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.
My mom has an iPhone 6 Plus and hasn’t even had it for a year when one day it suddenly died and would not charge. So she took it to an authorized Apple repair place and they charged her $50 for a diagnostic only to tell her that she would have to buy a brand new phone.
So she decided to go to the AT&T store to talk to our usual guy that upgrades our phones and handles any problems for us. She tells him what’s wrong and he takes her phone to the back only to come out two minutes later, puts her phone on charge and it comes back to life.
She asks him what was wrong with it that he managed to somehow fix when the people at the “authorized apple repair place” couldn’t. And you know what he told her?
“There was just a bit of fuzz in the charging port.”
I FUCKING KNEW IT. Listen, I have a MacBook from college. The charger has died twice, and I had to get a new one. This happened for two years in a row around the same time each year. I’m fucking convinced that their hardware is rigged to “expire” in order to force people to keep buying their shit.
Wait, people are just now learning that Apple has some of the shadiest business practices?
You know this isn’t really just apple, company’s do this all the time, everything is rigged to expire and all they want is your money.
Ohhh no no no, this IS JUST Apple.
All companies want you to buy their new products. None have gone to the lengths that Apple Inc. has gone to make end user repairs as impossible as is legally viable. I have been repairing electronics and computer systems privately, commercially and active duty in the US military for about 30 years.
Apple puts extra effort into special hardware requiring proprietary tools that are only legally produced by their licensed manufacturer and can only be purchased through licensed repair shops if at all.
Companies like iFixit can only exist as profit making companies because they are able to make workaround tools and kits that are still profitable but less of a blatant ripoff than Apple.
Apple has been doing this forever. The way Apple treats consumers is abysmal, and people still eat their products up.
Apple has gone so far downhill over the past decade and people still drop $2000 on their piece of shit laptops when they could get a more powerful machine from Dell or something for half the price. Oh, but god forbid because “I DONT LIKE WINDOWS THEY ALWAYS GET VIRUSES 😛 ITS NOT LIKE IM A STUPID USER OR ANYTHING!”
Not to mention their utter refusal to use standard cables. EVERYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET uses micro USB to charge their electronics. But Apple has to make some new bullshit charger every three years so they can force you to buy more. Seriously, look at the price of lightning cables vs. micro USB someday. Apple products are designer. You are solely paying for the branding and slick design. As long as you know that, we’re cool.
Bless him!
I’m a hardcore Apple user but not so much of a zealot that I don’t see the bullshit they do. I totally support this guy and any and all others who fight for the right to self-repair, to remove proprietary hardware, or to get rid of DRM and/or other lockdowns on the hardware, software, or media we OWN. My computer, my phone, MY CHOICE. It’s not that hard of a concept to get.
Mooncustafer 