144 karma · joined April 8, 2020
I appreciate the alert, thank you my friend.
think about what a police officer's salary is. think about underpoliced areas.
how many arrests would a trained, qualified police officer make in a high crime area of a major city in the timeframe it takes for them to earn $7300?
this is a bad deal.
the cost per arrest in austin while these cameras were up was over $7000/arrest.
From an anti-crime perspective, spending $7000 on police salaries & having the police patrol high crime areas is a much more effective use of funds. It also doesn't violate the 4th amendment.
I differentiate between someone who holds political beliefs that I don't, or that are a little wild; and someone who holds the belief that I am trying to get them killed. Particularly when there is an easy way to figure out which phone is mine if one were so inclined.
The former may not like me, but the latter ? if you believed someone was trying to kill you, what lengths would you go to? i think grapheneos & librewolf are two very different cases.
I was quite aggravated that the tech press managed to put focus on the piece of kit they were sending people to fix devices, rather than on the real issue; telling distributors they're not allowed to sell us individual components that they would otherwise make available to anyone willing to wire them money for a large enough order.
The aggravation over the tools rental, to me, was always a nothingburger.
I've always gone out of my way to make people feel welcome at meetups. From asking a little about what they do, how their day is going, what their dreams are in life. I don't just do this as meetups. I do this when people recognize me on the street, when people recognize me if I'm on a date. I even took five minutes out to talk to a viewer while I was taking my girlfriend for treatment after she had a stroke.
The only person I've ever had a negative reaction from at a publi meetup in person was the stalker that followed my girlfriend across the country after I physically removed from the event.
You're not somebody I've ever met.
He also encouraged me to start the right to repair non-profit and donated $1,000,000 to it 3 years ago.
It's not just the 10 minute video they think is boring, it's anything I produce. They're not viewers, they're commenters when something frontpages reddit or hn.
and that's fine - people don't have to watch or like my stuff. I just don't produce content for people who will NEVER watch my stuff. It's like fogo de chao trying to cater to vegans.
I could make this video 30 seconds, but it loses its effect. It loses the story, which is what draws people in who otherwise wouldn't care. Without the history, the details, the villain, and the point - do you honestly believe a 15 short of "hey bro john deere uses gpl stuff and doesn't release it rawr" would have the same effect as this video? Even 10% the effect, of getting normal people to care about farmers getting screwed? I doubt it.
I could be wrong, but as far as "Pushing into mainstream" - it made CBC news, at least half a dozen other news stations, got a 50 page report from the FTC, made it to the president's desk, was mentioned in an executive order, and a bill just passed a week ago.. I don't know how much more mainstream it gets unless the issue gets made into a boy band.
He then said he cannot negotiate with bullies, and the legislature said if the opposition won't negotiate, then we can't pass a bill.
Imagine if I said that I refused to be present at my murder trial because I didn't like the clerk. Would I get off trial for murder? Hell no. But it works for them.
He makes broad assumptions and undermines trust in our entire industry, and claims me calling him "clueless" in the thumbnail is beyond the pale - that's just too much! As a result, I am hands off in that state. I supply money and resources to people who do the work in that state, and keep my name off of it all. There was one senator who was on my side, Doug Erickson, but he died of COVID....
The irony of it all, one of the companies he represents, Samsung, actually DID start installing tiktok on customer phones without their consent, a point I went over 2 years later. This happened months after the legislature tossed right to repair because of concerns about repair shops stealing student data/copies of their homework... I'm not kidding. My demeanor in this video is kind of off the wall, but.. can you blame me? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUThdBfy_-U
No. My channel was never started with the goal of having 100m subscribers. In my initial musings, I thought, MAX subscribership, BEST CASE scenario was 300 subscribers, since I estimated the people going down the LCD-cell-only/component level repair rabbithole with Apple products to be around 300 at the time 10 yrs ago. and that assumes 100% of them watch/subscribe to my channel, which is a lofty figure.
getting to 1.7 million subscribers is ridiculous. This wasn't supposed to happen. A cursory look at my older videos, total lack of preparation, production quality, etc should make clear that the goal was never widespread viewership.
but, if 1.7 million people ARE viewing, if I've blown out my initial best-case-scenario by 3 zeros and change.... why go out of my way to do it all differently? Why adapt my content to people who admit they don't want to watch anyway?
It's not a movie, it's a 9 minute video... I totally get if someone doesn't want to watch a 9 minute video, but... I'm not making content for them.
I wasn't trying to get big, I was just producing what I felt like producing.. if doing that got me to 1.7 mil, maybe being myself is the thing to keep doing.
Try replacing an angle sensor in a A2442. It won't work, even if it is from another Macbook. It has to have GSX run on it for it to work.
What we do now when they're corroded is do our best to try and clean up the existing one. Maybe desolder the hall sensor, use a fine tipped iron like the Hakko 2032 w/ T30-KN tip to "file" the pins and pads as much as we can, and put it back on. Sometimes, it works.
When it doesn't, we tell the customer "I'm sorry, no sleep for you. Only manual sleeping!" It sucks.
The places with access to GSX, are the places not permitted to do component level board repair on machines with liquid damage.
The places without access to GSX, are the places with the best ratings in the country for component level repair on machines with liquid damage.
The world is a meme.
With the Right to Repair stuff, in some states, I've put together my own lobbying plans. In others, I tried to figure out who had the best foothold there already with an actionable plan & pre-existing experience winning on similar issues and funded them. Some examples of this were washington, rather than do it myself I gave USPIRG a fair amount of funding to get it done, which is helpful since the charlie brown affair sullied my reputation among some of the legislators.
Even in states where we do our own lobbying, there is usually a large level of partnership with organizations that already exist within the state, and a microgrant program where we fund a bunch of small groups to educate locals/organize people prior to making a legislative/lobbying push.
I would be fine with the author of the article not being informed on the topic if they had just reached out to some farmers to ask what they think before blindly publishing this as a win.
I'm not a farmer. I have no clue.
I get numbers of people who show up at the state legislature in Nebraska in 2017, Maryland 2020, NY 2015, and I call them all up when this comes out. Some will be open to speaking on the record, some not, and some will come on video.
Nobody has all the answers, and nobody has the time to research & become an expert on everything when covering so many different topics in a day. That's fine.
Not asking the direct stakeholders who are affected by this news what they think of it when writing these articles, is a giant misstep. It takes so little time to do.
I think there is a financial penalty to not being the first out with an article, so the incentive structure is to be the first out with the new news, rather than the most correct. The corrections will never do as well as the original piece, either. There was one thing I got wrong in 2018, because I didn't have access to the court records at the time. Once they were shared with me, I posted a correction in 3 separate videos, that, altogether, got less than 5% the viewership of the original piece. It's even worse for mainstream outlets that issue the correction as an asterisk or bury it, rather than as a centerpiece of their programming.
You are correct in that you need to fish where fish are. Conversely, this sounds too close to staying with the abusive partner because they're hot. At some point, the abusive partner needs that prompt to change their behavior, and that does mean leaving them, even if they are hot.
My problem is not owing on the areas where I made a mistake, which were 0.1% of my transactions. By all means, spend a year and two people's time around the clock going through my books to uncover less than $7k, the state is welcome to spend their time the way they see fit, regardless of fiscal viability.
My problem was with the starting assumption that my error rate was closer to 50%, before they even read any of my submissions, and maintaining this for almost a year and digging into it. That's a heart attack.
Every step of the process feels like you are trying to convince a toddler that PPBUS_G3H is 8.5v when the SMC works and 8.15v when the SMC doesn't, and if you can't get the toddler to understand it you lose your life savings.
A 0.1% error rate is a pretty good error rate. Would I prefer 0%... sure... I am human... I spent years trying to grow a business from nothing. I didn't get a bank loan for this or line of credit, I was rubbing two sticks together for years, working out of the park, and taking the time to show everyone else how to do what I do once I learned how to do it at night during the little spare time I had. To do that and be at 0.1% for an error rate after a year of professionals who are financially motivated to find everything they can, I'm actually kinda proud of that.
I don't feel like sharing my gross revenue with people I do not know. I do hire an expert, which is why a business with so many different and complex income streams had a 0.1% error rate over a very long time period.
If you get a 99.9% on a final after a group of professors spend a year reviewing your test & essay answers, wouldn't you be happy?
That's not my claim. I am not saying audits result from that.
I am saying, that the fact that my business model was disruptive in nature(show people how to do repairs that our industry has tried to keep secret for a long time) combined with the legislative efforts means it would be stupid for me to do something like cheat my taxes. It's incredibly low hanging fruit if you actually have enemies.
A competitor's business 10 years ago asked if I would close for $80,000, and implied he'd be reporting me to state collections agencies if I didn't take the offer. I laughed, and he said this was being cocky. "I pay people on the books, unlike you. and then I rattled off the names of 3 people he was paying off the books.. and he shut up.
If you google portatronics 46th st, you will learn about the business way faster than if you show up in person, take down the license number, look up their license number, etc.
Further, I have had angry customers leave bad reviews, file chargebacks, etc. Of all the customers I've had in the past 9 years with a DCA license, I had one go to the DCA over an issue they had with the post office that I quickly resolved with a full refund. This is one out of over 40,000 people in nine years, during COVID when the post office was being screwy with everything.
My point is, this just doesn't happen anymore. but I've had TONS of people take grievences to google/yelp, and 99% of the time we give them a call, say mea culpa, ask what we can do to fix it, and work it out and it gets turned into a 5 star again.
People who have a problem go to Yelp/Google to leave a review, or their credit card company for a chargeback. You won't find much related to the reputation of the business using the DCA because it's not the way this generation handles these issues.
We've moved on from this system. It's a system designed to be useful for a pre-internet era, and exists solely so that the city can generate revenue. It's important to call a spade a spade.
a) checked my soldering skills b) looked to see whether I got dust between the LCD cell & backlight layers when doing screen replacement c) checked to see what quality of iPhone screens we use for screen repairs d) asked or tested my ability to do my job
You pay the troll toll, and you get a paper that goes on your wall. I could be the best tech in the world, or I could be a giant idiot... you'd never know.
Some people have the mistaken impression that being licensed means I have been tested, inspected, etc.. nope. They inspect to make sure your business cards have your license number on them. They don't inspect to figure out if you actually do good work for your customers.
I do not mean the phone is an actual red rectangular prism used to construct buildings, and anyone listening to that video knows that. I mean that to the customer, they have a device that is dead. You are using the literal interpretation of the word brick to be ridiculous.
>Also, puhleeeeeeze... it's a good thing for society? There are any number of people for whom this won't be a good thing.
Name one person that would be harmed by the availability of a charging chip.
>The majority of people running repair shops can't do the repairs you do. You may think it's easy but you completely ignore the number of the mall kiosk "repair shops" that do shoddy work and can't put a new screen on right and expect them to do work that requires soldering and component-level surgical operations.
I do not ignore the fact that there are bad repair shops. The existence of a bad repair shop, whether first party or third party, is not an argument to remove people's ability to repair their own property.
>I'm only saying that you pretend like everyone else is going to get the same experience from every repair shop
Again, we'd probably be able to speak and get along much better if you stopped making things up. I understand. You dislike me. You're salty about me - I get it. but there is no need to continuously make things up. I have not stated this. There are good repair shops, and horrible repair shops - and I feature BAD repair shops on my channel in repair videos. I castigate their practices & bad work. I have no problem doing that. There is bad in every industry.
My argument is that, the existence of one bad repair shop, is not on its own enough to justify restricting repair for everyone.
This is also incorrect. I don't understand why you find the need to continuously make things up throughout your posts in this thread.
The law is not asking Apple to stock the chip. It would be sufficient if they not restrict the manufacturer of the chip, from selling freely in the market.
Why do you repeatedly lie? It's really not cool.
>that 99% of customers don't care if it's "their" phone that they have when they leave the store so long as it's indistinguishable for them.
You are implying that most customers DO NOT CARE about paying $349 vs $50? They do not care about having to reload their data from scratch vs. leave in 10 minutes with everything as it was?
How can you imply I am being disingenuous and say this with a straight face?
>. It's great that you have the skills to do the 15-minute repair with a cheap flex cable and it's great that you're training an army of toddlers to do this very repair process for every phone with a broken jack
Yes, it is great - you can have as much salt as you want about an "army of toddlers", but yes, technicians doing repairs for $50 in 10 minutes without erasing data that the manufacturer wants $350, in 2 weeks, while erasing data is a GOOD thing. Feel free to make fun or handwave it away as much as you want, but in the real world people value their time & their money and don't wish to senselessly waste it.
>"I want Apple to do work and keep stock for me so that I can make money at their expense without having to follow their standards or guidelines". That's nonsense.
You are correct; this is nonsense, because you strawmanned & made it up, as you have most of what you've posted here. Nothing I have asked for would be an "expense" for the manufacturer.
Stop making things up. It's seriously not cool.
It can be done, but it is a huge waste.
Take the A1989 Macbook. Let's say you bring it in because it stops charging. It's 2019. It's dead. Let's pretend I am a normal repair shop, and not someone with youtube fame that can find someone at intersil/renesas that can get me chips.
Let's say the ISL9240 charging chip dies.
I can, in theory, do my research, and find out that the iPhone XR charging case uses the same chip. I can buy that charging case for $100+, disassemble it, locate the ISL9240, remove it, reball it, and replace it on the customer's logic board.
but......this is insane.
a) I have to waste a battery charging case, including the lithium battery.
b) I am adding $100+ to the repair cost since I have to stock & sell this case now just to get a chip.
c) I have to do research to figure out what other device on the market uses this chip, on top of the work of figuring out what is wrong on a complex 5+ layer PCB.
The viability of this repair, for a shop that needs to get their customer in & out in a day or two for them to remain satisfied, goes out the window almost immediately.
>Even if we're talking about Apple devices or even Sony devices, there needs to be a balance between repairability and access.
What does this actually mean? What is the downside to this chip being made available for sale, so that when the device fails it can be repaired? What are we balancing here?
>Now, someone with enough social followers can create a PR nightmare for a company based on something that's totally out of that company's control so it's no surprise that no one wants to open up that Pandora's box.
It is 100% within the company's control whether or not they want this part to be available; the reason it cannot be sold to anyone is because they make it that way.
>I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Louis Rossmann are both the perfect example of why Right to Repair should work while at the same time being an amazing example of why the current versions of R2R can't work.
Where is the argument in favor of why this cannot work, and how I am example of it? Where is the citation? How is it for decades parts and chips were made available with zero problems and now it can be asserted that this "can't work" with no explanation?
This increasingly feels like someone's throwing poo at the wall in the hopes of finding something that sticks.
Luckily, nothing I've advocated for will do that!
Keep your A1989 Macbook the way it is. Change nothing, but this one thing: when it stops charging, let Louis(or you) buy an ISL9240 from mouser.com. And let people buy a schematic from Apple, instead of waiting for it to get pirated to vinafix, or leaked to me by a fan who works at Apple.
That's it. That's all.
No change to your device's functionality, no change to your device's weight, no change to your device's software.
Does this sound fair?
I really do want to engage with people who have concerns about what Right to Repair might do to their devices. I want to learn your concerns. I want to learn how to ensure Right to Repair bills, as they are drafted, never inconvenience you or lower the quality of the devices you use. I want to learn how to create messaging that makes it clear that this is my goal.
Serious question, and I'd be honored to get a reply.
If a customer has a basic problem, and you tell them that
a) You will not fix their phone b) You will not recover data from their phone. c) Your only option at Apple is to have them send your phone off to neverneverland, and get someone else's refurb for half the price of a new one
Did you tell them that their phone was now a red colored rocklike substance that can be used to build a house? No, bt that doesn't mean the person who left that store being told their phone was a "brick" was lying to you. You're effectively telling them their old phone is bricked. The fact that this was done for a long time over basics such as a charge port is sad.
Let's not even get into the fact that boards that had been inside iPhone 6+ and flexing for years were being used in refurbs. People who paid the replacement fee were given refurbs that were close to failure, and once warranty ran out, bye bye.
Whether or not a robot is going to go through your recycled device to give Apple a refurb to sell isn't what matters to the customer. When a customer who has a basic headphone jack issue gets told "there is nothing I can do for your device other than send it back to the manufacturer and get you a replacement in two weeks for $349 when your phone's resale value is $300" when a headphone jack goes bad, instead of "yes, let me perform a 15 minute repair using a cheap flex cable that a toddler could do", that sucks. Right to Repair isn't about forcing the manufacturer to fix it, either. It's about making sure the parts are made available, so that either a repair shop, or the consumer themself, can do that job rather than have their phone go off to a robot.
Saying "and you know it" isn't an argument, it's what people fighting back and forth in drama TV say.
> No one is telling customers "your phone is now a brick" when their charge port breaks
I did not say they tell customers your phone is a brick when their charge port breaks.
AASP did say, that when your headphone jack(attached to charge port) breaks, your only solution is
a) Send it back to manufacturer b) 2 week turnaround time c) All data GONE d) You spend half the cost of a new one, to get someone else's refurbished phone.
Citation: https://youtu.be/OR5ZUl0Q-NI?t=100
Brick could technically be one way to put it, since they will not fix your phone.
>and "right to repair", as a whole" does not have a fine handle on what's being advocated for.
It actually does. The bills in almost every state in the U.S. are virtually identical. What are the differences between House Bill 1212 in Washington and S4104 in New York that make it impossible to tell what is being advocated for? What are the inconsistencies?
These are bills in different states on opposite sides of the US, with totally different legislators; and each bill makes it clear they are advocating for the same thing.
What causes confusion over what Right to Repair is asking for is the opposition. They will make things up, like claim I am asking for source code, or demanding everything be modular. None of this is in any of the bills. No one cares though, because no one reads them.
>especially considering that you've made misleading claims in your videos and ignore when people call you out on it.
No citations. I'd respond to your assertion of a misleading claim if I knew what it was.
>That, to me, is not the way to grow support for people's rights over the products they own. The only way to do that is to be blunt and honest about what the situation is on both sides and what the motivations for the two sides are. They are not irreconcilable.
This seems to have gained a lot of steam. There are a small minority of haters, but that is what it is. You'll get that with anything that you do, and there is no movement that avoids this.
>and there are very few people, and I'm excluding you in this, who aren't trying to push their desires for it for anything but selfish reasons. I get that you're kinda the de-facto figurehead of the movement but let's not pretend that your reasons for supporting this are altruistic and that you're not pushing for this because you run a business that needs this to go through.
So now we have moved onto, "I don't have an argument so I am going to call you self interested." :( This one is less fun.
I have 1.58 million subscribers on YT. I hate using this word: it makes me sick.. but it is the case. I am "famous." If I say, "man, if only I had a schematic for an 820-00170" on stream, it gets emailed to me by someone from a hushmail address. If I say "man, I'd love to fix X, I just can't get this chip. Damn. If only I knew someone at TI.", I get a box with no return address in the mail with a spool of chips, and a handwritten thank you note for the content. This will happen from now until the end of time, because once you reach 1.58 million people, at some point, one of those people works somewhere or knows someone who can get you what you need.
I'll be fine. My business will go on just fine. I'm good.
You know whose repair businesses won't be fine? The repair shops that AREN'T run by C-list youtube celebrities. The businesses that are genuinely at the mercy of what they can buy from ebay or mobilesentrix.
I chose to get to this part last, because IMO it is deflection without substance. How does whether I benefit from something matter when arguing whether it is a good thing for society? It's like saying "Look at how selfish he is, PRETENDING he is altruistic when advocating for clean drinking water legislation. He's not doing it because he cares about making the world better. HE JUST WANTS CLEAN DRINKING WATER FOR HIMSELF TOO! BECAUSE HE DRINKS WATER! Yeah, can't trust him."
This is nonsense. It is natural, if the world is made a better place, that you as a citizen of the world are one of the beneficiaries of this improvement.
My customers benefit from saving money & time, and having choice(including the choice to get access to the parts/manuals to do the repair WITHOUT INVOLVING ME from this same legislation). Other shops benefit from having tools, diagrams, etc to do their job. I benefit from job security in the event that "fame" isn't enough going forward to get me what I need to do my job.
I like seeing people follow in the footsteps to success I was lucky enough to achieve. YT can be said to be a form of advertising, but stuff like this https://repair.wiki/w/A1707_2016-2017_15%E2%80%9D_Touchbar_M... I write in my spare time because I like knowing that someone else might be walking that path I took to success a little easier with less roadbumps in it. There is a happy feeling I experience knowing I am improving my small corner of the world.