Hacker News Reader

Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite youtubers is a channel named STS telecom[1]. He uses various tools to repair logic boards on iPhones. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch him hunt down a shorted capacitor the size of the end of a toothpick. Then like magic the phone works perfectly.

What it also taught me is that even the the phones are becoming more complicated, they’re also still repairable. Apples move is laudable here, and important at reducing e-waste.

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC39yMXOL0ubFxLWwF1RwelA

View on HN

Also Louis Rossmann channel where he repairs Macbooks while ranting about Apple.

No one can turn a three minute video into an hour long rant quite like Louis can.

Louis has done so much to keep the fire hot under Apple when it comes to Right To Repair. He's even gone to state legislatures to demonstrate why RtR is required in the modern world. "Mad Props" to Louis.

And getting his videos up on the front page of one of the biggest sites in the world, reddit, probably helped too!

Thanks to the YouTube policies of a couple of years, there's a lot more than there used to be.

Pity this is for iPhones only ... Louis would be a happier man if he could get access to genuine Apple parts instead of having to scavenge for them from other dead machines.

He'd also need the same software they have access to though to provision a new T2 chip ...

Donors boards can be very inexpensive. There’s a very small market for broken boards that are otherwise only good for scrap.

The only problem is when a particular component is really prone to failure and becomes rate limiting, while having no 3rd party supply.

(Ie: a burned out resistor is easier to swap than carry a full part count of every combination. While a custom chip that fails is really bad news).

The big problem Rossman has is that if the T2 chip goes the entire logic board is dead UNLESS you have the internal Apple tool to pair a new T2 chip to it.

That's not what they're doing though.

Apple is in deep trouble sales wise. They're not moving nearly as many phones and their margins are shrinking due to the Chinese/American political climate. Almost every day I hear ads on the radio for "brand new Iphone 7's" from mobile carriers. That's 3 generations behind and they're still moving new-old stock.

People are losing faith in Apple. The iteration of their progress has slowed and people aren't willing or able to spend $1,000 on a phone anymore. Especially one that doesn't offer significant improvements over the one they currently have.

On top of it all, the Right to Repair movement is growing beyond a point where they can fight it. RTR is snowballing people from all over the country from farmers to techies to mechanics to factories. People don't want to spend absurd amounts of money just to be held hostage by some ineffectual customer support team anymore, and the organization and consolidation of RTR movement is finally taking a toll on the lobbyists.

Don't laud them for this. They wouldn't be doing it if their old business model of telling broken phone owners to fuck off if was still turning a profit.

> They're not moving nearly as many phones

Actually, they're still moving about the same average number of phones each quarter that they have since 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...

Given the fact they're a trillion dollar company that's almost just as bad to them.

That's moving the goalposts.

This comment from the article should tell you a little bit about our problem:

> renewables are approaching their limit in California. The state’s electricity grid manager increasingly has to pay neighboring states to take California’s excess solar

It’s not about simply producing energy, it’s about producing the right load at the right time. For that, you have exactly one carbon-free choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com