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.