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My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

tobiasberg.net

211–220 of 554 posts

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#211
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly because Americans keep electing total morons.

I would actually suggest this is symptomatic of the real problem: money in politics. Elected officials (and some appointed, like SCOTUS) keep changing laws and precedents to allow more and more money in politics. They can't quit all that dark money - without a lot of funding, you don't get elected. Usually the best funded candidate wins. There was an anonymous oped from a congressman some years back which bemoaned th…

Part of the reason money has such a big influence on elections is that first-past-the-post election system you have over there in the US. When voters have to make a binary choice between two participants, low-information campaigns like hit-pieces are able to make a big difference and are cheap to communicate en-masse. When voters have a actual choice between four parties on the left and four parties on the right, hit-pieces will only make a voter switch from, say, one left-wing party to another. So since the return-on-investment on political advertising is much lower, much less money will be spent on it and there will be less of it. And what will be there will be of higher quality.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Macbook Neo is just as high-quality as any other Apple product. Apple has some of the most brilliant engineers in the industry, they can absolutely design a repairable device to their own standards.

>Apple has some of the most brilliant engineers in the industry, Did they fire the guy who designed the magic mouse? What about the one who designed the iPhone 4 antenna? Are they still working there? The butterfly keyboard? The class action Apple lost over the Macbook 2011 design flaws? Should I go on?

Yes, they did actually fire the guy who did the iPhone 4 antenna. The butterfly keyboard guy is now working with OpenAI apparently.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades of HN users finger wagging and suggesting FOSS hardware has progressed society nowhere. 12 months from EU mandatory replaceable batteries and products across the industry are being redesigned with repairability, usb-c, and user friendly designs. It’s time to accept regulation actually does work when you have a competent government.

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating sliver of plastic was a choice) and the cable hell attached to USB C. If USB C had been so important to me I wouldn't have bought iPhones all those years.

Apple can't even make their strain relief on their cables work properly due to "being ugly" so preferring them to USBC is just another case of Apple-juice-kool-aid

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#214
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades of HN users finger wagging and suggesting FOSS hardware has progressed society nowhere. 12 months from EU mandatory replaceable batteries and products across the industry are being redesigned with repairability, usb-c, and user friendly designs. It’s time to accept regulation actually does work when you have a competent government.

> It’s time to accept regulation actually does work when you have a competent government. Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent. Maybe the only requirement is that they're not totally in bed with the big corps making money.

> Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent

Context: I'm not a EU-native, I've migrated to here.

It disturbs me a lot when people keep repeating the "incompetent government" narrative when it comes to the EU, but when you compare it to the dictatorship that I escaped from, they still seem way more competent, surprising when the big advantage of a dictatorship is supposed to be increased efficiency while reducing personal rights.

Personally I cannot name a better government (or governing body, given that we are talking about the whole EU) anywhere else on this planet.

I feel I'm incredibly lucky to live here even when the economy is getting tougher. The only thing that worries me and makes me consider leaving is the right-extremes, which to this day, thankfully had limited influence.

Sorry for the digression, but I just wanted to address this repeating pattern. It's possible that you have very valid reasons to call them semi-competent and that I'm overreacting.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#215
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car safety is a bad counterexample because the risk is otherwise often externalized i.e. your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal. And as GP stated, regulating this sort of thing would definitely force a particular trade-off on everyone. A lot of people would be pissed to have MacBooks with worse "build quality" even if they were more reparable.…

>> your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal. You know that safety for pedestrians is also a very tightly regulated car safety category, right? Obviously, there's not much that can be done if you get hit by a car going 70mph, but the fact that most people should survive a 30mph impact with a modern car is mostly thanks to regulations requiring cr…

Not in the US. Specific pedestrian safety features are not included in cars sold there due to lack of regulation. FMVSS was planning a regulation modelled after ECE R127, then the administration changed and no progress since...

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the government regulate the free market is an issue of physical force and should always be discussed as such. Are you willing to deal with men by force beyond retaliation? This issue is moral, not practical. Besides, it’s easy to sell one’s freedom to a competent government, but it’s insanely hard to get it back when it rots. This has been the case of many welfare states. “Let’s force them to do the damn thing…

The perfect example of cognitive dissonance! The government, which mandates that the can of tomato soup I buy must not contain any glass shards, is immediately equated with physical violence. Although the shopkeeper who requires me to pay for the can before I take it out of the store is far more likely to get in my face if I don’t follow their rules. I don’t understand this worldview. You’re selling your freedom to b…

If I buy a can of soup and find glass in it, I have a valid claim against the manufacturer. It's a matter of holding someone accountable for fraud or negligence, not a matter of regulation. The proper route is a court, not a bureaucratic agency that preemptively dictates production methods on the assumption that every manufacturer is a potential prisoner.

> get in my face if I don’t follow their rules

If a shopkeeper asks me to leave because I refuse to follow his rules, he's exercising his right to control his own property, he's not initiating force.

> You’re selling your freedom to big corporations.

I'm not selling my freedom to corporations, they can't throw me in jail, or take my property by edict. The government, by contrast, holds a legal monopoly on force.

I am not an American, so I cannot diagnose declining life expectancy, homelessness, poor food, and other problems from afar. But I do know this: personal problems don't give one a moral claim on other people's labor. Need does not justify compulsion, and citizens are not sacrificial animals.

> I am an unfree European blinded by communism.

You hinted that Europe's communist past was somehow not a cautionary tale.

> The perfect example of cognitive dissonance!

Dressed-up ad hominem. You have no idea what I do or don't hold in my mind.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#217
post #208
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you worry about it if you can afford to replace it? If you say you worry about the cost, shouldn't you worry even more about the higher cost of the insurance? Sure, for one item the variance is higher if you are uninsured, but if you have several such items, variance goes down, and you are saving all the more money.

Because even though I can afford to buy/repair a new phone if I break mine; it still _feels_ terrible to have to spend 500+ bucks because I was a dumbass. I literally toss my phone to my couch or my bed from across the room dozens of times a week without worrying about misjudging the throw (which happens more than I’d like to admit), toss is on the ground at the gym, have no problems taking long baths with it, washin…

Yes, the argument is that the entity providing the insurance is surely earning more income that they are paying out since in addition to payouts, they also have overhead costs and must be profitable. Said another way, their customers are paying more than they receive, on average. That's a mathematical and economical certainty.

You are right that it might still feel better to you to pay regularly instead. That's subjective.

Knowing that you will likely end up paying less in the long term if you don't pay the insurance might help getting over that feeling, but that's a personal choice in the end.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#218
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Framework 13 is a bit long in the tooth. I can pay 529 EUR to get a new mainboard and keep the same case/battery/speakers/camera/keyboard/mouse/screen/etc. Or, I can replace the keyboard for 32 EUR. It's not just repairs, to upgrade a Mac you have to throw away all that perfectly working hardware just to get a new mainboard.

> I can pay 529 EUR to get a new mainboard and keep the same case/battery/speakers/camera/keyboard/mouse/screen/etc. Or you can spend 50 euros more and get an entire new laptop that is not only much more powerful than your old framework but is almost as repairable: the neo. At some point your argument begins to work against you, you should just have talked about the keyword repair being cheap. Not how you can get a n…

> Or you can spend 50 euros more and get an entire new laptop that is not only much more powerful than your old framework but is almost as repairable: the neo.

You forget to mention - less powerful than his old FW 13 with new mainboard/CPU.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one party will violate every norm and law to the greatest extent that they can get away with it, it's pretty much impossible to compete with them. I want good things for people. I can't compete with fascists because they will cheat and lie and employ violence. My positive intent is almost impossible to out thwart their dirty deeds if they are willing to break laws / change laws and I won't.

Assuming you're from the USA, your two main parties are exactly like that. The appearances have changed, but Obama drone-assassinating random children on the other side of the world was not much better than what Trump is doing. Not defending Trump, to be clear, just saying US imperialism and fascism has much deeper roots and that removing Trump is not going to fix any issues the rest of the world has with the USA.

It was not better, it was less. US imperialism has deep roots, yes, but a large chunk of the world who would tolerate a moderate level of it, don't tolerate this level.

Re: My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix

#220
FWIW the Macbook Air is slightly more repairable and modern ones are decent enough to do work on without the display limitations of prior non-pro apple silicon. As a travel machine, I shy away from the Pro because of how poor it is to repair.

Unfortunately a Macbook is a hard requirement for travel simply because of battery life, at my desk I use my Windows gaming rig for work.

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