Comment by jmpman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmpman | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve learned more about commercial real estate from Louis than I would have from other sources. There are disincentives for commercial real estate owners to lower their leasing rates, as it can drive a re-evaluation of loan criteria by the banks, forcing the owner to immediately increase equity. Banks don’t want this to happen, as it makes their books look bad.

Watching his business struggle through Covid fills me with great respect for the small business owner and the difficult choices which must be made. Did NY have it out for him? They were far from business friendly with their Covid restrictions. Recently, his shop was fined for not registering used laptops that his customers had abandoned for repair. Sure, NYC is attempting to prevent stolen laptops from being resold, but the level of bureaucratic idiocy turns Rossman’s channel into a Shakespearen comedy.

As for his specific gripes about repeated Apple design failures, he makes a good argument. Two stand out. First, liquid intolerance. Thinkpads from years ago used to tolerate coffee spilt on the keyboard. It flowed right through. From the number of water damaged MacBooks Louis repairs, it appears Apples can’t take a drop. If Apple is upset with Rossman’s criticism, they can easily apply board level coating to solve the problem.

Second, he’s critical of the connectors being soldered directly to the motherboard instead of going into a daughterboard and connecting via a flex connector.

And, yes, the above design decisions are made by Apple for a number of different, possibly valid reasons. To hit a price point, to fit within a form factor, to deliver in a required timeframe. But Louis brings up the point that Apple may be making these decisions for less than consumer friendly reasons. Planned obsolescence? Could Apple change the design of their connectors so they won’t break? Yes, but maybe they didn’t because they expect 5.8% of the connectors to fail and not be economical to repair in the Apple store, driving 5.8% greater revenue.

All that being said, yes, Louis takes the above points, which can be read in a minute, and rehashes them 50 different ways.

I've had three 12" Macbook main boards, two screens, and two keyboards replaced free under Australian Consumer Law because of broken components. Connectors that should have been replaceable onsite in seconds instead requiring depot maintenance and hundreds of dollars in couriers and staff interactions. 10c LVDS cables soldered on instead of replaceable, unrepairable even to Apple, have sent two high quality display panels straight to landfill.

Not a great way to run a business.

This is the number one thing that fails for me I hate these ribbon cables. Don't blame him for soldering though the connectors can be 5 to $6 a piece ugh hirose...

Building things to a certain price is always going to yield accusations of doing that to make it more breakable. But it's probably one of those cases where you can spend thousands of dollars for only 1% more reliability. Stuff that you bend open, throw in your backpack twice a day, touch for 14 hours a day, eat your meals over, etc. is going to break no matter how expensive the components are. I used to work on embedded systems and was always impressed by the quality of eval boards we got. Name brand components all over -- Coilcraft inductors, Vishay resistors, etc. They still flaked out, had bugs, broke, and required manual rework. The performance of the $10,000 reference board was the same as the $100 production units with decidedly non-name-brand components.

We'll never know for sure if Apple is making the right trade-offs, because you can't buy any other machines that run OS X to compare to, but they probably are. People who just spilled coffee on their keyboard really want a laptop that weighs 3x as much to have a keyboard drainage system. The 99% of users that don't spill coffee on their keyboard but do carry their laptop to and from work twice a day probably appreciate the weight savings. (You can kind of infer whether or not Apple is making the right decisions by looking at the PC market. Not a lot of laptops with roll cages and keyboard drainage anymore. People want specs per dollar, not the ability to run their laptop over with a car. When they do run their laptop over with a car or drop it into a pool, they're sad. But if those parts were standard issue, they wouldn't be able to afford a laptop to begin with. Such is the way of the market, I suppose.)

Apple probably doesn't have any good reason to make repairing their laptops so painful for skilled professionals. As far as I can tell, even their own repair service is garbage. That is probably a conscious decision -- paying someone to write repair guides, train technicians, and maintain a fulfillment network for spare parts cuts into new computer sales, so it's spending money to lose money, which nobody will ever do. Maybe government intervention is the right answer, but it's probably a cost the market can't bear. PC manufacturers compete ruthlessly, and all the laptops are junk too. There is probably a maximum amount of money consumers will pay for a certain amount of specs, and it isn't enough to make a reliable mobile computer. The downside is that you'll never have a computer you can spill coffee on. The upside is that even someone without a lot of money can afford a personal computer. That's the tradeoff.

I use a desktop and keep it where I can't spill my coffee on it. Works well.

> Recently, his shop was fined for not registering used laptops that his customers had abandoned for repair. Sure, NYC is attempting to prevent stolen laptops from being resold, but the level of bureaucratic idiocy turns Rossman’s channel into a Shakespearen comedy.

I saw this complaint and didn't follow what NYC did wrong. If one isn't allowed to sell "unregistered" laptops or whatever, why would abandoned customer laptops get a pass? Did the law state they should? I gather he is still allowed to repair them for people, even potentially thieves, just never "launder" them.

So what should he do to computers he spent time and money to fix and clients abandoned? Throw them into the bin?

I think you make clients pay a deposit, and if they don't pick up the laptops, send them to the state's lost property department. If that isn't possible, I guess you buy the laptop from the customer for some token small amount of money, and then sell it back to them when they come to pick it up. If they don't show up, it's legally your laptop.

> If they don't show up, it's legally your laptop.

That's the whole problem. He tries for a couple of months to contact them (calls, emails, etc) and if they don't even respond, after around 9 months they get put into the resale bin.

His policy is "no fix, no fee" so I would presume there's no deposit. If there is no transfer of money it seems difficult to make even a weak legal argument that the laptops were "purchased". That is why Rossmann found the whole situation ridiculous.

He actually tried calling the city to ask what he should do with abandoned laptops. He was transferred multiple times, told to call multiple numbers, and tried leaving voicemail messages to find an answer. He got nowhere, and the closest he got was "That's a good question".

The law explicitly states purchased laptops, which he did not. Now we can say "But that's not the purpose of the law, just the letter!" But the purpose of the law is to make selling stolen laptops non-profitable to thieves - and abandoning them does not turn a profit. Meaning Louis runs afoul of neither letter nor spirit of the law.

And so I'm legitimately asking, if you think he's in the wrong: what is he to do, when he can't properly fill out LEADS online without a purchase price? He tried calling the city, he tried calling would-be customers to collect their things. The former couldn't tell him, and the latter told him it wasn't worth their time.

He should recycle them. These machines are usually pawned off on seniors in very shady "deal of the century" sales schticks. My 72 year old father in law bought a complete pos laptop for $200 that was an abandoned machine from a repair shop. It didn't have any drivers installed, it was running Vista and it could not connect to the internet.

Rossman may not be selling under such shady circumstances, but this is how most of these machines are moved. I don't think any good comes out of selling these machines.

But can't every thief claim the laptop they picked up was "abandoned" too? I mean it was there on the table and no one was around at the moment..

If the customer owes him money and he is selling the laptop to get that money because the customer is choosing that outcome, then in a sense he is selling the laptop on behalf of the customer. For this option to be available to the customer, it seems they should still need to prove it was properly purchased. It still seems like this creates a loophole otherwise. What happens if a theft victim spots their laptop being used by someone who purchased it legitimately from a shop like this?

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