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Apple

Apple Founder Steve Wozniak Backs Right-to-Repair Movement (bbc.com) 43

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has issued a passionate endorsement of the right-to-repair movement, despite the company's opposition. From a report: The movement wants laws passed to guarantee users access to information and parts to repair their own devices. "We wouldn't have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world," Mr Wozniak, its co-founder with Steve Jobs in the 1970s, said. "It's time to recognise the right to repair more fully." Existing right-to-repair rules in Europe and the US are limited to appliances and vehicles, respectively. And right-to-repair advocates say Apple is one of the fiercest opponents to expanding the legislation to cover consumer electronics. It allows repairs by its own authorised technicians only and does not generally provide spare parts or repair information. And it has reportedly engaged lobbyists to persuade lawmakers repairing devices can be extremely dangerous. But Mr Wozniak, 70, said: "Companies inhibit [the right to repair] because it gives the companies power, control, over everything. "It's time to start doing the right things."
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Apple Founder Steve Wozniak Backs Right-to-Repair Movement More

Apple Founder Steve Wozniak Backs Right-to-Repair Movement

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  • He was Steve's exploited "friend" for all of Job's life, doing all the real brainwork but Jobs getting the credit; now that Apple has built an empire on mostly unrepairable unupgradeable gear he says this in his old age? ha, you built that monster for Dr. Frankenstein, Igor

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      He was Steve's exploited "friend" for all of Job's life, doing all the real brainwork but Jobs getting the credit; now that Apple has built an empire on mostly unrepairable unupgradeable gear he says this in his old age? ha, you built that monster for Dr. Frankenstein, Igor

      Didn't a lot (most?) of the unrepairable, difficult if not impossible to upgrade, soldered and glued Apple products come out after Steve Jobs died?

      • I'd assume the 2012 Retina macbook pros that were pissing people off with soldered in stuff were designed with Steve still alive. God smote him for that abomination

      • Dunno, how well can you repair an iPhone 4?

        • Re: hahaha (Score:3, Informative)

          by LaminarFlow ( 6246940 )
          iPhone 4 was a pleasure to work on. Iâ(TM)ve personally repaired dozens of those, basically no glue and very well made â" lots of tiny screws though ðY

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Didn't a lot (most?) of the unrepairable, difficult if not impossible to upgrade, soldered and glued Apple products come out after Steve Jobs died?

        No. The original Macintosh was actually the first impossible to upgrade soldered and sealed computer. Jobs didn't want anyone to do anything to the computer - it was supposed to be the computer you needed and that's it.

        Jobs nixed expansion slots for the Mac and only a little sleight of hand did Woz actually make it possible to upgrade a 128k Mac to a 512k Mac (it

    • Re:hahaha (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @06:37PM (#61563815)

      Wozniak left apple in 1985. Apple IIe times. Long long before the sealed systems. Very reparable and upgrade-able designs back then. Barely into the era of IBM PC clones just beginning to realize the concept of a highly interoperable personal computer ecosystem, so can't accuse him of ignoring that phenomenon either.

      • Woz is a brilliant engineer. I guess he’s catching shrapnel from the Apple haters here who engineer one part Mop N Glow to five parts water.

        • Yes Woz was brillant engineer, that's the point. His "friend" took all the credit and 99 percent plus the money for his ideas.

          • Yet, while Woz is alive and happy and always did and pursued what he loved in life, his "friend" is dead, and guess what, he had to leave behind everything he spent time gathering during this life.

            Now all the coins he managed to collect wasting his life on idiotic meetings, needlessly getting mad for stupid reasons (and behaving like a jerk sometimes too) and making enemies pretty much everywhere around himself had to remain to his family, which I'm sure will eat it all doing pretty much nothing in their wh

            • You're silly, Jobs had a shorter but much happier and interesting life and got lots more pussy, on his friend's accomplishments.

              Good guys finish last, if they're allowed to finish at alll

              • If you actually ever got any pussy yourself you wouldn't value as though getting more of it was an indication of success not than Woz's accomplishments. Most menI the world get laid. How many people directly affect the course of progress to the degree Woz has and remain highly respected by literally every informed human on the planet?

          • Re:hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Friday July 09, 2021 @04:25AM (#61565063)

            Yes Woz was brillant engineer, that's the point. His "friend" took all the credit and 99 percent plus the money for his ideas.

            Woz is a brilliant engineer who would be some no-name unemployed engineer today if it wasn't for Jobs, actually.

            Remember, when Jobs met Woz, Woz worked at HP, and was very happy at HP. He created what became the Apple I, but HP wasn't interested in it (HP felt "works with any TV" was a bad idea for a computer as TVs could be pretty terrible). Woz was happy to just give away the plans to build that computer at Homebrew. It was Jobs who had the business idea to build the computers and sell them, cutting business deals to where Woz could actually leave HP.

            Woz was more than happy doing the engineering and being the typical quiet engineer. If it wasn't for Jobs, he would still be the no-name engineer at HP, and who knows if he would've been kept on or laid off - would he be working at what is today HPE, or at Keysight? Or working at some other company like millions of other no-name engineers.

            It's a yin-yang thing. Jobs was the exhuberant one making business deals and making money, which Woz did make a lot of from his early Apple shares. Granted, Woz is far more philanthropic and had to right many of Jobs' wrongs, but without Jobs and Apple, Woz wouldn't be where he is today. He'd just be some million of other engineers out there who support right to repair.

            Yin and Yang. That's Jobs and Woz. Without one or the other, there would literally be no Apple - Woz was too timid to venture out from his "safe" HP job, Jobs had some, but not a lot, of technical ability. (Remember, Jobs was also an engineer, just your average to mediocre one).

            It's why Woz harbors no grudges against Jobs, despite being ripped off so many times over the decades. Woz is a better man, but he's also a smart one who realized that without Jobs, he wouldn't be where he is today. Plus well, money - he did make a lot of money from Apple.

            It took someone like Jobs and his RDF to convince Woz to leave HP.

            • Nonsense, Woz would have accomplished great things at other places plus would have gotten proper reward and recognition at the time.

              As for their being no Apple, sounds good to me. Might have had something lots better and the world wouldn't be using crippled malware and ransomware target Windows either.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by mark-t ( 151149 )
                That's not necessarily true. Woz was (is) brilliant, but he was not a shrewd businessman. He might have had a successful career as an engineer for some other company if not for Jobs, but it's unlikely anyone here would even know who he was if a more corporately minded person like Steve Jobs had not given him the necessary push and encouraged him to turn his ideas into a career opportunity, one that in hindsight ultimately forever changed the modern world. Although it's unlikely even Jobs could have then

                • You're missing the point. Somewhere else he could have gotten proper share of the profits for his great work, instead of "friend" that screwed him over. Being businessman and "recognition" aren't part of that. talking about Steve needing to give him "proper push" just makes you approve of the kind of people that screw others over and pocket all the money from others ideas, in short a parasite.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by mark-t ( 151149 )

                    I think you misunderstand my meaning. I did not mean to suggest that I like was Jobs did with Woz at all, Tbh, I always felt that Woz was exploited unfairly at Apple.

                    I am only saying that without Jobs' influence, Woz was not the sort of person who was likely to have made his ideas as big of a commercial success unless someone else close to him, like Jobs, happened to see some of that potential. Woz would have given his ideas away for free and I think he only would have been a local celebrity in the

              • Without Apple Gates would have had much more freedom in his endeavors to sell complete garbage to the masses. Apple kept Gates in his place to a large degree. Keep in mind we are talking about the late seventies and early eighties here. There is almost no comparison of what Apple is today and what it was back then.

      • and Wozniak has stayed on the employee list and received stipend every year to this present day to represent Apple in events and interviews, and is Apple shareholder.

        hahaha, nice try, do you have poster of Woz over your bed to jack off to?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      now that Apple has built an empire on mostly unrepairable unupgradeable gear he says this in his old age? ha, you built that monster for Dr. Frankenstein, Igor

      So you ARE in favor of Apples closed products and against the right to repair your own property.
      Yea your opinions aren't going to go down well here.

      I'll take the "monster" of full schematics and firmware source code in the back of the user manual any day over the world you want full of DRM and secret hardware.

      How about you leave our open hardware alone and keep your beloved unupgradable crap to yourself.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      Woz has *ALWAYS* been an advocate for this kind of view. He left Apple because his and Jobs' visions for where they wanted the company to go were too divergent. Woz wanted open, Jobs wanted closed. Jobs won, Woz left.

  • Easy to repair (Score:3)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @07:03PM (#61563897) Homepage Journal
    I was able to repair my Apple computer and hack my electronics to get stuff to work. The Apple I had on had a RS-422 which means I had to hack an interface to get it to work with affordable printers. My disk drive broke so I soldered new components in. 10 years later working on a computer just meant plugging in new components.

    I can repair some stuff on my macs. I am not going to repair a disk because they are so cheap, not the $1000 that it cost 30 years ago. Much of this is about designing and manufacturing electronics that can be repaired by a general technical staff. This clearly is not always possible.

    • Re: Easy to repair (Score:4, Informative)

      by triffid_98 ( 899609 ) on Friday July 09, 2021 @12:29AM (#61564683)
      I don't know about all of that but the Apple II+ was most definitely an easily repairable system. I remember swapping ram chips, swapping proms and soldering a wire in for lower case support...and resoldering (replacing) about half the keys on the keyboard and that was my first PC ever, I wasn't even in high school. All the code and hardware schematics were freely available from Apple.

      Newer Apple products are...slightly different from that. Also I guess that makes me old *sigh*
  • It's funny how Woz is now a geezer telling his old stories. But they're amazing because it's Woz. Great guy all around.

  • Good Job Louis Rossmann (Score:3, Informative)

    by maorb ( 2578043 ) on Thursday July 08, 2021 @07:30PM (#61563969)

    For context since it's buried in the article, Louis Rossmann released a video yesterday asking Woz to make a statement. For anyone not aware he's an independent electronics repairman with a focus on Apple products, and he's kinda become a major voice for consumer right-to-repair spending his time talking to state legislatures and other similar activities.

    Since no one's mentioned it yet in the comments I figure I'll leave a link to his video here [youtube.com].

  • Louis Rossmann posted a video on his YouTube channel thanking Woz for an email and video he sent him supporting him in his right to repair efforts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • There are very few people arguing in good faith that oppose right to repair. Making parts and manuals available to third parties is not a substantial burden, and it's easier to form a chain of trust with someone in your community than random repair people, even at Apple. In general, they're good about it, but it's impossible to guarantee anything.

    Even as a big Apple fan, I think it's absurd that they don't provide this info. I would still probably take my stuff to an Apple Store. They're far more convenient

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