There's a video you guys have wanted me to respond to for a while.
The truth is that haven't responded to it because anything on the topic of Apple & right to repair really depresses me. I've been deleting all the emails from people asking what I thought of it. I didn't have the energy or motivation to reply to any of them. I lost it.
I feel like I have done everything I can to advocate for Apple to treat consumers better by pointing out design flaws and encouraging consumers to push Apple for extended recall programs that would result in my repair shop making less money, as I cannot compete with free. I've done this for years alongside advocating for independent repair centers, as well as you, to get access to the parts and manuals necessary to perform economically viable repairs. This isn't all about me; it was about making things better for everyone.
In spite of this & dedicating my life to making all of this as available as possible, the general consensus usually becomes that I am only doing this for my own personal benefit or making it up. Further, less parts, chips, and resources are available in 2024, than were available in 2008. My colleagues, and myself, are worse off now than when we started. So I stopped caring to respond to all of this. I gave up.
For example: I got a TOTALLY DESERVED 1 star review on Google recently. It was 100% **EARNED!!!** With regards to the repair this customer wanted, we provide a horrible experience. I should've gotten 0 stars, or negative stars. I even updated my website in 2023 to tell people in more professional terms that for this repair, we suck, because I know people are coming here via referral as we used to be the best in the business at this specifivc service. The experience we used to provide wasn't just better than Apple, but better than everyone! I specialized in stocking screens for _EVERYTHING_, not just Apple products back in the day and bought 1k+ at a time to get the best prices, and had the first pick of Grade A LCDs before anyone else got them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121225114401/http://www.rossmannsupply.com/ I had enough different LCD models to be able to repair over 5000 different models of laptop, with a cross-compatibility list of what model screen worked in what model laptop that couldn't be beat.
This meant I could offer incredibly affordable repairs with a 20 minute turnaround, even on products that had the new LCD-cell-separate-from-the-frame-and-backlight-layers repairs. We were doing those high-difficulty ones all the way back in 2012, before anyone else in NYC did them! And we had 5 stars doing them all! My first youtube video, if you sort by oldest-to-newest, was boasting about the quality of the LCDs we bought, and the fact that they were all stocked right in the room next to my office.
Now, we can't get access to anything. the only way we can do these repairs is by using used junk, whose prices & availability constantly changes, that requires extensive hacking around and/or tools we don't have so the used part will even have the features of the original. Years of advocacy work later, and my industry is worse off than it was 15 years ago. My customers are worse off than they were 15 years ago.
It is difficult to not be depressed at that topic, after dedicating my life to it for a long period of time, and being worse off than it was in the beginning. When people tell me about the next thing Apple did, I lack the energy to care anymore.
What I learned is that my small corner of the world was a canary in the coal mine for what would follow everywhere else. This isn't just in my industry that it's happening; it is happening in similar verticals as well.
You might have noticed that I stopped discussing Apple as much. That wasn't just because I gave up trying to push a boulder up a hill. Rather, because there is so much anti-ownership nonsense going on in every other industry with every other company, that I want to bring awareness to before it spreads like a cancer that can't be rooted out. I stopped focusing on Apple as much.
I changed my mind, because it appears that Marques Brownlee's propaganda video was a dress rehearsal for a 24 page propaganda piece released by Apple this month which you can find here
https://support.apple.com/content/d.../otherassets/programs/Longevity_by_Design.pdf This document on top of that video is a slap in the face & a kick in the balls to my life's work.
I will have something by the end of today.
