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> My guess is less than .01% In the beginning it is theorized that humans were a hunter gatherer species. We dedicated 100% of our time to collecting food. At

> My guess is less than .01% In the beginning it is theorized that humans were a hunter gatherer species. We dedicated 100% of our time to collecting food. At some point we learned about farming and cultivating livestock. People could now generate more food then they would need. This enabled something magical: one person could generate the food required for a group of people and that group of people could do other things! This formation of a group and their social dynamics are sometimes called a "society". Soon people figured out you could do the same thing we did with food production with other things: building things, making cloths, cooking, etc. I think, even if .01% of Apple customers worked in the repair industry you'd see this same exact effect! For example: 1 Louis Rossman can fix ~10 MacBooks/day or 3650/year. There's about 5 Billion internet users and 20% of them are Mac users. .01% of Mac users would be ~100k globally. That means, if everyone of these people became interested in repair as a profession were as fast as Rossman we could fix all 1 billion Apple user's devices within 3 years. This is about the rate people buy and throw out an Apple product due to some breakage. This would essentially keep the market full of low cost devices for people who couldn't normally afford a Mac. Also, fun fact, it's estimated there's only about 50k neurosurgeons world wide: https://thejns.org/view/journals/j-neurosurg/130/4/article-p1142.xml#:~:text=The%20global%20total%20number%20of,have%20no%20neurosurgeons%20(zero) https://thejns.org/view/journals/j-neurosurg/130/4/article-p.... So we have an estimated 2x MacBook repair people to brain repair people. (Obviously this isn't concrete numbers but essentially even if only 40 people world wide want to repair devices it makes sense to let them)

pembrook 5y ago
Your Mac user numbers are off by a factor of 10X. The vast majority of those 5 billion internet users are exclusively accessing the internet through smartphones (cheap android ones), and do not even own a desktop PC/laptop. Android and iOS account for most internet traffic. Android alone is 40% of all internet users. [1] If the 0.01% number I threw out is correct, then that's not 100,000 Mac users. That would mean there's over a billion people with Macbooks, which is off by a factor of 10. Apple only sells 20 million of them a year. 0.01% would mean more like 5-10,000. There's not enough demand for MacBook repair for Rossman-types to make a living setting up repair shops anywhere outside of NYC/SF. And again, this would have no affect on the upgrade cycle. Most people do not throw away their computers because they are broken, they throw them away because they are old tech. I too am nostalgic for the days of building PC towers for my family, however, when I think about it, all of those towers I built ended up in a landfill. They were all super easy to repair and upgrade, and yet, nobody did. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
- swiley 5y ago
  >There's not enough demand for MacBook repair for Rossman-types to make a living setting up repair shops anywhere outside of NYC/SF and MAYBE Seattle. That's an odd thing to say considering the I've seen half a dozen of those kinds of repair shops in the small city near my home town (I never went out of my way to find them.) The grocery store near where I live now has one inside it. If someone's backlight/screen/camera suddenly stopped working and they could either pay $100 to fix it or $1000 they're probably going to pick the cheaper option. There absolutely is demand for it. Even if there wasn't taking away people's options for no good reason is kind of terrible anyway.

pembrook 5y ago

Your Mac user numbers are off by a factor of 10X. The vast majority of those 5 billion internet users are exclusively accessing the internet through smartphones (cheap android ones), and do not even own a desktop PC/laptop. Android and iOS account for most internet traffic. Android alone is 40% of all internet users. [1] If the 0.01% number I threw out is correct, then that's not 100,000 Mac users. That would mean there's over a billion people with Macbooks, which is off by a factor of 10. Apple only sells 20 million of them a year. 0.01% would mean more like 5-10,000. There's not enough demand for MacBook repair for Rossman-types to make a living setting up repair shops anywhere outside of NYC/SF. And again, this would have no affect on the upgrade cycle. Most people do not throw away their computers because they are broken, they throw them away because they are old tech. I too am nostalgic for the days of building PC towers for my family, however, when I think about it, all of those towers I built ended up in a landfill. They were all super easy to repair and upgrade, and yet, nobody did. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

swiley 5y ago
>There's not enough demand for MacBook repair for Rossman-types to make a living setting up repair shops anywhere outside of NYC/SF and MAYBE Seattle. That's an odd thing to say considering the I've seen half a dozen of those kinds of repair shops in the small city near my home town (I never went out of my way to find them.) The grocery store near where I live now has one inside it. If someone's backlight/screen/camera suddenly stopped working and they could either pay $100 to fix it or $1000 they're probably going to pick the cheaper option. There absolutely is demand for it. Even if there wasn't taking away people's options for no good reason is kind of terrible anyway.