iFixit tools in Apple's lab
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Not sure if such a lab would be even open to all employees at Apple from what I hear.
Soon engineers will be staging their workstations and benches so they look like the Kardashian I mean Apple selfies.
On the sidenote it is kind of ironic that you label this a studio, which is generally an artist term, and then claim that apple creates shiny pieces and not art. That would make it precisely a lab...
I would much prefer people bumbling over their words but speaking off-the-cuff than people who sound like they are reading something scripted by the PR department off a teleprompter.
Besides that, yes not having planned speeches and speaking your mind unfiltered are traits that I would absolutely expect to see in the same person. They are different expressions of the same thinking process. I'm sure a lot of us have read that Thailand is were pedos go etc. But most people would have the restrain to not call someone attacking them a pedo.
Musk tweeting some guy is a pedo has NOTHING to do with his public speaking skills. It wasn't in a public speaking setting.
“But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation.
"So, we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what’s going to keep Apple, Apple, is if we keep us, us"
- Steve Jobs.
I'd also prefer a more casual approach.
> He seems extremely tense and probably would freak out at someone having a bad day or even making a bad joke in the same room
This statement seems unfair to me. Not everyone who looks tense would lash out at innocent people.
The stock price is down since Monday, so I guess they screwed up?
I swear every presentation he spends a greater and greater portion of his speaking time doing prayer hands.
As a former EE, I can categorically state that absolutely no bench I have ever seen is that tidy when debugging hardware. It's usually a complete snake pit of cables, mess and hell. And half the equipment that they would actually need to support what they have out on display is not actually there. Also no one is going to sit on those god awful chairs while working.
And on top of that I guarantee that there are PCs in their real laboratories that do the CAD and debugging work. Zukon, SolidWorks, Catia and Altium don't run on Macs.
PCs design Macs. Discuss :)
Edit: in retrospect I think it felt like a Scientologist recruitment video.
But the old Apple II on the shelf in the back got me to smile.
Not sure for CATIA, but this is true for Zuken, Altium and SolidWorks at least; and Mentor Graphics and Cadence.
At least I hope so.
I made a very similar comment to my gf during the live stream. I think there is something insular, cult-like, and very broken in tech culture, and the live stream really seemed to emphasize the point.
Perhaps paradoxically, I thought this year's WWDC videos were much more natural and interesting, even though they clearly also were meticulously rehearsed and stage managed.
Check the transition at 13:10 "back to Johny"
You can't just do CGI and call it a day at 90% close-enough levels. You gotta do it well or not do it at all.
The sleek, clean, uncomfortable workspace is just convincing enough for the average user to seem like a real lab. It's perfectly on brand with how Apple wants to be perceived.
iFixit itself doesn't perform the repairs. They simply make and sell tools to facilitate unofficial repairs, and they had a good reputation on doing that - which, as you said, is becoming increasingly difficult.
They produce IP (researching and producing very clear instructions for fixes) and manage supply chain (trusted replacement parts & tools, worth more vs aliexpress equivalents because they endorse them).
The things they make money off are largely substitutable. Their value add (well deserved IMHO) is trust.
Don't look for gold yourself: sell the camping supplies and pickaxes to the prospectors looking for gold.
* https://www.flexport.com/blog/trade-merchants-rich-californi...
<runs from room protecting head from shrapnel>
For extreme example of this look at the Kindle - obviously it’s glued so it’s cheaper to make, but it makes it completely unrepairable.
It's obvious that apple has spent a lot of money on intentionally making their devices harder to repair.
At this point ascribing any sort of "it's just the economics" reasoning to Apple is wishful thinking. They're doing this on purpose.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...
Apple is trying to protect people (and their public image) from the scammy people who swap the cheapest shit on your phone and still charge a premium.
Then when the phone explodes and takes someones buttock with it, it's WAY too late for Apple to say "but it was a 3rd party battery, which was dodgy and installed carelessly" - the Court of Twitter has already decided that Apple is evil and their phones are crap and here come the class action suits.
So the only sane way is to make sure people can't get dodgy components installed on their devices.
Also, if every Apple Genius was Rossmann-good with similar tools, they could solder out single components and fix pretty much anything on site.
But they're not, so they are instructed on how to swap the smallest viable part when one section fails. That might mean swapping a whole case when one rubber foot falls of, but that's still easier and more cost-effective than training everyone to be a soldering and electrical engineering genius.
1) Half the stuff won't work if you solder them properly anyway.
2) Apple should not be worrying about the shoddy job repair shops might do. It's not their business. What they could do is ask for every 3rd party repair shop to declare that they are not Apple certified clearly in their website/storefront.
I've done things Apple's way, and my reward was losing access to my work tools for two weeks. They can pay for prime real estate but they can't pay to train their Geniuses to actually fix things? To change a battery? They can't keep parts in stock? Doing things their way is miserable---they are capricious, they deny they ever make any design errors, it is inconvenient. This drives people to third-party providers where they can actually get better service for the products they paid a premium for. How does this protect people?
I'm not even talking about component-level repair. I'm not talking about changing a bad chip.
These are the feet[2]. They stick on. No soldering required. But apparently that's too hard for their Geniuses to do.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rCUF-V1esM
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-and-MacBook-Pro-Uni...
The purpose is to deter people who have no business being inside of it to begin with.
Some smart person should enumerate all of the references. It was like an all-Apple version of Ready Player One.
I'm not sure what that was about. To me it was just weird, and came off as slightly pedo.
Ultimately you often need a setup something like this as EDA vendors can have various rules to follow about where the binaries are kept. For implementation engineers there may be onerous terms around access to the process library files which are easier to deal with if the libraries plus the tools that use them don't go near the engineer's personal machine.
Plus an engineer may want to spin up multiple instances of tool (very common for simulation for instance) so you want easy access to a cluster for this purpose.
If (when) the camera track is static, they can overlay any CGI on top of the final image to enhance backgrounds or add/remove items.