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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

#301
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. I was in another conversation with the same user, and they trolled in the same exact way. Harp on their point without actually addressing anything in the response, or original post. Just completely ignore it.

Yes, that's the right approach, if you can't develop your argument, just jump to another thread and assassinate my character with generalizations.

[deleted]

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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…

>> "for many if not most new PC laptops"

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.

But this is all fine, it could be worse.

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

#303
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

That wasn't my point. I was responding to the notion that a mechanic is qualified to tell the engineer his job. ;-)

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

#304
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>> "for many if not most new PC laptops" 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 i…

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.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 t…

I was responding to the comment in general: that having advertisers in no way compromises your credibility.

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

#306
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.

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

#307
post #26

Apple silicon repair: do you want an new device or just a new mobo. Costs the same

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.

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.

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

#308
post #306

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.

Anytime you want to mute a channel, just click the three dots to the lower right of a video and select "Don't recommend channel"

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

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-moti…

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.

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

#310
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.

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