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A modern Mac laptop uses a motherboard where everything is soldered on, everything is tiny, and it's basically impossible to repair. Leaving aside whether that

by __d 5y ago

A modern Mac laptop uses a motherboard where everything is soldered on, everything is tiny, and it's basically impossible to repair. Leaving aside whether that's good or bad, it's just a fact that you should know up front. Consequently, most failures are "repaired" by swapping the motherboard, and so your flash drive contents are gone. Happily, you are using Time Machine (right?) and so you plug your backup drive into a spare machine, do the restore, and you're back to where you were an hour before the disaster. You do the same again when your newly repaired machine comes back from the store. Yeah, it sucks more than swapping an SSD. But hey, you knew that before you bought a shiny, thin, light Macbook.

ben-schaaf 5y ago
Board-Level repair isn't that difficult with the right tools. Plenty of 3rd party repair, as well as Apple's refurbishment do it just fine. The only real reason it's impossible to repair is an artificial lack of parts/documentation.
- __d 5y ago
  Ok, sure -- I was lazy. It's sometimes possible, but it doesn't make economic sense. Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive. Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field. This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost. Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.
yourapostasy 5y ago
> ...and it's basically impossible to repair. While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem. Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann [2] https://www.rossmanngroup.com/ https://www.rossmanngroup.com/ [3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awesome-bunnie-huang/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awes...

by __d 5y ago

ben-schaaf 5y ago

Board-Level repair isn't that difficult with the right tools. Plenty of 3rd party repair, as well as Apple's refurbishment do it just fine. The only real reason it's impossible to repair is an artificial lack of parts/documentation.

__d 5y ago
Ok, sure -- I was lazy. It's sometimes possible, but it doesn't make economic sense. Paying for people and equipment to can safely swap a motherboard and reassemble the laptop is not cheap, but it's not expensive. Paying people who can diagnose a fault in a modern motherboard, do the board-level repair, test it, and turn it around to the customer doesn't make sense. Do a quick board swap and be done with it. Maybe forward the faulty board to some central facility for refurb or at least analysis to find out what's breaking in the field. This isn't unique to Apple -- very little consumer electronics is repaired because it isn't worth the cost. Now Apple makes the choice to solder everything on the motherboard (both for size & weight, and likely reliability reasons too). That means even peripheral failures junk the whole motherboard. But that's a trade-off they, and their customers, make.

yourapostasy 5y ago

> ...and it's basically impossible to repair. While Louis Rossmann [1] is well-known in the US for basing an entire, profitable small business around boards' component-level repair in one of the most unforgiving retail service markets in the US (NYC midtown Manhattan) [2], there are hundreds of shanzhai and tens of thousands of more generalized repair shops in China [3] who also demonstrate that with sufficient specifications and parts availability, what appears "basically impossible to repair" becomes the start of a journey towards a cradle-to-cradle ecosystem. Apple has led the industry in the past, and is hopefully leading the way towards such a cradle-to-cradle future. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that their recent designs that are perceived by Rossmann and others as anti-RTR (Right To Repair) are more unintentional side effects of their rapid vertical integration design strategy (the A* and M1 processors being only the most visible part of the strategy). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann [2] https://www.rossmanngroup.com/ https://www.rossmanngroup.com/ [3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awesome-bunnie-huang/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-broke-my-phones-screen-awes...