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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

#341

Post by mokus »

josephcsible wrote: post #326
mokus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whet…

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?

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

#342

Post by cgearhart »

worik wrote: post #316
cgearhart wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

Interesting. 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 ev…

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.

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

#343

Post by TeMPOraL »

userbinator wrote: post #309
Nextgrid wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#344

Post by webmobdev »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #184
webmobdev wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an assumption based on the assumption that designers would put time and effort into making a simple replacement operation somewhat more difficult. And it's a very genuine and valid assumption supported by an industry practice called Planned obsolescence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

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.

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.

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

#345

Post by gambiting »

clarkb286 wrote: post #275
BombNullIsland wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> "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…

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.

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

#346

Post by josephcsible »

jart wrote: post #300

"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.

Are you arguing that right to repair is a bad thing just because one repair shop did something wrong?

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

#347

Post by LegitShady »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #208

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 hap…

>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.

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

#349

Post by 29083011397778 »

unishark wrote: post #204
jmpman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#350

Post by dingusthemingus »

Nextgrid wrote: post #289
paulgerhardt wrote: post #261

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…

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.

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