dysamoria

I don't want to sound callous about the lost jobs but... good. This kind of luxury disgust me. The entire point seems to be elitism and wastefulness. It's antisocial.

I'm assuming that the 200 workers can be hired on elsewhere in a similar industry. We know the executives will float away on a golden parachute, so the bigger ethical concern in my mind is HOW they sever the jobs. 

Logic failures in the above comments:

• "This is the direction things are going" as an excuse to give in to a practice that's anti-consumer, anti-environmental, and only a benefit to manufacturers' profit margins.

• "Specialized training" as a presumption that authorized technicians are somehow better than non-authorized technicians. Haven't any of you been employed by tech makers? Don't put unknown people on a pedestal. There's only so much training manufacturers give to authorized services. Often very little guidance at all, aside from a parts list and schematic. They're relying on the third party to have those skills and learn on their own how best to disassemble and reassemble their gadgets (if at all). Start taking apart junked laptops bought for parts and you've possibly exceeded the training given by manufacturers to so-called authorized service people.

The skills are mostly not out there; corporations don't want to pay for such people, nor train employees to have these skills. They want a screwdriver jockey who can replace a large part quickly and toss the "bad part" into a bin to ship it off to a third-party who will break it down in tedious and time-consuming (and low paying) situations, and then maybe buy back some of the recovered materials. We're not talking special, component-level skills here. Just general carefulness and fine motor skills.

People like Louis Rossmann are rare (doing component-level repairs for people who can't afford to re-buy disposable electronics) and he's not even an authorized service person for the stuff he fixes (and his hands shake like mine). He does way more than anyone at an Apple Store or Toshiba/Dell service center, and they've no interest in him except for how he eats into their profits by letting people have their stuff repaired cheaper or at all. Most manufacturers just ship your stuff out as junk and send you someone else's reconditioned former junk and call it a "repair".

If you work at a manufacturer who does it differently, by all means tell me about it. I'm interested.

Back to Louis Rossmann, he's a clever (and more patient than myself) individual who learned how to do things most people can't find the mental space to do. He does what people want done. There's a market for such repairs (actual repairs), at a lower cost. He and iFixIt have both made businesses to support themselves on this market, however small it might seem.

If you don't like that business model, then you don't have to pay them for their services. There's no reason to crusade against what they do (where's all the usual libertarian, free market, pro-capitalism commentary to defend these guys doing what they do??). iFixIt tells you the task is difficult or not. So does OWC. These are good businesses who are empowering consumers (consumers that are otherwise being screwed by the pathological pursuit of perpetual increasing profits in corporations). Explain why that's a bad thing.

techprod1gy said:

I believe that Apple originally allows crap in at times to boost numbers for marketing purposes...so many titles should not have ever made it into App Store in the first place.  But I am glad they are cleaning this up a bit.  Should do 2 rounds of cleanup and then make it a practice to do this every quarter.

Agreed. It's hard to believe a company cares about quality over quantity when they're constantly marketing their store by "number of apps"...

StrangeDays said:

dysamoria said:

I've not noticed any reduction in clone or junk apps...

Have you been logging and counting them? What metrics are you using in your quantitative study? Details, please. 

When did I say I made a quantitative study? I'm just expressing my personal observation after browsing the App Store for specific things and finding app after app that does the same thing (badly if at all) as tens of other apps, most of them designed to sell advertising impressions. It's especially problematic in the "free" category and where open source is involved. 

Soli said:

I’m happy to read about this but I honestly never come across any of these crap apps since I’m mostly directly directed to new apps via a review from a trusted tech outlet or a personal recommendation. Very rarely do I even seek out app store on my own and even then it’s likely found via a Google Search or asking a friend. IOW, I never blindly check the App Store for titles.

Good thing too, because the App Store sucks for discovery of things. It STILL has no subcategories for the multiple and very different things that fit under their catch-all "Music" category. Idiotic. Myopic.