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.