Seems since the release of the A1502, things have just gone downhill. Losing useful/viable ports and declining options for repairs (both consumer and microsoldering). The MBPro Retina 13" / A1502 covered all areas well, and you could still change your SSD and still connect to items without requiring dongles. We should have seen Apple bring out the next one with USB C + USB A (3.x) but instead we ended up losing everything, even the laptop-saving magsafe.
Likewise on the iPhone market, iPhone 6S/6S+ was mostly the peak in balance, but since then the devices have become increasingly difficult to repair.
Yes, had this very same argument with some locals. Farmers/Beef-industry/diary... getting all upset about this topic, meanwhile the megacorp supermarkets drive them to the wall at the gate with the absurdly low payouts for their produce. Not like changing the definition / criterion is going to suddenly improve their profit margins, if anything this will just alienate more people.
Except the balance is against that of the creator, because for every tier of creator, there's probably 10~100 more of similar quality who are ready to take the place of who ever bows out.
The limited resource in the YouTube creator-view-advertiser balance is viewer eyeball-hours.
eBay is much the same; sellers can be culled in droves and there's always more to replace them, but buyers are the ones you need to stick around.
That's a separate but still important issue, relating to the internal resistance / health of the pack.
You can have a pack that still has plenty of energy left in it but if it's internal resistance is too high relative to the demand you're imposing on it then the voltage output will drop significantly and subsequently your device shuts down. As the cells get older their Ri increases and for a given load and requirements then the pack effectively "fails" at a higher charge% state from the observer's perspective.
If you're just having a once-off voltage sample only, then yes, predicting the current % capacity of a lithium pack is quite tricky given their fairly flat discharge curve and the fact that depending on what load you're imposing the voltage swings a fair bit depending on the pack internal resistance; however, in its place we use coulomb counting, with coulomb counting you're measuring the energy being put in and taken out, and as such you can track with a far greater level of predictability.
Often is the same hardware fault. Traces to the BGA balls suffering fatigue, just like the iP6+ touch, iP7 lag-audio, and plenty of other baseband IC issues ( U1 and V1 pads).
Here's a video of one being fixed (started at the point where he's looking right at the U1 and V1 pads ) https://youtu.be/tdD7BSIy_u4?t...
The fault is with the small traces connecting to some of the BGA chip balls. This is the same failure mode as what caused the iP6+ touch disease and the iP7 lag(audio) IC issue.
Fundamentally, we're getting circuits at a size now where the daily physical expansions/contractions and vibrations are causing these traces to fail because they're so fine/thin.
It's not the chip specifically at fault, it's the copper track on the top of the circuit board that's suffering fatigue fractures.
FTA: "An interesting side note is that the radiation-exposed rodents of both types lived significantly longer than their control peers: 28 percent of the original control group survived the full 2 years, while about twice that amount (48-68 percent) survived in the exposed group."
I fully expect this article headline to be linked by many sellers and promoters of anti-radiation stickers/trinkets/money-drainers, but the prolonged lifespan of the exposed rats would be the sort of thing you'd be more interested in as a scientist, but likely that isn't part of the budget.
Headline should have been more like "Radiation exposed rats live longer than control group", and we should see the resurgence of selling Radon water.
iP7/7+ are crippled with the same mechanical/physical issues that the iP6+ touch disease is caused by. In the 7/7+ it manifests in a different location (audio chip typically) and makes the phone become exceedingly laggy.
Overall the 7/7+ has not been a good phone for durability, the new alloy used for the chassis does a very good job at resisting damage to itself compared to the original 6/6+ but the consequence of that is that the shock is now being transferred to the PCB and we're seeing a lot of board failures from impacts; previously the 6/6+ chassis would be the crumple-zone and the boards would survive surprisingly well.
The iP6S/6S+ at this stage still represents the ideal balance of durability, repairability, cost, performance.
Apple really didn't want to have to go down the route of indicating/advising that something is wearing out and could be replaced because it infers that the phone is serviceable, and if people feel their devices are serviceable then that'll tend to bite in to the annual churn & profit rates.
From a technical perspective, throttling back the phone could have been pitched as a nice feature but again, it opens up the can of worms on serviceability, particularly in light of Apple's strong push against the "Right to repair" legislation.
If you're working the repair lines then you'll know if you tear apart a clone and compare to the genuine and you'll see there's notable differences. The protection/controller board attaching to the cell on those $4 batteries is a random hackjob at best. The cell quality too is different, cheap replacements have poor internal resistance compared to the genuine.
The $4~$12 replacements are a crap shoot, sometimes you get a decent quality unit, other times not so much. The resellers of replacement batteries give you grading options, cheap = 'zeroed' cycle count, non-original board, then you can get a "pulled from existing phone" batteries and their markings rubbed out, and then you can also get "Genuine zero cycles, high quality" packs but even if you ask for those, usually someone up the supply chain at some point pulls a swifty and starts sending you dodgy packs.
While Apple might pay $4 for theirs, the "3rd party" ones are probably $1 and it shows.
Apple has had some dud events like the iPhone 5 puffer fiasco but overall their packs definitely are of higher quality/consistency than the 3rd party replacements.
Couple of hundred batteries a year and it's averaging about 50% duds within 3 months.
You're not going to fix modern high density logic boards with a "home iron" or equipment, but if you pick up stuff like this...
$180~$300 Microscope $200 Soldering station (Hakko FX951 and JS02 tip to start) $250 Hotair station (Quick 951DW or even a $65 analogue) $100 assorted hand tools... then yes, they're fixable with a good dose of learning/experience/practice.
So sure, it's about a $1k investment in tools but it's still quite doable. Places like UnionRepair are making it cheaper every day, coupled with YouTube binge watching of people like iPadRehab, Louis Rossmann, Jason STS Telecom etc and you might succeed in fixing things like blown filters and perhaps a Tristar failure after a couple of attempts.
Don't even bother, waste of effort. If you want to expend energy, then focus it back on yourself and learn to accept that unless you're talking to peers you're always going to be misunderstood, not out of malice or intent, but simply because there's almost always a large collection of context and assumptions that you simply cannot impart on to those who ask the question.
Just keep it simple even and deal with accepting that it'll grind your soul. Same applies to a lot of other fields of work. Try hard and you'll just come off as self-important.
There's never a break even for ICEs; at least once you start using an electric car your CO2 footprint is relatively reducing compared to similar ICE, even if you're using dirty power.
Coal power stations are being phased out (gas turbine does still have a presence for the next few years as a fast response base load assist), eventually there'll be a greater utilisation of direct solar panel / wind turbine to car charging cycle and I won't be surprised if cars perform a secondary function as a large power storage system ( even though there'll be a lot of movements, overall there'll be a lot of parked cars at any given moment ) to deal with the greater level of unpredictability associated with our current green-energy sources.
It's like the old complaint that solar panels used more power to produce than they ever yield, that became invalid about 20 years ago (we're now at about 4~5x return). Things get better, old inefficiencies are removed. In another 20 years we'll look back and wonder why everyone was freaking out so much.
The problem is the chip-overhang, the Meson chip itself obscures the entire area. The balls are about 0.25mm diameter, the trace is about 0.1mm width and maybe 1.5mm long. The trace separation can manifest anywhere from ball pad edge up to typically about half way along towards the via.
Blobbing / bridging doesn't really behave predictably enough at these scales and it's not unusual for the said bridge to itself crack (previously when people just replaced Meson this in some ways was what was happening). Usual repair is to solder a suitable length of 40~42AWG / 0.1~0.06mm dia wire to the pad, then run it up close to the via and typically overlaying the whole track as a suitable reinforcement against the tension (some people put a bend in the wire for added "flexibility" ).
I would not call this a design fault from incompetence, rather it's just one of those faults that sometimes happen in complex designs due to unforeseeable manifestation of factors (happens with cars, planes, and many other things). With phones pushing hard on the edge of manufacturing densities it's not entirely surprising that something like this occurs, just unfortunate in this case it happened to manifest in a crucial area rather than some benign way in another portion of the assembly.
There's a crack on the short trace from the M1 ball, and the pad will frequently lift away when you remove the Meson chip to perform the task. Sure, there's a lot of 6+ units out there which aren't suffering it but for each that is suffering the classic touch disease the M1 trace is at fault. Classic M1 touch-disease failure will have the flickering grey bars at the top associated with it.
I don't care if people call it a design fault or what ever, it doesn't change the actuality that that particular trace fails. As mentioned, it does *not* require the phone to be dropped, normal thermal cycling and daily use alone can cause the failure. It's also not a highly visible break in the track, even at 30~40X magnification you really cannot notably see it. To me it would appear that the combination of parts in the location along with the layout of the trace for what ever reason causes the trace to eventually suffer the micro-tear.
For quite some time we were trying to just replace the meson chip and there'd be some levels of success, but almost always the phone would end up back in the shop within a month or two with the same classic touch disease issue. Where the "penny dropped" was that we started to notice that for every phone we did the meson replacement attempt that lost the M1 pad during the rework forcing us to put in a replacement trace in, we weren't seeing those ones come back later, and thus the classic touch-disease cause and repair was finally found.
The touch-disease happens even without a strike / drop.
The fault manifests as an extremely fine crack in the PCB track leading to the M1 ball on the touch controller IC. The proper way to fix this is the run a small jumper of wire from the touch IC BGA ball to further up the PCB track.
The phone does not need to be dropped for this to fail, just general thermal cycling and daily use is enough to develop the issues. Apple's little "addition" about requiring a drop is an attempt to try get some distance between the fault and themselves.
When you decide to express your personal brilliance to the developer, take the time to word it in such a way that it doesn't come across as condescending or undermining. Not to say that developers are all precious snow-flakes, but if the feature request is important to you then learning how to present it goes a long way towards gaining an outcome that you like, as with pretty much every other area in life when it comes to trying to get something done by other people.
Beautiful pitches like "...unless it has feature X it's not going to be considered professional", or "... I like your software but it would be better if..." and you wonder why there's so much push-back. If you don't see what's wrong with statements like that are a problem, then it might be helpful to try think about it a bit more.
Of course, if you can't stand that, you can always try add the feature yourself, though saying "do it yourself" pretty much causes the same level of angst in the other direction.
Given that you have to hold records for ~7 years (last I checked), and given the recent (2016/2017) focus shift from the ATO to specifically look at tradies, it's a really bad gamble to do that sort of thing. The tradie gains pretty much nothing from the transaction and then has to explain away a disparity in stock acquisition claimed against the quarterly GST. If the ATO decides to audit them they will be screwed. Unless you've got a hell of a setup you're not going to be able to convincingly (legally) smooth out the disparity in the flow of money; so you either create a paperwork flaw, or you sit on a pile of cash you can't really use.
I get a lot of people offering me cash-on-the-side for jobs to try "help me out", the thought is lovely, but at the end of the day it's a lot easier to sleep knowing that your books are genuine and will stand up to scrutiny. It only takes one disgruntled customer to lodge a report/complaint to the ATO and they'll be on you.
Had big hopes for OpenShot, then yep,it went to the crapper and the linux version ended up being more broken than the earlier editions.
Thankfully at least now there's Shotcut ( http://shotcut.org/ ) which seems like a far saner group of developers and the product actually works (using it to do all my YT videos). Lots of additional items to add to Shotcut but it's vastly further along.
It's interesting. Some people bemoan the loss of pin-through parts, strongly associating it with servicability; on the other hand, I for one actually much prefer the move to SMD and find that it makes servicing boards easier in ways.
Agreed, when you drop below 0402 parts become a bit of a pain to handle but if you have access to the schems and boardview then it's fine.
SMD requires some different techniques but it's not explicitly harder, and I for one am happy to no longer be flipping boards 100 times, bending component legs and trying to desolder parts with a bunch of pins without damaging the PCB.
Being able to get *access* to schematics and boardviews in a timely, and legal manner would be a real nice thing and one of the big pushes behind trying to get this "Right to repair" bill through. Seems a lot of the counter-fight is trying to detail how "poor dumb consumers" shouldn't be near this stuff in the first place ( and to a degree they're right ) as opposed to techs already skilled in the processes involved in the repair work., In reality what a lot of people such as myself and Louis Rossmann (who'll be there speaking in favour of the bill) would like to have is the ability to obtain the information required directly from the manufacturer, even at a fair-and-reasonable price.
In the old days (80's~90's) you could call up the service dept of most equipment manufacturers and for $15~$20 they would mail you the documents you wanted. These days you have to hope someone leaks it out to the internet. The businesses claim "trade secrets" but in reality there's nothing secret in those schematics, almost every section is pretty much a lift from the 'suggested/example layouts' from the part/chip manufacturer in the first place.
Ultimately it's all about preventing people from holding off buying a new product, but rebuffed under the guise of "safety" or "secrets".
I fix laptops and phones a lot (component level), and I have to say, at least with Apple most of their gear is still at least able to be serviced once you get a hold of the "not permitted" schematics and boardview files ( and watching a lot of Louis Rossmann helps too ).
PC laptops and worse, desktop motherboards, are like hens teeth at the best of times for locating usable schematics / boardviews. Now the market is starting to spit out "Repair guides" which are 75dpi screen shots squashed to a new aspect ratio and barely legible fonts writing over the top of pixelated chunks that include 3 or 4 pins many times. It can *seem* like there's a lot of available schems/boardviews for PC gear, but it's proportionally far lacking compared to what you can source for the Apple gear.
Truly, if you're despising Apple over this, you're going to really want to in to overdrive over the PC side of things.
Hoping that Louis Rossmann and iPadRehab give it a good shot, and if nothing else get an opening to negotiate with manufacturers to make it legal to purchase/acquire schems/boardviews. Likely won't happen, for every laptop saved today that's one less being purchased tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems since the release of the A1502, things have just gone downhill. Losing useful/viable ports and declining options for repairs (both consumer and microsoldering). The MBPro Retina 13" / A1502 covered all areas well, and you could still change your SSD and still connect to items without requiring dongles. We should have seen Apple bring out the next one with USB C + USB A (3.x) but instead we ended up losing everything, even the laptop-saving magsafe.
Likewise on the iPhone market, iPhone 6S/6S+ was mostly the peak in balance, but since then the devices have become increasingly difficult to repair.
Yes, had this very same argument with some locals. Farmers/Beef-industry/diary ... getting all upset about this topic, meanwhile the megacorp supermarkets drive them to the wall at the gate with the absurdly low payouts for their produce. Not like changing the definition / criterion is going to suddenly improve their profit margins, if anything this will just alienate more people.
Except the balance is against that of the creator, because for every tier of creator, there's probably 10~100 more of similar quality who are ready to take the place of who ever bows out.
The limited resource in the YouTube creator-view-advertiser balance is viewer eyeball-hours.
eBay is much the same; sellers can be culled in droves and there's always more to replace them, but buyers are the ones you need to stick around.
That's a separate but still important issue, relating to the internal resistance / health of the pack.
You can have a pack that still has plenty of energy left in it but if it's internal resistance is too high relative to the demand you're imposing on it then the voltage output will drop significantly and subsequently your device shuts down. As the cells get older their Ri increases and for a given load and requirements then the pack effectively "fails" at a higher charge% state from the observer's perspective.
If you're just having a once-off voltage sample only, then yes, predicting the current % capacity of a lithium pack is quite tricky given their fairly flat discharge curve and the fact that depending on what load you're imposing the voltage swings a fair bit depending on the pack internal resistance; however, in its place we use coulomb counting, with coulomb counting you're measuring the energy being put in and taken out, and as such you can track with a far greater level of predictability.
Here's a quick stater guide - https://www.digikey.com.au/en/...
Often is the same hardware fault. Traces to the BGA balls suffering fatigue, just like the iP6+ touch, iP7 lag-audio, and plenty of other baseband IC issues ( U1 and V1 pads).
Here's a video of one being fixed (started at the point where he's looking right at the U1 and V1 pads ) https://youtu.be/tdD7BSIy_u4?t...
The fault is with the small traces connecting to some of the BGA chip balls. This is the same failure mode as what caused the iP6+ touch disease and the iP7 lag(audio) IC issue.
Fundamentally, we're getting circuits at a size now where the daily physical expansions/contractions and vibrations are causing these traces to fail because they're so fine/thin.
It's not the chip specifically at fault, it's the copper track on the top of the circuit board that's suffering fatigue fractures.
FTA: "An interesting side note is that the radiation-exposed rodents of both types lived significantly longer than their control peers: 28 percent of the original control group survived the full 2 years, while about twice that amount (48-68 percent) survived in the exposed group."
I fully expect this article headline to be linked by many sellers and promoters of anti-radiation stickers/trinkets/money-drainers, but the prolonged lifespan of the exposed rats would be the sort of thing you'd be more interested in as a scientist, but likely that isn't part of the budget.
Headline should have been more like "Radiation exposed rats live longer than control group", and we should see the resurgence of selling Radon water.
iP7/7+ are crippled with the same mechanical/physical issues that the iP6+ touch disease is caused by. In the 7/7+ it manifests in a different location (audio chip typically) and makes the phone become exceedingly laggy.
Overall the 7/7+ has not been a good phone for durability, the new alloy used for the chassis does a very good job at resisting damage to itself compared to the original 6/6+ but the consequence of that is that the shock is now being transferred to the PCB and we're seeing a lot of board failures from impacts; previously the 6/6+ chassis would be the crumple-zone and the boards would survive surprisingly well.
The iP6S/6S+ at this stage still represents the ideal balance of durability, repairability, cost, performance.
Apple really didn't want to have to go down the route of indicating/advising that something is wearing out and could be replaced because it infers that the phone is serviceable, and if people feel their devices are serviceable then that'll tend to bite in to the annual churn & profit rates.
From a technical perspective, throttling back the phone could have been pitched as a nice feature but again, it opens up the can of worms on serviceability, particularly in light of Apple's strong push against the "Right to repair" legislation.
If you're working the repair lines then you'll know if you tear apart a clone and compare to the genuine and you'll see there's notable differences. The protection/controller board attaching to the cell on those $4 batteries is a random hackjob at best. The cell quality too is different, cheap replacements have poor internal resistance compared to the genuine.
The $4~$12 replacements are a crap shoot, sometimes you get a decent quality unit, other times not so much. The resellers of replacement batteries give you grading options, cheap = 'zeroed' cycle count, non-original board, then you can get a "pulled from existing phone" batteries and their markings rubbed out, and then you can also get "Genuine zero cycles, high quality" packs but even if you ask for those, usually someone up the supply chain at some point pulls a swifty and starts sending you dodgy packs.
While Apple might pay $4 for theirs, the "3rd party" ones are probably $1 and it shows.
Apple has had some dud events like the iPhone 5 puffer fiasco but overall their packs definitely are of higher quality/consistency than the 3rd party replacements.
Couple of hundred batteries a year and it's averaging about 50% duds within 3 months.
You're not going to fix modern high density logic boards with a "home iron" or equipment, but if you pick up stuff like this...
$180~$300 Microscope ... then yes, they're fixable with a good dose of learning/experience/practice.
$200 Soldering station (Hakko FX951 and JS02 tip to start)
$250 Hotair station (Quick 951DW or even a $65 analogue)
$100 assorted hand tools
So sure, it's about a $1k investment in tools but it's still quite doable. Places like UnionRepair are making it cheaper every day, coupled with YouTube binge watching of people like iPadRehab, Louis Rossmann, Jason STS Telecom etc and you might succeed in fixing things like blown filters and perhaps a Tristar failure after a couple of attempts.
Don't even bother, waste of effort. If you want to expend energy, then focus it back on yourself and learn to accept that unless you're talking to peers you're always going to be misunderstood, not out of malice or intent, but simply because there's almost always a large collection of context and assumptions that you simply cannot impart on to those who ask the question.
Just keep it simple even and deal with accepting that it'll grind your soul. Same applies to a lot of other fields of work. Try hard and you'll just come off as self-important.
Fair call, incorrect use of term on my behalf. Thankfully won't change the progress of the industry.
There's never a break even for ICEs; at least once you start using an electric car your CO2 footprint is relatively reducing compared to similar ICE, even if you're using dirty power.
Coal power stations are being phased out (gas turbine does still have a presence for the next few years as a fast response base load assist), eventually there'll be a greater utilisation of direct solar panel / wind turbine to car charging cycle and I won't be surprised if cars perform a secondary function as a large power storage system ( even though there'll be a lot of movements, overall there'll be a lot of parked cars at any given moment ) to deal with the greater level of unpredictability associated with our current green-energy sources.
It's like the old complaint that solar panels used more power to produce than they ever yield, that became invalid about 20 years ago (we're now at about 4~5x return). Things get better, old inefficiencies are removed. In another 20 years we'll look back and wonder why everyone was freaking out so much.
The problem is the chip-overhang, the Meson chip itself obscures the entire area. The balls are about 0.25mm diameter, the trace is about 0.1mm width and maybe 1.5mm long. The trace separation can manifest anywhere from ball pad edge up to typically about half way along towards the via.
Blobbing / bridging doesn't really behave predictably enough at these scales and it's not unusual for the said bridge to itself crack (previously when people just replaced Meson this in some ways was what was happening). Usual repair is to solder a suitable length of 40~42AWG / 0.1~0.06mm dia wire to the pad, then run it up close to the via and typically overlaying the whole track as a suitable reinforcement against the tension (some people put a bend in the wire for added "flexibility" ).
I would not call this a design fault from incompetence, rather it's just one of those faults that sometimes happen in complex designs due to unforeseeable manifestation of factors (happens with cars, planes, and many other things). With phones pushing hard on the edge of manufacturing densities it's not entirely surprising that something like this occurs, just unfortunate in this case it happened to manifest in a crucial area rather than some benign way in another portion of the assembly.
There's a crack on the short trace from the M1 ball, and the pad will frequently lift away when you remove the Meson chip to perform the task. Sure, there's a lot of 6+ units out there which aren't suffering it but for each that is suffering the classic touch disease the M1 trace is at fault. Classic M1 touch-disease failure will have the flickering grey bars at the top associated with it.
I don't care if people call it a design fault or what ever, it doesn't change the actuality that that particular trace fails. As mentioned, it does *not* require the phone to be dropped, normal thermal cycling and daily use alone can cause the failure. It's also not a highly visible break in the track, even at 30~40X magnification you really cannot notably see it. To me it would appear that the combination of parts in the location along with the layout of the trace for what ever reason causes the trace to eventually suffer the micro-tear.
For quite some time we were trying to just replace the meson chip and there'd be some levels of success, but almost always the phone would end up back in the shop within a month or two with the same classic touch disease issue. Where the "penny dropped" was that we started to notice that for every phone we did the meson replacement attempt that lost the M1 pad during the rework forcing us to put in a replacement trace in, we weren't seeing those ones come back later, and thus the classic touch-disease cause and repair was finally found.
You're welcome to visit and I'll gladly show you.
The touch-disease happens even without a strike / drop.
The fault manifests as an extremely fine crack in the PCB track leading to the M1 ball on the touch controller IC. The proper way to fix this is the run a small jumper of wire from the touch IC BGA ball to further up the PCB track.
The phone does not need to be dropped for this to fail, just general thermal cycling and daily use is enough to develop the issues. Apple's little "addition" about requiring a drop is an attempt to try get some distance between the fault and themselves.
DickSmith was the chap who floated it:
http://hoaxes.org/af_database/...
When you decide to express your personal brilliance to the developer, take the time to word it in such a way that it doesn't come across as condescending or undermining. Not to say that developers are all precious snow-flakes, but if the feature request is important to you then learning how to present it goes a long way towards gaining an outcome that you like, as with pretty much every other area in life when it comes to trying to get something done by other people.
Beautiful pitches like "...unless it has feature X it's not going to be considered professional", or "... I like your software but it would be better if ..." and you wonder why there's so much push-back. If you don't see what's wrong with statements like that are a problem, then it might be helpful to try think about it a bit more.
Of course, if you can't stand that, you can always try add the feature yourself, though saying "do it yourself" pretty much causes the same level of angst in the other direction.
Given that you have to hold records for ~7 years (last I checked), and given the recent (2016/2017) focus shift from the ATO to specifically look at tradies, it's a really bad gamble to do that sort of thing. The tradie gains pretty much nothing from the transaction and then has to explain away a disparity in stock acquisition claimed against the quarterly GST. If the ATO decides to audit them they will be screwed. Unless you've got a hell of a setup you're not going to be able to convincingly (legally) smooth out the disparity in the flow of money; so you either create a paperwork flaw, or you sit on a pile of cash you can't really use.
I get a lot of people offering me cash-on-the-side for jobs to try "help me out", the thought is lovely, but at the end of the day it's a lot easier to sleep knowing that your books are genuine and will stand up to scrutiny. It only takes one disgruntled customer to lodge a report/complaint to the ATO and they'll be on you.
Had big hopes for OpenShot, then yep,it went to the crapper and the linux version ended up being more broken than the earlier editions.
Thankfully at least now there's Shotcut ( http://shotcut.org/ ) which seems like a far saner group of developers and the product actually works (using it to do all my YT videos). Lots of additional items to add to Shotcut but it's vastly further along.
It's interesting. Some people bemoan the loss of pin-through parts, strongly associating it with servicability; on the other hand, I for one actually much prefer the move to SMD and find that it makes servicing boards easier in ways.
Agreed, when you drop below 0402 parts become a bit of a pain to handle but if you have access to the schems and boardview then it's fine.
SMD requires some different techniques but it's not explicitly harder, and I for one am happy to no longer be flipping boards 100 times, bending component legs and trying to desolder parts with a bunch of pins without damaging the PCB.
Being able to get *access* to schematics and boardviews in a timely, and legal manner would be a real nice thing and one of the big pushes behind trying to get this "Right to repair" bill through. Seems a lot of the counter-fight is trying to detail how "poor dumb consumers" shouldn't be near this stuff in the first place ( and to a degree they're right ) as opposed to techs already skilled in the processes involved in the repair work., In reality what a lot of people such as myself and Louis Rossmann (who'll be there speaking in favour of the bill) would like to have is the ability to obtain the information required directly from the manufacturer, even at a fair-and-reasonable price.
In the old days (80's~90's) you could call up the service dept of most equipment manufacturers and for $15~$20 they would mail you the documents you wanted. These days you have to hope someone leaks it out to the internet. The businesses claim "trade secrets" but in reality there's nothing secret in those schematics, almost every section is pretty much a lift from the 'suggested/example layouts' from the part/chip manufacturer in the first place.
Ultimately it's all about preventing people from holding off buying a new product, but rebuffed under the guise of "safety" or "secrets".
I fix laptops and phones a lot (component level), and I have to say, at least with Apple most of their gear is still at least able to be serviced once you get a hold of the "not permitted" schematics and boardview files ( and watching a lot of Louis Rossmann helps too ).
PC laptops and worse, desktop motherboards, are like hens teeth at the best of times for locating usable schematics / boardviews. Now the market is starting to spit out "Repair guides" which are 75dpi screen shots squashed to a new aspect ratio and barely legible fonts writing over the top of pixelated chunks that include 3 or 4 pins many times. It can *seem* like there's a lot of available schems/boardviews for PC gear, but it's proportionally far lacking compared to what you can source for the Apple gear.
Truly, if you're despising Apple over this, you're going to really want to in to overdrive over the PC side of things.
Hoping that Louis Rossmann and iPadRehab give it a good shot, and if nothing else get an opening to negotiate with manufacturers to make it legal to purchase/acquire schems/boardviews. Likely won't happen, for every laptop saved today that's one less being purchased tomorrow.