates that you can cause a lot of damage to an iOS device with just an email and a link!! be careful Apple might not like you insinuating iOs is such terrible at security.
>2. The malware in question did not have any known function and didn't actually do anything or send anything to anyone. In other words, despite being prevalent, it was completely harmless.
Cure, malware sending data over the intenet behind the users back is harmless.
The conclusion is that Apple care more about PR,
if Facebook would have sent one single bit of the users data Apple is putting a big article in the newspaper, if some malware is sending the exact same bit of data Apple changes it's mind last minute and keeps it hidden from the user.
>Android quickly copied Apple a
Ah, OK so Apple and Google shit stinks as bad, nothing new... Apple and Google are in the same boat, just one has some better PR and a big army of fanboys. Luckily the users found out and a judge forced this assholes companies to confess, otherwise next time the storage would say 500Gb but in reality would be half.
"In plain text? I know how this shit works, I digitally signed things before, and for this verification there is no need for internet. So copy pasted a lot of tech stuff there but it is complexly wrong. I could explain it how it works and why intenet is not needed but you could use google and figure it out, then find out what exactly Apple was checking(it was not the developer signiture)."
Actually, you do need the internet to ensure that the certificate was not revoked. This is partly why Apple put in the whole App Notarization thing in Catalina, because when you Notarize the app, MacOS can check if the Notarization was revoked whereas a simple Developer Certificate from a security company is a harder thing to revoke on demand or to check the authenticity of.
Notarization gives Apple, for better or worse, to immediately revoke a Developer Certificate without the need to check in with the Developer and have the developer signing certificate revoked from GeoTrust or whoever issued it. The Mac then checks in with Apple servers if the notarization is valid, and if it is valid, the app runs; and if it isn't valid, it knows it's been tampered with and revokes the app.
One benefit of Notarization is that it helps protect Apple and MacOS users from developer supply-side attacks like XcodeGhost. If the developer was compromised resulting in the code's legitimate source being poisoned and a hacked update was distributed, Apple could still immediately revoke that app because the Mac checks in when online.
"Tim could hire some competent guy to write a clear email to prevent this. Also your point insinuates that you can cause a lot of damage to an iOS device with just an email and a link!! be careful Apple might not like you insinuating iOs is such terrible at security."
I said Phishing Scam. A scam where you enter your credit card info for a fictional security software. Not all scams require a software hack.
"Cure, malware sending data over the intenet behind the users back is harmless."
Researchers analyzed it and concluded that it sent nothing back to the hackers. So it was indeed harmless. Apple also knew that their updates have a 90%+ opt-in rate, so when the next update went out, most users would have it automatically removed, and anyone who didn't update would likely restart their iPhone at some point, in which case AppleMobileFileIntegrity would detect and kill it.
"Ah, OK so Apple and Google shit stinks as bad, nothing new... Apple and Google are in the same boat, just one has some better PR and a big army of fanboys. Luckily the users found out and a judge forced this assholes companies to confess, otherwise next time the storage would say 500Gb but in reality would be half."
Even if you don't like it Apple already admitted it was a bad implementation and they are fixing it. (maybe next time they put more competent people and give them what they need to implement things right especially when it is about privacy, the thing Apple is screening this days)
>What BS are you spouting?
Big companies downgrading your hardware capabilities behind your back, then denying it until a judge forces them to admit and pay the users. If Apple would not have been caught with the CPu downclockingm, storage would be next for sure.
> Rossmann is an important voice in the right to repair, however I do feel like he leaned into a certain audience, pandering to them a bit as a reliable target for ad impressions, and it has undermined his credibility.
I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility.
Every politician is pandering to their constituents counting on their votes.
> When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook.
You are barely comprehensible.
Louis literally owns a company that repairs MacBooks. And if you cared to watch his channel a little bit over the years as I did, he build his user base not on ire for Apple but on his expert knowledge on how to repair their products.
The channel is not just for people who want to repair their MacBooks. The channels are for people who maybe at some point were interested in MacBook repair (I went in for board diagnosis) but then stayed because Louis had something more to say.
> The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.
Is this jealousy I am hearing?
Is this a proof he isn't right?
EVERY channel on youtube with large userbase is earning some money.
This guy literally owns his own, successful repair shop business, outside of youtube channel.
He also shown he is not beholden to his channel by creating thousands of hours of niche content on electronics repair for electronics guys like me at a time when no other electronics channel was too successful (eevblog was just starting).
Going your way anybody successful is automatically discredited because he is beholden to his business, regardless to how he became successful or what he is saying.
I don't see people moaning that anything Elon Musk says cannot be trusted because he has invested a lot of money into SpaceX or Tesla and as such he is beholden to his businesses.
Careful, like another comment pointed out, this sounds like a polished way of character assassination/accusation - that he's trying to squeeze his userbase for monetary gains.
I would argue that most of his userbase is tech savvy and most of them (for example I also watch his videos for references on some ICs/upgrades) have ad-blockers in place.
He has immensely contributed so much to the repair community so much so that many shops in Asia wouldn't even exist if not for his videos. I had one of those keyboard faults on a brand new Macbook Pro. The so called "Genius" jokers didn't even know it was a known issue on their machines. I had to send them a Rossman video just to help them even understand that such a thing was going on. So, I think we should be careful here of not questioning anyone's character without proof/evidence. I mean, we could say the same about Tim Cook too, right? That's why I think this is a bad direction for discussion that will only lead to flame with little value for readers here.
I agree with you but I think that's just part of the youtube celebrity playbook. His massive following might give him the confidence/ego to put out a lot more edgy type of content that appeals to his audience. I noticed he also puts out a lot of videos about his personal opinions (eg. NYC real estate, personal relationships, etc.). It is his own channel.
Regardless it does not diminish his prominent role for the Right to Repair.
Distilled into its abstract, you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers.
I'm not a fan of hit jobs especially when presented as extensive prose to veil the attack. Please reconsider and assume the best intentions in people. Unfortunately, I can't assume the same of your comment because there was no reason for you to author it except a personal distaste for the human subject.
This tact has been plied by a dozen different replies in a dozen different but similar ways (some talking about prose, while others claim it's incomprehensible).
Groan.
A large number of the replies I have gotten would normally be deleted by mods, for good reason. If you're rewording to conjure up flamebait or attacking by conspiracy because you don't like a position, better to not post it.
"you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers."
Don't add your own pejorative narrative and then strike it down. It adds nothing to HN and is flamebait.
Rossmann took his right to repair advocacy and branched out into a personality engagement. For YouTube viewers who are into that, or people who sympathize with his other positions, good for you and good for him, but for the rest of us it's just noise. I no longer pay attention to what he says because his motives have been perverted.
> This tact has been plied by a dozen different replies in a dozen different but similar ways (some talking about prose, while others claim it's incomprehensible).
> Groan.
defaultname, I'm sorry you took offense. I'll see if I can present it a bit differently.
The GP comment reads as if its author added fluff to distract from the true nature of the comment — an entirely unsolicited rant that acts as flamebait on HN.
Every comment on HN is "unsolicited". I certainly didn't ask for your observation on this. Further, "rant"? Give me a break.
Humorously the top comment to this submission is that Rossmann is a "national treasure", along with some commentary about some other guy and how they should do a podcast together.
Nothing whatsoever to do with the submission. Just slathering praise and adulation. Whatever floats someone's boat and no skin off my back.
Did you, perchance, berate that comment for being some sort of NSA-tactic astroturfing "praise-job" that was an unsolicited rant? No? Gosh, I wonder why. Did you conspire that it's subterfuge dropped by Google?
Declaring my comment flamebait is telling. It's a completely banal observation about a conflict in someone's position. The many angry personal attacks (such as yours) are not my doing, and reflect on your own rather bizarre motivations.
> Declaring my comment flamebait is telling. It's a completely banal observation about a conflict in someone's position. The many angry personal attacks (such as yours) are not my doing, and reflect on your own rather bizarre motivations.
Hm... I applied the label to the original comment I replied to, not yours.
But defaultname, I do see you're pretty new. Try not to take things personally; even me labeling their comment as flamebait is a description of the comment and style of discourse rather than an assertion about the person.
The goal in the end is to have quality discussion where we can all learn something and grow a bit, and none of that happens if we either attack each other or perceive each others' words as attacks.
For what it's worth, I do apologize if my words rubbed you the wrong way. Certainly wasn't my intent.
Defaultname’s original comment isn’t flamebait. It just expresses a fairly mild opinion about the direction that Rossman’s channel has taken. It’s especially ironic that you should be so concerned about assuming the best intentions. When has Rossman ever done that in the case of Apple?!
Like defaultname, I also think that Rossman has done a lot of good, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to love his YouTube channel or refrain from saying anything critical about it.
This feels like one of those x is great but.... posts that you see you in NSA or GCHQ manuals about influencing the narrative in an online discussion. I saw a lot of it during the Israeli/Palestinian conflict last week. This post feels the same.
It's unfortunate that the type of "directed discussion" you are referring to works so well. It drives so much engagement to the comment it ends up derailing threads on other sites, i.e. 1000 comments but only a handful of top level ones. I doubt the number of commenters that read like they took a page out of the online misinformation manuals are actually on a payroll to do so, but damn I sure am seeing this stuff often lately.
His YouTube channel is estimated to net him $500K+ per year with negligible expenses. His business has an estimated revenue, per the linked article, of 1-2 million per year, with 15 employees or so.
In all probability the YT channel is much more lucrative than the business is.
Where are you getting your speculative estimates? I just googled it and see numbers about a tenth of what you’re suggesting for 1.5M subscribers. It doesn’t seem probable at all that his channel is more lucrative. I also don’t understand why you emphasized “revenue” for the repair business, when the YT income is also revenue, or how you know what his YT channel expenses are. Care to elaborate?
Regardless, why would it even matter? "Louis makes 500k per year from Youtube ads" is not a valid response to "Apple is harming consumers and destroying the environment"
There are a number of sources that put him in that league given his number of videos and engagement.
As to why I emphasized revenue, the expense to run a YouTube channel from a little room is a world removed from running a repair business with 15 employees.
Please, do share a “number” of sources, that was my question: where are you getting the info you’re using to speculate? From my own sources (Google search), it seems like you might be exaggerating.
What is your point is about the YT revenue vs the repair revenue? Why do you assume they’re separate things? Maybe the YT channel is marketing for the repair business, and both operate as a single entity? Highly monetized YT channels frequently require a staff to maintain, to do filming and editing, writing and research, marketing and SEO, not to mention the time investment to produce a lot of content. How do you know what’s involved behind the scenes of this particular channel? Why are you certain the expenses are negligible and don’t involve employees? People just baselessly assuming YT vids are easy and cheap is one of the reasons so few people make money on YT, and so many people share myths about who’s getting lucky and by how much.
This. I cannot stand the guy. He clearly has gone deep in the brand and his hate-jerk is how he makes money. It is intentional and designed to maximise impressions. I would not trust a single thing he has to say on basically any topic as it is all marketing as a result. It was clear 5 years ago and is worse today.
Hell, if Apple addressed his concerns he would be out of this (very lucrative) business. So do not trust him to actually care about your right to repair. As always, follow the money.
Interesting. I only stumbled upon one of his repair videos a few years back — was frankly blown away by his meticulous identification and cross referencing of specific chips, his ability to replace surface-mount components.
It left me with an appreciation for someone who can dedicate themselves to this depth of esoterica and make something I thought impossible look ... doable by an enthusiast?
But from your comment I wonder about that audience you mention: anti-Apple.
Because something that I also took away from his videos was this sense that technology, and I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all.
I was careful not to say he made the repairs look easy — he made repair look doable but also underscored just what the layman is up against (SMDs, obscure codes on chips that are little bigger than fleas, specialized tools to open cases, paper-thin ribbon cables, etc.).
I think his audience is broader than just anti-Apple. Perhaps they're upset about all of the ways in which we have become enslaved to devices we can't understand.
I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all.
A "normal" person's inability to understand or repair is limited by the lack of the literature, tools and parts - not because technology has "advanced". (To a lay person, any technology that they doesn't understand is akin to magic to them). And this is ignoring the glaring obvious - things are today being deliberately designed to be unrepairable because that's more profitable for company's like Apple that even lobby against any Right to Repair legislation. Remember, if they want these companies can design things to be easily repairable - e.g. concept https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop
He had a couple of videos where he went looking for buying a new office space. Those were, in his words, the best performing videos of his channel. Real estate stuff. A lot of the people who watch his stuff relate to his frustrations on a personal level
When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook.
Oh, please - as if only an Apple fan can have legitimate concerns about an iDevice.
I am typing this on an iPad. I am a vocal Apple critic. (Go through my post history here). Apple has turned a section of their customer base against them because of their unethical business tactics. Right to privacy and data protection is intrinsically linked to your Right to Repair. Those of us who have invested in a product want to own it completely, like we do our car or house.
Apple critics like to watch content produced by someone who regularly critisizes Apple. So what? No surprises there.
Yeah, he often talks about things outside his wheelhouse. He has an entire series about real estate in NYC. That doesn't make his actions and commentary regarding right to repair any less legitimate.
"But Rossmann hopes to raise it. As a repair technician slash right to repair advocate slash YouTube personality, he has expertise and clout that he’s looking to leverage in his latest endeavor: trying to put the right to repair for consumer electronics on the ballot in Massachusetts.
To do so, Rossmann started the Repair Group Preservation Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, and launched a fundraiser on March 30. So far, he has raised more than $700,000 toward his $6 million goal, which by all accounts isn’t nearly enough, given his potential opponents could be tech and telecom giants like Apple, Verizon and T-Mobile.
“It’s not that we’re against it,” said Gordon-Byrne. “God bless him for trying. But I think our ability to sponsor that is very limited. We gotta find some friendly billionaires.”
The move is risky, even if Rossmann can raise $6 million.
“If you lose on the ballot, that really makes it tough to get other people to pick it up again, because it’s kind of like you’ve lost your proof of concept,” said Nathan Proctor, director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s right to repair campaign.5"
1. I hope Louis succeeds for his state's sake.
2. My fear is what the big companies did CA. A few legislators introduced bills aimed at ending E-waste, or Right to Repair. The big boys used their money to squash the bills, and succeeded stupendously. All it took was a few scare commercials.
3. The big pocketed companies made these rediculious commercials. They featured a thief, or rapist, gaining access to your vechicle in a dark parking lot. This was supposedly due to the bad guy having access to schematics.
California has had 2, or 3 bills over (E-waste) Right to Repair Bills; and they all failed.
Failed-----------. This is beyond frustrating to me.
Corporations own Sacramento. Be it tech, insurance, or Realator's, they are making our lives more expensive. I won't even get started on the Insurance industry Lobbiests. (My blood pressure is climbing)
We Californians need to smarten up.
If we get another shot at Right to Repair, I guarantee you won't be raped in a parking garage because someone reverse engineered a gadget to take over your vechicle, or you.
If you main concern is someone taking control of your vehicle I would allow all security schematics exempt from Right to Repair.
Now let's the next bill passed.
I would like a Proposition, but they would Uber us?
(I'm not angry over just Right to Repair. It a lot. It mandatory vechicle insurance, smog checks that are pricey, and too frequent, Insurance rates that I guarantee are price colluded, outrageous traffic fines for infractions, driving past 10 pm, and being pulled over for no reason. Cops think we all get hammered like they do?, harassing homeless for sleeping, etc.)
I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, introducing repairability laws won’t solve the problem.
I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station rather than swapping out some dims if it means my laptop is half as thick and twice as rugged. I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet (WeChat/Taobao) or find someone to do the repair for me for $40 on the Chinese street markets (Huaqiangnan in Shenzhen). When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+