Louis Rossman on soldered SSD

[TSE]

YouTube makes it easy to see what people actually care about watching and repeating over and over again. In this case:

View attachment 2247337

1. Grabs girlfriend by shoulders and exclaims “you’re learning: it’s an Apple product, throw it away!”
2. Thermal image of the processor overheating, which is objectively cool to see
3. Uses girlfriend as human shield in Nerf Dart war
4. Concluding rant about Apple

View attachment 2247336

1. Apple SSD rant
2. Talking about how he’s too outspoken to be advertiser friendly
3. BGA pad reveal
4. Apple rant while piling loose screws into customer MacBook
5. Story about confronting restaurant customers who commented on his girlfriend
6. Closing Apple rant


So yeah, it seems people spend most of their time replaying his rants, and not so much watching him work.

Yep. He is a gimmick at this point, not far off from a professional wrestler. They act as a character and have a set over-the-top gimmick, even if it's not consistent with the man behind the gimmick. This is that, just on Youtube. It makes him money. But I do think it started out authentically with him being angry and vengeful at the time.

And I've watched him since the beginning. I think.... 2006 or 2007 was when he started? I just got the first generation Black MacBook and Youtube started popping off at that time. Somewhere around there. So I've seen him from the beginning and appreciated his early stuff.

That being said, I have and i would again bring my stuff to his shops for repair. Excellent service. Great people. Solid prices (like so low I didn't expect it to be that low kind of pricing). So his online persona is so far removed from him and his company in real life I see through the ******** in multiple ways.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

It's worse than a gimmick. It's just sad. An entire business model based on driving clicks and attention through mutual hate of something. If you're stupid enough to be pulled in by that and it becomes your persona, something I've seen many times in real life, then you really have some psychological problems to contend with.

As for his repair business, it's about average if you look deeper into the reviews.

But you know any attention is good business as they say.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Dont ever get to know a car mechanic, or an aircraft mechanic. Or anyone who services anything. You’ll find that they too are all just actors, in a huge conspiracy to trick you into thinking they're frustrated having to fix a million of the same problems from the manufacturers they work on. Their expertise and experience having fixed a thousand of something means nothing compared to your self assuredness of just generally knowing better than everyone else on earth. In reality, there are no problems, nothing ever breaks due to poor engineering. Everything is perfect all the time and everyone is happy about it all. Also there is no proof that other people actually exist and entire world is not just a smoke & mirror show put on to trick you into believing in it. And other hits.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

This is the part that kinda made my skin crawl throughout the videos.

Rossmann goes on and on about how he refuses to use NAND chips from a donor board because they’ll have an unknown write history and he, being very customer focused, would never give a customer a component that might fail in the not so distant future.

But look at how cavalier he is about treating these MacBooks, in particular as regards ESD. You can complain about flash chips being “wear parts”, but if you manage ESD like this then literally every part in the system is made a wear part.

In terms of static, I regularly touch a grounded object near my desk while working. No, I do not wear an ESD strap and honestly if that's the point we're at now to nitpick at criticisms of my workmanship... I give up.

....and a freaking plastic bag holding parts and stored in the machine.

The items going into a plastic bags are screws and screwcovers. Are you going to honestly tell me that putting screws into a metal baggie is something you are going to complain about? You are acting like I tossed that customer's top case into a litterbox or something. At what point can you look at your post and be honest with yourself that this is an insane level of detail to put into character assassination?

what really set my teeth on edge: opening a cellophane package to get darts to load his gun and leaving the cellophane next to the machine while he worked on it. Just hearing the cellophane…

I am going to propose that what sets your teeth on edge has nothing to do with my repair practices, and something else entirely.

Then he takes the metal screws and such from the bench and loads them into a customer’s open machine with a plan to work on it the next day

The metal screws go on a magnet, the magnet goes onto the hinge.

He puts sooooo much solder on the BGA pads right after commenting how easily pads short when the chip was removed.

Do you even understand the point I was making there? Explain it in you own words. I want to see.

And he must get a buzz from solder flux, because he goes through it by the gallon.

We ultrasonic the boards before giving them back to customers to ensure any potential corrosion under a BGA chipset is cleared, so the amount of flux used is inconsequential. Using too little risks a joint that isn't to my liking. Using too much means more work to clean. The negative in using too little, bad work. The negative in using too much, the ultrasonic cleaner takes an extra 20 seconds to remove it - which makes more sense for my customer, and my reputation?

And then there’s the time he replaces one part with another part because the numbers are close. They’re different, he knows that they’re different but doesn’t know how they’re different, and he installs it anyway. His justification is that he thinks it’s ok to put an 1.8V input into a 3.3V chip. It’s not. The minimum high input voltage for a 3.3V chip is 2.3V, the minimum output high voltage for a 1.8V chip is 1.3V. And it’s a power supply chip to boot, so are these pins being used as analog references to the power circuit? He doesn’t seem to care. After saying he doesn’t want to blow anything else up on the board, he puts the wrong part on the pad, powers it up, and then blames Apple.

This is for a data line - more importantly, the chip going on is expecting 3.3, and it is receiving 1.8. The opposite would be an issue. I think you misunderstand big time here, but let's be real, that's been what you've done from the beginning. You don't understand any of these issues, the same way you fumbled the discussion on error 53 with a complete lack of awareness of what it actually was. You're making it up as you go. Anything to get a jab in.

And yes, I do blame Apple for that chip being unavailable. There are written records of Renesas saying they cannot sell this chip to us because who they supply it to, doesn't want them to.

So, for all the grandstanding around treating his customers repairs with respect, there are so many basic violations happening with the hardware under his care because, in the end, he’s just tinkering.

Again - you define a violation as "louis put screw covers in a plastic bag." I will let the audience decide whether or not they think my practices are ok. and, given the volume of work and happy customers coming through the door everday, many of whom coming in from watching these videos - I think the decision is clear. They are not offended by me putting screws in a plastic bag - and if they are, honestly..... I kinda pray they go to a genius bar and stay far away from me.

And while he's trying to explain that solder balls are caused by a failed NAND putting tension on the line, he's digging them out and flicking them around the customers PCB with a pair of tweezers saying he could replace the NAND chips but they might have write cycles on them already… Little flecks of conductive solder littered around the logic board? That's free to the customer...

These must be flicked off, removed, and then the board thoroughly looked through after an ultrasonic cleaning to ensure they are OUT of there. Why would you leave them there? Why would you leave solder balls that can be flicked loose with minimal effort on a customer device? That's insane. Get that **** off of there so it doesn't wind up coming dislodged and shorting something down the line if the machine is on.

There are so many posts you have made throughout this thread that make it obvious you have no idea how to perform a repair on these products, no idea how the process works, and no idea in general. You just want to be mad, and I get that - I understand you have a burning desire to get in a jab at any cost... I've been polite & kind in prior posts, I've even invited you into my workplace in them.... I don't know what to tell you at this point.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

It's worse than a gimmick. It's just sad. An entire business model based on driving clicks and attention through mutual hate of something. If you're stupid enough to be pulled in by that and it becomes your persona, something I've seen many times in real life, then you really have some psychological problems to contend with.

As for his repair business, it's about average if you look deeper into the reviews.

But you know any attention is good business as they say.

My business existed for five years before I had published repair videos, and had a retail space prior to them as well. I find it funny that in a thread accusing me of conspiratorial thinking, that there are many comments assuming my business is based on something that didn't exist for its first five years.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

People get kind of neurotic about heat and their SSDs but heat is a legitimate concern. Most will typically put some sort of heat sink on top of their drives if they have space for it. For a laptop, the heat spreader approach is typically used which pulls the heat from the hottest parts and spreads over a larger surface to radiate and heat more air to be blown or convect away.

But it’s the controller that is the hottest part of the drive, so when you take it out of the thermally managed SoC package and put on an M.2 drive next to the NAND chips it has the effect of taking the heat from the controller and spreading it over and adding heat to the NAND chips themselves:


View attachment 2247246View attachment 2247247

That’s in contrast to the MacBook Pro approach of putting the NAND chips on a cool area of the board and right where the cool air gets drawn in by the fans:

View attachment 2247248

So Apple's design approach here is actually quite SSD and performance friendly.

This is what makes it even more surprising that A2141 SSDs drop at the rate that they do. I would be curious to see what the temperature of those NANDs were on that machine. I might check with my thermal camera when I am at the office again.

---

He goes into a rant about how the SSD is a “wear part” that will eventually fail. That’s true. Over time SSDs develop a few problems around maintenance of the floating gate, charge accumulation, oxide issues etc. You wind up with bits that fail validation on write or erase, you get bad sectors, etc.

But this is an entirely new thing for me:

LR2 (2:31) “My personal favorite, is when the NAND fails by shorting to ground. Many of these fail by shorting to ground entirely. Not just like a dead SSD where the data went poof, I mean when the actual NAND chips fail and bring down the power line completely because there is a 6 to 0 ohm short to ground on the NANDs main power line.”

Ok, so what about Rossmann’s argument that these parts are all shorting to ground?

Here’s where Rossmann’s credibility is so important to the discussion— he claims that half of the repairs he does on A2141’s is because of SSD shorts to ground. That’s a rather incredible number and one that I can’t find any independent confirmation of. Rossmann claims this has been happening since at least 2019. 4 years is a lot of time for Apple to work with their suppliers, of which they apparently have 4: Samsung, Hynix, Kioxia, Western Digital. It seems odd that this would be a failure point across so many vendors for so long without a correction.

Can a digital IC like this show a short? Sure. But typically it’ll happen on the I/O ring because of some damage inflicted on the chip not as a result of wear. One major culprit would be ESD or some other voltage surge blowing out the protection diodes on the pins. Wear would imply this was a short in a particular NAND cell, which would be a rather bizarre mechanism for sinking that much current. The I/O pins at least are beefy transistors with (relatively) fat bond wires attached, the internal cells are delicate structures with nm scale metal layers that you’d expect to vaporize and open circuit when passing that much current.

I am not an engineer, I am not a designer. I'm a repair person. I wish I could say "XYZ in the ABC is why this product has a higher failure rate, and why it is bad design." I can't say that, and I'm not going to try to pull something out of my ass to explain why it is the case.

Rather, I would stick to what I know.

a) This machine uses a fairly non-standard NAND I cannot get access to anywhere.
b) This non-standard NAND fails at an unheard of rate for my shop, and any shop in the industry that gets these machines. TCRS Circuit, Paul Daniels, Jessa Jones, etc - my colleagues, whom I trust & look up to.

And can someone, anyone, explain this statement to me: LR2 (30:42) “It's more likely here that the NAND is what's bad. [...] If the .9V rail has all these little solder balls moving around that means that most likely the NAND is shorted and it is placing a lot of tension on all of the power rails that are powering the SSD which is why there is solder balls there which… **** my life…” WT-actual-F is he going on about? Is he saying the solder balls are formed by "tension" in the power rail caused by a short in a NAND chip?!? Is it somehow getting mechanically squeezed out of the capacitor?

Seeing tiny solder balls near a failed or shorted capacitor is common. It's a hint I look for because very often it's next to something that is either strained or dead.

Sometimes, those solder balls are just there because of bad manufacturing and do not indicate a failure. it has to be taken in context with the rest; this is a hint that by itself, isolated, isn't proof of something. When we are trying to figure out what happened, or what died, we usually follow clues because the board isn't going to tell you what is wrong.

View attachment 2247304

None of the MacBooks Rossmann opens in those videos show any actual evidence of the NANDs shorting to ground. What we see, if you trust his measurement methods, is that something may have shorted to ground and in most cases it’s hard to know what by the time he’s finished throwing chips out and reworking component after component.

When I remove the inductor that sits inbetween the TPS62180 and the NANDs, it is going to be one of the capacitors, or the NAND. When you inject voltage and no capacitors are warm, it's the NAND.

---

And finally, what about the fact that you can't boot from an external drive without a working internal SSD? I think it comes down to what working means to understand how much of a problem that presents. He goes through a sloppy interpretation of an iBoff video that needs some disentangling.

For one, he says that T2 Macs don't have UEFI. That's wrong. They do:

View attachment 2247253

The UEFI firmware sits in the main SSD array rather than in a separate SPI connected Flash chip and the T2 acts as an eSPI client to the Intel chip which reads the UEFI firmware through the T2. So, yes, there is still UEFI firmware.

The fact that this firmware sits on the NAND you are writing to everyday that will stop functioning if it dies is the valid detail. This is senseless nitpicking but more importantly, proving of the point that you end up with a machine that is functionally useless if the NAND dies.

The T2 also has its own SPI connected Flash that holds the secure iBoot procedure. This is the part that gets updated when you go into DFU mode. iBoot validates the UEFI, UEFI is needed to access the ports on the machine which eventually allows access to an external drive and verifies that you aren't booting from an external drive to roll back to an insecure version of firmware.

If you have a board failure that blows up your power rails, can you boot from an external SSD? No. But I don't see how that's relevant to the discussion. It's no different if you had a modular SSD-- you have a board failure and a power supply failure. You can't expect anything to work. If you held the UEFI in a separate SPI NOR flash somewhere, it still relies on a power supply, it still relies on a working flash chip, and the same failure modes that apply to the main SSD apply to that part as well.\

Semi true. A modular SSD doesn't have all the NAND rails created by the motherboard, the SSD is powered by PP3V3_S0. It doesn't have all of the subrails made by the main motherboard.

But let's say that wasn't true - this would be a chicken & the egg situation, and a fun one!

If the failure mode is that the NAND dies, the SSD is shorted, this is fixable. You'd unplug the SSD, plug in a new one, and you're good - because any subrails if they were necessary are being created on the SSD, not the main logic board. A modular SSD would be beneficial here only if

a) The PSU is made in a way that it can turn off QUICKLY enough after detecting a short that it doesn't die in a nasty fashion when given a sudden extreme load(aka sending input voltage straight to output)

b) The user removes the faulty component before the PSU DOES die from trying to send unlimited power into a shorted-to-ground output.

If the failure mode is that the NAND PSU died, sent 12v to the NANDs, and killed them... well, now you're screwed regardless of whether your SSD is modular. Your SSD will expect 3v and get 12v. Ouch! A modular SSD would NOT be beneficial here.

So which did it? The NAND shorted and killed the power supply, or the power supply died and killed(then shorted) the NAND? That's a question we don't get an answer to here

The thing is... again.... older machines did not do this. I have had ZERO KNOWN CASES of any pre-A2141 machine sending PPBUS_G3H straight to the NAND. It just didn't happen.

If the NAND shorts and the machine dies, the power supply doesn't have to go with it.

One thing that is absolutely true here though: you must have a backup to boot from an external drive. For everyone saying that Apple is horrible for how they made their SSDs because it's unreasonable to expect people to back up their data, you need another drive to boot from, folks.

I agree that people should back up their data.

I also think that it sucks that this machine is designed in a way where, if the main SSD dies,
a) You cannot replace it
b) You cannot boot off an external/turn it on & have it POST properly

As far as I can tell, this is an entirely hypothetical problem being hypothesized by people with an agenda.

My agenda is to make up a problem for a video that gets 90,000 views. At the expense of the credibility of my business, my livelihood, and my personal time.

I will leave other people to judge what they think of this.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

He is implying the parts he are sourcing are genuine or OEM, and they aren't. Maybe they end up functioning as well, but nothing that he has presented has shown that, and the smokescreen that he throws up says he doesn't really think so, either.

Edit: To clarify, that is what is offensive about HIS practice to me. Not that he has to source the parts somehow, but he is invoking the mystique of Apple while balancing everything with a lot of "maybe" or 'probably'. The repair guys down the road that put a new battery in my first gen Retina MBP didn't sell me a load about the poor factory worker's wages or how the battery was basically built in a factory that maybe didn't quite get a contract with apple through no fault of their own.

I don't want to invoke a mystique of Apple. My site had "proud to not be apple certified" written on it back in 2010 if you go to archive.org.. I prefer to be as far away as possible.

When it comes to the batteries I do use, batteries I don't use, and why, see this post I made a few years ago.

At the end of the day, I see that all as a red herring. I would like nothing more than the ability to buy batteries from Apple directly. I cannot do that without joining a program that requires I sign an NDA, and gives them the ability to audit my business if they find items they do not find acceptable(schematics, ISL9240s, CD3217s, LCD cells by themselves, etc). This would be business suicide, as the items are necessary for me to perform my work.

Batteries aren't really a profit center. We don't do them often, it's usually mixed in with another repair someone is paying for where they're getting the battery for close to part cost or at a serious discount because there's already another repair. I don't really care about saving $10-$20 by getting some **** aftermarket battery since our business model is based on repairs in the $200-$400 range where the cost is mostly labor and training. I care about never seeing that customer again for the same thing. If there were a way for me to pay a 30%-40% premium over what we pay right now and buy batteries from store.apple.com , we'd do it in a heartbeat.

We can't. There's no option for an independent who wishes to do board repairs, to buy batteries from Apple.

What I am fighting for, is for there to be the option for an independent, to buy an OEM battery. If you dislike the nonsense we have to go through to get good parts - help me win the fight to get access to the ability to buy them from the manufacturer.

There are so many people who criticize the choice of parts we use, understandably so, that I'd love to point to right to repair! Right to repair is about us having the ability to purchase OEM parts, so we can buy & use the same thing that they're putting into your machine at a genius bar or AASP, without being blocked off from doing the repairs that customers demand we do.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

My business existed for five years before I had published repair videos, and had a retail space prior to them as well. I find it funny that in a thread accusing me of conspiratorial thinking, that there are many comments assuming my business is based on something that didn't exist for its first five years.

That might have been true then but you leverage your YouTube channel now to drive business. Times change as do marketing strategies which you seem to avoid making the association with in your reply to mine

Hey I don’t have a problem with that. We all have to eat. But if it quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.

 

[ArkSingularity]

This thread is still devolving into an ad hominem mess of attacks that argue on the basis of assumed intentions rather than on the merits of the argument.

People are allowed to have their opinions. That's perfectly fine, but this sort of thing isn't very convincing.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

This thread is still devolving into an ad hominem mess of attacks that argue on the basis of assumed intentions rather than on the merits of the argument.

People are allowed to have their opinions. That's perfectly fine, but this sort of thing isn't very convincing.

Not really how it works. If you present an argument, before you get to the merit of the argument itself, you need to qualify why the argument is brought to the table. You see to claim a rational argument, it has to be free of bias and that is not the case when the arguer stands to gain from one outcome of the argument. This is fundamentally selection bias. And obviously a sample size of one loud YouTuber who runs a repair business does not represent everyone, including me.

Extrapolating that, the danger here is that Mr Rossman's overt promotion of the repair process is possibly statistically invalid. He may see 1 in 10,000 devices that fail within a 5 year cycle. That does not account for the 9,999 devices which required no intervention and the disproportionate representation of the failure model biases the data. He does not have that data as he is only party to the failures. This in turn biases his view of the situation.

What we should be interested in, is the measured MTTF and distribution of failures over the lifespan of products. If 1% of devices fail within 5 years, it's probably a bad engineering decision to introduce mechanical and electronic complexity, which will most likely decrease the MTTF (this is bad), to enable repair. There's an inflection point at which there are diminishing returns in reliability and an increase in overall service costs.

Ergo, the problem is a lot more complex that it is made out to be by any of the particularly loud voices on the matter.

Edit: worth noting that if the user breaks something, that's a whole different story. That's why we have insurance

 

[ArkSingularity]

Not really how it works. If you present an argument, before you get to the merit of the argument itself, you need to qualify why the argument is brought to the table. You see to claim a rational argument, it has to be free of bias and that is not the case when the arguer stands to gain from one outcome of the argument. This is fundamentally selection bias. And obviously a sample size of one loud YouTuber who runs a repair business does not represent everyone, including me.

"One loud youtuber who runs a repair business" doesn't necessarily need to represent every single person who owns a Mac to make a case for why repairability is a good thing. Just because one person's Mac hasn't broken doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't benefit from repairability.

Extrapolating that, the danger here is that Mr Rossman's overt promotion of the repair process is possibly statistically invalid. He may see 1 in 10,000 devices that fail within a 5 year cycle. That does not account for the 9,999 devices which required no intervention and the disproportionate representation of the failure model biases the data. He does not have that data as he is only party to the failures. This in turn biases his view of the situation.

Which models are you referring to that supposedly have 1 out of 10,000 failures within a five year cycle? We don't have real numbers to debate here, so these are just hypothetical numbers.

What we should be interested in, is the measured MTTF and distribution of failures over the lifespan of products. If 1% of devices fail within 5 years, it's probably a bad engineering decision to introduce mechanical and electronic complexity, which will most likely decrease the MTTF (this is bad), to enable repair. There's an inflection point at which there are diminishing returns in reliability and an increase in overall service costs.

Let's talk numbers for the models, and let's compare these with laptops with socketed SSDs. Can we prove that the socket fails more often than the SSDs for these models?

But let's suppose we don't socket them for other reasons (there are plenty of reasons for why we might not do this). Can we then prove that making the NANDs not available for purchase (even by those who have the tools required) makes them less likely to fail?

Much of what Louis Rossmann advocates for is better parts availability.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

Well you outlined my point nicely. I threw some hypothetical things in, so did you. We don't have data, which is the point. Ergo there is no rational perspective to base an outcome on, so we probably should ask Apple to qualify that rather than making assumptions and trying to force policy on those assumptions.

But without data, we can pose the question that if someone only experiences failure outcomes and only a subset of those and the success outcomes, can they accurately evaluate the reliability model or specify a desired outcome? And the answer to that is a resounding no. Ergo, one YouTuber with a loud voice does not represent a decent failure model to base a product change on.

I'm sure Apple know that...

 

[BigMcGuire]

It's easy to be critical right? I figure no matter what one does on the internet, no matter how perfectly, someone will find fault with it.

I have been a long time watcher (but not since the beginning) of Mr. Rossmann's videos and I made a comment what I saw to be his anti-Apple bend recently and guessed to the cause ($). In his video he responded to my comment pointing out that he had at least several videos pointing out Apple's flaws way before he monetized. I sent him a message apologizing and thanking him for pointing out what I didn't now. I also thought his response to Macrumors comments was level headed and pretty cool.

But some of the comments here are really hostile, something I don't get. Even if I thought/think Mr. Rossmann is hard on Apple - I like a lot of what he says. If I had a broken MacBook I wouldn't think twice before sending it to him. I have learned a lot from his videos - not just the soldering ones.

His calm response to some really hostile comments here is really amazing imo.

 

[maflynn]

But some of the comments here are really hostile,

Some people here take criticisms lobbed at Apple as a personal affront and insult to them.

To me, Apple is an impersonal trillion dollar corporation who's goal is to make money for their owners (shareholders). They make great stuff, and I love their design, but they also make decisions that are based on their bottom line. Its to their benefit that they limited upgradability and reparability. You now need to buy a new machine - who's the beneficiary of that decision - Apple.

They in the past have put artificial barriers to people getting their products repaired outside of apple, including the loss of touchid. Those actions are are strictly anti-consumer yet people will defend the actions because for many people apple can do no wrong.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

For reference I'm not any more hostile to Rossman any more than any other YT personality. The arguments have no statistical or mathematical merit, that is the point. There are no quantitative measures here, only dubious qualitative ones. That does not stand as a rational position. I would like to see Apple publish that data though (and all other manufacturers under consumer law).

And I wouldn't send my MBP to Rossman, because I'm in UK it's covered by decent warranty, consumer protection, credit card insurance and property insurance and is backed up. Not because there's anything wrong with what he's doing.

 

[clayj]

How does Apple's announcement that they support California SB 244 (right-to-repair bill) factor into all of this? It seems to undermine any argument that unserviceable notebooks are an OK thing.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

How does Apple's announcement that they support California SB 244 (right-to-repair bill) factor into all of this? It seems to undermine any argument that unserviceable notebooks are an OK thing.

Define "serviceable" from an engineering perspective. It's quite difficult to nail that one down. Is changing the logic board serviceable? Is swapping the NAND chips serviceable? Undefined.

The whole right-to-repair legislation is quite stupid in this respect. All it does is let manufacturers get away with short warranties still and pass the costs down to customer to throw at the repair industry. Probably why iFixit and Rossman are happy.

Make the manufacturers supply a 5 year warranty and mandatory buy-back at material costs for recycling afterwards. Watch things get suddenly get orders of magnitude more reliable and more recyclable overnight. Forget repair!

 

[120FPS]

Define "serviceable" from an engineering perspective. It's quite difficult to nail that one down. Is changing the logic board serviceable? Is swapping the NAND chips serviceable? Undefined.

The whole right-to-repair legislation is quite stupid in this respect. All it does is let manufacturers get away with short warranties still and pass the costs down to customer to throw at the repair industry. Probably why iFixit and Rossman are happy.

Make the manufacturers supply a 5 year warranty and mandatory buy-back at material costs for recycling afterwards. Watch things get suddenly get orders of magnitude more reliable and more recyclable overnight. Forget repair!

That implies every problem will be sorted out and I have been in a situation where Apple refused to do anything even after a problem persisted with graphics issues, I had to purchase a new machine in the end as the previous repair effort ate into work time.

We also know how Apple’s buy back program works and the amount they offer. Material costs are very low.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

That might have been true then but you leverage your YouTube channel now to drive business. Times change as do marketing strategies which you seem to avoid making the association with in your reply to mine

Hey I don’t have a problem with that. We all have to eat. But if it quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.

My channel started with showing people how to fix their own stuff for free. If that so happens to make them trust in my abilities to fix their stuff for money, I have no problem with that.

Define "serviceable" from an engineering perspective. It's quite difficult to nail that one down. Is changing the logic board serviceable? Is swapping the NAND chips serviceable? Undefined.

The whole right-to-repair legislation is quite stupid in this respect. All it does is let manufacturers get away with short warranties still and pass the costs down to customer to throw at the repair industry. Probably why iFixit and Rossman are happy.

Make the manufacturers supply a 5 year warranty and mandatory buy-back at material costs for recycling afterwards. Watch things get suddenly get orders of magnitude more reliable and more recyclable overnight. Forget repair!

Most of our repairs are not from warrantyable issues but rather people with accidental damage claims where they have dropped it or spilled liquid on it. I would have no problem with Apple being forced by law to have a five-year warranty because it would not get rid of most of our business. When it comes to insurance, I've gone over the math earlier in this thread how for many, many, many issues you are still better off going to a third party than you would be having insurance and paying a deductible.

I would define serviceable as making the same parts, tools, schematics and diagrams available to us that you make available to authorized service facilities. And when I say authorized service facilities, I mean the people that are actually refurbishing these systems, not the mailing centers that they call Apple authorized service provider retail outlets that you can walk into. The right to repair bills currently being proposed are not about changing the actual design of the product but rather about making things available to end users and independents that are being made available to the people that are actually refurbishing these boards for Apple. This is all something you could learn with a quick read of the bill or an honest inquiry if you were interested in that rather than never ending passive aggressive jabs at my character.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

That implies every problem will be sorted out and I have been in a situation where Apple refused to do anything even after a problem persisted with graphics issues, I had to purchase a new machine in the end as the previous repair effort ate into work time.

We also know how Apple’s buy back program works and the amount they offer. Material costs are very low.

I've been there too over the double press keyboard issue. I raised a chargeback against my CC and ended up with a free, but broken MacBook. I usually assume that if I'm to run without downtime, which is required for my day job, then I will have to buy another machine at a moment's notice even while the warranty claim is being processed or the repair done. This is incidentally why I only ever buy off the shelf configurations: lowest MTTF and highest stock.

If the device is defunct i.e. obsolete or dead then it's worth what it is: material cost only. At no point should you throw something that still works at a trade-in or buy-back scheme - that's insanity!

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

My channel started with showing people how to fix their own stuff for free. If that so happens to make them trust in my abilities to fix their stuff for money, I have no problem with that.

Most of our repairs are not from warrantyable issues but rather people with accidental damage claims where they have dropped it or spilled liquid on it. I would have no problem with Apple being forced by law to have a five-year warranty because it would not get rid of most of our business. When it comes to insurance, I've gone over the math earlier in this thread how for many, many, many issues you are still better off going to a third party than you would be having insurance and paying a deductible.

I would define serviceable as making the same parts, tools, schematics and diagrams available to us that you make available to authorized service facilities. And when I say authorized service facilities, I mean the people that are actually refurbishing these systems, not the mailing centers that they call Apple authorized service provider retail outlets that you can walk into. The right to repair bills currently being proposed are not about changing the actual design of the product but rather about making things available to end users and independents that are being made available to the people that are actually refurbishing these boards for Apple. This is all something you could learn with a quick read of the bill or an honest inquiry if you were interested in that rather than never ending passive aggressive jabs at my character.

I've watched your stuff before and while I wouldn't do anything myself past logical unit replacement, I respect what you do to get people's data back.

Thanks for the clarification on your repair ingress. I think we're probably aligned. As for the insurance, as I mentioned above it's better to just buy a replacement device and deal with it separately if you need it. But from an economic perspective, it is better for cash flow, not necessarily total cost of ownership and most people have problems with cash flow these days (running month to month etc). I'm sure you've seen that from your clients who are asking for a repair because buying a new unit is too expensive for them.

For reference, I am more interested in the vendors taking the responsibility for the entire life of a product and the disposal of it. At the moment everything from crap children's toys (trash) to high end computers is thrown at people with little to no recourse if their investment fails on them and the manufacturer washes their hands of it. That's a bad economic and environmental situation and the manufacturers should own it rather than pass the costs down to the rest of society and stuff their mattresses full of cash.

 

[SymeonArgyrus]

When it comes to the batteries I do use, batteries I don't use, and why, see this post I made a few years ago.

Thanks for personally replying; it looks like the post you linked to was about water damage rather than batteries.

My impression of your intentions came from the previously quoted post by you, which (unintentionally?) seemed to imply that you were using should-be-OEM parts.

Stepping away from batteries, I agree that companies should be more open to providing repair parts, on a lower level than Apple does now, and should encourage their suppliers to sell surplus parts to consumers/repair places.

I don’t agree that Apple in particular limits this to force consumers to buy new products. That pipeline would be a minuscule portion of their revenue. Additionally, if this was intended as a source of revenue, they are missing the part where they incentivize the new purchase, eg ‘I can’t fix the logic board but we’ll knock off X% if you purchase Y product today.” The closest I’ve seen to that was essentially confirming the published trade in amount, which doesn’t fit a retail channel incentivization.

back to right to repair, advocating it is great, but adding emotions to the actions of a company is a good way to get clicks, but doesn’t really drive the discussion forward.

 

[l.a.rossmann]

I've watched your stuff before and while I wouldn't do anything myself past logical unit replacement, I respect what you do to get people's data back.

Thanks for the clarification on your repair ingress. I think we're probably aligned. As for the insurance, as I mentioned above it's better to just buy a replacement device and deal with it separately if you need it. But from an economic perspective, it is better for cash flow, not necessarily total cost of ownership and most people have problems with cash flow these days (running month to month etc). I'm sure you've seen that from your clients who are asking for a repair because buying a new unit is too expensive for them.

For reference, I am more interested in the vendors taking the responsibility for the entire life of a product and the disposal of it. At the moment everything from crap children's toys (trash) to high end computers is thrown at people with little to no recourse if their investment fails on them and the manufacturer washes their hands of it. That's a bad economic and environmental situation and the manufacturers should own it rather than pass the costs down to the rest of society and stuff their mattresses full of cash.

I appreciate your reply! Thank you!

I think we might agree more than we disagree - very short warranties on very expensive hardware that have these types of issues leaves a lot of users to fend for themselves. A lot of what I advocate for is for the manufacturer to cover issues under warranty when it's a known defect so users only have to come to me for the genuine accidents(lemonade spill, dropped off a table, etc.)

I think it's horrendous that people came to me for 2011 GPU repairs via BGA rework, flexgate repairs on A1707s, C9560 on 820-2850 for GPU panics, etc. This is totally separate from right to repair - but I've pushed for these to be acknowledged as defects, and handled accordingly for a long time. Handled accordingly to me means, if you paid $3k for a device with a known design flaw, the manufacturer fixes it for free for a period of time way longer than 1 year post-purchase, irrespective of you buying Applecare.

You spilling something on electronics is on you. A flex cable being half a mm too short, or C7771 failing and causing 0.3v instead of 1.05v on PP1V05_S5 in large numbers is on the manufacturer.

IMO, there's more than enough money for everyone in this field to eat well fixing user-caused, accidental damage, even if the manufacturer covered all of their defects under warranty. Without that we are literally drowning in work fixing product defects the manufacturer should be covering under a recall or extended warranty program.

 

[clayj]

"Handled accordingly to me means, if you paid $3k for a device with a known design flaw, the manufacturer fixes it for free for a period of time way longer than 1 year post-purchase, irrespective of you buying Applecare."

Sort of like how automobiles have different-length warranties on different components, e.g., a 5 year, 40K mile warranty on the vehicle, but a 10 year, 100K mile warranty on the transmission.

 

[120FPS]

Thanks for personally replying; it looks like the post you linked to was about water damage rather than batteries.

My impression of your intentions came from the previously quoted post by you, which (unintentionally?) seemed to imply that you were using should-be-OEM parts.

Stepping away from batteries, I agree that companies should be more open to providing repair parts, on a lower level than Apple does now, and should encourage their suppliers to sell surplus parts to consumers/repair places.

I don’t agree that Apple in particular limits this to force consumers to buy new products. That pipeline would be a minuscule portion of their revenue. Additionally, if this was intended as a source of revenue, they are missing the part where they incentivize the new purchase, eg ‘I can’t fix the logic board but we’ll knock off X% if you purchase Y product today.” The closest I’ve seen to that was essentially confirming the published trade in amount, which doesn’t fit a retail channel incentivization.

back to right to repair, advocating it is great, but adding emotions to the actions of a company is a good way to get clicks, but doesn’t really drive the discussion forward.

It's in the comment section