Louis Rossmann
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2025
15:05 · 1.6M views · Jul 2, 2022
Louis Rossmann explains why many 16-inch MacBook Pros fail and are difficult to repair, focusing on power design on the logic board. He argues the design leads to failures that are hard to fix.
HN mentions are mostly critical or incidental, using it in discussions of Apple hardware design and repairability rather than recommending it.
4 comments from Hacker News
You forgot: - inadequate cooling - fried NAND chips - screens spontaneously cracking - flexgate (not to be confused with bendgate) And that’s only a subset of the engineering failures with MacBooks. You even bring it up in your post: the only reason they have “dead silence” is because Apple is literally baking your laptop and leaving you to pay the bill. I’ll give Apple that their custom chips are pretty great for power and efficiency, but their actual product design is bad. I mean, who designs a laptop with the fan pointing the wrong way?[0] Or a power bus alongside a data bus?[1] These are literally basic errors that go into production for a company that is far too big for this to be happening. [0] - [LINK] [1] - this video
Louis Rossman gives lots of examples on hist YouTube channel. For example, in one case Apple appears to have cut some corners when designing the power supply for the SSD, so that when it fails it dumps 13 volts into the 2.5 volt SSD which permanently damages it: this video In other videos he shows how Apple puts display data lines right next to high-voltage lines instead of separating them with a ground line, which means you’ll fry the board if you get a tiny bit of moisture in that area. So you will notice these cut corners when your device breaks and the repair costs almost as much as the original device.
Engineers have become experts in selecting components so that they fail right after the warranty period. Replaceable batteries just means they will make something else weaker instead, preferably something that fries the device once it fails (see this video ). It's too dangerous not to, as nowadays phones (or computers in general) don't really need to be upgraded that often to remain useful. No manufacturer wants a repeat of the 1080Ti.
If your strategy is working for you then that's great. I do wonder why you need a new computer every 3 years, but I don't know your personal circumstances. The things you do might actually make perfect sense. But for me personally, you lost me at "Macbook": this video Then again, life is often about tradeoffs. For me, Framework offers the best tradeoff.