It sounds like people would love open source devices they can build/customize.
This reminds my of the MySpace wall vs Facebook wall problem.
There should be a market for both in hardware.
One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
351–360 of 562 posts
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#352Living 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…
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…
> 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For people interested in this general topic (parent poster here mentioned living in Shenzhen), go read through all the historical content of Bunnie Huang's blog...
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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.
> 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.
Those are badly designed engines.
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#354Apple'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 "…
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…
> 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".
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> "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…
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...
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#356Living 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…
> 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.
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#357Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume he is talking about phones stolen from consumers that have been parted out.
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.
Ghost shifts are getting rarer and rarer in the days of 24/7, nonstop manufacturing lines.
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#359Earlier 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…
A decade ago the Air Force had a supercomputer made up of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3s. They claimed using PS3s saved them $2 million.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...
They also have been experimenting with using video game controllers to control military equipment
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/military-contracto...
Re: One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 ch…
> How do you know that it is to spite repair? Can you name a single advantage of pentalobe screws over pre-existing standard screw heads like Torx? If not, then Occam's razor is how I know.
I can in fact.
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.