3 days ago “ASUS becomes a meme” with the thumbnail text “ASUS ARE YOU KIDDING”.
The guy runs a Mac repair store. That’s his day business. It doesn’t sound inauthentic that he would have more complaints about Apple products.
Further, as far as right to repair is concerned, it’s undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot, and has used its massive market driving ability to move other companies in that direction as well (although you can still find complete hardware manuals for a Lenovo, HP, etc, which was never possible with Apple).
Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops. Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something.
Others are now going in this direction following Apple's lead. Did you forget Apple literally goes so far as to make the screws nonstandard just deliberately out of spite for repair? Did you forget about Error 53? And mind you, Apple charges a premium. If Apple was charging $500 he would be taking that into account too. It's quite undeniable Apple has stood out like a sore thumb for a long time. He literally has hours (days? weeks?) of rants about shenanigans unique to Apple going back for years so please don't make us rehash them all here.
> Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something.
I thought the discussion was about hardware manuals. Not product quality.
How do you know that it is to spite repair? Apple certainly knows that you can buy those screwdrivers for less than $10 from iFixit for the last 6 years. If it was to purely spite us, you'd think they'd make them more complicated or change them every year.
Instead, a more likely scenario is that it is to prevent people who have no idea what they are doing from following a YouTube tutorial, being overconfident in their abilities, opening a machine, doing more damage, and then having a more expensive repair. Or to prevent my curious 10-year-old from opening the machine just because he wants to have a look and then breaking something. Which is a whole argument entirely as to whether that is warranted, but it isn't necessarily spite.
Error 53? Another example where the actions may be excessive, but it isn't necessarily spite. Can you imagine what a hacked fingerprint sensor could do? If I was a scammer, I'd set up my booth in the mall and swap all my client's fingerprint scanners with fake ones. Yes, Error 53 was an extreme reaction to that risk, but you can't say it was sheer spite.
Oh no! So Apple is trying to save people money through all this? We've been so blind to their goodwill...
I like how you change the discussion topic so easily. We went from discussing whether Apple is the worst R2R offender to discussing the quality of their products and now the discussion is about my assessment of precisely what percentage of what Apple does is out of spite instead of other lame excuses to prevent people repairing their products.
The entire discussion is about bad patterns of behavior that have emerged over the years from a particular company called Apple. The history of Apple's behavior is long and people are not going to waste time rehashing it all over again here, especially not when you're already aware of past events and yet only begrudgingly acknowledge their existence as isolated events when others force you to. That makes having a genuine conversation about the topic pretty infeasible.
Yes, there is long history of behavior, but I think that there could be more discussion about why Apple does things than just assuming bad behavior. I was trying to give alternative explanations than just "apple is being bad as usual."
Can you name a single advantage of pentalobe screws over pre-existing standard screw heads like Torx? If not, then Occam's razor is how I know.
Really tiny Torx screws are easy to strip the head on. I've done it more than once, to my considerable regret.
Pentalobes are harder to strip, because a pentagon is less like a circle than a hexagon is.
Are they the Platonic ideal of a screw head for the exact size used in iPhones? No idea, I'm not a mechanical engineer. Just a klutz who has stripped a few tiny Torx screws with my big ol' meat hands.
Curious how we are going to determine most here but Lenovo and Dell make their service manuals easily available with the service tag/serial. HP has service manuals available with some Google fu (eg. http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c06148960.pdf). There are a lot of manufacturers who could do better but saying "my parents 500$ HP laptop had no repair manual available so it's not so bad that a 2000$ Apple machine does not have one either" just sounds weird to me. If I have to disassemble an Apple laptop I have to check iFixit, I also need to own weird screwdrivers and if I had the repair schematics (they do exist) I may be violating a copyright or at least a ToU.
But this is all fine, it could be worse.
For example, a MacBook. Perhaps it's because China clones everything and would happily clone a MacBook board and sell that to unsuspecting people, so Apple doesn't want to share info on where they got parts or the schematics. You might disagree, and I do wish Apple would share this info, but Louis could at least examine this possible argument.
The schematics are already out there. The issue is its impossible to find parts. You can't take your 2 year old apple to him to get its screen replaced, because there are no screens available to buy for him to replace it with. Apple doesn't let the manufacturers sell them, apple doesn't sell them, and there aren't enough 'donor' screens from devices broken in other ways to satisfy demand.
Louis has done more examining than you give him credit for, while you ignore a lot of the real issues at hand.
Locking down car repair to protect car IP and having no parts available because your car manufacturer wants you to buy a new car or pay for a refurbished car directly...
Louis runs an Apple repair shop, so he complains about the availability of Apple schematics. Seems reasonable. It's not like the schematics aren't available, it's mostly the hoops you/he has to jump through to get them and even if he/you has them he might not be legally allowed to use them.
And this all ignores the aspect of you complaining about not having a service manual for a 500$ machine and Louis complaining about not being able to service a 1700$ logic board (which, if he can't repair it, might mean you have to pay full price to replace a 3000$ laptop).
Isn't it "China" that makes those MacBook boards already? They wouldn't need to clone anything, just make some more of them.
That was circa 2012. I'm not sure it would be possible with 2021 Dells. We had lots more of miniaturization. And maybe this actually made laptops also a little stronger!!
Rossmann opensourced his repair manuals and has detailed videos of how to repair equipment, you can literally start your own repair business of that.
If that is not being for right to repair I don't know what is.
Reading your post again it is a character assassination post.
Shifting goalpost and attacking personal characteristics instead of the point.
If I said, "I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him" that isn't a character assassination- just my opinion he is unlikeable.
Then you're not reading what some folks are writing. To some people here he seems to be a "bad person". e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27257657
This, on the other hand:
>The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.
OP does say it as if there's something wrong with it.
If you were in court for an act you didn't commit and the prosecutor said:
"I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him"
What would you said to this?
This commenthas noting to do with anything. Its a pointless opinion nothing to do with given case. And its a vague ad-hominem attack.
I grew up seeing plenty of this kind of passive-aggressive language lawyering. It doesn't change anything.
Seems like the type of tactic you'd see from those lobbyist groups that pay money to release commercials claiming right to repair will lead to rape: https://youtu.be/EozPi1qmH44?t=59
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If a comment is sitting at the top of the thread that you feel is off-topic in an unhelpful way, the one thing you can do that will make the most difference is let us know at [email protected]. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for more explanation.
Posting insinuations about "lobbyist groups" is singularly unhelpful; as I've written about ad nauseum in recent years, the overwhelming majority of such perceptions are based on zero evidence. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's not really surprising at all if you're on here enough. It's standard practice. It's not like it takes as many upvotes as the story gets to be the top comment on the page. Usually 20-40 is enough even for modestly popular posts like this. Larger ones will require over 50. A few people don't like some of his content or thumbnails and there you go - easy to reach the top.
Pretty rabid fanbase. Anything other than adulation must have nefarious origins. It certainly can't be organic.
I think it was upvoted (after a lot of downvotes) because a lot of people have experienced the same thing. Rossmann started as a Mac/Apple repair guy elbowing to try to keep his business going, which no one can contest and was admirable and sympathetic. He had a credible argument about right to repair.
Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension. He has a whole plethora of anti-Apple opinions, and he seems to be a cult of personality not for repair people, but rather for people who still harbor a grudge that their Lumia prophecies didn't come true.
So I just said what I thought, and clearly a lot of people have the same impression, which was that once I'd see his name and think credible repair arguments, and now I see his name and just click past because it's going to be some new anti-Apple screed appealing to a base. Eh.
One thing that can be said about him is that he supports R2R fro a selfish reason of being able to keep his business afloat.
> Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension. (...)
WHO CARES? Who cares? I want my phone to be sum of more then 1 parts. I don't care if Rossman kicks puppies for fun. I don't give a fuck about that. I don't care if someone is supporting R2R because their turtle choked on an apple. Its as irrelevant as this example.
What I care about is clear pattern of slow creep of anti-consumer practices lately serialisation of parts is abhorrent. Before that - parts exclusively sold to the makes of the phones, design choices made with intention of making repairs harder.
And this is not only scourge of phones, if car manufactures could they would be renting you cars. If they could the car computers would lock your car till you pay them to fix 0x4525828 error.
> I and many others don't like that Rossman is the one who is harboring this when he has moved from well-done repair videos to rants about anything that can be ranted about.
He rants on random topics that's what his audience likes to watch. And mind you, they're often quite educational and make you think. Even when he's wrong.
It's ludicrous to say he's a bad person because he rants about something other than R2R in some of his videos. It's like you cannot fathom a good person can have more than one topic he's interested in?
> Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension.
So after being persecuted by Apple he became generally anti-Apple? Wow, go figure, how utterly weird.
(And clearly shows he's the bad guy and Apple the good ones.)
And FWIW I've rarely seen outright accusations of character assassination on here, even against wildly cynical comments, insults or when wild allegations are made. So again it's weird that your pretty moderate/balanced take on a guy directly relevant to the article is getting so many of those.
This is totally in his wheelhouse and expertise since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices. You can thank YouTube’s algorithm for the inflammatory title.
And thus, the insight comes from someone who only repairs the components, not someone who knows about designing them. I wouldn't trust my mechanic to tell me that my car's engine was designed badly because chances are that opinion is solely based on how easy/cheap it is to repair.
Of course there may be good explanations for design decisions that negatively impact reliability, but it's reasonable for owners to be grumpy about it. It also wouldn't completely shock me if there's a former Ford engineer out there somewhere collecting a paycheck from Helicoil, a manufacturer of threaded inserts used to repair stripped spark plug holes, with no current job duties.
I come from a family of mechanics, my grandfather lamented new cars and their electronics because it’s harder to repair, he doesn’t try to understand the reason why, just that it’s harder now because the manufacturers “did it to him” to prevent third party repairs.
You can argue that the electronics are to prevent cheaper repairs, but there is another truth there: the ECU is an almost required component for decent fuel efficiency.
Shift solenoids are a nasty problem that I've run into. They don't need to be hidden inside the transmission. And the transmission doesn't require the entire engine to be dropped to remove it. This was done to be consumer hostile and to maximize dealer shop hours. Batteries in most german cars are also deliberately placed under major engine components, whereas my Mazda 3 requires two minutes and one socket to replace. Shop hours.
This all needs to be stopped. Major components need to be able to be replaced, for all appliances and machines. Laws need to be changed to force this.
Source? I used to own a 2000 Audi S4 (bought in 2005), and the battery was easy to access and didn't take much labor to to replace. I now own and drive a 2006 Mercedes-Benz C55 AMG that I bought in 2009. One of the very few issues that the car has had was a parasitic battery drain, which went unnoticed for a long time, until I started a new job in which I was able to work from home, and, therefore, I didn't drive the car very often during that time span of around 4 years. Before I eventually determined what the problem was (the passenger power seat control module continued to draw current when the car was turned off), I had to replace the battery ~7 times (which usually didn't cost me anything since the since the batteries were still under warranty when they finally went dead). The battery in my car is very easy to access (it's not located under any major engine components) and is also very easy to remove, requiring little more than a socket wrench and no more than 15 minutes of labor.
So why are the spark plugs so hard to get to? I doubt it had anything to do with hostility towards repairability because this car is easily repairable. This came down to the design requirements for the car and particularly the engine they wanted to use to satisfy those design requirements.
Long gone are the days when you could sit in an engine bay to work on it because there was that much free room. Modern vehicles have to comply with many regulations, e.g. emissions and safety, whilst simultaneously meeting consumer demands at a price point people will accept. Without knowing the exact model of car you have, I'd say your shift solenoid problem almost certainly comes down to component sourcing - the manufacturer either uses this transmission in a number of vehicles or it's procured from someone else - and manufacturability/supply chain optimization - it's easier to integrate an already integrated solution^[4]. There might also be other considerations such as space availability, weight distribution (since you said you had to pull the engine to get to it), environmental, and efficiency. Again I don't know your exact vehicle, but engineering is a ton of trade-offs and sometimes the trade-offs suck in a particular case while overall satisfying the design constraints.
By the way I agree that German cars suck to work on, but that has largely been the case for every German car I've personally worked on going back to the 80s.
I am 100% certain there are decisions made during the design of various products which are solely or partially predicated on the inability for the end user to repair the product. I also know from first hand experience that many products never have some Machiavellian product manager who dictates designs expressly to be unrepairable; rather due to consumer demands, economics, regulatory and safety compliance, etc the end result is a product that is hostile towards repairability.
I feel this differentiator is rarely brought up in these right to repair comments and yet should be a critical talking point. Rather, everyone frustrated by a lack of repairability immediately assumes corporate shenanigans. This seems related to Hanlon's razor but for product design.
^[1] Under trays, battery, strut bars, fuel lines, air intake, etc.
^[2] The engine doesn't need to be fully pulled, it just needs to be lifted to where there's room to access the spark plugs.
^[3] People have managed to do this without hoisting the engine, hoisting actually seems easier if you have the tools.
^[4] This is the same reason why SiPs, SoMs, and microcontrollers with an ever expanding repertoire of peripherals exist. It's easier - from a hardware perspective - to integrate a single component that 'does it all' rather than pulling in multiple components and doing the integration yourself.
It's made to go in as a whole component at some point in the assembly and streamline that step for first cost reasons vs for serviceability of sub components after the warranty has expired.
The right to repair complaint would be that if your evaporator core fails you have to replace your car because that sub component wouldn't be allowed to be sold by sake of making the pipe connectors a drm copywriting mess, not that it's a pain to get to it.
I’m lobbying at work now for one such case. Sometimes the existing pin assignments are just bad, and that can destroy signal integrity, increase layout complexity (and thus board cost) and negatively affect EMC performance. I don’t know whether that is the case here but I wouldn’t automatically trust someone’s judgment on it without knowing their level of expertise on high speed layout design.
This is an assumption. It's an assumption based on the assumption that designers would put time and effort into making a simple replacement operation somewhat more difficult. I can make an assumption too: that the designers wanted a new chip revision to fix some small errata, to have a custom pinout to ease routing, or to break out an additional pin or two to allow more reliable testing. This assumption is based on the assumption that Apple wants to make good quality products and puts time and money into DFT/DFM.
If I was a big company for example, protecting the chip I may have helped design from being used in other products is boilerplate legal agreement. I don't have an evil motive or want to stop repair and screw Louis, it's just one of the default things I throw in my legal agreements so Huawei doesn't make their Matebooks or whatever with the same chip I helped improve.
Louis always assumes Apple hates repair and is fighting actively against him but doesn't take a look to see some of the broader reasons why. He doesn't make a video explaining, for example, some of the more logical less-diabolical reasons Apple might do something.
This doesn't mean you have to agree with Apple. I just think Louis would be far better off if he just gave some logical reasons why Apple might have done something and tried to rebut those instead of assuming Apple is evil, because that's an easy straw-man to fight.
That just means that you wrote evil into your default contract.
It's an assumption based on the assumption that designers would put time and effort into making a simple replacement operation somewhat more difficult.
https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-14/features/#:~:text=iOS%C2%A0...
The iPhone 6s was released September 25, 2015. This is mainly still supported because it's a very popular phone in India and other low-income countries, but it's there.
What I've noticed from "right of repair" types of complaints is that they're often missing any search for ulterior motives regarding those decisions beyond "well obviously the only reason they did this was because they wanted to make it hard to repair". I need to reserve judgment until I see what Rossman has to say about the specific instance you mention - but is it possible the chip is actually not identical, and Apple has made customisations that change how it works beyond merely making it hard to repair? And Apple would not want competitors to be able to purchase these chips because they're somehow superior to the standard ones, at least for the use case Apple has custom-ordered them for?
In these kind of scenarios I really don't see how a trillion dollar company would be worried about squeezing a few extra dollars by putting an extra dependency in their logistical pipeline by ordering a very specific chip whose sole purpose is to put a relatively insignificant hurdle for repair shops to repair a device. I say relatively insignificant, because I'm guessing the impact shouldn't be that much - not many repair shops would order all possible chips, find defective ones, and solder the chip in/out as a service or do it cost-effectively, and of those that do, most will probably just salvage those chips from other broken devices, meaning the decrease in repaired devices is very small in terms of value for Apple, but the extra work it generates for them would be immense and, I believe, disproportional.
I'm watching this video[0] here where he's complaining about 4 charging chips, and if one of them breaks none of them work. Rossman mentions it's "completely asinine engineering design". He completely fails to think about whether there'd be any reason for this behaviour. Maybe Apple engineers aren't as dumb as he portrays them to be, and actually have made that decision for a very good reason. Maybe the failure modes of those chips actually involves a possibility of damaging the battery on the output side, and the output side is not separated - e.g. the output lines of those chips all come together on the same bus towards the battery, and thus if one chip is broken it could easily put the wrong kind of energy on those lines, causing damage to the battery and possibly it exploding. For this reason, Apple decided to keep things safe and as soon as one part of that system is malfunctioning, not to try and work through it in order to avoid a 1 in a million "battery explodes" kind of situation.
I'm not an electrical engineer and know next to nothing about how these systems work internally, but I believe there's too little nuance in Rossman's opinions and that impacts his credibility to me.
This might actually be why he complains he's been in many legislatures, testified, and they haven't gone further. The lack of willingness to give some perspective from Apple's side hurts his credibility.
That makes me wonder... is there any example where the newer model of an iPhone was easier to repair than the previous one? I'm still rocking my 6s and I had to have the front-glass replaced twice (clumsy!). Thankfully I haven't needed any other repairs.
If they really wanted you to rather buy a new phone, they'd stop providing software updates much sooner, and they'd just let the phone die as soon as the battery is broken.
A 50 cent component needs to be replaced on the main-board of an Apple product. Lets say I have found a qualified repair shop willing to do the repair at a price that I agree with. Why does Apple actively block the supply of parts?
If it's not a publicly available component, then how do you know it costs 50 cents, if Apple is the only one manufacturing it and they're not selling it? It's not because Apple is paying 50 cent to the manufacturer, that this means the component doesn't involve Apple-specific IP, which they obviously do not pay for. Maybe Apple doesn't want to set up appropriately priced pipelines to sell these all five thousand of the parts that they order just so repair shops can purchase them at cost.
Hypothetical scenario: imagine the iPhone is 2 components, each costs $1 to produce at TSMC, but the IP to produce them is what makes the components so valuable, and this is owned by Apple. So Apple pays $2 to TSMC for both parts, assembles them, and then sells the iPhone for $1000.
Now a repair shop complains that they don't have access to these two $1 parts, but that's only logical. The value of the parts is much higher than what Apple is paying the manufacturer. And if Apple would provide these parts available at cost, someone could build their own iPhone for $2 instead and circumvent all their IP licensing.
Please don't take this attitude as a developer towards your operations / support staff.
Right to repair isn't about telling companies how they should design their products.
A good resource is:
Having watched quite a lot of his videos, he is, at the very least a competent electrical engineer, if not a formally trained one. On top of explaining a problem, he narrates why the problem is happening, which is indicative of solid understanding.
Um, I would. Easiness of repair is a part of a car lifecycle.
When buying a new car, my first stop is my mechanic. They know all the failure modes of the new cars. They also know which cars don't have common failure modes.
There are engines where you have to drop the whole thing to do basic things like change spark plugs. There are engines where if you lose the timing belt the engine will eat itself. etc.
Those are badly designed engines.
When your mechanic says don't buy a car with a specific motor... You might just want to listen.
When you find a good mechanic, listen to them.
This, in a machine that's been designed for generations to have a fan pull air aggressively THROUGH a channel, the only path the air can go, that goes directly across the CPU heatsink. This is not a 'circulating the air' situation: a laptop can't do that. It's an overall system with many considerations (turbulence, air handling noise) that is no longer a system at all if you take the top of the duct off. You cannot run that sort of machine with the case taken apart, it's part of the ducting.
Either he's dishonest for effect (and clicks), or he's considerably dumber than a drummer and college dropout (yours truly! derp!) about cooling airflow in a constrained duct inside a laptop. At face value, he's dumber. For his sake I hope he's dishonest.
The design of a modern motherboard is far from complex since all the complexity has pretty much been hidden inside the black boxes of highly integrated circuits. You as a designer do not in general need to concern yourself with the implementation details and just need to understand the interfaces, similar to, for example, using python's numpy as opposed to writing BLAS or LAPACK from scratch.
Getting GHz frequency circuits to work requires much more than just understanding the digital interfaces.
If you think designing and laying out a modern motherboard is “easy”, then there’s a 1% chance that you’re a highly experienced and capable electronic engineer, and a 99% chance that you just have no idea about the existence of entire classes of problems that need to be solved to make a motherboard work.
I am not saying it is trivial or that Rossmann could do it with his knowledge (no, he could not) or that anyone could do it. I just claimed that in the grand scheme of things it is not "highly complex" (as opposed to pretty much anything analog, or proper RF, or getting the actual implementation inside the chips correct).
If you haven’t actually been involved in designing a motherboard yourself, I’m also inclined to believe that there might well be complexities that you’re unaware of. Power management is complex. Routing hundreds of length-matched high frequency traces is complex. Low power circuits are complex. Safely charging LiPo batteries is complex. If you can show me something similarly complex that you’ve done yourself, then I’ll be willing to believe your claim that all of this is not really very difficult.
I have not designed a motherboard, but plenty of smaller digital IC-based schematics and PCBs and in my experience the most problematic part has been either erroneous or lack of proper documentation or bugs in ICs which there are plenty of.
What I recommend you to do is to compare the schematics of, for example, Thinkpad T420 and Keithley 2001 both of which should be available with a search. What you will find is that the former is a collection of specialized chips (including one for battery charging) with mostly datasheet reference design based implementations + bunch of mosfets for enabling/disabling/routing signals, whereas the latter has almost none of that and plenty of analog "cleverness" and "raw" digital design, let alone the power input, which in my opinion was totally overdesigned. Or take any oscilloscope, where you need to design not only a computer but also an analog front-end + high frequency signal processing, not only routing. And I'm not even going into the actual RF board designs which you are probably well aware of is more physics than electronics.
Again I am not saying that it is easy for any guy on the street, but "relatively easy" to understand what is going on on the motherboard as opposed to the actual complex stuff. So if you see a common fault among many motherboards you can probably conclude that that specific area of the design was bad and criticize that. Whether the criticism is valid might be another question, but I would not automatically dismiss it.
Edit: I will put designing a motherboard on my todo list.
Just saying.
Further, blaming YouTube for someone's pandering to the basest audience seems dubious.
Except everything you just listed is mostly _not_ true or unique to Apple.
The apps that you launch? That was the developer certificate, not the app, over the same protocol for verifying certificates that is used in Windows SmartScreen and other systems.
The malware issue? Every statistic shows iOS has less malware than Android, so why exactly is that a complaint?
CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness, a battery repair is like $50 or so, and it does that so that the thing doesn't crash and restart randomly just as Android phones will also do if their batteries are old.
>(malware...)so why exactly is that a complaint?
Because some good people at Apple prepared emails to sent tot he victims but Tim decided that is bad for PR so fuck the victims. Aka people need to know that if Apple has to chose between PR or the customer PR is on top.
>CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness,
You are the problem, Apple only does this after a class action lawsuit, you either are very misinformed or you are intentionally misinforming people. It is not an isolated incident where Apple is doing something fair for the user only when forced(similar cases with bad GPUs, keyboards,batteries)
Every OS on the planet will verify developer certificates to ensure that the app you are using is genuine. Windows uses SmartScreen, for example. Like I said, it's the same protocol (OCSP - Online Certificate Status Protocol) Windows and other apps use for certificate verification, so Apple is hardly doing anything wrong or being incompetent by not reinventing the wheel.
"Because some good people at Apple prepared emails to sent tot he victims but Tim decided that is bad for PR so fuck the victims. Aka people need to know that if Apple has to chose between PR or the customer PR is on top."
Understandable for three reasons: 1. It would cause major unwarranted panic that could cause additional attacks. I.e. A phishing scam saying "click here to be protected from the iPhone attack!" 2. The malware in question did not have any known function and didn't actually do anything or send anything to anyone. In other words, despite being prevalent, it was completely harmless. 3. The malware would be automatically removed from the device after a restart or software update, which most customers were likely enough to do naturally.
"You are the problem, Apple only does this after a class action lawsuit,"
Android quickly copied Apple and added warnings because Android never notified the user up to that lawsuit either. To the end user, even though Android didn't typically slow the device down, the Android phone would just crash and restart randomly when under too much CPU load.
In plain text? I know how this shit works, I digitally signed things before, and for this verification there is no need for internet. So copy pasted a lot of tech stuff there but it is complexly wrong. I could explain it how it works and why intenet is not needed but you could use google and figure it out, then find out what exactly Apple was checking(it was not the developer signiture).
>Understandable for three reasons: 1. It would cause major unwarranted panic that could cause additional attacks. I.e. A phishing scam saying "click here to be protected from the iPhone attack!"
Tim could hire some competent guy to write a clear email to prevent this. Also your point insinuates that you can cause a lot of damage to an iOS device with just an email and a link!! be careful Apple might not like you insinuating iOs is such terrible at security.
>2. The malware in question did not have any known function and didn't actually do anything or send anything to anyone. In other words, despite being prevalent, it was completely harmless.
Cure, malware sending data over the intenet behind the users back is harmless.
The conclusion is that Apple care more about PR, if Facebook would have sent one single bit of the users data Apple is putting a big article in the newspaper, if some malware is sending the exact same bit of data Apple changes it's mind last minute and keeps it hidden from the user.
>Android quickly copied Apple a
Ah, OK so Apple and Google shit stinks as bad, nothing new... Apple and Google are in the same boat, just one has some better PR and a big army of fanboys. Luckily the users found out and a judge forced this assholes companies to confess, otherwise next time the storage would say 500Gb but in reality would be half.
Actually, you do need the internet to ensure that the certificate was not revoked. This is partly why Apple put in the whole App Notarization thing in Catalina, because when you Notarize the app, MacOS can check if the Notarization was revoked whereas a simple Developer Certificate from a security company is a harder thing to revoke on demand or to check the authenticity of.
Notarization gives Apple, for better or worse, to immediately revoke a Developer Certificate without the need to check in with the Developer and have the developer signing certificate revoked from GeoTrust or whoever issued it. The Mac then checks in with Apple servers if the notarization is valid, and if it is valid, the app runs; and if it isn't valid, it knows it's been tampered with and revokes the app.
One benefit of Notarization is that it helps protect Apple and MacOS users from developer supply-side attacks like XcodeGhost. If the developer was compromised resulting in the code's legitimate source being poisoned and a hacked update was distributed, Apple could still immediately revoke that app because the Mac checks in when online.
"Tim could hire some competent guy to write a clear email to prevent this. Also your point insinuates that you can cause a lot of damage to an iOS device with just an email and a link!! be careful Apple might not like you insinuating iOs is such terrible at security."
I said Phishing Scam. A scam where you enter your credit card info for a fictional security software. Not all scams require a software hack.
"Cure, malware sending data over the intenet behind the users back is harmless."
Researchers analyzed it and concluded that it sent nothing back to the hackers. So it was indeed harmless. Apple also knew that their updates have a 90%+ opt-in rate, so when the next update went out, most users would have it automatically removed, and anyone who didn't update would likely restart their iPhone at some point, in which case AppleMobileFileIntegrity would detect and kill it.
"Ah, OK so Apple and Google shit stinks as bad, nothing new... Apple and Google are in the same boat, just one has some better PR and a big army of fanboys. Luckily the users found out and a judge forced this assholes companies to confess, otherwise next time the storage would say 500Gb but in reality would be half."
What BS are you spouting?
>What BS are you spouting?
Big companies downgrading your hardware capabilities behind your back, then denying it until a judge forces them to admit and pay the users. If Apple would not have been caught with the CPu downclockingm, storage would be next for sure.
I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility.
Every politician is pandering to their constituents counting on their votes.
> When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook.
You are barely comprehensible.
Louis literally owns a company that repairs MacBooks. And if you cared to watch his channel a little bit over the years as I did, he build his user base not on ire for Apple but on his expert knowledge on how to repair their products.
The channel is not just for people who want to repair their MacBooks. The channels are for people who maybe at some point were interested in MacBook repair (I went in for board diagnosis) but then stayed because Louis had something more to say.
> The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.
Is this jealousy I am hearing?
Is this a proof he isn't right?
EVERY channel on youtube with large userbase is earning some money.
Using politicians as an example of how the guy is reputable isn't the argument you are looking for.
Being beholden to ads absolutely undermines your credibility in my mind.
He also shown he is not beholden to his channel by creating thousands of hours of niche content on electronics repair for electronics guys like me at a time when no other electronics channel was too successful (eevblog was just starting).
Going your way anybody successful is automatically discredited because he is beholden to his business, regardless to how he became successful or what he is saying.
I don't see people moaning that anything Elon Musk says cannot be trusted because he has invested a lot of money into SpaceX or Tesla and as such he is beholden to his businesses.
I would argue that most of his userbase is tech savvy and most of them (for example I also watch his videos for references on some ICs/upgrades) have ad-blockers in place.
He has immensely contributed so much to the repair community so much so that many shops in Asia wouldn't even exist if not for his videos. I had one of those keyboard faults on a brand new Macbook Pro. The so called "Genius" jokers didn't even know it was a known issue on their machines. I had to send them a Rossman video just to help them even understand that such a thing was going on. So, I think we should be careful here of not questioning anyone's character without proof/evidence. I mean, we could say the same about Tim Cook too, right? That's why I think this is a bad direction for discussion that will only lead to flame with little value for readers here.
Regardless it does not diminish his prominent role for the Right to Repair.
Distilled into its abstract, you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers.
I'm not a fan of hit jobs especially when presented as extensive prose to veil the attack. Please reconsider and assume the best intentions in people. Unfortunately, I can't assume the same of your comment because there was no reason for you to author it except a personal distaste for the human subject.
Groan.
A large number of the replies I have gotten would normally be deleted by mods, for good reason. If you're rewording to conjure up flamebait or attacking by conspiracy because you don't like a position, better to not post it.
"you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers."
Don't add your own pejorative narrative and then strike it down. It adds nothing to HN and is flamebait.
Rossmann took his right to repair advocacy and branched out into a personality engagement. For YouTube viewers who are into that, or people who sympathize with his other positions, good for you and good for him, but for the rest of us it's just noise. I no longer pay attention to what he says because his motives have been perverted.
> Groan.
defaultname, I'm sorry you took offense. I'll see if I can present it a bit differently.
The GP comment reads as if its author added fluff to distract from the true nature of the comment — an entirely unsolicited rant that acts as flamebait on HN.
Humorously the top comment to this submission is that Rossmann is a "national treasure", along with some commentary about some other guy and how they should do a podcast together.
Nothing whatsoever to do with the submission. Just slathering praise and adulation. Whatever floats someone's boat and no skin off my back.
Did you, perchance, berate that comment for being some sort of NSA-tactic astroturfing "praise-job" that was an unsolicited rant? No? Gosh, I wonder why. Did you conspire that it's subterfuge dropped by Google?
Declaring my comment flamebait is telling. It's a completely banal observation about a conflict in someone's position. The many angry personal attacks (such as yours) are not my doing, and reflect on your own rather bizarre motivations.
Hm... I applied the label to the original comment I replied to, not yours.
But defaultname, I do see you're pretty new. Try not to take things personally; even me labeling their comment as flamebait is a description of the comment and style of discourse rather than an assertion about the person.
The goal in the end is to have quality discussion where we can all learn something and grow a bit, and none of that happens if we either attack each other or perceive each others' words as attacks.
For what it's worth, I do apologize if my words rubbed you the wrong way. Certainly wasn't my intent.
Like defaultname, I also think that Rossman has done a lot of good, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to love his YouTube channel or refrain from saying anything critical about it.
its...wat for it!
repairing macs!
The way he monetizes vids is via his item store. Which you would know if you video just one single vid
In all probability the YT channel is much more lucrative than the business is.
As to why I emphasized revenue, the expense to run a YouTube channel from a little room is a world removed from running a repair business with 15 employees.
What is your point is about the YT revenue vs the repair revenue? Why do you assume they’re separate things? Maybe the YT channel is marketing for the repair business, and both operate as a single entity? Highly monetized YT channels frequently require a staff to maintain, to do filming and editing, writing and research, marketing and SEO, not to mention the time investment to produce a lot of content. How do you know what’s involved behind the scenes of this particular channel? Why are you certain the expenses are negligible and don’t involve employees? People just baselessly assuming YT vids are easy and cheap is one of the reasons so few people make money on YT, and so many people share myths about who’s getting lucky and by how much.
Hell, if Apple addressed his concerns he would be out of this (very lucrative) business. So do not trust him to actually care about your right to repair. As always, follow the money.
It left me with an appreciation for someone who can dedicate themselves to this depth of esoterica and make something I thought impossible look ... doable by an enthusiast?
But from your comment I wonder about that audience you mention: anti-Apple.
Because something that I also took away from his videos was this sense that technology, and I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all.
I was careful not to say he made the repairs look easy — he made repair look doable but also underscored just what the layman is up against (SMDs, obscure codes on chips that are little bigger than fleas, specialized tools to open cases, paper-thin ribbon cables, etc.).
I think his audience is broader than just anti-Apple. Perhaps they're upset about all of the ways in which we have become enslaved to devices we can't understand.
I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all.
When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook.
I am typing this on an iPad. I am a vocal Apple critic. (Go through my post history here). Apple has turned a section of their customer base against them because of their unethical business tactics. Right to privacy and data protection is intrinsically linked to your Right to Repair. Those of us who have invested in a product want to own it completely, like we do our car or house.
Yeah, he often talks about things outside his wheelhouse. He has an entire series about real estate in NYC. That doesn't make his actions and commentary regarding right to repair any less legitimate.
For instance Rossmann did a video titled "Apple watching & logging EVERY APP YOU OPEN with new OS." (which is interesting given that another of his videos is "Why I don't use Apple products", "The horrible truth about Apple's repeated engineering failures", "Is Apple using sweatshop labor in the US", etc -- there are dozens of these things) This is so ridiculously outside of his wheelhouse or expertise, but it panders to an audience that lines up to get fed that anti-Apple pablum.
When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. Instead you'll find someone who has spent years calling Apple users sheep and boasting about their Windows Phone.
The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.