penboundOrator

IT'S GOING FASTER THAN I THOUGHT

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That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

Have an iPhone and are in need of repairs

Have a friend with that problem

Hate Apple and are more than happy to spite them in some way

So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.

So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.

These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.

this smug little bastard man is Peabody

my mom named him

She will also no longer be allowed to do any favours—there are elderly people living in isolated farms around here, and she (and other postmen) often offer to bring some groceries to them (which they don’t buy during their shift) in winter when the roads are bad, or meds from the pharmacy, and starting next year there will be inspectors doing surprise inspections of postmen’s cars to check for anything that is not post, with penalties if they find groceries or other stuff. I couldn’t think of why so she explained gloomily that the post company started a (paid) service to provide this kind of assistance so it is now wrong to offer the same help for free. 

i had a paper route as a kid and was paid like this and would happily choose to chat for an extended period of time with some customers. one woman would make a cup of cocoa every cold morning and invite me in and we’d chat while i drank it.

i want to highlight though that this is also a problem with how people assess costs and benefits.

what looks like inefficiency, might actually be providing a valuable service that creates wealth in society. i can’t even count how many times i’ve done valuable things to help people, and sometimes even directly help the company employing me, while in downtime on various jobs. one minute i might be chatting about someone’s personal struggles or talking about religion, the next moment i might be helping someone in a neighboring office with databases in ways that saves them a ton of time and saves our employer tens of thousands of dollars.

i once was chatting casually with a guy repairing a door and he gave me some useful information that i relayed to the proper person and weeks later the person came back and informed me that i had saved them tens of thousands of dollars by passing on the maintenance man’s recommendations.

and of course there are huge mental health benefits to having these casual, positive interactions

if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out.