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 happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet (WeChat/Taobao) or find someone to do the repair for me for $40 on the Chinese street markets (Huaqiangnan in Shenzhen). When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
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 it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
Repairability laws would actually help here. You would get the same repair shops in the US if Apple was forced to provide schematics & parts at a reasonable cost, with no risk of counterfeits or bad parts.
This is a big deal, and the reason there's so much opposition to right to repair, even beyond Apple. If R2R was a stupid, niche, geeky idea that doesn't bother anyone it would quietly get passed and that would be it, but the reason people are bothered by it and oppose it is because device manufacturers (whether computers or cars or farm equipment) actually make a lot of money off the status-quo.
> 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...
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 companies are kicking and screaming about right to repair is 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. No one is making massive profit off repair parts - they’re offsetting massive losses.
It's a signal when humans will do something against the law - and generally it seems to be a fair response to excessive control or at minimum a counterweight to the actions of a selfish for-profit or industry. Piracy comes to mind as well: if content becomes too expensive, requiring monthly subscriptions to too many places or then unreasonable cost to buy a specific film or series - then more people will pirate, and more reasonable people willing to pay will start to pirate - the more friction and unfairness in the balance of everything, the more piracy. The ability to pirate or repair by third-party both I believe are necessary to keep organizations in check.
Edit to add: makes me think of Bitcoin too, people certainly have reason to be unhappy with local-global financial systems which have heavy-matured regulatory capture and overall corruption whether it's printing excessive money or being deceptive to foreign players so it's an uneven playing field.
> It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
People are not stealing macbooks and sending them to chop shops... they steal them and try to flog them so unsuspecting consumers. What grey market parts really mean is dead macbooks and phones that Apple would prefer to see shredded rather than used for spares.
RE counterfeits: I don't know how to seriously answer this, beyond saying: stop being so fucking precious about Apple electronics, no other computer manufacturer has this problem but Apple has to be fully vertically integrated - and the argument for quality has been thrown out of the window, deeo down everyone knows why Apple want this level of control over device life cycle, it's the same as their App store.
> It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft
Nobody stole parts from Apple's warehouses.
So "essentially", it is not theft. Unless "essentially" means "by some outlandish, ridiculous, anti-popular and pro-corporate international legal fiction".
>It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
If they actually stole the parts they'd be in jail in no time.
What they do is merely copyright infringe - if that.
>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.
There is of course a market of Apple devices stolen for parts, but majority of spare parts are coming from used donor devices, obtained at discount, I believe big shops may also buy new ones solely for parts
There are plenty of differing qualities of parts, but they're not all official while some are the same.
If R2R were a thing in the US and parts were commonly-available, there wouldn't be a need for white-, gray-, and black- marketplaces. Sure, there could be lower-quality ones when someone wants to do it cheaper, like there are right now. The problem is the giant corporation locking-up the schematics, the tools, the guides, and the parts to be able to repair their shit at a sane cost and reasonable effort.
Right to Repair isn’t demanding manufacturers make all memory socketed: but if a RAM chip goes bad they are asking that a new one can be purchased legally and soldered in place. Right now, there are many 40-cent components in laptops a repair shop cannot purchase from component manufacturers because Apple, or Asus or whenever told them not to sell it to 3rd parties. Or proprietary firmware flashing tools, or what have you. None of this impacts the physical form factor of a machine.
And some parts are can't even be swapped from one genuine device to another - home buttons used to be like that. But in newer iPhones that applies for other components too. IIRC some of them can be reprogrammed somehow but it is additional difficulty not nornally seen in other brands.
> 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
The right to repair laws Louis Rossmann advocates for do not require manufacturers to change their designs to make repairs easier. Apple would still be allowed to solder memory on their devices without any repercussions.
> I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
Louis Rossmann owns and operates the kind of "corner shop" you're referring to. He certainly isn't demanding everyone repairs their own devices. He's just advocating for the ability for owners and third parties to repair devices without interference from manufacturers.
> When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
That's because US shops cannot legally acquire parts and schematics necessary to perform component-level repair. Technicians in Chinese street markets aren't worried about legal retaliation from US-based companies. Right to repair would ensure owners and third parties could legally acquire the parts and schematics for repairs. They don't even need the manufacturer to provide the parts and schematics; they just need to be protected from legal retaliation.
> 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.
> By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.
Louis Rossmann proves that such a business does work and is profitable while remaining significantly cheaper for customers (otherwise he wouldn't get any business).
> 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.
You are really overestimating the value of those skills. You don't need a college degree to run a hot air reflow station. It's a valuable skill but I'd be shocked if it was worth even a quarter of your estimate, even in NYC.
Even if running a hot air reflow station were a supremely difficult skill which required decades to master, the market value of a skill like that depends on the employee's ability to demand better compensation from competing employers. How many repair shops even have equipment like that? It's a very specific skill set, particular to an industry which is struggling due to lack of right to repair protections.
I remember in the 80s, devices would all come with the complete schematics right there in the box. I remember poring over them after buying something, I thought it was fascinating. Like my TV, computer etc. Everything.
This should really be brought back, even though component-level fixing is not nearly as easy as it was back then.
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, and press the "test" button. A meter or lights on the kiosk would tell you if the tube was dead.
If it was, you looked up the tube in a book that was attached to the kiosk. The book would list the part number of an equivalent tube sold at the kiosk. You'd grab the right tube from the racks of tubes in the kiosk, go pay for it at the checkout stand, take it home, put it on the socket, and 99% of the time that fixed your TV.
If that didn't you might take the rest of the tubes in and test them just in case the problem was a tube failure other than a burned out filament.
Only if that didn't do it did you call the TV repair shop.
I recently bought a cheap Chinese electric cooker just for fun. The instruction "manual" was a flimsy piece of paper. Yet it still contained schematics, as simple as it was.
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 electronics are made there, it's a staggering concentration of skilled electronics workers.
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet
Exactly. And we need legislation to make it happen. In India, I remember someone started a multi-brand service centre for cars. The automobile industry ganged up on him and refused to supply original parts to him. He had to go to the courts, and the courts ruled for him and in favour of consumer rights and made it very clear that the automobile industry had to supply parts to any mechanic shop that asked for it.
We now need a similar legislation for every other industry too.
Would hope such legislation articulates exactly what parts of a "phone" would need to be made available. There are hundreds of parts in an iPhone. It's unreasonable to expect that Apple or any vendor have the resources to make sure every single part, large and small, is available to 3rd party repair shops.
I worry that believing the jobs are not coming back is a self-fulfilling prophecy – one with dangerous consequences of locking its believers into perpetual dependence on supply from places that act essentially as sin externalization depots.
If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering). Or if not one of those, then some other untried thing.
Edit: as sibling comments mention, if in fact the main limitation is not labor prices but exclusive-supply agreements for certain consumable parts, then this seems easily within the scope of Antitrust to address.
> If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering).
That incentive is the $x per hour. And the low $x per hour relative to quality of life is what causes the status lowering. Status is not lowered by a couple words. A doctor spends a ton of time in “vocational education”.
>My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
They do - they just do it upstream of you. The people you want to swap the parts can't get them, or if they do the parts are expensive, or don't pass the security checks of your device and now there's reduced functionality.
The lack of repairability laws affects you but its up stream of you directly.
louis rossman, the man from the article, does do component level board repair. A lot of right to repair is about being able to obtain these parts to enable this type of repair, without having to go through dodgy channels
The repair cost isn't dominated by the cost of parts, but operation cost such as labour and rent.
If your concern are the $100+ for repair, then it will be the same regardless Apple provide the parts or not. Not to mention knowing Apple, they will definitely sell you an iPhone battery for $20+. Earning the same Gross Margin as their product.
I don't know what to say about that. HP wanted to charge me the price of a new laptop motherboard for a forgotten BIOS password(around £650). A guy, in the phone repair shop on the high street replaced the BIOS chips for £112 and my laptop runs like a champ. It's a pretty big difference for a laptop worth around £1500.
Apple'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 "private companies must satisfy the shareholders" answer is just a scapegoat. Truly innovative companies (and companies of Apple's size and worth) should be able to solve these problems. Doing anything else is just fucking laziness.
Apple’s business and design philosophies revolve around control. In exchange for locking down everything, they promise you a seamless, high-performance, safe experience. That extends to designing products in a way that end-user repair is not a consideration, to locking down access to the App Store (see the Epic trial), and more.
I personally think it’s a bad direction to go in, especially with the outsized power Apple has over the industry, but they have clearly found willing audiences for it.
It was such a different philosophy back then even just 10 years ago. The RAM modules were easy to access and work with. The battery could be accessed with your finger and a latch, because it was assumed users would need a new battery in a few years. The HD was also accessible from this same door, because it was assumed users would be upgrading to an SSD in a few years. Users were given all the IO Apple thought they would possibly need.
Then Tim Cook came to power and let Jony Ive have free reign of the glue and the solder iron, and Macbooks became disposable.
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, ship, and assemble separate RAM, GPUs, Processors, etc from separate suppliers located all across the world.
10 years from now when your entire motherboard and all its components sit inside a chip small enough to fit inside a single AirPod...and 20 years from now when the need for physical LCD/OLED panels disappears...does it really matter how repairable it is? Even 100 million of them won't fill a single average-sized landfill.
Hell, we've already broke 1nm [1]. This means hardware will continue to get smaller and smaller for years to come.
Hardware consolidation and physical size reduction is the bigger gain, and the goal we all should be focused on if we actually care about sustainability.
The fact is, only a tiny minority of consumers would even entertain the idea of replacing computer components in the first place. This has been true for the 4 decades PCs have been around with easily replaceable hardware, so I don't think Apple changing to Philips head screws is going to change that.
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 about is the same that inspired me to learn how to do it.)
Not having to throw stuff away because a single component that could otherwise be replaced is a huge gain for the environment (especially people in places that ewaste accumulates) and doesn't have to come at the expense of size reduction.
idk what you are on about, you wanna defend throwing away a whole laptop when the battery's dead or the LCD is broken? You don't think "right to repair" is all about replacing IC's on a PCB, right? There are a ton of vital components in a modern laptop that would easily be replacable by either a dedicated layman or an unlicenced professional. E.g. the webcam, SSD, battery, cables between these and the MB, the LCD, keyboard, touchpad, power button, speakers, screen bezel, digitizer, daughterboards, lid sensor, the list goes on and on and on.
And remember that "right to repair" does not only entail end users, but also local repair shops and IT service companies who simply are not licensed with a specific brand.
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 is broken instead of throwing the whole assembly away or trying to source parts and removing a glued in battery.
Replacing some component in a computer/phone is something every member of my extended family did within the last 3 years. Usually it was a screen, a battery, a home button, a headphone jack, a hard drive, ... Every instance where they did this they used a piece of electronics longer and thus reduced the carbon footprint more than any single engineering change Apple could have come up with.
I mean before you call it hypocritical you need to take a holistic view of the supply chain. Electronics manufacturing is incredibly wasteful, even if you're making something that can be repaired!
Apple is at least working towards more sustainable technologies than traditional manufacturing. Photolithography is fucking awful for the planet and yet foundational to many devices, just for example.
Some devices like the Magic Mouse become paperweights after the battery fails and cannot be repaired at all.
I think one part of the problem is all of the encouragement and virtue signaling around recycling. A friend told me “Apple is the best tech company for the environment because they recycle more than any others”.
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
The fact that Apple peripherals are not user repairable is an absolute environmental disaster.
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 data rights to the design in order to hold down development costs. (Side note: as a contracting necessity, we’d also put the whole purchase on one huge contract to be managed by the so-called prime contractor and negotiate a profit fee explicitly in the contract itself. The total cost of the prime contract included “pass through” funding for subcontracts that the prime contractor would handle. In some cases the prime would let a subcontract to a vendor who would contract _back_ to a subsidiary of the prime, and we’d pay guaranteed profit margin explicitly on the prime and the subcontract amounts, so we’d pay a profit markup to the prime on the profit they would make from their subsidiary. And folks around here gripe about the 30% app “tax”.)
Anyway, vendor lock-in means we can’t compete subcomponents and our long term maintenance costs are really high because we always have to go back to the vendor for service. (Sounding familiar…?) The brass started dreaming up “modular weapons systems” where we maybe develop things like universal power modules, guidance modules, and other components, then we could compete for low cost production and long-term maintenance and achieve utopia.
I spent quite a while on this, and what we found is that it wouldn’t work (at least not for weapons). Universal components aren’t well-suited to different platforms (3” rocket vs 14” missile, etc.), the modular design adds weight, reduces efficiency for the electronics systems, increases part count to make them all interoperable, and so on. The engineering trades that you have to make for modular designs are incompatible with optimizing performance as measured by the end user. Ironically perhaps, one of the major case studies that helped argue that point was based around Apple products.
Which is perhaps a long way to say that most consumers don’t seem to care about modular computers, and in the worst case many of the changes that modularity would require are counterproductive to the things consumers _do_ seem to care about.
It’s one thing to argue that we should use governmental regulation to push negative externalities back onto firms so that they reconsider the design and engineering constraints they prioritize, but it’s not like firms are being irrational or irresponsible by giving people what they want—some combination of smaller, lighter, faster, longer battery life, and cheaper devices. There would be some negative impact on some (or all) of those characteristics if Apple, Samsung, or anyone else switched to fully modular designs—and I think most consumers would choose the cheaper, faster, smaller, lighter, or longer battery life models than to buy a modular one either on principle or because they expect to repair or upgrade it for significantly longer than they expect to own them today.
That might apply to very complex, high reliability systems like those in the military. But a battery is very basic and it's a consumable more than a modularize-able component like an engine or turbo. I think batteries are easily replaceable in most military equipment.
Consumables in the very least should be replaceable for consumer products, or the price for its replacement capped, otherwise we're throwing away electronics that hasn't reached even a third of its lifetime just because the battery's lifetime is over, it's like buying a new car everytime the tires are worn out. It's an incredible waste of resources.
Same thing for connectors like USB, audio jack, buttons and joysticks.
Most egregious is the chip signature-checking and exclusive buyer rights on same chip, that should be outlawed, heavily fined and easily reported and checked. It's like adding a chip with a serial number for each tire and if you install one not from your car manufacturer then your car refuses to move. It's just a scam.
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 even a scoop—it contains the world's only missile components from Toys R Us... One day I brought to work my sons toy car. We Passed it among us, and we saw that there were actually components suitable for us. More than that I can not tell.".
> 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".
Wasn't the Aegis system designed with this very kind of modularity, though at a higher level? Want different missiles on your ship, no need to build a different ship: just lift the module out and put a new one in.
I genuinely do not want repairability anywhere near the top of the list of performance and design trade offs.
Ruggedness, longevity, sure. Avoiding need to repair, definitely. Repairability? Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
Spent too many years as a full service PC network support small business to ever again want to deal with parts that aren’t actually attached to each other. Connection issues (especially on heating and cooling, so intermittent) were essentially all the problems except a vanishingly small proportion that were components.
The thing is, the repair shops get what’s left after the design is iterated until other problems are gone. So maybe only these component failures are left. Reverting to the old methods of replaceable components would likely re-introduce a massive class of problems that have by and large been eliminated.
Only the remaining problems have a voice, who is advocating on behalf of all the problems that the last 20 years of more solid design eliminated?
// Apologies for the HN trope, but see also Chesterson’s Fence, a tech version of “get off my lawn”.
The repairability Rossmann is talking about is not user-replaceable components. His repairs usually require soldering to replace components.
One of his main critique points is that Apple makes it hard to repair their products, even for electronics professionals. In the past, Apple has also altered designs so that small electrical problems suddenly fry the most expensive component on the board, the CPU. Either this is an embarrassing, junior-level oversight or a deliberate anti-repair-buy-new-hardware tactic.
Right to repair isn't "obligation to repair devices yourself", or "force manufacturers to redesign hardware so repair shops jobs are easier".
It's about preventing certain business practices that hinder the repair industry. Like when Apple forces their suppliers to not sell components to anyone but them.
"Component level repair" is a thing that's done today. It involves replacing individual components on a motherboard with a microscope and soldering iron, special equipment, and smart and well-trained people. That's what Rossman does regularly on his Youtube channel.
But even if you have the skills and tools to replace a tiny burned out IC on a motherboard, where do you get a replacement? Apple doesn't allow suppliers to sell them to anyone.
I don’t think your first sentence is accurate - there is no single standard definition for right to repair, and I have absolutely seen people saying that right to repair includes an obligation for manufacturers to redesign hardware so repairs are easier. I’ve also seen people say it’s only about allowing schematic access and nothing else. I’ve seen people say it includes unlocking bootloaders. IMO this is one of the biggest problems with the right to repair movement: the goals are fairly poorly defined.
Repairability doesn’t make products fragile or unreliable, poor design and quality control does. Source: spent the last 18 months building a highly repairable product and putting it through the same reliability tests less repairable products go through.
A lot of repairability just comes down to making replacement parts readily available too, which is orthogonal to the design.
I respectfully disagree. I’ve worked on products where field serviceability is a design goal. It absolutely can add complexity and cost - after all, it’s another design constraint. Rivets and glue are faster, cheaper, smaller, and often more reliable than screws. Soldered-on connectors are more vibration resistant and smaller than pluggable ones. Access panels can introduce structural weakness. Gluing or welding cases shut provides environmental protection that’s difficult to achieve with screws.
Even making parts available can be a pain. I might want to spin a new rev on a product where the old parts aren’t compatible with the new - but now I have to warehouse the old in case anybody wants them. I might not actually warehouse anything myself (contract manufacturer ships directly to retailers), but now I have to find a way of warehousing spares of everything. I might not have any good way of packing/shipping some of these loose parts.
That’s not to say R2R is a bad idea or anything (rather, I think it’s generally a good idea) - but it is not free, and we should be realistic about that.
I upvoted you because you presented an alternate view I hadn't heard before, but I disagree.
After a few years, a laptop's battery degrades. In well under a decade, Wirth's Law kicks in to make devices seem slow.
This attitude unintentionally suggests that people should turn their entire computers into e-waste instead of just swapping the battery or upgrading the RAM.
Nobody's saying that companies should have to make design tradeoffs to make things easier to repair (e.g., making devices bigger to fit sockets so components can be replaced without soldering). We're just saying they should stop going out of their way to make things harder to repair (e.g., withholding schematics and service manuals that they already did the work to write, and forcing suppliers to not sell their parts to independent repair shops).
Rossmann is not advocating for companies to change how they design stuff. Primarily, he just wants companies to release schematics (that they already have and aren't really proprietary) and to stop making deals with manufacturers to only sell custom parts to that company (which is what apple is doing with one of their charge chips).
I agree I dont care about reparability by third party as long as the devices is literally made indestructible. But If it cant be made that way, why the trade offs?
Why should I loss all my Data on MacBook when its CPU, GPU, or logic board has a problem?
Why does repairing a keyboard require replacing the half of the laptop.
And why are these repair so expensive.
It is all about balance. And a lot of these balance in Apple seems to be disintegrating since Steve Jobs passed away.
> Repairability? Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
I don't think repariability is something you need to put effort into build into a product, it's something you put effort into taking out of a product. Apple's engineers definitely have things like what Louis uses for his repairs: board views, schematics, diagnostics software. Louis gets these things from illegal vendors in other countries who obtain them from Apple workers. If Apple just sold these things to him he'd be willing to pay but that's not in Apple's best interest.
Also, Apple prevents Louis from buying replacement parts because they make their vendors agree to never sell the components they use to anyone but apple.
> Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
This avoids another massive externality: recycling and the environment. Right now Apple's recycling program takes old mostly working systems and shreds them. There's a reason we should: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle in that order.
> So maybe only these component failures are left. Reverting to the old methods of replaceable components would likely re-introduce a massive class of problems that have by and large been eliminated.
The macbook repair community was at one point fixing a very common issue by replacing a component with a slightly higher spec part. The difference was 1/1000 th of a cent to 2/1000 th of a cent in cost or something like that. Multiple iterations of macbooks came out with this flaw until Apple employed a similar fix.
I think another thing that's important to look at is how other industries handle similar things. If you found something that was:
1. In a different industry.
2. Had a similar experience ruining issue.
3. Said issue was resolved by a consumer.
4. Rather than ignoring the issue for years they very quickly create a patch that takes the feedback from the end user.
We could then conclude that this adversarial relationship between repair professionals is: not required to run a profitable business, can lead to better products, and can make everyone happy.
We can conclude then that Apple explicitly does not do this out of their own will. Apple doesn't have a hardware bug bounty. Apple does not acknowledge when a community member derives a fix for their product that works better then them.
I couldn't begin to imagine why Apple doesn't behave more like this. It just seems to make more sense for everyone.
Are you also against being able to upgrade a device, like adding memory or a larger hard drive? Why can't repairability be at the top of the list with performance and design?
Apple doesn't want you to fix its devices, it wants to force you to either have them fix it or buy a new one. It's a business decision not a technical one.
How much of this, I'm curious, is changing now that Jony Ive is gone?
Think about it. Since he left, Apple is bringing color back to their designs, bringing back ports other than Thunderbolt, abandoned the Butterfly keyboard, made the MacBook Pro 16" thicker to improve battery life and cooling, added the discounted business rate to the App Store...
Now, this doesn't mean Apple will continue improving or will make Right to Repair happen. However, I think that with Jony's departure, something may have, just may have, snapped within the company, and they seem to be looking at changing their ways just a little bit.
I wrote a book for O'Reilly that did really poorly in sales.
I added content to show the places I made mistakes in my assumptions about the process, and put in sections in chapters that showed how I troubleshot those errors, and corrected the code.
My editors asked me to remove that code. O'Reilly's brand, IMHO, is having the smartest people in the room talking to you. They don't want content that shows the author making mistakes. I felt like there was an audience for people who want a different voice, but who was I to argue with O'Reilly's success?
Rossman seems like he is talking to that audience, people who aren't experts, and still courageous enough to get something fixed on their own.
YouTube permits him to monetize that audience. I still think there is a huge gap in talking to people who are not experts and intimidated by the experts. There is a massive market for publishing there.
I just did my first surface mount repair this morning and it 100% happened because of Rossmann's channel. It was so easy that I feel like I should have been doing it much sooner. The things I've thrown away over the years..
Tip: if you're curious enough to watch a video of Rossmann's, do that in the incognito mode. Otherwise you'll be pestered with recommendations of the other two thousand of his videos, until the end of your days. Perhaps you'll even be able to follow the epic of his fight by the titles of new videos.
Sorta loath to do that, because I don't want YT to stop suggesting stuff related to that channel and its general topics. I just don't need more Louis Rossmann in my life, the rants don't do me any good—possibly aside from keeping my heart strong from pumping against the pressure, I guess. But the stress snacks will kill me. I'd like the algo to take a gentle hint already, it was like a year since the last watching.
I did some digging in the innards of a Macbook Pro, years earlier, and have a couple leftover screws as a result. I think I'll leave the next endeavor to people with better hands, especially since putting in an extra hard drive isn't an option anymore.
There is a Chrome ext that allows you to quickly open a link/video in incognito by clicking it while holding a meta key like shift, highly recommend for avoiding the Youtube recommendation hell [0].
I always watch YouTube in incognito mode, otherwise it pigeonholes you and you don't get to experience all of the breadth of the site. (If you're going to put up with Google you might as well make the most of it.)
Rossmann is seriously a national treasure. Along with Lex Fridman the two Youtube personalities irrefutably prove fair mindedness, humility & sincerity is valued. My fears that content online would eventually consist of nothing but selfies, food pics & competitive victimhood are somewhat reduced. I'd like to see Rossmann on Fridman's podcast.
I find Rossman insufferable due to his hyperbolic approach to shaming Apple and having a bone to pick with just about everyone- he's the definition of a narcissist. I agree in principle to "right to repair", but Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting. I've watched over 100 hours of his content and realized that his audience is primarily made up of anti-apple PC Master Race fanatics that just want to hear Louis troll apple for an hour.
Rossman always presents himself as the ultimate victim. Apple has it out for him, NY has it out for him, people less successful than him have it out for him. When you've watched as much of his content as I have, you start to see where his head is, and it's not a pretty place. Anyway, I have found other repair guys that are better than Rossman and don't have so much negativity on their channels. I can get a deeper understanding of repairing tech without the hyperbolic commentary.
It’s a shame to see this downvoted because even if it’s against what many people believe (we all have “hero’s” and “villains” I suppose, and our hero’s do no wrong) it’s something I also see.
I used to watch a lot of Rossman and glossed over his Apple hate because ultimately Apple are putting him and people like him out of a job, so it’s fair to be salty.
But a large portion of his content (a few years ago at least) is just hour long rants which are unsubstantiated opinion, he does not see nuance or doesn’t want to try steel-manning the things he disagrees with. Which is something Linus Sebastian is incredibly good at.
It does come off almost narcissistic at times, to me at least.
But at the end of the day explaining how computers are constructed is great content.
I’ve learned more about commercial real estate from Louis than I would have from other sources. There are disincentives for commercial real estate owners to lower their leasing rates, as it can drive a re-evaluation of loan criteria by the banks, forcing the owner to immediately increase equity. Banks don’t want this to happen, as it makes their books look bad.
Watching his business struggle through Covid fills me with great respect for the small business owner and the difficult choices which must be made. Did NY have it out for him? They were far from business friendly with their Covid restrictions. Recently, his shop was fined for not registering used laptops that his customers had abandoned for repair. Sure, NYC is attempting to prevent stolen laptops from being resold, but the level of bureaucratic idiocy turns Rossman’s channel into a Shakespearen comedy.
As for his specific gripes about repeated Apple design failures, he makes a good argument. Two stand out. First, liquid intolerance. Thinkpads from years ago used to tolerate coffee spilt on the keyboard. It flowed right through. From the number of water damaged MacBooks Louis repairs, it appears Apples can’t take a drop. If Apple is upset with Rossman’s criticism, they can easily apply board level coating to solve the problem.
Second, he’s critical of the connectors being soldered directly to the motherboard instead of going into a daughterboard and connecting via a flex connector.
And, yes, the above design decisions are made by Apple for a number of different, possibly valid reasons. To hit a price point, to fit within a form factor, to deliver in a required timeframe. But Louis brings up the point that Apple may be making these decisions for less than consumer friendly reasons. Planned obsolescence? Could Apple change the design of their connectors so they won’t break? Yes, but maybe they didn’t because they expect 5.8% of the connectors to fail and not be economical to repair in the Apple store, driving 5.8% greater revenue.
All that being said, yes, Louis takes the above points, which can be read in a minute, and rehashes them 50 different ways.
When you can’t attack their arguments, resort to personal attacks.
The amount of childish personal attacks about Rossman in this thread I think is a good indicator of how right he is. Makes me feel good about that money I donated to his Gofundme.
> I agree in principle to "right to repair", but Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.
It’s pretty clear he had built a business on repairing electronics. But that doesn’t invalidate his points. If you own something, you should be able to get it repaired to a reasonable degree. Apple goes out of their way to frustrate even consumables like batteries from being swapped, and I say that as someone that still uses apple products.
For him, it makes sense hes more passionate than most, not only is it a passion for him to do this type of work (repairing electronics, not youtubing) but its also his livelyhood, so it makes sense that he would call out companies that make design changes that serve little other purpose than to frustrate repairs and decrease longevity to bolster their sales (and increase e-waste in the process)
> I've watched over 100 hours of his content and realized that his audience is primarily made up of anti-apple PC Master Race fanatics that just want to hear Louis troll apple for an hour.
Gonna disagree. Regardless of the type of people attracted to his content. It doesn’t invalidate the points he makes there. I don't watch his stuff religiously, and probably haven't viewed as much as you purport to have, but he has a clear schtick (which is basically mandatory for youtubers) but is definitely less negative than many I have seen. The good seems to outweigh the bad.
The article starts out saying this was a way for him to vent in a healthy and cathartic way, as a direct substitute to therapy. And it seems to work for him and he has said it before and it shows in the stuff he posts. I wont judge him solely on that just as I wouldn't judge other others who prefer something different, like fishing or hunting and escaping people (myself), or hobbies like music (also myself) or maintaining a garden or yard to work out frustrations. Some even go on the internet to criticize others I guess.
What other YouTube channels are showing people to cleanup or swap individual chips, or what part of a board does what? [1][2] I haven’t seen one that compares. It’s pretty neat and a display of a skill set definately don't posses. Even though I work with tech on a daily basis in my own right.
I could not have said it better. This apple employee (BTW - making $20/hr) didn't detect this weird thing I did to scrw up this laptop and so was going to send it to Apple tech people.
Dude, if you can find folks to work for $20 / hr with the people skills to fix stuff day in and day out for while dealing with insane repair volume - you could manage your own apple store.
Here's the bottom line as an actual customer. I have NEVER been disappointed in the reliability of my iphone. The one time I broke it I walked in an AppleCare had me out same day with a new device. They are also surprisingly waterproof (I know, just resistant supposedly).
Does any of this have to do with gluing everything down? How do I know. But my phone has kept on going through some rediculous stuff, so I don't care. Solder everything, glue on top. And USB-C on my laptop keeps on flaking out while lightning seems to seat more reliably.
AND my "non repairable" junk iphone seems to have INCREDIBLE re-sale value in comparison to whatever else is out there. So apple IS designing for the long haul, and market rewards that. My wife has an old iphone still getting updates for some reason (in android land this is crazy talk).
I think he just understood how YouTube and social media works. New content is more rant and less repair. Anyone can enjoy a good rant troubleshooting motherboards and soldering components is less accessible.
Makes me think of Thunderf00t. This guy is a massive troll with, from time to time, great scientific content. He has a lot of followers just here to enjoy the trolling, as evidenced by the fact he is never questioned by his fans even though it is what his channel is supposed to teach.
If your largest problem is "negativity" and not about wether it's true the problem is somewhere between your chair and the keyboard. People can have very good reasons to be negative.
He makes very valid arguments, how is this "financial and self promoting"? Dont lie about someone's intentions just because you don't agree with their reasoning.
It is fair that you might not like his personality and sometimes he presents things like the Apple engineers are idiots to design such fragile stuff(probably the fragility is by design) BUT all the facts he presents are true and you can confirm by googling things like all the class action lawsuit that were required to force Apple to admit mistakes, or how Apple "geniuses" are incompetent and will not correctly diagnose your issue but instead offer you a new product or just replace the entire motherboard etc.
Though I think it would be best to have more people leading the right to repair just for this reason of avoiding people that hate someone personality then opposing this movement.
I agree with your characterization but don’t think that it makes him insufferable or have questionable motives. He’s authentic to himself and shows it on YouTube warts and all. Have to respect that. Take his videos as 50-75% opinion and it’s all good.
> I agree in principle to "right to repair", but Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.
Self-promoting maybe but if Apple made better products how Rossman would benefit? Isn't it currently the opposite? Rossman does well due to Apple refusing to fix the smallest of issues with their products. And fighting anyone who does whether a customer or repairman.
> Rossman's motives are purely financial and self promoting.
How does he benefit by teaching others on how to repair stuff for free. You can start your own repair business by watching and learning from his videos.
Lex Fridman misrepresents his role at MIT to make himself sound more accomplished than he really is, and the way he went about putting out his self driving car research directly to the press instead of going through peer review is shady. The guy is a cringeworthy grifter. He’s trying to be viewed as some AI expert but he’s totally full of shit.
I’ve also had a really hard time understanding why people praise him so much, I’ve tried multiple times to listen to his stuff and it’s just super disappointing. Worse than most lay people in depth. For people interested in AGI there are many better sources (MIRI, Yudkowsky), for people interested in self-driving: Andrej Karpathy. Max Tegmark also has some great public facing physics writing.
There’s so much great stuff out there, Friedman seems to get disproportionate attention. Personal attacks aside, I find him tedious to listen to and he often comes across as if he hasn’t done even cursory reading of his guest’s work. It often feels like a sophomore in college waxing about “big ideas” with little substance to back them up. Even at 2x speed I found the talks low signal.
Yes, he is not an expert on most of the things he talks about. Also you can almost predict what he will be going to ask to the guests.
But nonetheless as a podcast, I judge more on the basis of the conversation and the guest he had, and in both the metrics he is really great. He is really good in making the guests speak in easy and intuitive terms and making them speak the idea behind the discovery/invention. He sometimes even irritates the people in asking question behind the intuition when many guests are more accustomed with saying strictly provable statements in other places. And that is a part that is really missing in the world and that gives the sense of what's going on, instead of talking just formally provable sentences and terse description of their work.
This is unfair. He is a podcaster now that spans many disciplines. There is no way one can learn and be an expert at all of this.
Lex is a humble, open minded podcaster that tries to bring all sorts of topics on the table. Even uncomfortable ones like Anarchy and Religion. This is exactly what we need in times of a massive echo chambers of left and right.
I consider Lex to be one of the best, polite, and cordial interviewer that doesn’t inject too much of their personal agenda into the interviewee’s space (like Joe Rogan).
One of the best interviews was with Jim Keller where it gets a little confrontational and see how he deals with it.
I’ll second this - I work in ai and have been pretty disappointed by many of his interviews. I also hardly think that ‘humility’ comes to mind as OP suggests, he argues (often incorrectly) with guests on some of the most trivial facts. It’s one thing to not be an expert and ask poor questions due to lack of knowledge, it’s another to pretend to be all knowledgeable and still make baffling arguments.
Completely agree and very interesting how shallow the bar to praiseworthiness has become. Just put the words MIT, AI and self-driving car research on your bio line and you can sell snake oil to millions on Youtube.
I can't agree with respect to Lex Fridman, who began humbly hosting the MIT AI Podcast until he saw a payday by riding AI hype to being a techno-Joe Rogan.
Like who you want to like, but "irrefutably...sincer[e]" does not apply.
A major problem with Rossmann I have is that he leaned into a strong anti-Apple PCMasterRace crowd. For them, listening to him rant against Apple gives them a fun confirmation bias that they were right to buy PCs. They enjoy listening to that, but his very long rants aren't very interesting to newcomers or for spreading right to repair to new audiences. Does my mom have time for a 45-minute rant full of complex technical details about how Apple is bad and we need Right to Repair?
The other problem I have with him is that he always assumes Apple is nefarious because Apple is nefarious. He never addresses ulterior motives that Apple may have had for a decision, nor attempts to consult with engineers about why Apple's engineering might have some reason to it. Apple is anti-repair because they're a big company and because Apple hates noble honest people like him, not because there are any other logical explanations.
Finally, my last sticking point with Rossmann as a Right to Repair leader is that he is constantly missing the forest for the trees. He constantly picks on Apple because that gets clicks, but he mostly ignores all the BS that other PC manufacturers are doing or experiencing. When's the last time you saw him talk about a Surface Laptop 3, a laptop with a repair program because the screen was spontaneously cracking? Or the Surface Pro 4 with the battery inflating issue? Or a Razer Blade that spontaneously died on Linus Tech Tips after only a year of use?
Why would that happen? There's more great content than ever (and a lot of it is completely free). Of course, the amount of garbage has also increased, but the ratio seems to be staying steady.
Readit News
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 happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).
My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet (WeChat/Taobao) or find someone to do the repair for me for $40 on the Chinese street markets (Huaqiangnan in Shenzhen). When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
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 it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.
Repairability laws would actually help here. You would get the same repair shops in the US if Apple was forced to provide schematics & parts at a reasonable cost, with no risk of counterfeits or bad parts.
This is a big deal, and the reason there's so much opposition to right to repair, even beyond Apple. If R2R was a stupid, niche, geeky idea that doesn't bother anyone it would quietly get passed and that would be it, but the reason people are bothered by it and oppose it is because device manufacturers (whether computers or cars or farm equipment) actually make a lot of money off the status-quo.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang_(hacker)
The reason companies are kicking and screaming about right to repair is 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. No one is making massive profit off repair parts - they’re offsetting massive losses.
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.
Edit to add: makes me think of Bitcoin too, people certainly have reason to be unhappy with local-global financial systems which have heavy-matured regulatory capture and overall corruption whether it's printing excessive money or being deceptive to foreign players so it's an uneven playing field.
People are not stealing macbooks and sending them to chop shops... they steal them and try to flog them so unsuspecting consumers. What grey market parts really mean is dead macbooks and phones that Apple would prefer to see shredded rather than used for spares.
RE counterfeits: I don't know how to seriously answer this, beyond saying: stop being so fucking precious about Apple electronics, no other computer manufacturer has this problem but Apple has to be fully vertically integrated - and the argument for quality has been thrown out of the window, deeo down everyone knows why Apple want this level of control over device life cycle, it's the same as their App store.
Nobody stole parts from Apple's warehouses.
So "essentially", it is not theft. Unless "essentially" means "by some outlandish, ridiculous, anti-popular and pro-corporate international legal fiction".
If they actually stole the parts they'd be in jail in no time.
What they do is merely copyright infringe - if that.
Or they use parts from doner phones/devices.
There are plenty of differing qualities of parts, but they're not all official while some are the same.
If R2R were a thing in the US and parts were commonly-available, there wouldn't be a need for white-, gray-, and black- marketplaces. Sure, there could be lower-quality ones when someone wants to do it cheaper, like there are right now. The problem is the giant corporation locking-up the schematics, the tools, the guides, and the parts to be able to repair their shit at a sane cost and reasonable effort.
They're not stolen. But carry on pushing apples narrative that they own everything even after its sold.
The right to repair laws Louis Rossmann advocates for do not require manufacturers to change their designs to make repairs easier. Apple would still be allowed to solder memory on their devices without any repercussions.
> I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.
Louis Rossmann owns and operates the kind of "corner shop" you're referring to. He certainly isn't demanding everyone repairs their own devices. He's just advocating for the ability for owners and third parties to repair devices without interference from manufacturers.
> When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+
That's because US shops cannot legally acquire parts and schematics necessary to perform component-level repair. Technicians in Chinese street markets aren't worried about legal retaliation from US-based companies. Right to repair would ensure owners and third parties could legally acquire the parts and schematics for repairs. They don't even need the manufacturer to provide the parts and schematics; they just need to be protected from legal retaliation.
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.
Louis Rossmann proves that such a business does work and is profitable while remaining significantly cheaper for customers (otherwise he wouldn't get any business).
You are really overestimating the value of those skills. You don't need a college degree to run a hot air reflow station. It's a valuable skill but I'd be shocked if it was worth even a quarter of your estimate, even in NYC.
Even if running a hot air reflow station were a supremely difficult skill which required decades to master, the market value of a skill like that depends on the employee's ability to demand better compensation from competing employers. How many repair shops even have equipment like that? It's a very specific skill set, particular to an industry which is struggling due to lack of right to repair protections.
Actually that is exactly what you are doing, and you know that is what you are doing or you would not have needed to add the equivocation
This should really be brought back, even though component-level fixing is not nearly as easy as it was back then.
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, and press the "test" button. A meter or lights on the kiosk would tell you if the tube was dead.
If it was, you looked up the tube in a book that was attached to the kiosk. The book would list the part number of an equivalent tube sold at the kiosk. You'd grab the right tube from the racks of tubes in the kiosk, go pay for it at the checkout stand, take it home, put it on the socket, and 99% of the time that fixed your TV.
If that didn't you might take the rest of the tubes in and test them just in case the problem was a tube failure other than a burned out filament.
Only if that didn't do it did you call the TV repair shop.
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 electronics are made there, it's a staggering concentration of skilled electronics workers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
We now need a similar legislation for every other industry too.
If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering). Or if not one of those, then some other untried thing.
Edit: as sibling comments mention, if in fact the main limitation is not labor prices but exclusive-supply agreements for certain consumable parts, then this seems easily within the scope of Antitrust to address.
That incentive is the $x per hour. And the low $x per hour relative to quality of life is what causes the status lowering. Status is not lowered by a couple words. A doctor spends a ton of time in “vocational education”.
They do - they just do it upstream of you. The people you want to swap the parts can't get them, or if they do the parts are expensive, or don't pass the security checks of your device and now there's reduced functionality.
The lack of repairability laws affects you but its up stream of you directly.
If your concern are the $100+ for repair, then it will be the same regardless Apple provide the parts or not. Not to mention knowing Apple, they will definitely sell you an iPhone battery for $20+. Earning the same Gross Margin as their product.
I do agree that there's no culture of appreciating schematics around Palo Alto.
While repairability laws do not exist in China, Anti-repairability laws also do not exist in China.
In the US we have layers upon layers of regulations to the impede or outright prevent repairs on electronics and other devices.
I am not sure if "Right to repair" is the correct path, or if removing these anti-repairability laws would be a better path.
Why can't Apple make their products easily repairable while making them aesthetically pleasing? The typical "private companies must satisfy the shareholders" answer is just a scapegoat. Truly innovative companies (and companies of Apple's size and worth) should be able to solve these problems. Doing anything else is just fucking laziness.
I personally think it’s a bad direction to go in, especially with the outsized power Apple has over the industry, but they have clearly found willing audiences for it.
Then Tim Cook came to power and let Jony Ive have free reign of the glue and the solder iron, and Macbooks became disposable.
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, ship, and assemble separate RAM, GPUs, Processors, etc from separate suppliers located all across the world.
10 years from now when your entire motherboard and all its components sit inside a chip small enough to fit inside a single AirPod...and 20 years from now when the need for physical LCD/OLED panels disappears...does it really matter how repairable it is? Even 100 million of them won't fill a single average-sized landfill.
Hell, we've already broke 1nm [1]. This means hardware will continue to get smaller and smaller for years to come.
Hardware consolidation and physical size reduction is the bigger gain, and the goal we all should be focused on if we actually care about sustainability.
The fact is, only a tiny minority of consumers would even entertain the idea of replacing computer components in the first place. This has been true for the 4 decades PCs have been around with easily replaceable hardware, so I don't think Apple changing to Philips head screws is going to change that.
[1] https://technosports.co.in/2021/05/20/tsmc-mit-and-ntu-annou...
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 about is the same that inspired me to learn how to do it.)
Not having to throw stuff away because a single component that could otherwise be replaced is a huge gain for the environment (especially people in places that ewaste accumulates) and doesn't have to come at the expense of size reduction.
And remember that "right to repair" does not only entail end users, but also local repair shops and IT service companies who simply are not licensed with a specific brand.
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 is broken instead of throwing the whole assembly away or trying to source parts and removing a glued in battery.
Replacing some component in a computer/phone is something every member of my extended family did within the last 3 years. Usually it was a screen, a battery, a home button, a headphone jack, a hard drive, ... Every instance where they did this they used a piece of electronics longer and thus reduced the carbon footprint more than any single engineering change Apple could have come up with.
Apple is at least working towards more sustainable technologies than traditional manufacturing. Photolithography is fucking awful for the planet and yet foundational to many devices, just for example.
I think one part of the problem is all of the encouragement and virtue signaling around recycling. A friend told me “Apple is the best tech company for the environment because they recycle more than any others”.
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
The fact that Apple peripherals are not user repairable is an absolute environmental disaster.
Anyway, vendor lock-in means we can’t compete subcomponents and our long term maintenance costs are really high because we always have to go back to the vendor for service. (Sounding familiar…?) The brass started dreaming up “modular weapons systems” where we maybe develop things like universal power modules, guidance modules, and other components, then we could compete for low cost production and long-term maintenance and achieve utopia.
I spent quite a while on this, and what we found is that it wouldn’t work (at least not for weapons). Universal components aren’t well-suited to different platforms (3” rocket vs 14” missile, etc.), the modular design adds weight, reduces efficiency for the electronics systems, increases part count to make them all interoperable, and so on. The engineering trades that you have to make for modular designs are incompatible with optimizing performance as measured by the end user. Ironically perhaps, one of the major case studies that helped argue that point was based around Apple products.
Which is perhaps a long way to say that most consumers don’t seem to care about modular computers, and in the worst case many of the changes that modularity would require are counterproductive to the things consumers _do_ seem to care about.
It’s one thing to argue that we should use governmental regulation to push negative externalities back onto firms so that they reconsider the design and engineering constraints they prioritize, but it’s not like firms are being irrational or irresponsible by giving people what they want—some combination of smaller, lighter, faster, longer battery life, and cheaper devices. There would be some negative impact on some (or all) of those characteristics if Apple, Samsung, or anyone else switched to fully modular designs—and I think most consumers would choose the cheaper, faster, smaller, lighter, or longer battery life models than to buy a modular one either on principle or because they expect to repair or upgrade it for significantly longer than they expect to own them today.
Consumables in the very least should be replaceable for consumer products, or the price for its replacement capped, otherwise we're throwing away electronics that hasn't reached even a third of its lifetime just because the battery's lifetime is over, it's like buying a new car everytime the tires are worn out. It's an incredible waste of resources.
Same thing for connectors like USB, audio jack, buttons and joysticks.
Most egregious is the chip signature-checking and exclusive buyer rights on same chip, that should be outlawed, heavily fined and easily reported and checked. It's like adding a chip with a serial number for each tire and if you install one not from your car manufacturer then your car refuses to move. It's just a scam.
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 even a scoop—it contains the world's only missile components from Toys R Us... One day I brought to work my sons toy car. We Passed it among us, and we saw that there were actually components suitable for us. More than that I can not tell.".
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".
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/military-right-to...
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/even-the-american-military... is a later article that references back to the NYT opinion piece.
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But give me the choice to buy a repairable long term platform and I’ll stay invested in the ecosystem and pay a premium for thicker repairable MBP
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Ruggedness, longevity, sure. Avoiding need to repair, definitely. Repairability? Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
Spent too many years as a full service PC network support small business to ever again want to deal with parts that aren’t actually attached to each other. Connection issues (especially on heating and cooling, so intermittent) were essentially all the problems except a vanishingly small proportion that were components.
The thing is, the repair shops get what’s left after the design is iterated until other problems are gone. So maybe only these component failures are left. Reverting to the old methods of replaceable components would likely re-introduce a massive class of problems that have by and large been eliminated.
Only the remaining problems have a voice, who is advocating on behalf of all the problems that the last 20 years of more solid design eliminated?
// Apologies for the HN trope, but see also Chesterson’s Fence, a tech version of “get off my lawn”.
One of his main critique points is that Apple makes it hard to repair their products, even for electronics professionals. In the past, Apple has also altered designs so that small electrical problems suddenly fry the most expensive component on the board, the CPU. Either this is an embarrassing, junior-level oversight or a deliberate anti-repair-buy-new-hardware tactic.
See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jahtu1_idVU
As such, it seems you are arguing against an idea that no one is suggesting.
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It's about preventing certain business practices that hinder the repair industry. Like when Apple forces their suppliers to not sell components to anyone but them.
"Component level repair" is a thing that's done today. It involves replacing individual components on a motherboard with a microscope and soldering iron, special equipment, and smart and well-trained people. That's what Rossman does regularly on his Youtube channel.
But even if you have the skills and tools to replace a tiny burned out IC on a motherboard, where do you get a replacement? Apple doesn't allow suppliers to sell them to anyone.
A lot of repairability just comes down to making replacement parts readily available too, which is orthogonal to the design.
Even making parts available can be a pain. I might want to spin a new rev on a product where the old parts aren’t compatible with the new - but now I have to warehouse the old in case anybody wants them. I might not actually warehouse anything myself (contract manufacturer ships directly to retailers), but now I have to find a way of warehousing spares of everything. I might not have any good way of packing/shipping some of these loose parts.
That’s not to say R2R is a bad idea or anything (rather, I think it’s generally a good idea) - but it is not free, and we should be realistic about that.
After a few years, a laptop's battery degrades. In well under a decade, Wirth's Law kicks in to make devices seem slow.
This attitude unintentionally suggests that people should turn their entire computers into e-waste instead of just swapping the battery or upgrading the RAM.
Why should I loss all my Data on MacBook when its CPU, GPU, or logic board has a problem?
Why does repairing a keyboard require replacing the half of the laptop.
And why are these repair so expensive.
It is all about balance. And a lot of these balance in Apple seems to be disintegrating since Steve Jobs passed away.
I don't think repariability is something you need to put effort into build into a product, it's something you put effort into taking out of a product. Apple's engineers definitely have things like what Louis uses for his repairs: board views, schematics, diagnostics software. Louis gets these things from illegal vendors in other countries who obtain them from Apple workers. If Apple just sold these things to him he'd be willing to pay but that's not in Apple's best interest.
Also, Apple prevents Louis from buying replacement parts because they make their vendors agree to never sell the components they use to anyone but apple.
> Other concerns, things that change the day-to-day use of the device, should weigh more.
This avoids another massive externality: recycling and the environment. Right now Apple's recycling program takes old mostly working systems and shreds them. There's a reason we should: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle in that order.
> So maybe only these component failures are left. Reverting to the old methods of replaceable components would likely re-introduce a massive class of problems that have by and large been eliminated.
The macbook repair community was at one point fixing a very common issue by replacing a component with a slightly higher spec part. The difference was 1/1000 th of a cent to 2/1000 th of a cent in cost or something like that. Multiple iterations of macbooks came out with this flaw until Apple employed a similar fix.
I think another thing that's important to look at is how other industries handle similar things. If you found something that was:
1. In a different industry.
2. Had a similar experience ruining issue.
3. Said issue was resolved by a consumer.
4. Rather than ignoring the issue for years they very quickly create a patch that takes the feedback from the end user.
We could then conclude that this adversarial relationship between repair professionals is: not required to run a profitable business, can lead to better products, and can make everyone happy.
I happen to have one such example:
- https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/developers-to-update-...
We can conclude then that Apple explicitly does not do this out of their own will. Apple doesn't have a hardware bug bounty. Apple does not acknowledge when a community member derives a fix for their product that works better then them.
I couldn't begin to imagine why Apple doesn't behave more like this. It just seems to make more sense for everyone.
Apple doesn't want you to fix its devices, it wants to force you to either have them fix it or buy a new one. It's a business decision not a technical one.
Think about it. Since he left, Apple is bringing color back to their designs, bringing back ports other than Thunderbolt, abandoned the Butterfly keyboard, made the MacBook Pro 16" thicker to improve battery life and cooling, added the discounted business rate to the App Store...
Now, this doesn't mean Apple will continue improving or will make Right to Repair happen. However, I think that with Jony's departure, something may have, just may have, snapped within the company, and they seem to be looking at changing their ways just a little bit.
I added content to show the places I made mistakes in my assumptions about the process, and put in sections in chapters that showed how I troubleshot those errors, and corrected the code.
My editors asked me to remove that code. O'Reilly's brand, IMHO, is having the smartest people in the room talking to you. They don't want content that shows the author making mistakes. I felt like there was an audience for people who want a different voice, but who was I to argue with O'Reilly's success?
Rossman seems like he is talking to that audience, people who aren't experts, and still courageous enough to get something fixed on their own.
YouTube permits him to monetize that audience. I still think there is a huge gap in talking to people who are not experts and intimidated by the experts. There is a massive market for publishing there.
https://youtube.com/c/NorthridgeFix
Great channel. Sometimes lacks deep dive into troubleshooting, but certainly encourages to do microscopic work.
I did some digging in the innards of a Macbook Pro, years earlier, and have a couple leftover screws as a result. I think I'll leave the next endeavor to people with better hands, especially since putting in an extra hard drive isn't an option anymore.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/key-ncognito/lilom...
Rossman always presents himself as the ultimate victim. Apple has it out for him, NY has it out for him, people less successful than him have it out for him. When you've watched as much of his content as I have, you start to see where his head is, and it's not a pretty place. Anyway, I have found other repair guys that are better than Rossman and don't have so much negativity on their channels. I can get a deeper understanding of repairing tech without the hyperbolic commentary.
I used to watch a lot of Rossman and glossed over his Apple hate because ultimately Apple are putting him and people like him out of a job, so it’s fair to be salty.
But a large portion of his content (a few years ago at least) is just hour long rants which are unsubstantiated opinion, he does not see nuance or doesn’t want to try steel-manning the things he disagrees with. Which is something Linus Sebastian is incredibly good at.
It does come off almost narcissistic at times, to me at least.
But at the end of the day explaining how computers are constructed is great content.
Watching his business struggle through Covid fills me with great respect for the small business owner and the difficult choices which must be made. Did NY have it out for him? They were far from business friendly with their Covid restrictions. Recently, his shop was fined for not registering used laptops that his customers had abandoned for repair. Sure, NYC is attempting to prevent stolen laptops from being resold, but the level of bureaucratic idiocy turns Rossman’s channel into a Shakespearen comedy.
As for his specific gripes about repeated Apple design failures, he makes a good argument. Two stand out. First, liquid intolerance. Thinkpads from years ago used to tolerate coffee spilt on the keyboard. It flowed right through. From the number of water damaged MacBooks Louis repairs, it appears Apples can’t take a drop. If Apple is upset with Rossman’s criticism, they can easily apply board level coating to solve the problem.
Second, he’s critical of the connectors being soldered directly to the motherboard instead of going into a daughterboard and connecting via a flex connector.
And, yes, the above design decisions are made by Apple for a number of different, possibly valid reasons. To hit a price point, to fit within a form factor, to deliver in a required timeframe. But Louis brings up the point that Apple may be making these decisions for less than consumer friendly reasons. Planned obsolescence? Could Apple change the design of their connectors so they won’t break? Yes, but maybe they didn’t because they expect 5.8% of the connectors to fail and not be economical to repair in the Apple store, driving 5.8% greater revenue.
All that being said, yes, Louis takes the above points, which can be read in a minute, and rehashes them 50 different ways.
The amount of childish personal attacks about Rossman in this thread I think is a good indicator of how right he is. Makes me feel good about that money I donated to his Gofundme.
It’s pretty clear he had built a business on repairing electronics. But that doesn’t invalidate his points. If you own something, you should be able to get it repaired to a reasonable degree. Apple goes out of their way to frustrate even consumables like batteries from being swapped, and I say that as someone that still uses apple products.
For him, it makes sense hes more passionate than most, not only is it a passion for him to do this type of work (repairing electronics, not youtubing) but its also his livelyhood, so it makes sense that he would call out companies that make design changes that serve little other purpose than to frustrate repairs and decrease longevity to bolster their sales (and increase e-waste in the process)
> I've watched over 100 hours of his content and realized that his audience is primarily made up of anti-apple PC Master Race fanatics that just want to hear Louis troll apple for an hour.
Gonna disagree. Regardless of the type of people attracted to his content. It doesn’t invalidate the points he makes there. I don't watch his stuff religiously, and probably haven't viewed as much as you purport to have, but he has a clear schtick (which is basically mandatory for youtubers) but is definitely less negative than many I have seen. The good seems to outweigh the bad.
The article starts out saying this was a way for him to vent in a healthy and cathartic way, as a direct substitute to therapy. And it seems to work for him and he has said it before and it shows in the stuff he posts. I wont judge him solely on that just as I wouldn't judge other others who prefer something different, like fishing or hunting and escaping people (myself), or hobbies like music (also myself) or maintaining a garden or yard to work out frustrations. Some even go on the internet to criticize others I guess.
What other YouTube channels are showing people to cleanup or swap individual chips, or what part of a board does what? [1][2] I haven’t seen one that compares. It’s pretty neat and a display of a skill set definately don't posses. Even though I work with tech on a daily basis in my own right.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr13FEBRzjM [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUWmqucOkZk
Dude, if you can find folks to work for $20 / hr with the people skills to fix stuff day in and day out for while dealing with insane repair volume - you could manage your own apple store.
Here's the bottom line as an actual customer. I have NEVER been disappointed in the reliability of my iphone. The one time I broke it I walked in an AppleCare had me out same day with a new device. They are also surprisingly waterproof (I know, just resistant supposedly).
Does any of this have to do with gluing everything down? How do I know. But my phone has kept on going through some rediculous stuff, so I don't care. Solder everything, glue on top. And USB-C on my laptop keeps on flaking out while lightning seems to seat more reliably.
AND my "non repairable" junk iphone seems to have INCREDIBLE re-sale value in comparison to whatever else is out there. So apple IS designing for the long haul, and market rewards that. My wife has an old iphone still getting updates for some reason (in android land this is crazy talk).
Makes me think of Thunderf00t. This guy is a massive troll with, from time to time, great scientific content. He has a lot of followers just here to enjoy the trolling, as evidenced by the fact he is never questioned by his fans even though it is what his channel is supposed to teach.
He makes very valid arguments, how is this "financial and self promoting"? Dont lie about someone's intentions just because you don't agree with their reasoning.
Though I think it would be best to have more people leading the right to repair just for this reason of avoiding people that hate someone personality then opposing this movement.
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 piece of shit.
Self-promoting maybe but if Apple made better products how Rossman would benefit? Isn't it currently the opposite? Rossman does well due to Apple refusing to fix the smallest of issues with their products. And fighting anyone who does whether a customer or repairman.
How does he benefit by teaching others on how to repair stuff for free. You can start your own repair business by watching and learning from his videos.
There’s so much great stuff out there, Friedman seems to get disproportionate attention. Personal attacks aside, I find him tedious to listen to and he often comes across as if he hasn’t done even cursory reading of his guest’s work. It often feels like a sophomore in college waxing about “big ideas” with little substance to back them up. Even at 2x speed I found the talks low signal.
But nonetheless as a podcast, I judge more on the basis of the conversation and the guest he had, and in both the metrics he is really great. He is really good in making the guests speak in easy and intuitive terms and making them speak the idea behind the discovery/invention. He sometimes even irritates the people in asking question behind the intuition when many guests are more accustomed with saying strictly provable statements in other places. And that is a part that is really missing in the world and that gives the sense of what's going on, instead of talking just formally provable sentences and terse description of their work.
Lex is a humble, open minded podcaster that tries to bring all sorts of topics on the table. Even uncomfortable ones like Anarchy and Religion. This is exactly what we need in times of a massive echo chambers of left and right.
I consider Lex to be one of the best, polite, and cordial interviewer that doesn’t inject too much of their personal agenda into the interviewee’s space (like Joe Rogan).
One of the best interviews was with Jim Keller where it gets a little confrontational and see how he deals with it.
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Like who you want to like, but "irrefutably...sincer[e]" does not apply.
The other problem I have with him is that he always assumes Apple is nefarious because Apple is nefarious. He never addresses ulterior motives that Apple may have had for a decision, nor attempts to consult with engineers about why Apple's engineering might have some reason to it. Apple is anti-repair because they're a big company and because Apple hates noble honest people like him, not because there are any other logical explanations.
Finally, my last sticking point with Rossmann as a Right to Repair leader is that he is constantly missing the forest for the trees. He constantly picks on Apple because that gets clicks, but he mostly ignores all the BS that other PC manufacturers are doing or experiencing. When's the last time you saw him talk about a Surface Laptop 3, a laptop with a repair program because the screen was spontaneously cracking? Or the Surface Pro 4 with the battery inflating issue? Or a Razer Blade that spontaneously died on Linus Tech Tips after only a year of use?
Or do you rather that Rossmann talk about what he doesn't know?
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