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One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

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Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#81

Post by nrp »

Terretta wrote: post #60

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…

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.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#82

Post by xyst »

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.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#83

Post by BombNullIsland »

jmpman wrote: post #69
bstar77 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 wi…

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.

Not a great way to run a business.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#84

Post by mokus »

gambiting wrote: post #32
judge2020 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

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.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#85

Post by defaultname »

fredgrott wrote: post #59
defaultname wrote: post #3

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 EV…

ahem, get real info jAck.. his main income is not monetizing youtube vids. its...wat for it! repairing macs! The way he monetizes vids is via his item store. Which you would know if you video just one single vid

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.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#86

Post by mardifoufs »

kingTug wrote: post #49
ravenstine wrote: post #8

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…

Those IDW characters have shown themselves to be pretty fraudulent. The Weinsteins especially.

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).

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#87

Post by JKCalhoun »

defaultname wrote: post #3

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 EV…

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.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#88

Post by tokamak-teapot »

Applejinx wrote: post #52
foldr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'circ…

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.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#89

Post by JKCalhoun »

lmilcin wrote: post #79
defaultname wrote: post #3

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 EV…

> 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 some…

> I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility.

Being beholden to ads absolutely undermines your credibility in my mind.

Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks

#90

Post by nrp »

xyst wrote: post #82

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 "…

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.

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