Rossmann opensourced his repair manuals and has detailed videos of how to repair equipment, you can literally start your own repair business of that.
If that is not being for right to repair I don't know what is.
Reading your post again it is a character assassination post.
Shifting goalpost and attacking personal characteristics instead of the point.
If I said, "I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him" that isn't a character assassination- just my opinion he is unlikeable.
Then you're not reading what some folks are writing. To some people here he seems to be a "bad person". e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27257657
This, on the other hand:
>The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.
OP does say it as if there's something wrong with it.
If you were in court for an act you didn't commit and the prosecutor said:
"I find his voice really grating and his outrage mostly makes me dislike him"
What would you said to this?
This commenthas noting to do with anything. Its a pointless opinion nothing to do with given case. And its a vague ad-hominem attack.
I grew up seeing plenty of this kind of passive-aggressive language lawyering. It doesn't change anything.
Seems like the type of tactic you'd see from those lobbyist groups that pay money to release commercials claiming right to repair will lead to rape: https://youtu.be/EozPi1qmH44?t=59
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If a comment is sitting at the top of the thread that you feel is off-topic in an unhelpful way, the one thing you can do that will make the most difference is let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for more explanation.
Posting insinuations about "lobbyist groups" is singularly unhelpful; as I've written about ad nauseum in recent years, the overwhelming majority of such perceptions are based on zero evidence. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
It's not really surprising at all if you're on here enough. It's standard practice. It's not like it takes as many upvotes as the story gets to be the top comment on the page. Usually 20-40 is enough even for modestly popular posts like this. Larger ones will require over 50. A few people don't like some of his content or thumbnails and there you go - easy to reach the top.
Pretty rabid fanbase. Anything other than adulation must have nefarious origins. It certainly can't be organic.
I think it was upvoted (after a lot of downvotes) because a lot of people have experienced the same thing. Rossmann started as a Mac/Apple repair guy elbowing to try to keep his business going, which no one can contest and was admirable and sympathetic. He had a credible argument about right to repair.
Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension. He has a whole plethora of anti-Apple opinions, and he seems to be a cult of personality not for repair people, but rather for people who still harbor a grudge that their Lumia prophecies didn't come true.
So I just said what I thought, and clearly a lot of people have the same impression, which was that once I'd see his name and think credible repair arguments, and now I see his name and just click past because it's going to be some new anti-Apple screed appealing to a base. Eh.
One thing that can be said about him is that he supports R2R fro a selfish reason of being able to keep his business afloat.
> Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension. (...)
WHO CARES? Who cares? I want my phone to be sum of more then 1 parts. I don't care if Rossman kicks puppies for fun. I don't give a fuck about that. I don't care if someone is supporting R2R because their turtle choked on an apple. Its as irrelevant as this example.
What I care about is clear pattern of slow creep of anti-consumer practices lately serialisation of parts is abhorrent. Before that - parts exclusively sold to the makes of the phones, design choices made with intention of making repairs harder.
And this is not only scourge of phones, if car manufactures could they would be renting you cars. If they could the car computers would lock your car till you pay them to fix 0x4525828 error.
> I and many others don't like that Rossman is the one who is harboring this when he has moved from well-done repair videos to rants about anything that can be ranted about.
He rants on random topics that's what his audience likes to watch. And mind you, they're often quite educational and make you think. Even when he's wrong.
It's ludicrous to say he's a bad person because he rants about something other than R2R in some of his videos. It's like you cannot fathom a good person can have more than one topic he's interested in?
> Somewhere along the way -- maybe after Apple had customs block some of his imports, or maybe after he started getting those fat YouTube checks -- he turned from an Apple repair guy to an anti-Apple advocate in virtually every dimension.
So after being persecuted by Apple he became generally anti-Apple? Wow, go figure, how utterly weird.
(And clearly shows he's the bad guy and Apple the good ones.)
And FWIW I've rarely seen outright accusations of character assassination on here, even against wildly cynical comments, insults or when wild allegations are made. So again it's weird that your pretty moderate/balanced take on a guy directly relevant to the article is getting so many of those.