> Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops.

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.

"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?"

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.

> Instead, a more likely scenario is that it is to prevent people who have no idea what they are doing from opening a machine, doing more damage, and then having a more expensive repair.

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, Apple has bad behavior. Sorry, the conversation is sometimes unclear from my Hacker News reader app and so my changing the conversation is probably unintentional as I didn't realize I was doing it, I apologize.

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."

The history is absolutely crucial here because the lack of people's interests in "alternative explanations" at this point in time is literally the history. There was room for it in the past, people gave the benefit of the doubt, and then year after year Apple kept debunking it through more and more consistent bad behavior. The ship has sailed already. At some point you gotta realize the doubt that you're so generously trying to give them the benefit of has been vanishing.

> How do you know that it is to spite repair?

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.

I can in fact.

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.

Isn't Torx basically a hexagram rather than a hexagon? To me, pentalobe looks closer to circular than Torx does. Also, how much have you worked with tiny pentalobe screws compared to tiny Torx screws? Is it possible you've seen the latter strip more just because you've used them more?

I agree with you in large part, but you are forgetting that pentalobe tools are not easy to find in some countries. In Chile, which is a relatively developed country compared to its neighbors, I went to a shop to buy a pentalobe screwdriver. It took me a couple of afternoons to find the shop. They quoted me something like $35 for a set of screwdrivers (they didn't sell them individually), or $30 to do the service for me.

>> "for many if not most new PC laptops"

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.

Like I said earlier, one thing that bugs me about Louis Rossmann is that he never examines possible ulterior motives for Apple's decision making other than that they are evil.

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.

Louis' biggest issue is he can't buy parts because apple stops their suppliers from selling parts to other people, and apple now designs devices so even authentic screens/etc from other devices will cause errors.

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...

Ah, so it's about board schematics and your parents HP was just a sidenote. Yes, it would be nice if every manufacturer would publish board schematics so performing component level repairs would be easier.

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).

> Perhaps it's because China clones everything and would happily clone a MacBook board and sell that to unsuspecting people

Isn't it "China" that makes those MacBook boards already? They wouldn't need to clone anything, just make some more of them.

I had that happen on my Dell Vostro laptop just after 25 months with 2 y warranty. A hinge of the lid broke. I was able to contact support and order the new lid for about 35 euros and replaced it myself. Repairing was not super easy because I had to remove so many components & the screen was partly glued but it worked. After another year and a half the new part broke in exactly the same way.

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!!

No other company, as far as I am aware, has 2nd hand parts seized as counterfeits. Until another company does that, Apple is undeniably the worst