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

tobiasberg.net

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has had even more corrupt/authoritarian/cult of personality leaders than Trump. They were younger and their brains still worked so they did way more damage than trump too. Most Americans just don't learn much history so can't compare.

> America has had even more corrupt/authoritarian/cult of personality leaders than Trump. Like who?

Andrew Jackson to this day is a darling among conservatives in America.

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

#412

€780 is 1/5th of the price of a laptop?

That jumped out at me as well.

It is not hard to spec a Macbook Pro to $4000+ though

I'm a little skeptical of the top case cost - iFixit has these ranging from $90 to $160 usually. The most expensive I found was $299.

Maybe the author meant the entire repair would cost €780.

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

#413
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.…

I disagree. The lack of repairability has external costs not born by the purchaser or the manufacturer -- more toxic trash unnecessarily added to the environment. Forcing a particular trade-off on everyone is entirely the point. It's the point of car safety, it's also the point of minimum warranties, electrical emission regulations, safety standards, etc.

It's much more effective and economically efficient to deal with externalized pollution costs with deposits to incentivize proper disposal.

A ton of normal users will simply never bother to repair their own laptops no matter how easy it is, but you don't even have to recycle your own bottles and cans to see the effectiveness of bottle deposits work. Someone will usually come and recycle them for you in any big city.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All governments have a propensity to want more power. Some governments have more effective checks-and-balances than others. The EU is a much looser confederation than the US, with significantly more power still invested in the member states (many of whom themselves are also loose confederations of semi-autonomous provinces...)

And let terrorism happen to any number of the member states. They would demand Chat Control being passed

The EU is no stranger to terrorism? The troubles in Ireland, ETA in Spain, Al Qzaeda and ISIL in France/Spain/Germany, domestic terrorism in Norway/Germany/Denmark - all in the last 35 years.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, do you also consider it "authoritarian" to have e.g. regulations on vehicle exhaust? Should the government have an environmental protection agency? Who gets to be on it? What about my right to insulate my house with asbestos and paint it with lead? And who's talking about banning private import of laptops? You do know that you can regulate national sales without controlling absolutely everything right? Whoeve…

> mean, do you also consider it "authoritarian" to have e.g. regulations on vehicle exhaust? In the US this is why so many wagons have turned into SUVs which have more lax fuel efficiency requirements. They find ways around the regulations. All Apple laptops have hard soldered SSDs. SSDs have to go bad eventually. Should the government force apple to only sell laptops with replaceable ssds ? The most environmentally…

One country did a bad job with regulations, therefore regulation as a whole is useless? Anyway, the question was if you consider it authoritarian, not whether the particular legislation in your particular country was successful.

Should the government force Apple to sell laptops with replaceable SSDs? Perhaps. What's the upside of having to desolder it when it goes bad? What's the upside of riveting the keyboard to the frame?

You're also dodging the question of my right to buy vegetables with high levels of PFAS and drink water with high levels of lead.

> Back to the original point, the laptop isn’t even hard to fix. OP just didn’t do [their] research.

The original point was never whether some guy did a good job fixing his laptop or not, but rather whether there's any point to riveting the keyboard, and more generally, whether it's worth defending companies' "rights" to sell intentionally crippled products and pollute the environment.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that complain about the number of screws are very counter productive. The important thing is that repair is possible at all without permanent damage. Framework and some of the 'repair optimized' designs seem to assume that the device is going to be repaired daily and that it needs to be as easy as possible.

The bar should be higher than "Better than glue". While repair is possible, the number of screws with many different screw types still make it needlessly time consuming / expensive.

The ease of repair only needs to be in proportion to the likelihood of needing repair and frequency of occurrence.

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

#417

>Here’s hoping governments regulate laptop manufacturers to actually make repairable machines in the future. No, this is a bad solution. If you want a repairable machine, buy one. They exist. Others have already mentioned Framework, but there are other options that aren't that far down the spectrum either. One of the things macbook users praise the most is "build quality", which often means the solidity of the device…

MostlyStable, are you a deregulation zealot?

By extension, are you also an antitrust enforcement denier?

Also by extension, do you understand the term late-stage capitalism?

Because if you truly believe that regulation isn't necessary, then you are either ok with, or unaware that, unregulated capitalism ends in monopoly (or duopoly to keep up appearances). A free market only has a chance of existing under regulation, otherwise it's immediately gamed to maximize profit, which leads to runaway wealth inequality (the antithesis of a free market).

In other words, a €730 ($835) top case replacement is only allowed to exist because your worship of deregulation prevents the very competition that you yearn for.

I don't normally word my comments this strongly, but we seem to have lost our BS detectors since yours is the top comment.

Remember that it's ok to change your mind. So I'm not criticizing you, but the mindset that's allowing fundamental mistakes to not only go unchallenged, but be celebrated.

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

#418
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppleCare is leaps and bounds better than any other insurance you can buy for mobile or laptops. For accessories I don’t see the point, those are effectively disposable wear items. Ironically a large part of deciding to migrate to an iPhone from android was final frustrations with even Google purchased devices under warranty coupled with hardware quality requiring repairs. My wife’s experience with AppleCare won me o…

Insurance for things you can afford to replace never makes sense anyway. The expected cost of insurance will always exceed the expected cost of replacement in the long run. Unless for some reason you know you will be breaking your device much more than the average person. Insurance is for things that are unlikely to ever happen but would financially ruin you if they did.

Definitely agreed, to a point. Phones I used to break so often it seemed worth it, although a lot seemingly had to do with device quality vs. me being especially clumsy. My iPhone has been dropped, dunked in the bath, etc. just as much as my past Pixels but is going on 3 years now. I never made it a year previously.

My laptop I'm on the fence about. It's a $3,000 machine that isn't especially robust if dropped, but I haven't broken one in a decade or two. Probably won't pick it up on the next one I buy. The unrepairability of modern Macbooks is what got me to buy it in the first place though. An old Thinkpad I could self-insure for quite cheap because I had the ability to replace any component failure myself. Not so true on the Macbook. I also see it as travel insurance - I can walk into any Apple store in a major city and in theory get a replacement device on the spot. Of course that theory has yet to be strongly tested.

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

#419

>Here’s hoping governments regulate laptop manufacturers to actually make repairable machines in the future. No, this is a bad solution. If you want a repairable machine, buy one. They exist. Others have already mentioned Framework, but there are other options that aren't that far down the spectrum either. One of the things macbook users praise the most is "build quality", which often means the solidity of the device…

MostlyStable, are you a deregulation zealot? By extension, are you also an antitrust enforcement denier? Also by extension, do you understand the term late-stage capitalism? Because if you truly believe that regulation isn't necessary, then you are either ok with, or unaware that, unregulated capitalism ends in monopoly (or duopoly to keep up appearances). A free market only has a chance of existing under regulation,…

Lol I think watching the entirety of the EU run on shitty plastic laptops that are government approved would really top the British fight against heatwaves by smearing yoghurt on their windows.

I think I’d really enjoy this. Yes, please do this.

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

#420
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc. Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up. USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's poss…

> I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.

Probably a lot of lint in there! My 4 year old phone gets that way until I clean it out with a plastic pick (very vigorously at that) and it's like new again.
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