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.
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.