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Rossmann is an important voice in the right to repair, however I do feel like he leaned into a certain audience, pandering to them a bit as a reliable target fo

Rossmann is an important voice in the right to repair, however I do feel like he leaned into a certain audience, pandering to them a bit as a reliable target for ad impressions, and it has undermined his credibility. I hear about Rossmann most now when some vicious Apple detractor uses him as an authority on things having nothing to do with repair. For instance Rossmann did a video titled "Apple watching & logging EVERY APP YOU OPEN with new OS." (which is interesting given that another of his videos is "Why I don't use Apple products", "The horrible truth about Apple's repeated engineering failures", "Is Apple using sweatshop labor in the US", etc -- there are dozens of these things) This is so ridiculously outside of his wheelhouse or expertise, but it panders to an audience that lines up to get fed that anti-Apple pablum. When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. Instead you'll find someone who has spent years calling Apple users sheep and boasting about their Windows Phone. The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it.

henriquez 5y ago
> “The horrible truth about Apple’s repeated engineering failures” This is totally in his wheelhouse and expertise since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices. You can thank YouTube’s algorithm for the inflammatory title.
- foldr 5y ago
  It’s not really. There’s a big gap between knowing how to repair circuit boards (which is mostly about part sourcing and being good with a hot air station) and understanding the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex. He has loud opinions about laptop design, but it’s worth bearing in mind that he’s never designed even a simple piece of electronics in his life.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    You are the "you can't criticise a movie if you are not a seasoned director" kind...
    - foldr 5y ago
      I don’t think that’s a good analogy. This is like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who’s never written ‘Hello World’.
      - AwaAwa 5y ago
        Seems more like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who has to debug your code.
        foldr 5y ago
        I’d hope that the person debugging my code had written at least one program of their own. If not, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in their opinions on software architecture.
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    I've seen very little of him, and didn't know he was 'The Right To Repair Guy', but I saw him freak out over an Apple laptop because he took the back off and the fan was not directly over the chip like in gamer PCs. This, in a machine that's been designed for generations to have a fan pull air aggressively THROUGH a channel, the only path the air can go, that goes directly across the CPU heatsink. This is not a 'circulating the air' situation: a laptop can't do that. It's an overall system with many considerations (turbulence, air handling noise) that is no longer a system at all if you take the top of the duct off. You cannot run that sort of machine with the case taken apart, it's part of the ducting. Either he's dishonest for effect (and clicks), or he's considerably dumber than a drummer and college dropout (yours truly! derp!) about cooling airflow in a constrained duct inside a laptop. At face value, he's dumber. For his sake I hope he's dishonest.
    - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
      I don’t think he’s ‘dumb’. Just not an engineer. He unscrews computers and replaces parts and puts them back together. I’m disappointed he doesn’t concentrate on the important topic of right to repair and finds things to criticise that seem like they’re chosen to play to the lowest common denominator.
    - wsay 5y ago
      Sounds like you misunderstood the criticisms of that laptops cooling design (which was abysmal to the point where it pretty much had to be deliberate). I would suggest refraining from calling people dumber than yourself, until you're totally sure how dumb you actually are.
      - foldr 5y ago
        Unfortunately Rossman’s critique of the cooling design really is as silly as Applejinx suggests. For some reason he seems to think that fans need to be next to the things that they are cooling.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    If only everyone on the HN really adhered to the "ne sutor supra crepidam" principle, I bet an entry with a dozen comments would be considered crowded. Just saying.
  - m55au 5y ago
    > the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex The design of a modern motherboard is far from complex since all the complexity has pretty much been hidden inside the black boxes of highly integrated circuits. You as a designer do not in general need to concern yourself with the implementation details and just need to understand the interfaces, similar to, for example, using python's numpy as opposed to writing BLAS or LAPACK from scratch.
    - foldr 5y ago
      What knowledge and experience do you have of designing motherboards or other similarly complex PCBs? Getting GHz frequency circuits to work requires much more than just understanding the digital interfaces. If you think designing and laying out a modern motherboard is “easy”, then there’s a 1% chance that you’re a highly experienced and capable electronic engineer, and a 99% chance that you just have no idea about the existence of entire classes of problems that need to be solved to make a motherboard work.
      - m55au 5y ago
        Would not call myself an experienced electronics engineer (have only gotten into RF lately, but yes I know about signal integrity and EMI problems), but getting GHz circuits to work on a modern motherboard is not as big of a deal as you might think mainly because it is a "solved problem" with best practices and design tools, and there are just not really that many things to connect together. I am not saying it is trivial or that Rossmann could do it with his knowledge (no, he could not) or that anyone could do it. I just claimed that in the grand scheme of things it is not "highly complex" (as opposed to pretty much anything analog, or proper RF, or getting the actual implementation inside the chips correct).
        foldr 5y ago
        It seems that we agree then. Rossman is operating well outside his knowledge and expertise when critiquing the design of a motherboard. As far as I know the guy has never so much as blinked an LED with an Arduino, or designed a simple two-sided low frequency PCB. A motherboard is way more complex than anything a hobbyist electronics enthusiast will ever work on. If you haven’t actually been involved in designing a motherboard yourself, I’m also inclined to believe that there might well be complexities that you’re unaware of. Power management is complex. Routing hundreds of length-matched high frequency traces is complex. Low power circuits are complex. Safely charging LiPo batteries is complex. If you can show me something similarly complex that you’ve done yourself, then I’ll be willing to believe your claim that all of this is not really very difficult.
  - bloggie 5y ago
    As someone who was a mechanic, and later became an engineer, this is the main reason why I find Rossman's videos insufferable. He is constantly making assumptions about how electronics are designed based on his views as a repair man. As a mechanic I made the same assumptions, but I was later able to learn that every decision an engineer makes is one of compromise, based on hundreds of variables that the mechanic does not know about because of the narrow view that any technician has concerning the product that they are servicing: observing the hard shell of an egg and assuming that the contents must be equally hard.
- defaultname 5y ago
  I referred to the operating system commentary as having nothing to do with his wheelhouse. The other videos just give a context to his...theme. Further, blaming YouTube for someone's pandering to the basest audience seems dubious.
  - simion314 5y ago
    Apple tracking what apps you launch, when you launch them and using a plain text protocol is fucking disgusting, anyone has the right to feel this disgust and share it , many non technical people will nit have the chance to hear the truth about Apple (how many iOS users know about the malware issue , about the CPU down-clocking behind your back or other true facts about Apple)...
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      "or other true facts about Apple)" Except everything you just listed is mostly _not_ true or unique to Apple. The apps that you launch? That was the developer certificate, not the app, over the same protocol for verifying certificates that is used in Windows SmartScreen and other systems. The malware issue? Every statistic shows iOS has less malware than Android, so why exactly is that a complaint? CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness, a battery repair is like $50 or so, and it does that so that the thing doesn't crash and restart randomly just as Android phones will also do if their batteries are old.
      - simion314 5y ago
        Sure dude, it was not the app name sent in plain text but the app certificate, what is the difference ? Either Apple does not care about your privacy or they really care but are incompetent, chose one or other or both OR impress me with some mental gymnastics that makes Apple look good. >(malware...)so why exactly is that a complaint? Because some good people at Apple prepared emails to sent tot he victims but Tim decided that is bad for PR so fuck the victims. Aka people need to know that if Apple has to chose between PR or the customer PR is on top. >CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness, You are the problem, Apple only does this after a class action lawsuit, you either are very misinformed or you are intentionally misinforming people. It is not an isolated incident where Apple is doing something fair for the user only when forced(similar cases with bad GPUs, keyboards,batteries)
- judge2020 5y ago
  > since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices. And thus, the insight comes from someone who only repairs the components, not someone who knows about designing them. I wouldn't trust my mechanic to tell me that my car's engine was designed badly because chances are that opinion is solely based on how easy/cheap it is to repair.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    You have a low opinion of your mechanic. Operational knowledge is very important and designs that look good at design time sometimes deal poorly with the world. The iPhone 6 and the butterfly keyboard show designs that were not good in actual operation. Mechanics worth their salt know great engine design beyond easy/cheap to repair. Please don't take this attitude as a developer towards your operations / support staff.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      I agree with your comment/sentiment, but to be a little more nuanced: I can tell you that butterfly keyboards suck but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed.
      - bogwog 5y ago
        > but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed. Right to repair isn't about telling companies how they should design their products.
        inb4_cancelled 5y ago
        It often sounds like that to me.
        bogwog 5y ago
        Probably because of comments like the one I responded to, which are spreading misinformation. A good resource is: https://fighttorepair.org https://fighttorepair.org
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TravHatesMe 5y ago
I agree with you but I think that's just part of the youtube celebrity playbook. His massive following might give him the confidence/ego to put out a lot more edgy type of content that appeals to his audience. I noticed he also puts out a lot of videos about his personal opinions (eg. NYC real estate, personal relationships, etc.). It is his own channel. Regardless it does not diminish his prominent role for the Right to Repair.
addicted 5y ago
And last week he released a video titled “The myth & fallacy that one brand is the problem”. 3 days ago “ASUS becomes a meme” with the thumbnail text “ASUS ARE YOU KIDDING”. The guy runs a Mac repair store. That’s his day business. It doesn’t sound inauthentic that he would have more complaints about Apple products. Further, as far as right to repair is concerned, it’s undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot, and has used its massive market driving ability to move other companies in that direction as well (although you can still find complete hardware manuals for a Lenovo, HP, etc, which was never possible with Apple).
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  "it's undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot" Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops. Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    > Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops. Others are now going in this direction following Apple's lead. Did you forget Apple literally goes so far as to make the screws nonstandard just deliberately out of spite for repair? Did you forget about Error 53? And mind you, Apple charges a premium. If Apple was charging $500 he would be taking that into account too. It's quite undeniable Apple has stood out like a sore thumb for a long time. He literally has hours (days? weeks?) of rants about shenanigans unique to Apple going back for years so please don't make us rehash them all here. > Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something. I thought the discussion was about hardware manuals. Not product quality.
fredgrott 5y ago
ahem, get real info jAck.. his main income is not monetizing youtube vids. its...wat for it! repairing macs! The way he monetizes vids is via his item store. Which you would know if you video just one single vid
- defaultname 5y ago
  His YouTube channel is estimated to net him $500K+ per year with negligible expenses. His business has an estimated revenue, per the linked article, of 1-2 million per year, with 15 employees or so. In all probability the YT channel is much more lucrative than the business is.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Where are you getting your speculative estimates? I just googled it and see numbers about a tenth of what you’re suggesting for 1.5M subscribers. It doesn’t seem probable at all that his channel is more lucrative. I also don’t understand why you emphasized “revenue” for the repair business, when the YT income is also revenue, or how you know what his YT channel expenses are. Care to elaborate?
    - bogwog 5y ago
      Regardless, why would it even matter? "Louis makes 500k per year from Youtube ads" is not a valid response to "Apple is harming consumers and destroying the environment"
    - defaultname 5y ago
      There are a number of sources that put him in that league given his number of videos and engagement. As to why I emphasized revenue, the expense to run a YouTube channel from a little room is a world removed from running a repair business with 15 employees.
      - dahart 5y ago
        Please, do share a “number” of sources, that was my question: where are you getting the info you’re using to speculate? From my own sources (Google search), it seems like you might be exaggerating. What is your point is about the YT revenue vs the repair revenue? Why do you assume they’re separate things? Maybe the YT channel is marketing for the repair business, and both operate as a single entity? Highly monetized YT channels frequently require a staff to maintain, to do filming and editing, writing and research, marketing and SEO, not to mention the time investment to produce a lot of content. How do you know what’s involved behind the scenes of this particular channel? Why are you certain the expenses are negligible and don’t involve employees? People just baselessly assuming YT vids are easy and cheap is one of the reasons so few people make money on YT, and so many people share myths about who’s getting lucky and by how much.
me_me_me 5y ago
Is this a character assassination post? It really feels like it. 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.
- CPUstring 5y ago
  A character assassination would be something like "He does something morally reprehensible (cheating, selling ads to three year olds, etc". The above post is more like "He harps on multiple things he maybe shouldn't, and has an outraged user-base he keeps stoked, so that should be taken into account." 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.
  - camehere3saydis 5y ago
    A sizable portion of the audience here considers selling ads morally reprehensible in itself. 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.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      How does that quote remotely imply there is something "wrong" with it (aside from it obviously factoring into credibility)? Another person took the exact same quote and declared that it betrayed jealousy. This borders on parody.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        If that doesn't "remotely" imply anything to you, have you considered whether you're perhaps just a little less sensitive to linguistic nuance than others? And that this doesn't necessarily mean that it is they who are overly sensitive?
wayneftw 5y ago
Which statement that you quoted was untrue?
drumhead 5y ago
This feels like one of those x is great but.... posts that you see you in NSA or GCHQ manuals about influencing the narrative in an online discussion. I saw a lot of it during the Israeli/Palestinian conflict last week. This post feels the same.
- VistaBrokeMyPC 5y ago
  It's unfortunate that the type of "directed discussion" you are referring to works so well. It drives so much engagement to the comment it ends up derailing threads on other sites, i.e. 1000 comments but only a handful of top level ones. I doubt the number of commenters that read like they took a page out of the online misinformation manuals are actually on a payroll to do so, but damn I sure am seeing this stuff often lately.
- prvc 5y ago
  Or, just a run-of the-mill Apple fan.
lmilcin 5y ago
> Rossmann is an important voice in the right to repair, however I do feel like he leaned into a certain audience, pandering to them a bit as a reliable target for ad impressions, and it has undermined his credibility. I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility. Every politician is pandering to their constituents counting on their votes. > When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. You are barely comprehensible. Louis literally owns a company that repairs MacBooks. And if you cared to watch his channel a little bit over the years as I did, he build his user base not on ire for Apple but on his expert knowledge on how to repair their products. The channel is not just for people who want to repair their MacBooks. The channels are for people who maybe at some point were interested in MacBook repair (I went in for board diagnosis) but then stayed because Louis had something more to say. > The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it. Is this jealousy I am hearing? Is this a proof he isn't right? EVERY channel on youtube with large userbase is earning some money.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility. Being beholden to ads absolutely undermines your credibility in my mind.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    This guy literally owns his own, successful repair shop business, outside of youtube channel. He also shown he is not beholden to his channel by creating thousands of hours of niche content on electronics repair for electronics guys like me at a time when no other electronics channel was too successful (eevblog was just starting). Going your way anybody successful is automatically discredited because he is beholden to his business, regardless to how he became successful or what he is saying. I don't see people moaning that anything Elon Musk says cannot be trusted because he has invested a lot of money into SpaceX or Tesla and as such he is beholden to his businesses.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Interesting. I only stumbled upon one of his repair videos a few years back — was frankly blown away by his meticulous identification and cross referencing of specific chips, his ability to replace surface-mount components. It left me with an appreciation for someone who can dedicate themselves to this depth of esoterica and make something I thought impossible look ... doable by an enthusiast? But from your comment I wonder about that audience you mention: anti-Apple. Because something that I also took away from his videos was this sense that technology, and I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all. I was careful not to say he made the repairs look easy — he made repair look doable but also underscored just what the layman is up against (SMDs, obscure codes on chips that are little bigger than fleas, specialized tools to open cases, paper-thin ribbon cables, etc.). I think his audience is broader than just anti-Apple. Perhaps they're upset about all of the ways in which we have become enslaved to devices we can't understand.
- rdedev 5y ago
  He had a couple of videos where he went looking for buying a new office space. Those were, in his words, the best performing videos of his channel. Real estate stuff. A lot of the people who watch his stuff relate to his frustrations on a personal level
- webmobdev 5y ago
  I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all. A "normal" person's inability to understand or repair is limited by the lack of the literature, tools and parts - not because technology has "advanced". (To a lay person, any technology that they doesn't understand is akin to magic to them). And this is ignoring the glaring obvious - things are today being deliberately designed to be unrepairable because that's more profitable for company's like Apple that even lobby against any Right to Repair legislation. Remember, if they want these companies can design things to be easily repairable - e.g. concept https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop
neya 5y ago
Careful, like another comment pointed out, this sounds like a polished way of character assassination/accusation - that he's trying to squeeze his userbase for monetary gains. I would argue that most of his userbase is tech savvy and most of them (for example I also watch his videos for references on some ICs/upgrades) have ad-blockers in place. He has immensely contributed so much to the repair community so much so that many shops in Asia wouldn't even exist if not for his videos. I had one of those keyboard faults on a brand new Macbook Pro. The so called "Genius" jokers didn't even know it was a known issue on their machines. I had to send them a Rossman video just to help them even understand that such a thing was going on. So, I think we should be careful here of not questioning anyone's character without proof/evidence. I mean, we could say the same about Tim Cook too, right? That's why I think this is a bad direction for discussion that will only lead to flame with little value for readers here.
eganist 5y ago
Yikes. Distilled into its abstract, you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers. I'm not a fan of hit jobs especially when presented as extensive prose to veil the attack. Please reconsider and assume the best intentions in people. Unfortunately, I can't assume the same of your comment because there was no reason for you to author it except a personal distaste for the human subject.
- defaultname 5y ago
  This tact has been plied by a dozen different replies in a dozen different but similar ways (some talking about prose, while others claim it's incomprehensible). Groan. A large number of the replies I have gotten would normally be deleted by mods, for good reason. If you're rewording to conjure up flamebait or attacking by conspiracy because you don't like a position, better to not post it. "you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers." Don't add your own pejorative narrative and then strike it down. It adds nothing to HN and is flamebait. Rossmann took his right to repair advocacy and branched out into a personality engagement. For YouTube viewers who are into that, or people who sympathize with his other positions, good for you and good for him, but for the rest of us it's just noise. I no longer pay attention to what he says because his motives have been perverted.
  - eganist 5y ago
    > This tact has been plied by a dozen different replies in a dozen different but similar ways (some talking about prose, while others claim it's incomprehensible). > Groan. defaultname, I'm sorry you took offense. I'll see if I can present it a bit differently. The GP comment reads as if its author added fluff to distract from the true nature of the comment — an entirely unsolicited rant that acts as flamebait on HN.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      Every comment on HN is "unsolicited". I certainly didn't ask for your observation on this. Further, "rant"? Give me a break. Humorously the top comment to this submission is that Rossmann is a "national treasure", along with some commentary about some other guy and how they should do a podcast together. Nothing whatsoever to do with the submission. Just slathering praise and adulation. Whatever floats someone's boat and no skin off my back. Did you, perchance, berate that comment for being some sort of NSA-tactic astroturfing "praise-job" that was an unsolicited rant? No? Gosh, I wonder why. Did you conspire that it's subterfuge dropped by Google? Declaring my comment flamebait is telling. It's a completely banal observation about a conflict in someone's position. The many angry personal attacks (such as yours) are not my doing, and reflect on your own rather bizarre motivations.
CivBase 5y ago
Apple critics like to watch content produced by someone who regularly critisizes Apple. So what? No surprises there. Yeah, he often talks about things outside his wheelhouse. He has an entire series about real estate in NYC. That doesn't make his actions and commentary regarding right to repair any less legitimate.
webmobdev 5y ago
When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. Oh, please - as if only an Apple fan can have legitimate concerns about an iDevice. I am typing this on an iPad. I am a vocal Apple critic. (Go through my post history here). Apple has turned a section of their customer base against them because of their unethical business tactics. Right to privacy and data protection is intrinsically linked to your Right to Repair. Those of us who have invested in a product want to own it completely, like we do our car or house.
devwastaken 5y ago
He wasn't wrong in any of those videos.
agloeregrets 5y ago
This. I cannot stand the guy. He clearly has gone deep in the brand and his hate-jerk is how he makes money. It is intentional and designed to maximise impressions. I would not trust a single thing he has to say on basically any topic as it is all marketing as a result. It was clear 5 years ago and is worse today. Hell, if Apple addressed his concerns he would be out of this (very lucrative) business. So do not trust him to actually care about your right to repair. As always, follow the money.

henriquez 5y ago

> “The horrible truth about Apple’s repeated engineering failures” This is totally in his wheelhouse and expertise since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices. You can thank YouTube’s algorithm for the inflammatory title.

foldr 5y ago
It’s not really. There’s a big gap between knowing how to repair circuit boards (which is mostly about part sourcing and being good with a hot air station) and understanding the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex. He has loud opinions about laptop design, but it’s worth bearing in mind that he’s never designed even a simple piece of electronics in his life.
- varispeed 5y ago
  You are the "you can't criticise a movie if you are not a seasoned director" kind...
  - foldr 5y ago
    I don’t think that’s a good analogy. This is like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who’s never written ‘Hello World’.
    - AwaAwa 5y ago
      Seems more like being critiqued on your software architecture by someone who has to debug your code.
      - foldr 5y ago
        I’d hope that the person debugging my code had written at least one program of their own. If not, I wouldn’t be particularly interested in their opinions on software architecture.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I've seen very little of him, and didn't know he was 'The Right To Repair Guy', but I saw him freak out over an Apple laptop because he took the back off and the fan was not directly over the chip like in gamer PCs. This, in a machine that's been designed for generations to have a fan pull air aggressively THROUGH a channel, the only path the air can go, that goes directly across the CPU heatsink. This is not a 'circulating the air' situation: a laptop can't do that. It's an overall system with many considerations (turbulence, air handling noise) that is no longer a system at all if you take the top of the duct off. You cannot run that sort of machine with the case taken apart, it's part of the ducting. Either he's dishonest for effect (and clicks), or he's considerably dumber than a drummer and college dropout (yours truly! derp!) about cooling airflow in a constrained duct inside a laptop. At face value, he's dumber. For his sake I hope he's dishonest.
  - tokamak-teapot 5y ago
    I don’t think he’s ‘dumb’. Just not an engineer. He unscrews computers and replaces parts and puts them back together. I’m disappointed he doesn’t concentrate on the important topic of right to repair and finds things to criticise that seem like they’re chosen to play to the lowest common denominator.
  - wsay 5y ago
    Sounds like you misunderstood the criticisms of that laptops cooling design (which was abysmal to the point where it pretty much had to be deliberate). I would suggest refraining from calling people dumber than yourself, until you're totally sure how dumb you actually are.
    - foldr 5y ago
      Unfortunately Rossman’s critique of the cooling design really is as silly as Applejinx suggests. For some reason he seems to think that fans need to be next to the things that they are cooling.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  If only everyone on the HN really adhered to the "ne sutor supra crepidam" principle, I bet an entry with a dozen comments would be considered crowded. Just saying.
- m55au 5y ago
  > the design of a modern motherboard, which is highly complex The design of a modern motherboard is far from complex since all the complexity has pretty much been hidden inside the black boxes of highly integrated circuits. You as a designer do not in general need to concern yourself with the implementation details and just need to understand the interfaces, similar to, for example, using python's numpy as opposed to writing BLAS or LAPACK from scratch.
  - foldr 5y ago
    What knowledge and experience do you have of designing motherboards or other similarly complex PCBs? Getting GHz frequency circuits to work requires much more than just understanding the digital interfaces. If you think designing and laying out a modern motherboard is “easy”, then there’s a 1% chance that you’re a highly experienced and capable electronic engineer, and a 99% chance that you just have no idea about the existence of entire classes of problems that need to be solved to make a motherboard work.
    - m55au 5y ago
      Would not call myself an experienced electronics engineer (have only gotten into RF lately, but yes I know about signal integrity and EMI problems), but getting GHz circuits to work on a modern motherboard is not as big of a deal as you might think mainly because it is a "solved problem" with best practices and design tools, and there are just not really that many things to connect together. I am not saying it is trivial or that Rossmann could do it with his knowledge (no, he could not) or that anyone could do it. I just claimed that in the grand scheme of things it is not "highly complex" (as opposed to pretty much anything analog, or proper RF, or getting the actual implementation inside the chips correct).
      - foldr 5y ago
        It seems that we agree then. Rossman is operating well outside his knowledge and expertise when critiquing the design of a motherboard. As far as I know the guy has never so much as blinked an LED with an Arduino, or designed a simple two-sided low frequency PCB. A motherboard is way more complex than anything a hobbyist electronics enthusiast will ever work on. If you haven’t actually been involved in designing a motherboard yourself, I’m also inclined to believe that there might well be complexities that you’re unaware of. Power management is complex. Routing hundreds of length-matched high frequency traces is complex. Low power circuits are complex. Safely charging LiPo batteries is complex. If you can show me something similarly complex that you’ve done yourself, then I’ll be willing to believe your claim that all of this is not really very difficult.
- bloggie 5y ago
  As someone who was a mechanic, and later became an engineer, this is the main reason why I find Rossman's videos insufferable. He is constantly making assumptions about how electronics are designed based on his views as a repair man. As a mechanic I made the same assumptions, but I was later able to learn that every decision an engineer makes is one of compromise, based on hundreds of variables that the mechanic does not know about because of the narrow view that any technician has concerning the product that they are servicing: observing the hard shell of an egg and assuming that the contents must be equally hard.
defaultname 5y ago
I referred to the operating system commentary as having nothing to do with his wheelhouse. The other videos just give a context to his...theme. Further, blaming YouTube for someone's pandering to the basest audience seems dubious.
- simion314 5y ago
  Apple tracking what apps you launch, when you launch them and using a plain text protocol is fucking disgusting, anyone has the right to feel this disgust and share it , many non technical people will nit have the chance to hear the truth about Apple (how many iOS users know about the malware issue , about the CPU down-clocking behind your back or other true facts about Apple)...
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    "or other true facts about Apple)" Except everything you just listed is mostly _not_ true or unique to Apple. The apps that you launch? That was the developer certificate, not the app, over the same protocol for verifying certificates that is used in Windows SmartScreen and other systems. The malware issue? Every statistic shows iOS has less malware than Android, so why exactly is that a complaint? CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness, a battery repair is like $50 or so, and it does that so that the thing doesn't crash and restart randomly just as Android phones will also do if their batteries are old.
    - simion314 5y ago
      Sure dude, it was not the app name sent in plain text but the app certificate, what is the difference ? Either Apple does not care about your privacy or they really care but are incompetent, chose one or other or both OR impress me with some mental gymnastics that makes Apple look good. >(malware...)so why exactly is that a complaint? Because some good people at Apple prepared emails to sent tot he victims but Tim decided that is bad for PR so fuck the victims. Aka people need to know that if Apple has to chose between PR or the customer PR is on top. >CPU down clocking? iOS warns you your battery is old, warns you this may cause slowness, You are the problem, Apple only does this after a class action lawsuit, you either are very misinformed or you are intentionally misinforming people. It is not an isolated incident where Apple is doing something fair for the user only when forced(similar cases with bad GPUs, keyboards,batteries)
judge2020 5y ago
> since he does circuit board repair for Apple devices. And thus, the insight comes from someone who only repairs the components, not someone who knows about designing them. I wouldn't trust my mechanic to tell me that my car's engine was designed badly because chances are that opinion is solely based on how easy/cheap it is to repair.
- protomyth 5y ago
  You have a low opinion of your mechanic. Operational knowledge is very important and designs that look good at design time sometimes deal poorly with the world. The iPhone 6 and the butterfly keyboard show designs that were not good in actual operation. Mechanics worth their salt know great engine design beyond easy/cheap to repair. Please don't take this attitude as a developer towards your operations / support staff.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I agree with your comment/sentiment, but to be a little more nuanced: I can tell you that butterfly keyboards suck but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed.
    - bogwog 5y ago
      > but I am not qualified to say how they should have been designed. Right to repair isn't about telling companies how they should design their products.
      - inb4_cancelled 5y ago
        It often sounds like that to me.
        bogwog 5y ago
        Probably because of comments like the one I responded to, which are spreading misinformation. A good resource is: https://fighttorepair.org https://fighttorepair.org

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TravHatesMe 5y ago

I agree with you but I think that's just part of the youtube celebrity playbook. His massive following might give him the confidence/ego to put out a lot more edgy type of content that appeals to his audience. I noticed he also puts out a lot of videos about his personal opinions (eg. NYC real estate, personal relationships, etc.). It is his own channel. Regardless it does not diminish his prominent role for the Right to Repair.

addicted 5y ago

And last week he released a video titled “The myth & fallacy that one brand is the problem”. 3 days ago “ASUS becomes a meme” with the thumbnail text “ASUS ARE YOU KIDDING”. The guy runs a Mac repair store. That’s his day business. It doesn’t sound inauthentic that he would have more complaints about Apple products. Further, as far as right to repair is concerned, it’s undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot, and has used its massive market driving ability to move other companies in that direction as well (although you can still find complete hardware manuals for a Lenovo, HP, etc, which was never possible with Apple).

gjsman-1000 5y ago
"it's undeniable that Apple is easily the worst of the lot" Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops. Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > Actually, it's quite deniable. You can't find Hardware repair manuals for many if not most new PC laptops. Others are now going in this direction following Apple's lead. Did you forget Apple literally goes so far as to make the screws nonstandard just deliberately out of spite for repair? Did you forget about Error 53? And mind you, Apple charges a premium. If Apple was charging $500 he would be taking that into account too. It's quite undeniable Apple has stood out like a sore thumb for a long time. He literally has hours (days? weeks?) of rants about shenanigans unique to Apple going back for years so please don't make us rehash them all here. > Most PC laptops have oversights in their design that would make Rossmann blush if he took a look at them. My parents had a $500 2018 HP that the screen broke off of, after only a year of use, even though it was always on a desk and it literally broke by itself from just opening/closing because the hinges were too weak for the 17" display or something. I thought the discussion was about hardware manuals. Not product quality.

fredgrott 5y ago

ahem, get real info jAck.. his main income is not monetizing youtube vids. its...wat for it! repairing macs! The way he monetizes vids is via his item store. Which you would know if you video just one single vid

defaultname 5y ago
His YouTube channel is estimated to net him $500K+ per year with negligible expenses. His business has an estimated revenue, per the linked article, of 1-2 million per year, with 15 employees or so. In all probability the YT channel is much more lucrative than the business is.
- dahart 5y ago
  Where are you getting your speculative estimates? I just googled it and see numbers about a tenth of what you’re suggesting for 1.5M subscribers. It doesn’t seem probable at all that his channel is more lucrative. I also don’t understand why you emphasized “revenue” for the repair business, when the YT income is also revenue, or how you know what his YT channel expenses are. Care to elaborate?
  - bogwog 5y ago
    Regardless, why would it even matter? "Louis makes 500k per year from Youtube ads" is not a valid response to "Apple is harming consumers and destroying the environment"
  - defaultname 5y ago
    There are a number of sources that put him in that league given his number of videos and engagement. As to why I emphasized revenue, the expense to run a YouTube channel from a little room is a world removed from running a repair business with 15 employees.
    - dahart 5y ago
      Please, do share a “number” of sources, that was my question: where are you getting the info you’re using to speculate? From my own sources (Google search), it seems like you might be exaggerating. What is your point is about the YT revenue vs the repair revenue? Why do you assume they’re separate things? Maybe the YT channel is marketing for the repair business, and both operate as a single entity? Highly monetized YT channels frequently require a staff to maintain, to do filming and editing, writing and research, marketing and SEO, not to mention the time investment to produce a lot of content. How do you know what’s involved behind the scenes of this particular channel? Why are you certain the expenses are negligible and don’t involve employees? People just baselessly assuming YT vids are easy and cheap is one of the reasons so few people make money on YT, and so many people share myths about who’s getting lucky and by how much.

me_me_me 5y ago

Is this a character assassination post? It really feels like it. 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.

CPUstring 5y ago
A character assassination would be something like "He does something morally reprehensible (cheating, selling ads to three year olds, etc". The above post is more like "He harps on multiple things he maybe shouldn't, and has an outraged user-base he keeps stoked, so that should be taken into account." 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.
- camehere3saydis 5y ago
  A sizable portion of the audience here considers selling ads morally reprehensible in itself. 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.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    How does that quote remotely imply there is something "wrong" with it (aside from it obviously factoring into credibility)? Another person took the exact same quote and declared that it betrayed jealousy. This borders on parody.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      If that doesn't "remotely" imply anything to you, have you considered whether you're perhaps just a little less sensitive to linguistic nuance than others? And that this doesn't necessarily mean that it is they who are overly sensitive?

wayneftw 5y ago

Which statement that you quoted was untrue?

drumhead 5y ago

This feels like one of those x is great but.... posts that you see you in NSA or GCHQ manuals about influencing the narrative in an online discussion. I saw a lot of it during the Israeli/Palestinian conflict last week. This post feels the same.

VistaBrokeMyPC 5y ago
It's unfortunate that the type of "directed discussion" you are referring to works so well. It drives so much engagement to the comment it ends up derailing threads on other sites, i.e. 1000 comments but only a handful of top level ones. I doubt the number of commenters that read like they took a page out of the online misinformation manuals are actually on a payroll to do so, but damn I sure am seeing this stuff often lately.
prvc 5y ago
Or, just a run-of the-mill Apple fan.

lmilcin 5y ago

> Rossmann is an important voice in the right to repair, however I do feel like he leaned into a certain audience, pandering to them a bit as a reliable target for ad impressions, and it has undermined his credibility. I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility. Every politician is pandering to their constituents counting on their votes. > When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. You are barely comprehensible. Louis literally owns a company that repairs MacBooks. And if you cared to watch his channel a little bit over the years as I did, he build his user base not on ire for Apple but on his expert knowledge on how to repair their products. The channel is not just for people who want to repair their MacBooks. The channels are for people who maybe at some point were interested in MacBook repair (I went in for board diagnosis) but then stayed because Louis had something more to say. > The guy is monetizing a certain base. Probably doing pretty well out of it. Is this jealousy I am hearing? Is this a proof he isn't right? EVERY channel on youtube with large userbase is earning some money.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
> I don't see how pandering to your audience or making money on ad impressions is undermining credibility. Being beholden to ads absolutely undermines your credibility in my mind.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  This guy literally owns his own, successful repair shop business, outside of youtube channel. He also shown he is not beholden to his channel by creating thousands of hours of niche content on electronics repair for electronics guys like me at a time when no other electronics channel was too successful (eevblog was just starting). Going your way anybody successful is automatically discredited because he is beholden to his business, regardless to how he became successful or what he is saying. I don't see people moaning that anything Elon Musk says cannot be trusted because he has invested a lot of money into SpaceX or Tesla and as such he is beholden to his businesses.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Interesting. I only stumbled upon one of his repair videos a few years back — was frankly blown away by his meticulous identification and cross referencing of specific chips, his ability to replace surface-mount components. It left me with an appreciation for someone who can dedicate themselves to this depth of esoterica and make something I thought impossible look ... doable by an enthusiast? But from your comment I wonder about that audience you mention: anti-Apple. Because something that I also took away from his videos was this sense that technology, and I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all. I was careful not to say he made the repairs look easy — he made repair look doable but also underscored just what the layman is up against (SMDs, obscure codes on chips that are little bigger than fleas, specialized tools to open cases, paper-thin ribbon cables, etc.). I think his audience is broader than just anti-Apple. Perhaps they're upset about all of the ways in which we have become enslaved to devices we can't understand.

rdedev 5y ago
He had a couple of videos where he went looking for buying a new office space. Those were, in his words, the best performing videos of his channel. Real estate stuff. A lot of the people who watch his stuff relate to his frustrations on a personal level
webmobdev 5y ago
I'm talking about the day to day things in our lives, has gone completely beyond any normal person's ability to repair, diagnose, or, really, understand at all. A "normal" person's inability to understand or repair is limited by the lack of the literature, tools and parts - not because technology has "advanced". (To a lay person, any technology that they doesn't understand is akin to magic to them). And this is ignoring the glaring obvious - things are today being deliberately designed to be unrepairable because that's more profitable for company's like Apple that even lobby against any Right to Repair legislation. Remember, if they want these companies can design things to be easily repairable - e.g. concept https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop

neya 5y ago

Careful, like another comment pointed out, this sounds like a polished way of character assassination/accusation - that he's trying to squeeze his userbase for monetary gains. I would argue that most of his userbase is tech savvy and most of them (for example I also watch his videos for references on some ICs/upgrades) have ad-blockers in place. He has immensely contributed so much to the repair community so much so that many shops in Asia wouldn't even exist if not for his videos. I had one of those keyboard faults on a brand new Macbook Pro. The so called "Genius" jokers didn't even know it was a known issue on their machines. I had to send them a Rossman video just to help them even understand that such a thing was going on. So, I think we should be careful here of not questioning anyone's character without proof/evidence. I mean, we could say the same about Tim Cook too, right? That's why I think this is a bad direction for discussion that will only lead to flame with little value for readers here.

eganist 5y ago

Yikes. Distilled into its abstract, you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers. I'm not a fan of hit jobs especially when presented as extensive prose to veil the attack. Please reconsider and assume the best intentions in people. Unfortunately, I can't assume the same of your comment because there was no reason for you to author it except a personal distaste for the human subject.

defaultname 5y ago
This tact has been plied by a dozen different replies in a dozen different but similar ways (some talking about prose, while others claim it's incomprehensible). Groan. A large number of the replies I have gotten would normally be deleted by mods, for good reason. If you're rewording to conjure up flamebait or attacking by conspiracy because you don't like a position, better to not post it. "you're saying his primary motivation isn't right to repair; it's to extract cash from his viewers." Don't add your own pejorative narrative and then strike it down. It adds nothing to HN and is flamebait. Rossmann took his right to repair advocacy and branched out into a personality engagement. For YouTube viewers who are into that, or people who sympathize with his other positions, good for you and good for him, but for the rest of us it's just noise. I no longer pay attention to what he says because his motives have been perverted.
- eganist 5y ago
  > This tact has been plied by a dozen different replies in a dozen different but similar ways (some talking about prose, while others claim it's incomprehensible). > Groan. defaultname, I'm sorry you took offense. I'll see if I can present it a bit differently. The GP comment reads as if its author added fluff to distract from the true nature of the comment — an entirely unsolicited rant that acts as flamebait on HN.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    Every comment on HN is "unsolicited". I certainly didn't ask for your observation on this. Further, "rant"? Give me a break. Humorously the top comment to this submission is that Rossmann is a "national treasure", along with some commentary about some other guy and how they should do a podcast together. Nothing whatsoever to do with the submission. Just slathering praise and adulation. Whatever floats someone's boat and no skin off my back. Did you, perchance, berate that comment for being some sort of NSA-tactic astroturfing "praise-job" that was an unsolicited rant? No? Gosh, I wonder why. Did you conspire that it's subterfuge dropped by Google? Declaring my comment flamebait is telling. It's a completely banal observation about a conflict in someone's position. The many angry personal attacks (such as yours) are not my doing, and reflect on your own rather bizarre motivations.

CivBase 5y ago

Apple critics like to watch content produced by someone who regularly critisizes Apple. So what? No surprises there. Yeah, he often talks about things outside his wheelhouse. He has an entire series about real estate in NYC. That doesn't make his actions and commentary regarding right to repair any less legitimate.

webmobdev 5y ago

When you see someone posting a Rossmann video, 9 times out 10 if you look at their history it isn't some guy concerned about repairing his iPhone or MacBook. Oh, please - as if only an Apple fan can have legitimate concerns about an iDevice. I am typing this on an iPad. I am a vocal Apple critic. (Go through my post history here). Apple has turned a section of their customer base against them because of their unethical business tactics. Right to privacy and data protection is intrinsically linked to your Right to Repair. Those of us who have invested in a product want to own it completely, like we do our car or house.

devwastaken 5y ago

He wasn't wrong in any of those videos.

agloeregrets 5y ago

This. I cannot stand the guy. He clearly has gone deep in the brand and his hate-jerk is how he makes money. It is intentional and designed to maximise impressions. I would not trust a single thing he has to say on basically any topic as it is all marketing as a result. It was clear 5 years ago and is worse today. Hell, if Apple addressed his concerns he would be out of this (very lucrative) business. So do not trust him to actually care about your right to repair. As always, follow the money.