kwiens

http://www.reddit.com/user/kwiens

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kwiens664 karma

I think it's a net win across the board. The amount of e-waste generated by specialty proprietary chargers is just crazy. And the latest rumor is that the connection will support faster speeds, so it should be a nice upgrade at the same time.

That said, Right to Repair is about enabling repair, not mandating technology choices. While I personally like the idea of standard chargers, I also love headphone jacks! We have not proposed requiring headphone jacks in all smartphones, as much as I would personally be thrilled to rid the world of the scourge of glued-in batteries in wireless earbuds.

At iFixit, we think that products can and should be designed to be easier to repair. We score gadgets from 1-10 on how easy they are to fix, and we work directly with manufacturers to help them design easier to fix products. Microsoft, for example, has made huge strides with the Surface Pro 9 to improve repairability. It now has accessible external storage—amazing!— and a user replaceable battery (once you remove the screen).

This hasn't gotten enough coverage, but Apple actually completely redesigned the iPhone 14 to make it easier to fix. It now opens from the front and the back, radically lowering the cost for back glass repairs. This is a win for the environment, for repair shops, and for iPhone owners. (The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max do not have this improvement—stick to the base model for now!)

kwiens569 karma

Section 1201 is insidious: it makes certain kinds of math illegal. I have a real problem with that.

It shifts control from the owner of the product to the manufacturer, who gets to decide who has permission to break certain kinds of locks. Not OK.

In the repair community, the biggest impacted product is the Xbox and PlayStation, where you can't fix the optical drive. Literally, you can't fix it because the blu-ray drive is paired to the main board. And it's a violation of 1201 to un-pair the drive and program a new one.

Or rather, it was a violation. Thanks to hard work of legal eagles at PK and iFixit, we won an exemption for optical drive repair of game consoles.

We also got an exemption for repairing just about anything else that a consumer might own. Including boats, for you fancy snoos. ⛵

This is a huge win! Here's an in-depth overview of what's legal now and what's not.

kwiens541 karma

Yes, absolutely! iFixit has been scoring gadgets for repairability for a long time now, here are some handy pages:

In addition, the French government has a new scoring system that we helped them develop for smartphones, washing machines, laptops, and more. That system is massively successful, and is inspiring an upcoming EU-wide repair labeling scheme.

You can see the french system in action with a label on pages like this:

kwiens408 karma

The amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the manufacturer lobbyists trying to stop us is just unreal.

Take a look at these astroturfing pages and tell me what your favorite bad-faith arguments are!

My favorite was this stalker ad the auto OEMs ran during the Massachusetts ballot initiative. If you let a local mechanic fix your car, they will follow you to your house!

(It looks like the video is private now, can anyone find it?) https://www.youtube.com/embed/NYp2_oiwtIg?feature=oembed&rel=0&enablejsapi=1

kwiens392 karma

A lot. This is a catastrophe. There are so many people that have spent hard-earned money that they didn’t need to. A friend of mine bought a new iPhone 8 to replace her iPhone 7 because it was too slow. I thought she was crazy because the 7 should still be super fast, but our benchmarks show that Apple is slowing down phones with older batteries by 60%.

If your phone was only 40% as fast as it used to be, and a new model had just come out, wouldn’t you think pretty hard about getting a new one?

This is a shame, because all of the experts (myself included) have been defending Apple for years, saying that new operating systems aren’t specifically designed to slow down your phone. Now it turns out that this one was. And despite their best intentions, it’s caused a lot of people to upgrade prematurely.

I’m seeing analysts speculating that battery replacements could cut iPhone sales by millions of units this year. Apple's battery confession has finally clued everyone in that they don’t need to upgrade their phone until their device goes completely kaput.

Good on ya for resurrecting your dead MacBook. What did you have to fix?