That's why boardviews are so nice - they don't reveal *anything* about the actual PCB fabrication other than position of the parts and the logical connections between the parts (ie, which pins are on the same net); they are not *design* files, likewise schematics aren't truly revealing a lot either, certainly not enough that you could implement a clone for exactly the reasons you cite, there's simply too many other things such as firmware, routing and actual timing/impedence-control of the signals that go well beyond what can be deduced from the schematic and/or boardview alone.

If you look at common boardview files for things like Macbooks, all they contain is a long list of the following data tuple
{ position, side, part#, pin#, network name } ... yet having a boardview + schematic goes a long way towards making things actually repairable.

I had hoped that Framework would be a real change in the market but we're still locked out from really repairing those boards because there's no boardview access.

Sure, you can fix some things without the schematic and/or boardview ( they're two separate things btw ), but if you really want to be able to service machines that have been damaged you do need both in this day & age.

I've approached Framework a few times and it keeps ending up with a dead end when it comes to the boardview ( even through the conduit of Louis Rossmann to assist ). Basically, the whole repairability marketing tilt is little more than skin deep; they don't even have the rights to the designs to distribute the boardviews, of which I will point out are NOT the same as design files.

@CAIMLAS very much my own sentiment. After years of replacing HTC, Samsung phones due to performance loss, breakage, or just not being supported by updates, got my hands on an iPhone ( I repair them ) to try out and was basically a convert over night. That was a bit painful in many ways as I was primarily android/*nix person, shunning microsoft/apple any way I could, yet the improvement from the change was so great I was able to overcome that mindset, at least with Apple ;)

These days I am fine to use iPhones that are 4~5 years old and there really isn't any problem. iPhone 11's are by far the most popular currently.

Provably false in general terms. iPhone SE, 6, 6S still run just fine.

Apple's "fail" with the slow-down was their marketing side; should simply have said "If your battery is lacklustre iOS will dial back the performance to avoid instability caused by the battery not being able to comply with instaneous power demands". Makes me wonder if that feature was slipped in as a "Lets extend the life of an iPhone" by some engineers trying to be nice which probably goes against the MO of the Apple shareholders/board which would deeply frown on that as their pitch would be "Upgrade to a new iPhone".

The feature serves to extend the working life of a device, that's not cool on the quarterly profits.

Meanwhile, I moved to iPhones because places like Samsung can't help but render flagship phones to laggy crap only after 2 years with their updates. Might be better now but at the time of the change over my Samsung Note went from being a great phone to a source of frustration (I'm sure if I loaded in a different Android build that stripped out the crap that Samsung wouldn't it'd have restored performance... alas, normal people don't do that ).

I repair Apple devices, at the microscopic electronics level; I am anticipating some sort of trap in this "change of heart" out of Apple.

I like their gear but their progressive obsession with pairing everything is becoming quite problematic; it effectively nerfs a large portion of what could be done.

Thankfully at least while they can go about pairing a lot of things, there's still a good number of repairs that don't involve the paired parts.

What I'd like to see is the ability to purchase brand-specific variants of the components that are used for things like USB-C PD, or battery management, which frequently are existing products from TI/Linear/etc but with small tweaks but you cannot buy them from sources such as Farnell/Mouser/Digi.

In fairness, Apple is primarily screws-not-glue in their builds; at least when it comes to iPhones and Macbooks ( ignoring the batteries alas! ), certainly compared to a lot of Androids the glue factor isn't a big thing any more, thank goodness.

Regarding topic of article, no big surprise about Apple doing this, right from the outset it was fairly obvious it was a bit of lip service and you should have expected Apple to do their absolute utmost fo ensure it was infeasible to be part of their program and make money.

We do have another looming issue, 3rd parties are locking up the boardviews & schematics now; so while they're getting leaked out of Apple still, there's a new gatekeeper that isn't releasing them to the public, the 820-02773 board should be out, it's available on one boardview program but it's not available as a normal BRD file yet and this is becoming more and more difficult to get.

Macbooks are pretty cheap on the second hand market. Macbook Air A1466 2017 release with a 1.8~2.2GHz / 8GB combo can be picked up for $300~$400 and it's a good machine.

Macbooks are value for money in many cases but perhaps not in the lens of "How many ops can we do per $ invested in the machine". Once you get over the ops/$ mindset you see the value in devices like Macbooks and iPhones. I've been developing for open source since the 90s and long been a *BSD/linux person as well as an electronics engineer, and for as much as I tried PC-laptops and android-phones, I hate to say it, I switched to Macbooks and iPhones and I'm not going back. Stuff "just works" a lot better. It's a qualitative experience, not a quantitative. Furthermore, Macbooks and iPhones seem to last longer ( agreeably there's some colossal SNAFUs like the AMD GPUs issues in 2011, the butterfly keyboards, revision 1 and 2, the screen cable issues in the A170x series, but overall, Apple gear seems to last long and maintains a better resale value.

I'm run an electronics repair and design business as well as being a commercial software developer - I know it's popular to beat the hell out of apple socially, but in terms of hardware they definitely offer better value long term if you're not specifically focused on ops/$.

You might actually be thinking of silver. Gold is good but the primary reason it's used as a surface treatment is due to the corrosion resistance; silver has superior conductivity.

Silver->Copper->Gold->Aluminium

After 18 years I think it's time to close the door on the developers of Thunderbird. Its resource demands are absurd. It's an email client for crying out loud, not emacs!

Someone needs to organise to take Claws email client and add in HTML generation support with some decent funding to have it happen. I for one love plain-text emails ( prefer in fact ) but it seems spam filters love to mark off clean and lean emails as "likely spam".

Most people who get their exhausts replaced toss out the original or sell off as parts. There'll be some who put real effort in to dodging the fines but after a few rounds they're going to be sufficiently sick of it.

Likewise. I'm a motorcyclist (31 years now) and "loud exhausts save lives" is a load of BS for sure.

Unless they 180' turn the exhaust pipes so that they're front-facing then there's no technical validity in the claim. If anything, chances are loud exhausts cause accidents because of the shock/rage they cause when the bike (or car) passes by creating a needless distraction.

Came here to make the same suggestion - use PayPal as the buffer/gatekeeper. The upside with PayPal is that I can dispute directly with ease and I can see a hell of a lot more details about the transaction than the bank's system which is just "Australian Tax Office Sydney" ( which it wasn't - no idea how that one slipped through checking process for business names ).

Been hit twice in 12 months with a card that doesn't go out with me; only place it was ever stored was previously Google's card system and now I've definitely stopped that. I've also obtained a separate account purely for the purpose of using it at those sites that only offer credit card and nothing else.

The fact that AliExpress now accepts PayPal for most stores really helps too.

All in all, it'd be nice if the bank offered 2FA for transactions involving the credit-card from online sources as it seems those 3 digits on the back are about as useful as a teapot made of chocolate.

Almost every time a new product comes out, there's the headlines of "[Near] Impossible to repair, likely to kill repair shop industry", and it does not.

It does usually mean new tooling, new skills, and some waiting, but so far it's not a death of the industry. When we started seeing surface mount parts many were "Oh no! we can't solder those!" ( Fine tip irons and more flux ), when we moved to ever smaller parts (01005) "Oh no, we can't see those properly" (Microscopes), when we moved to BGA "Oh no, impossible to solder those" (Stencils and solder paste), and so on.

Yes, Apple makes it troublesome in many ways but for all the areas/options they close off, there's still a lot of repairable devices and areas on their devices.

I do, like most people, wish that Apple would cease with these excessive moves masked as security improvements but it is what we have and you can either choose to cry and close up, or you can be realistic and see that there's still a lot of work available and simply redirect today's clients back to Apple until a work-around/solution becomes available. Still repairing iPhone 4 and 2010 Macbooks here, so there's a long life in these products and a lot of work.

You would have had an excellent point, if only there were parts of the FaceID integral to the screen, of which there are not.

FaceID projector and sensor are located in the main chassis; the screen merely has "windows" for the said projector and sensor.

Reasonably skilled rework technicians won't have a problem moving the chip between screens, it's more of a time waster than anything else and lends nothing to the actual security of the phone.

Sounds like you had one of the post-2015 machines, where they have the 50V backlight line next to a CPU signal line and there's no guard pin (ground) to protect, something they did have on the earlier models. As a consequence of this change it means that the newer machines have a higher likelihood of being damaged in a non-recoverable way if liquid gets on to that region. Not saying Apple has designed it wrong ( it is within design spec of the connector ) but rather that due to their choice to omit the guard pins, it is now quite easy to render them irrepairably dead through liquid damage.

The bike thing was quite bad for his health ( on top of an existing life-shortening issue ) and then the flooding was another major blow ( set things back a lot ), unfortunate that those things happened and he has subsequently redesigned the business in a new location and new staff to avoid his personal situations creating such delays as what you experienced.

While he's not an EE, he does have a good grasp on the repairing of the machines with a wealth of experience, and yes, he does make a lot of noises and drama, in part because that's what brings the viewers, but at his core he is absolutely competent at his job.