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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

#471

Post by infogulch »

This is another symptom of the sickness in our current implementation of Intellectual Property law. IP is being allowed to eat all other forms of ownership, even as whatever is left is being eroded away.

I'm not sure where I heard "In 50 years nobody will own anything, and everyone will be happy about it." to which I respond with two possibilities: 1. We are happy; great. 2. We are unhappy; and able to do fuck all about it because we own nothing.

Maybe we should sacrifice option 1 to dodge option 2.

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

#472

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

pembrook wrote: post #428
swiley wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no that's bullshit. (and a change of subject) We're not asking for modular connectors (although those are nice) or larger competents. we're asking Apple (and everyone imitating them) to stop artificially preventing people from replacing parts (either via deals with suppliers that prevent people from buying them or via software lockouts.) People do surface mount rework all the time (I think the guy TFA is talking…

> “People do surface mount rework all the time” What percentage of Apple customers are doing surface mount rework, or even hiring other people to do this, in your estimation? My guess is less than .01%. And how much could that really be increased if Apple were forced to make their parts accessible and available in the aftermarket? Vs the carbon footprint of the extra manufacturing effort and having to set up distribu…

> My guess is less than .01%

I'd say that your guess is very bad.

> It’s disingenuous to play the “green” card here.

No it is actually disingenuous to act like this is about "tinkering with apple devices". Actually it is hard to express how disingenuous the whole spin of "If people are able to repair products they will become worse, I don't want my product to become worse" truly is.

Especially so when we start talking about devices that actually would be repairable if companies didn't spent some truly petty amount of effort to stop it, using DRM and crippling via detection.

Besides that there is a market for refurbished iPhones, actually there are shops that specialize in selling nothing besides them, and the ones buying from it are hardly the evil hacker/tinker people you describe, that want to take away your shiny apple elegance by forcing different product designs...

> I don’t think any large number of people would suddenly say they want to keep their slow, heat-generating Intel MBPs if they were more repairable.

What about the concept of a device being sold used instead of sitting in a box until it gets thrown into the trash? The whole "people just want the new and shiny anyway" is a very priviliged way of thinking. Being able to repair something is more than you keeping your device and repairing it yourself, it also means that suddenly a device still has use instead of contributing to the pollution just because some company rather wants to see you burn that thing in your backyard than seeing it get any use in the hands of someone else.

Besides that: There is more technology than Apple, not everybody has to care what the Apple fan bubble thinks. Apple (and the people that defend this mess when it comes to repairability) just reaches critical levels of hypocrisy when it comes to the "we are doing good for the environment" advertisement.

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

#473

Post by BiteCode_dev »

infogulch wrote: post #471

This is another symptom of the sickness in our current implementation of Intellectual Property law. IP is being allowed to eat all other forms of ownership, even as whatever is left is being eroded away. I'm not sure where I heard "In 50 years nobody will own anything, and everyone will be happy about it." to which I respond with two possibilities: 1. We are happy; great. 2. We are unhappy; and able to do fuck all ab…

You forgot the scariest:

3. we are unhappy, but don't even understand it because society have lost any reference point to an alternative or any way to talk about it.

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

#474

Post by theshrike79 »

vultour wrote: post #276
theshrike79 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the time I noticed how insufferable he is (to me). He had a video where he was trashing a new MacBook. The largest reason why he liked his current Lenovo over the MacBook was the Lenovo's battery bump. He used the battery bump as a handle when editing videos standing up on the subway. Oof. The sleek MacBook didn't have a convenient handle in the back for him to do his stand-up video editing, thus it was a…

From the videos I’ve seen there are very few where he doesn’t come off as insufferable. My favourite one is when he starts trashing the Genius Bar for not being able to diagnose an issue with a specific component on the motherboard like he does, and instead they recommend replacing the whole board. I don’t think Dell/HP/Lenovo support is going to bother inspecting a mobo with a microscope and checking voltage levels…

Yea, he seems to be willfully oblivious to the fact that it's not in any way feasible to have every Apple Store staffed with people who have the skills to reflow surface mount components and debug issues with oscilloscopes.

It's orders of magnitude easier to just swap whole boards and ship the broken ones to a central place to be either recycled or repaired.

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

#475

Post by gravypod »

pembrook wrote: post #428
swiley wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no that's bullshit. (and a change of subject) We're not asking for modular connectors (although those are nice) or larger competents. we're asking Apple (and everyone imitating them) to stop artificially preventing people from replacing parts (either via deals with suppliers that prevent people from buying them or via software lockouts.) People do surface mount rework all the time (I think the guy TFA is talking…

> “People do surface mount rework all the time” What percentage of Apple customers are doing surface mount rework, or even hiring other people to do this, in your estimation? My guess is less than .01%. And how much could that really be increased if Apple were forced to make their parts accessible and available in the aftermarket? Vs the carbon footprint of the extra manufacturing effort and having to set up distribu…

> My guess is less than .01%

In the beginning it is theorized that humans were a hunter gatherer species. We dedicated 100% of our time to collecting food. At some point we learned about farming and cultivating livestock. People could now generate more food then they would need. This enabled something magical: one person could generate the food required for a group of people and that group of people could do other things! This formation of a group and their social dynamics are sometimes called a "society". Soon people figured out you could do the same thing we did with food production with other things: building things, making cloths, cooking, etc.

I think, even if .01% of Apple customers worked in the repair industry you'd see this same exact effect!

For example: 1 Louis Rossman can fix ~10 MacBooks/day or 3650/year.

There's about 5 Billion internet users and 20% of them are Mac users.

.01% of Mac users would be ~100k globally. That means, if everyone of these people became interested in repair as a profession were as fast as Rossman we could fix all 1 billion Apple user's devices within 3 years. This is about the rate people buy and throw out an Apple product due to some breakage. This would essentially keep the market full of low cost devices for people who couldn't normally afford a Mac.

Also, fun fact, it's estimated there's only about 50k neurosurgeons world wide: https://thejns.org/view/journals/j-neurosurg/130/4/article-p....

So we have an estimated 2x MacBook repair people to brain repair people.

(Obviously this isn't concrete numbers but essentially even if only 40 people world wide want to repair devices it makes sense to let them)

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

#476

Post by worik »

kragen wrote: post #388
worik wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Apple developer it is not a "seamless, high-performance, safe experience". Anything but.

You're not the customer, you're the product.

Not in this case mate. I paid them.

I am the creative cutting edge!

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

#477

Post by swuecho »

theshrike79 wrote: post #254
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…

I've watched my fair share of Strange Parts [1]. The reason why you can get any device fixed is the availability of parts, yes. But also all of the highly specialized tools available combined with the skill of people in there. Even if someone in the US could get the exact same parts, they wouldn't be as able to fix the devices due to the lack of devices and necessary skills. This is also the reason why most electroni…

Strange Parts is marvelous.

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

#478

Post by chevill »

BoorishBears wrote: post #456
chevill wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but you also have to take into account that he's internet famous. Probably the most well known person in the computer repair industry says his shop with 16 people is taking in between 1 and 2 million a year. So that's somewhere between 62.5k and 125k per employee annually in revenue. He's doing well enough but its not exactly a money printing machine and you would assume a person at the top of his industry is doi…

I really don't get what your point is here. The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing. And the fact that these repairers will charge per repair rather than a flat fee for partial replacements of entire boards like OEMs do means they can be cost effective while profitable. - Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP…

>The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.

I wasn't suggesting it did matter in regards to his mail-in business. Someone else mentioned that living in a large city makes it easier to maintain a high volume of work locally.

>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.

This is true. My point was that when a large computer repair shop run by arguably the most famous person in the electronics repair industry is only attracting enough work to have an annual revenue of 1-2 million a year, it could be entirely possible that a regular, non-famous person in a smaller electronics business might struggle to stay busy enough to earn enough of a living, even if certain repairs like the one you described are very profitable on their own.

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

#479

Post by blueblisters »

nwallin wrote: post #389
walrus01 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What kind of theft, and from whom? My understanding is that a person with decision making power at these factories are negotiating with third party repair shops, agreeing on a price, and selling authentic Apple badged components or Apple schematics to them. In that sense, it is not theft. My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those fac…

> My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those factories do not have a de-jure legal right to sell those parts. In that sense, it is intellectual property theft.

I am not sure breach of contract/license agreements is IP theft. I bet IP theft has a very specific legal definition that draws a fine line between theft and breach of contract. Apple can of course try to bring these factories to court to seek damages.

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