Louis Rossmann
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2018–2023
24:48 · 3.9M views · Apr 24, 2018
Louis Rossmann, a Macbook repair shop owner, goes through a long list of Apple hardware engineering failures, from GPU defects to keyboards and repair practices.
Mostly cited by critics of Apple hardware quality, and as a rabbit hole for people curious about laptop repair.
20 comments from Hacker News
Louis Rossmann, a well known advocate for right-to-repair and a repair shop owner has a lot to say about Apple's build quality. this video His videos are a great rabbit hole to go down, if you are interested in laptop repair methods. He knows his stuff.
Louis Rossmann made a video highlighting a lot of the engineering problems with Apple laptops. His whole business is about repairing Apple laptops so he has all the reasons and incentives to defend Apple and downplay their issues. this video
Apple has been making hardware with sub par durability for quite some time. The only things they made more durable have all been at the expense of repairability. The whole bendgate thing? Yup, apple actually went against best practice and stopped using proper underfill. The result? The touch-ic chip came off. Who would have guessed that a bendy phone without underfill would have flexion damage? Everybody. Even apple themselves, in official, leaked documents. Apple has been extremely successful at denying problems up until there is a class action lawsuit. Then they silently release a pretty hostile repair program with the words "a small percentage of iDevices ...". I used to be the biggest apple fanboy, but after having not one, but two macbooks fail on me was more than I was willing to stand. The last time I had to chose: leave the device to them in an official repair programme and have it wiped OR saving the data on it and void any apple repair programme (they later changed this policy though). Why? Because some sort of catch-22 where they would not do data recovery on a device with a faulty logic board (onto which they had soldered the SSD!) and the fix was a new logic board with a new SSD with the old logic board and SSD sent away for refurbishment. Think different! Don't take my words for it. Take this repair guys words for it: this video
Hardware incompatibilities goes both way stuff that won't work on windows or that requires some obscure/bloated driver will work plug and play on linux. Depends on the hardware and the work put on it but the opensource people. Many people have their first linux experience with ubuntu which is a shame seeing how this distribution is riddled with problems that are not being addressed because the distro is going to be binned in 6 months anyway and devs have to work on the next release. I agree with you, daily usage is mostly a web browser / email client but there's also all the uncommon stuff and exotic hardware except my experience is that 70-80% of time you plug it and it just works, 10% of time it requires some web searching and meddling with installing/configuring somethins and 10% of time it will not work (85% of those are apple devices). There's also one important thing to take into account, in 2010 Mac were repairable and serviceable, since 2012 repairability of Mac is abysmal and consistently get the worst score on fixit. The long list of Apple engineering failures[1] adds to the idea that getting Mac just to be able to run OSX is not as good as it was in 2010. [1]: this video
They will fix it eventually in their own way, as almost always after losing class action lawsuit they release info saying 'some keyboards' and 'in specific conditions', for 'some users' and so on. Then replacement will be $175. But who else to say it better as my favourite Apple basher Louis Rossman: this video (see description below video if you want tl;dr) Many people report X1 to be great MBP replacement (I have mid 2014 MBP 13" retina - couldn't be happier and 2017 MBP 15" with s*it strip - well keyboard is awful as well as this touch strip) and from using X1 for a week and from input from people @ work those are not that great either. First of all fan noise and it's rpms it's very annoying, screen quality and resolution (after using MBP with retina) is just horrible, touchpad is just rudimentary - works but can be better.