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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

#521

Post by hwbehrens »

walrus01 wrote: post #352
Nextgrid wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

In the case this is a misunderstanding of the US perspective, and not a deliberate misinterpretation, the context taken here by Apple is based on US intellectual property law.

In that context, this would be a criminal offense and would very likely be pursued in court by Apple, leading to punitive damages, loss of contract, or both (e.g., the GEEP lawsuit). Third-shift manufacturing [0] is seen as a serious issue by many large corporations who have their production based in China for this reason.

If the schematics or other intellectual property were transferred to a third party (e.g. another factory) for production, then this would be IP theft, if the use of the word `theft` specifically is the crux of your objection.

I'm not saying the current situation is "right" or "correct", just clarifying the terminology so everyone is on the same page semantically.

[0]: https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825...

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

#522

Post by tzs »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #446
tzs wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 1960s DIY TV repair was such a big thing that there were self-service kiosks in supermarkets that sold vacuum tubes and included a tube tester. When your TV stopped working, you took the back panel off with the TV turned on and looked to see which tube was not glowing. You would then turn the TV off, pull that tube from its socket, take it down to the supermarket, stick it into the correct socket on the kiosk,…

Wow, I would so not do that without rubber gloves or something. I've always been pretty hesitant working on CRTs knowing the voltages present in there (and they could linger for a long time due to charged capacitors). Was the failure mode of tubes always such that it would stop glowing? I'm surprised they always failed in that way. I suppose the main issue would be that the heater filament would burn out and stop emi…

Vacuum tubes have other failure modes besides the filament burning out, but the filament burning out was by far the most common.

A tube might have a filament life of many thousands of hours, but a TV might have a dozen or so tubes so the odds were highest for filament burnout when your TV suddenly stopped working.

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

#523

Post by pcdoodle »

Foxfox12 wrote: post #383
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing. The real thing is already broken if you're at the point of buying these parts. The entire object is already e-waste until you add new parts. E-waste turned into functional object is a good thing even if it's achieved with used/rejected/counterfeit parts.

The only bad part is some of these parts are stolen from users. Because the main board on an iPhone is account locked, crime groups will strip the phone down for parts and sell these on eBay to people looking to fix their phones. This is why I think Apple should account lock all parts on the iPhone and tell the user this but if the original owner unlinks the phone, the parts will work again.

Crime groups stealing iPhones? What planet do you live on?

Apple is the number one creator of e-waste in 2021.

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

#524

Post by tenacious_tuna »

whoknowswhat11 wrote: post #394
worik wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are focused on the users - not the developers. We already have a sense of the insane dark patterns developers can deliver on the web. Pop up and under ads with unhittable close boxes, recurring subscriptions that can only be cancelled in narrow windows by calling a UK phone number. Seriously - look at the coalition Epic put together for their trial. Almost everyone on there has some sort of abusive billing proce…

> They are focused on the users - not the developers.

I'm a former Mac dev--I think Apple likes to use this argument to justify a lot of their choices, but in reality their design decisions often make life difficult for developers in ways that aren't beneficial to the customers.

My former company produced screen recording software, and since I started in 2018 to when I left at the end of 2020 each MacOS release required us to spend a good 3 months fixing our apps to run under the new OSes. Notarization required us to change how we signed our libraries and integrated them across the 3 applications we produced; the permissions paradigm for mic and webcam was beautiful, and easy to develop around, but when they added screen recording permissions it was truly awful, and they broke their own patterns. APIs would be deprecated with no replacement, documentation was sparse at best, with header files often being more useful than the examples provided on developer.apple.com....

My point being, we often spent more time bending our app to Apple's will than fixing bugs or adding much-requested features. Apple's argument was that these changes they forced us to make was net-beneficial for end users: less malware with notarization, better privacy controls with permissions--but when it really came down to it, they just want more control over distribution of apps and "special treatment" for their own tooling.

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

#525

Post by pembrook »

atoav wrote: post #512
pembrook wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because they can see the bigger picture, beyond these 2010s-era complaints of 'user-upgradable RAM.' This is totally irrelevant in a SOC world. Apple is indeed reducing the carbon footprint of computer manufacturing, by consolidating more and more components on a single chip (SOC) with M1, and creating smaller and smaller hardware. There's a ridiculous amount of carbon footprint saved by not having to source, sh…

What do you think reduces the carbon footprint of a company more: A) Company consolidates hardware into a single unrepairable resin block B) All customers are able to use their devices 50% longer because stuff is repairable As someone who designes PCBs you could save the world by doing the math here for me and convince me how this is better for the planet than e.g. my fairphone where I can swap out my battery when it…

Clearly A is better. Because those resin blocks will be made smaller and smaller in the next decade or so to the point that arguments like "Landfills!" become irrelevant.

B isn't even a possibility. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology upgrade/purchase cycle, and of consumer behavior in general.

Most people don't throw away their computers because they "break and can't be repaired." They throw them away because newer hardware is more powerful and smaller and uses less energy.

When I went home last year my parents had 4 old PC towers of various generations sitting in their basement, they recently took them all to the local dump. All of them were still completely functional. Literally nothing was broken.

Why did they throw them away? Because they were 1/10th the processing power of a modern MacBook and impossible to move around the house. Nobody was using them.

There's mountains of giant plastic PC towers sitting in landfills that were built with the easy to repair/upgrade mindset everybody here is so nostalgic about. It did nothing to save the environment.

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

#526

Post by horsawlarway »

whoknowswhat11 wrote: post #394
worik wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are focused on the users - not the developers. We already have a sense of the insane dark patterns developers can deliver on the web. Pop up and under ads with unhittable close boxes, recurring subscriptions that can only be cancelled in narrow windows by calling a UK phone number. Seriously - look at the coalition Epic put together for their trial. Almost everyone on there has some sort of abusive billing proce…

They're focused on making money and fuck all else.

Apple is the literal definition of "insane dark patterns" if you happen to be a developer.

Made a profitable app on the app store? Oh look! Apple used your market data to clone it, shoved their product to the top of the "marketplace" they happen to own, and now you have no business.

Want to improve your user experience by shipping a compliant browser rendering engine? Oh... we're so sorry, only Apple can "safely" let the user view the web, using safari, where they hoover up more data.

Want to debug on a variety of hardware/software combinations to better support users? Oh... sadly the licensing agreement forbids virtualization - Go spend 10k on physical devices.

Basically - Apple is a shit company that happens to have interests that are currently aligned with customer value (in some places). They will not remain that company.

Benevolent dictatorships are by far the best form of government you can get - as long as you're in the in group. The problem is you never stay there forever: Either you will change, or the company will change. See the turmoil happening now around Google products. See the backlash MS got in the 90/2000s.

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

#527

Post by pineaux »

singlow wrote: post #458
m1el wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the seller paying for the manufacture of these parts, or is Apple. I don't know the actual situation, but let's say for the sake of argument; - Apple pays $1M to make 1M chips, with the contract that forbids making these parts to sell third parties. - A Shenzhen shop pays $15K to make 10K of the same parts, the manufacturer breaches the contract, violates Apple's IP and makes extra parts for the shop. None of th…

So all of the senses of theft that do apply, which have been in use for millenia, are not "meaningful" because they do not meet the cause of your morality. Of course when Prometheus "stole" the fire from Mount Olympus he did not deny Zeus anything, but it was called theft. The fire that he brought to athens was the intellectual property of the Gods.

I think you are both right: I think the act of stealing is the act of taking something (an idea, an object) without permission from someone else. It doesn't matter how much this "something" costs to make in time, money or effort. In that sense, taking designs without permission and creating electronic parts is theft. However, having said this, I don't believe theft is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a good thing (to a certain point) that the government steals your money (takes it without permission) as taxation. I also believe that where there is a limited supply - either by design or the nature of the thing - the owner of this supply should be coerced into doing what is not only good for themselves but also for the whole of society. I might be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but in my eyes you don't have the right as a home owner to leave your house empty when there is a shortage of housing. Squatting should be legal in such circumstances. This forces homeowners to keep rent affordable. I also believe that apple keeps these parts off the market to make more profits in a way that is not beneficial for the environment and society as a whole. This makes it a moral imperative to steal these parts and make them available for the general public.

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

#528

Post by smolder »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #261
Nextgrid wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

It's really unforunate, since repair is a good value in terms of reducing externalities like e-waste and natural resource use, not to mention a potential way to develop electronics skills in our workforce with low-barrier-to-entry jobs.

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

#529

Post by CRConrad »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #304
fors wrote: post #302

Earlier 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…

> Perhaps it's because China clones everything and would happily clone a MacBook board and sell that to unsuspecting people

Isn't it "China" that makes those MacBook boards already? They wouldn't need to clone anything, just make some more of them.

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

#530

Post by CRConrad »

defaultname wrote: post #195
camehere3saydis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sizable portion of the audience here considers selling ads morally reprehensible in itself. This, on the other hand: >The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it. OP does say it as if there's something wrong with it.

How does that quote remotely imply there is something "wrong" with it (aside from it obviously factoring into credibility)? Another person took the exact same quote and declared that it betrayed jealousy. This borders on parody.

If that doesn't "remotely" imply anything to you, have you considered whether you're perhaps just a little less sensitive to linguistic nuance than others? And that this doesn't necessarily mean that it is they who are overly sensitive?
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