4 ms·

What an over-engineered piece of junk. I am convinced one of the requirements was that the design should be intentionally over-complicated. It is a f** heating

What an over-engineered piece of junk. I am convinced one of the requirements was that the design should be intentionally over-complicated. It is a f** heating plate with a suction device. Why the hell do you need all those different cartridges, an RFID chip, and a giant touchscreen for that?

crazygringo 4y ago
So that employees can use it with minimal training and be guaranteed it won't damage the phone because they misaligned it or used the wrong temperature or for the wrong length of time. This isn't meant for occasional boutique repairs, it's meant to work perfectly a thousand times a month for many, many months.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  Can't you imagine a few ways to reach the same requirements with a significantly simpler and less wasteful design? What is the point of this giant touchscreen, for example? It doesn't even show descriptive error messages. And once you have this useless display, it will drive more complexity into the design. The fact is, you don't even need a CPU to meet the requirements. A simple microcontroller would be cheaper and less fragile while saving you the trouble of designing a complex digital circuit out of simpler timers, op-amps, and flip-flops. Really, I refuse to believe that the best way to realize this design is by packing it with probably more computational power than what you had in Apollo's Guidance Computer.
  - detourdog 4y ago
    The iPhone itself outshines the Apollo guidance computer. The tool to repair a tool may require sophisticated tooling. Apple doesn't need to design tools for part time installers. Apple already has one that works well and was forged on the front lines. For a reasonable fee Apple will let you borrow it and Apple expects you to be happy with your results. If there is such a big market for the supply of these sophisticated but in-expensive tools it will be exploited by someone.
    - dzikimarian 4y ago
      Literally any modern computer outshines Apollo guidance computer. It's 50 years old.
      - detourdog 4y ago
        Yes, my point was the sophistication of Apollo guidance computer is a poor yard stick, although it may outshine the D-17B.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    Yeah, you could skip the NFID+hotpockets system and just have adjustable heating elements and use the touchscreen to select the appropriate program. Now if you adjust the heat elements wrongly, you can fail to weaken the glue in some spots, and the screen will break when you’re removing it. Also you might select the wrong program and insufficiently weaken the glue (broken screen again), or damage a phone not able to take the higher heat a different model can. Also it doesn’t prevent you from using this device on a phone that’s changed in dimensions due to battery expansion - now you’re heating an already expanding battery, good recipe for a battery fire. The presence of a touchscreen that doesn’t utilize the touch functionality tells me they have learned some of these lessons the hard way.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    I mean maybe, but why even care? This is low volume manufacturing. There are probably 1,000's of these, not 100,000's. They probably selected the components that were easiest to purchase in small quantities and assemble, and whatever the engineer was most familiar with. Maybe there's a touchscreen in case they want to do a firmware update someday to improve it. But at low volumes, why be bothered even if it is overengineered? All this stuff is cheap. It's not a big deal. It's not even for consumers.
  - tverbeure 4y ago
    You are trying to optimize the cost of something that doesn’t need cost optimizing. “Hey boss, shall I spend a week to reduce the cost of a low volume $1000 device by $2? Or shall I reuse stuff that we already have?” As for the RFID part: I’ve been involved in creating setups for a production environment. You want to avoid an operator to make decisions because they will mistakes otherwise. The RFID solution is elegant and prevents an operator from accidentally cooking a $1000 device.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  It's interesting that the YouTube comments have multiple supposed AASPs saying that the display opener breaks due to software failures on a regular basis.

crazygringo 4y ago

So that employees can use it with minimal training and be guaranteed it won't damage the phone because they misaligned it or used the wrong temperature or for the wrong length of time. This isn't meant for occasional boutique repairs, it's meant to work perfectly a thousand times a month for many, many months.

elzbardico 4y ago
Can't you imagine a few ways to reach the same requirements with a significantly simpler and less wasteful design? What is the point of this giant touchscreen, for example? It doesn't even show descriptive error messages. And once you have this useless display, it will drive more complexity into the design. The fact is, you don't even need a CPU to meet the requirements. A simple microcontroller would be cheaper and less fragile while saving you the trouble of designing a complex digital circuit out of simpler timers, op-amps, and flip-flops. Really, I refuse to believe that the best way to realize this design is by packing it with probably more computational power than what you had in Apollo's Guidance Computer.
- detourdog 4y ago
  The iPhone itself outshines the Apollo guidance computer. The tool to repair a tool may require sophisticated tooling. Apple doesn't need to design tools for part time installers. Apple already has one that works well and was forged on the front lines. For a reasonable fee Apple will let you borrow it and Apple expects you to be happy with your results. If there is such a big market for the supply of these sophisticated but in-expensive tools it will be exploited by someone.
  - dzikimarian 4y ago
    Literally any modern computer outshines Apollo guidance computer. It's 50 years old.
    - detourdog 4y ago
      Yes, my point was the sophistication of Apollo guidance computer is a poor yard stick, although it may outshine the D-17B.
- fwlr 4y ago
  Yeah, you could skip the NFID+hotpockets system and just have adjustable heating elements and use the touchscreen to select the appropriate program. Now if you adjust the heat elements wrongly, you can fail to weaken the glue in some spots, and the screen will break when you’re removing it. Also you might select the wrong program and insufficiently weaken the glue (broken screen again), or damage a phone not able to take the higher heat a different model can. Also it doesn’t prevent you from using this device on a phone that’s changed in dimensions due to battery expansion - now you’re heating an already expanding battery, good recipe for a battery fire. The presence of a touchscreen that doesn’t utilize the touch functionality tells me they have learned some of these lessons the hard way.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  I mean maybe, but why even care? This is low volume manufacturing. There are probably 1,000's of these, not 100,000's. They probably selected the components that were easiest to purchase in small quantities and assemble, and whatever the engineer was most familiar with. Maybe there's a touchscreen in case they want to do a firmware update someday to improve it. But at low volumes, why be bothered even if it is overengineered? All this stuff is cheap. It's not a big deal. It's not even for consumers.
- tverbeure 4y ago
  You are trying to optimize the cost of something that doesn’t need cost optimizing. “Hey boss, shall I spend a week to reduce the cost of a low volume $1000 device by $2? Or shall I reuse stuff that we already have?” As for the RFID part: I’ve been involved in creating setups for a production environment. You want to avoid an operator to make decisions because they will mistakes otherwise. The RFID solution is elegant and prevents an operator from accidentally cooking a $1000 device.
kevingadd 4y ago
It's interesting that the YouTube comments have multiple supposed AASPs saying that the display opener breaks due to software failures on a regular basis.