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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

#141

Post by jjcon »

tcoff91 wrote: post #53
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #2

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.

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’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.

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

#142

Post by me_me_me »

defaultname wrote: post #112
bogwog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

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

#143

Post by gravypod »

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? 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.

I happen to have one such example:

- https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/developers-to-update-...

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.

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

#144

Post by helmholtz »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #109
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…

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.

Give us your best-of list then lad!

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

#145

Post by systemvoltage »

tcoff91 wrote: post #53
howmayiannoyyou wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

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

#146

Post by gambiting »

bloggie wrote: post #116
gambiting wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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?

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

#147

Post by teatree »

josephg wrote: post #64
gonehome wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

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.

A HN reader not knowing Jim Keller is a bit surprising. He is a well known name in tech communities.

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

#148

Post by bogwog »

inb4_cancelled wrote: post #133
bogwog wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed. Right to repair isn't about telling companies how they should design their products.

It often sounds like that to me.

Probably because of comments like the one I responded to, which are spreading misinformation.

A good resource is:

https://fighttorepair.org

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

#149

Post by Hnaomyiph »

______- wrote: post #140
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…

> 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…

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

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

#150

Post by m55au »

foldr wrote: post #115
m55au wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 th…

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).

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