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Comment by throwahey | Hacker News Reader

I would take anything Rossman says with a grain of salt, he clearly has a personal vendetta against Apple. Further, Apple products are almost entirely recyclable, up to and including the packaging. As long as they are properly disposed of, you wouldn't be producing additional waste.

And you are assuming that "flash" and "sexy" serve a single, vapid purpose. The designs of their products are as compact and space efficient as possible because weight, battery size, and thermals all play a factor in the quality of a product.

You can shit on them all you want but no company comes close to Apple in quality, and I don't see anyone complaining about the right to repair ultrabooks, or pixelbooks.

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Louis Rossmann, Jessa Jones, these are all people I'm aware of at least on YouTube that are people who truly care about teaching the public how to do a lot of their own repairs.

I can tell you, I'm a software guy. And I was absolutely intimidated by circuit boards, until I found the world of electronics repairs on Youtube (EEVBlog too). Now I have fixed two power supplies and a pair of headphones. In all those cases, I was able to get parts easily from third parties (and for my headphones, I got cheap replacement parts from AudioTechnica themselves).

I am delighted to have rediscovered this part of my skills that I lost in my teens when I fell in love with software development.

Yet I still can't get a genuine apple battery to replace on my phone. I've successfully replaced batteries on about 5 iPhones now, but they were all shady battery replacements on Amazon. Frankly I'm just annoyed that Apple doesn't make these parts available.

Look at the backlog for battery replacements now. If you get it from Apple, there is now a monthslong wait-list at the genius bar because they've created their own bottleneck.

>are people who truly care about teaching the public how to do a lot of their own repairs

Rossmann makes money off of his businesses that repair computer products, Apple or otherwise. He stands to gain a lot based on the popularity of his channel whether he's telling people the truth or not. He's not in it to help people, he's in it to drum up business. If he helps people along the way, then that's great.

Case in point - he made a whole video about how shitty the new MacBooks are and claimed that plugging a USB device into the USB-C port disabled WiFi. He pushed that point and tweeted about it and posted it everywhere. When it was discovered that it wasn't the computer but the cheap $5 USB-C to USB-A converter that he was using that was unshielded (which is required by the USB spec), he never issued a retraction or an apology. All he wanted was to get in on the fervor surrounding the newly released laptops. He doesn't give 2 shits about whether or not he's teaching people factual information. What really sucks about it, much like the whole "Right to Repair" movement, is that it takes away substantially from the issues and points he brings up that are completely valid.

>As long as they are properly disposed of, you wouldn't be producing additional waste.

I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. You'd have to take into account the cost of sourcing raw materials for a replacement machine, right? I've heard anecdotes about how buying a used gas-burning car is actually less detrimental to the environment than buying a new EV; this strikes me as a similar situation.

buying a used gas-burning car is actually less detrimental to the environment than buying a new EV

I think that's only true if that gas burning car was going to be destroyed if you didn't buy it. Someone will buy it, maybe someone that's replacing their older less efficient car. And by buying the more expensive EV, your demand is helping to increase volume and lower costs of EV's.

No, even driving 200miles a day, for 15 years in a 1978 suburban with bad rings is less poluting than producing a single eCar.

The air quality in the 70s would disagree with you. Sunsets are not supposed to be orange, and the sky is not supposed to be brown.

Source?

https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life...

Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle. For larger, longer-range EVs that travel more than 250 miles per charge, the manufacturing emissions can be as much as 68 percent higher.

These differences change as soon as the cars are driven. EVs are powered by electricity, which is generally a cleaner energy source than gasoline. Battery electric cars make up for their higher manufacturing emissions within eighteen months of driving—shorter range models can offset the extra emissions within 6 months—and continue to outperform gasoline cars until the end of their lives.

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