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> “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

> “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

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