> since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices.

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.

A mechanic is well-positioned to notice that a particular car engine has an unusually high rate of a certain type of failure, and very often to identify the root cause of said failure. If Subaru head gaskets fail because they're bathed in fluids when the engine isn't running, and Ford Tritons spit out spark plugs because they only used 3.5 threads in an aluminum head, mechanics who work on them will notice. Rossmann is in an equivalent position.

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.

A mechanic is in a good position to notice that when a car fails, it tends to fail in certain ways. Far too often, though, they then generalize to claims that the car is likely to fail in that way, but that is not necessarily the case. It may be that they fail 1% as often as competitors and due to a relatively fewer number of causes. Without being in a position to see the absolute failure rate, a mechanic may incorrectly conclude that those parts they see failing are especially badly designed even if they are more reliable than the industry average.

I get your point, but even your car mechanic would be able to tell if a component they worked with previously has changed only to make it more difficult to replace. You might argue "how do you know that was the only reason" - well, Rossman has a video on a USB-C charging controller embedded into the macbooks, previously if that burnt out(and they do burn out) he could just buy the chip itself online for a dollar. But after one iteration of macbooks, apple replaced it with identical chip with a changed pin layout and model number incremented by one - and they have secured exclusive production of this chip, so you can't buy this for a dollar any more. There is no hidden design reason here - it was clearly changed to stop people like him from repairing macbooks, because their specific chip revision is not available on the open market.

For the little it’s worth: cars are mostly computer now.

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.

Perhaps. But it was a deliberate design decision to place certain sensors and actuators that may need repair in inaccessible locations. Pumps, spark plugs and chains need to be removable without major disassembly of the engine.

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.

> "Batteries in most german cars are also deliberately placed under major engine components"

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.

For what it's worth - I've had a 2016 GLA45 AMG, and that car was a piece of cake to work on. Did majority of maintenance by myself and everything was nicely laid out and accessible, haven't ran into any issues where something felt like it was intentionally placed in an awkward place. I'd bet a person who has never worked on cars could change the turbo on that engine.

Shift solenoids do need to be inside the transmission, although I'm not sure what you mean by "hidden" -- does dropping the pan and possibly removing the valve body count as "hidden"? I don't think so.

Which German cars hide the battery under major engine components?

I have a car whose spark plugs are a pain in the ass to change. You have to disconnect a number of things^[1], unbolt the engine, and lift it to get to them^[2][3]. The thing is this is a modding friendly car, most everything is easily accessible and user serviceable.

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.

To echo your point: Going back decades it's been a real PITA to repair dash components on many vehicles, and this is primarily a manufacturing artifact that in the factory the whole assembly of the dash is brought into the car on a specialty arm made for that task.

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.

Rossman has also made it clear that right to repair is concerned with things like access to replacement parts, and has stated that it is not about things being more difficult to repair due to technological change. An example he gave is that he may grumble about having to reball a chip, but people can still do that. On the other hand, there is very little they can do if they need a repacement chip they are denied access to. (Their only recourse are doner boards, and even that has limits.)

I understand about the frustration of not being able to source the part, but a change in a single IC or connector’s pin mapping absolutely can be a performance improvement alone.

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.

But don't forget this part of the post: "and they have secured exclusive production of this chip, so you can't buy this for a dollar any more". There may have been a legitimate reason to change the pinout, but there was no reason other than greed to prohibit the vendor from selling the new chip to anyone else.

Absolutely agree, but that’s a whole new can of worms and outside the point I was making (which was that it is not obvious that they made this change for the SOLE purpose of preventing repairs). Do we force them to sell the M1 module as well? Individual chips from that module? I’m all for that, personally, but good luck getting that passed. And assuming we can’t make them do that, what is the line between those parts and the less special ones like this one?

> There is no hidden design reason here - it was clearly changed to stop people like him from repairing macbooks, because their specific chip revision is not available on the open market.

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.

Except they don't make this chip - it's made by an external 3rd party. And that third party sells all revisions of this chip, except for the one used in MacBooks now. Rossman asserts that it's because Apple bound them contractually to do so - why would they sell every other revision openly to anyone with money, except for the one used in MacBooks?

This happens a lot, I have done it myself. When you buy enough volume you can buy custom packaging, or custom chips from these vendors. The license can be exclusive, for example if Apple asked for some development that cost them some NRE fees, or it can be non-exclusive, and the vendor can decide not to sell the custom version due to insufficient demand or some other non-technical reason.

Fair enough, but the final result of that change is that what used to be a 50c + labour repair is now a full motherboard replacement because you can't buy the chip separately.

Also, something that put me off about him is that he always assumes that Apple is doing this because they are nefarious, so he sometimes fails to see the bigger picture.

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.

> 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.

That just means that you wrote evil into your default contract.

I agree, but I think it's much more likely that Apple simply did not consider this case, rather than actively working against having commonly-available replacement components on every board. Apple does not replace components, they replace motherboards. I think you'll find that as volume increases, this kind of practice becomes more common, as a way to reduce cost, increase yield, reduce board size, etc. And, that this will be true for even lower volumes in the future as customized silicon becomes more feasible at lower volumes, such as 10k or 100k units, as we're seeing with companies like SiFive popping up.

    It's an assumption based on the assumption that designers would put time and effort into making a simple replacement operation somewhat more difficult. 

And it's a very genuine and valid assumption supported by an industry practice called Planned obsolescence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

However, if you take a look, Apple does perhaps the least planned obsolescence of any tech company, period. iOS updates are now going, like, 6+ years back on phones while Android flagships were lucky to get 2 years or any at all, for example.

For reference:

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.

They do provide updates, but the devices also become slower either by design (batterygate) and / or through software bloat. Moreover, it doesn't at all excuse their hardwares deliberately designed to be hard to repair.

Do you have a link to that video?

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.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7RWdVWv7oU

This. He always assumes Apple is evil, Apple is screwing repair because they like screwing repair. Most companies aren't like that - companies are made of engineers, and do they like fighting repair for the sake of fighting repair? He never addresses what ulterior motives there may be.

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.

I agree that Apple isn't necessarily evil, but they sure would rather you buy a phone than repair it.

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.

iPhone have the longest life of all the smartphones out there. Very old phones still get software updates. They even throttle CPU to make sure an expired battery doesn't necessarily mean a broken phone.

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.

Yes, I do appreciate the updates. But we're talking about repair here, so I'd like to discuss that. Repairs could be needed at any time during the lifetime of a phone. Its not just about being able to repair 10 year old phones.

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 a publicly available component, then Apple would not be able to block the supply.

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.

You have a low opinion of your mechanic. Operational knowledge is very important and designs that look good at design time sometimes deal poorly with the world. The iPhone 6 and the butterfly keyboard show designs that were not good in actual operation. Mechanics worth their salt know great engine design beyond easy/cheap to repair.

Please don't take this attitude as a developer towards your operations / support staff.

I agree with your comment/sentiment, but to be a little more nuanced: I can tell you that butterfly keyboards suck but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed.

> but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed.

Right to repair isn't about telling companies how they should design their products.

My point is that some people try to and want right to repair to force companies to make their computers more modular in order to make them repairable, when that might stifle innovation.

It often sounds like that to me.

Probably because of comments like the one I responded to, which are spreading misinformation.

A good resource is:

https://fighttorepair.org

That wasn't my point. I was responding to the notion that a mechanic is qualified to tell the engineer his job. ;-)

Mechanics are generally pretty knowledgeable about reliability of various vehicles and their components generally; many are genuinely interested in these things and not just repairability as it relates to their job. I would imagine something similar is true here

Mechanics can get a slightly biased view on things - for example, they’re more likely to like less reliable vehicle that’s dead simple to work on compared to a more reliable vehicle that’s harder to repair (or they rarely see).

Right, this is absolutely the case with Rossman. He makes no attempt to control for the base rate.

I would argue that, the harder/more expensive it is to repair a consumer car, the worse it is designed. It's not the only factor, but it is an important one to a LOT of people.

If your mechanic tells you not to buy a model of car because he keeps seeing them come in with engine failure at low mileage you'd be a fool not to listen to him.

I think you’re not giving him his due credit. He may only be fixing there devices, but that gives him a unique perspective on how the design behaves in the field.

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.

> I wouldn't trust my mechanic to tell me that my car's engine was designed badly

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.

> chances are that opinion is solely based on how easy/cheap it is to repair.

When your mechanic says don't buy a car with a specific motor... You might just want to listen.

Or other things. Brought in my dad's car to a local mechanic because the driver's side door handle was broken. He told me its too damn common on that manufacturers cars from a range of years. Came back later in the day and he showed me the plastic part that had broken. He replaced it with an aluminum part he made.

When you find a good mechanic, listen to them.

What are those chances? Are you judging their experience based on your non-experience? How would you know what bad design is and the reasons for it?

It’s not really. There’s a big gap between knowing how to repair circuit boards (which is mostly about part sourcing and being good with a hot air station) and understanding the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex. He has loud opinions about laptop design, but it’s worth bearing in mind that he’s never designed even a simple piece of electronics in his life.

I've seen very little of him, and didn't know he was 'The Right To Repair Guy', but I saw him freak out over an Apple laptop because he took the back off and the fan was not directly over the chip like in gamer PCs.

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.

I don’t think he’s ‘dumb’. Just not an engineer. He unscrews computers and replaces parts and puts them back together. I’m disappointed he doesn’t concentrate on the important topic of right to repair and finds things to criticise that seem like they’re chosen to play to the lowest common denominator.

Sounds like you misunderstood the criticisms of that laptops cooling design (which was abysmal to the point where it pretty much had to be deliberate). I would suggest refraining from calling people dumber than yourself, until you're totally sure how dumb you actually are.

Unfortunately Rossman’s critique of the cooling design really is as silly as Applejinx suggests. For some reason he seems to think that fans need to be next to the things that they are cooling.

As someone who was a mechanic, and later became an engineer, this is the main reason why I find Rossman's videos insufferable. He is constantly making assumptions about how electronics are designed based on his views as a repair man. As a mechanic I made the same assumptions, but I was later able to learn that every decision an engineer makes is one of compromise, based on hundreds of variables that the mechanic does not know about because of the narrow view that any technician has concerning the product that they are servicing: observing the hard shell of an egg and assuming that the contents must be equally hard.

> the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex

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.

What knowledge and experience do you have of designing motherboards or other similarly complex PCBs?

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.

Would not call myself an experienced electronics engineer (have only gotten into RF lately, but yes I know about signal integrity and EMI problems), but getting GHz circuits to work on a modern motherboard is not as big of a deal as you might think mainly because it is a "solved problem" with best practices and design tools, and there are just not really that many things to connect together.

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).

It seems that we agree then. Rossman is operating well outside his knowledge and expertise when critiquing the design of a motherboard. As far as I know the guy has never so much as blinked an LED with an Arduino, or designed a simple two-sided low frequency PCB. A motherboard is way more complex than anything a hobbyist electronics enthusiast will ever work on.

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 think it depends on what he is specifically criticizing.

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.

If only everyone on the HN really adhered to the "ne sutor supra crepidam" principle, I bet an entry with a dozen comments would be considered crowded.

Just saying.

You are the "you can't criticise a movie if you are not a seasoned director" kind...

I don’t think that’s a good analogy. This is like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who’s never written ‘Hello World’.

Seems more like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who has to debug your code.

I’d hope that the person debugging my code had written at least one program of their own. If not, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in their opinions on software architecture.

I referred to the operating system commentary as having nothing to do with his wheelhouse. The other videos just give a context to his...theme.

Further, blaming YouTube for someone's pandering to the basest audience seems dubious.

Apple tracking what apps you launch, when you launch them and using a plain text protocol is fucking disgusting, anyone has the right to feel this disgust and share it , many non technical people will nit have the chance to hear the truth about Apple (how many iOS users know about the malware issue , about the CPU down-clocking behind your back or other true facts about Apple)...

"or other true facts about Apple)"

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.

Sure dude, it was not the app name sent in plain text but the app certificate, what is the difference ? Either Apple does not care about your privacy or they really care but are incompetent, chose one or other or both OR impress me with some mental gymnastics that makes Apple look good.

>(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)

"Sure dude, it was not the app name sent in plain text but the app certificate, what is the difference?"

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.

>Every OS on the planet will verify developer certificates ...

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.

"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)."

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?

Even if you don't like it Apple already admitted it was a bad implementation and they are fixing it. (maybe next time they put more competent people and give them what they need to implement things right especially when it is about privacy, the thing Apple is screening this days)

>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.

It isn’t dubious. He posts for engagement and money. You can absolutely blame youtube for incentivizing bad behavior.