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That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

Follow @the-future-now

This is really important and let me tell you why.

My mom has an iPhone 6 Plus and hasn’t even had it for a year when one day it suddenly died and would not charge. So she took it to an authorized Apple repair place and they charged her $50 for a diagnostic only to tell her that she would have to buy a brand new phone.

So she decided to go to the AT&T store to talk to our usual guy that upgrades our phones and handles any problems for us. She tells him what’s wrong and he takes her phone to the back only to come out two minutes later, puts her phone on charge and it comes back to life. 

She asks him what was wrong with it that he managed to somehow fix when the people at the “authorized apple repair place” couldn’t. And you know what he told her?

“There was just a bit of fuzz in the charging port.”

I FUCKING KNEW IT. Listen, I have a MacBook from college. The charger has died twice, and I had to get a new one. This happened for two years in a row around the same time each year. I’m fucking convinced that their hardware is rigged to “expire” in order to force people to keep buying their shit.

Wait, people are just now learning that Apple has some of the shadiest business practices?

You know this isn’t really just apple, company’s do this all the time, everything is rigged to expire and all they want is your money.

Ohhh no no no, this IS JUST Apple. 

All companies want you to buy their new products. None have gone to the lengths that Apple Inc. has gone to make end user repairs as impossible as is legally viable. I have been repairing electronics and computer systems privately, commercially and active duty in the US military for about 30 years. 

Apple puts extra effort into special hardware requiring proprietary tools that are only legally produced by their licensed manufacturer and can only be purchased through licensed repair shops if at all. 

Companies like iFixit can only exist as profit making companies because they are able to make workaround tools and kits that are still profitable but less of a blatant ripoff than Apple. 

-mumbles quietly- well they’ve always been helpful to ME and also far more respectful and easy to chat to than most other IT companies let alone telecommunications companies mumble mumble 

Of course, they’ve not been successful from nothing. Their stores are designed to give you the maximum face-to-face contact with employees as possible. Human contact is as important to them as their products being the most aesthetically simple and pleasing. If everything they did was evil quote unquote then they’d be nowhere.

But I think anyone who’s ever had an ipod, iphone, ipad, etc, can agree that planned obsolescence is built into these things with gusto. My family’s given the apple company a fair amount of cash over the years for their products and they’re the kind of people that like to get their money’s worth from electrical goods: my mother still has a huge 20-year old grey-plastic TV set because it refuses to die on her, or drop even a single pixel of the screen, and my dad refuses to replace his disgusting-looking workhorse ThinkPad because it only takes minimal upkeep and it just keeps barreling on. God only knows how old it is. I think it’s older than time itself.

Both of them have iPads, a gen 1 and gen 2. They were bought pretty much as they came out, so that’s 2010 and 2011.

Yeah, sounds insane to keep an Apple product that long, right? That’s part of the problem.

And let me tell you: they really don’t want to live that long.

The gen 1 crashes at everything, has long since been left behind by software upgrades of any kind (pretty much since gen 2 came out), and despite being fully charged at all times often decides that it wants to randomly and without provocation switch off entirely and not turn back on for several hours. The gen 2 crashes, moves the screen by itself, turns off, turns on, opens apps and closes them, everything except what you imput on screen.

As for me, I’ve had two ipod touches. One lasted me from 2009 (release of 3rd gen) to 2012 (release of 5th gen). I bought the 5th gen pretty much on release because it was dead, my poor little ipod. Despite never having been in more adverse conditions than a pocket, it was buggered: the left half of the screen didn’t work, then it did, then it didn’t, and had a knack of knowing when I was turning on the keyboard before buggering it up. My fifth gen still works perfectly despite having had it for 5 years in the exact same conditions as the 3rd gen.

Call me cynical, but I think it’s because I’m only one model behind on the line.

this guy’s a hero.

Apple solders ram in MacBooks now

there is absolutely no reason to solder ram other than to fuck over the consumer

Considering all this, as well as the limited function of their mobile devices, it bewilders me that some people still willingly choose iPhones

Christmas Lessons from Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

I never get tired of these

Science side of tumblr, How much potato do boyfriend/girlfriend cost?

depends. Some irish have been known to have been bought for two potato, and I’ve heard reports of some british and japanese going for as low as ten potato, but in america it is exchanged for fries. This messes with the normal metric potato measurements since they refuse to convert from Mc.standard, and the rate of potato-to-fries isn’t always the same. On average, a gf in america will be about 3 medium fries, or 4.56 potato. A bf, though, is often 5 medium fries, and that number can vary anywhere between 9 and 12.5 potato.

Despite Jennifer Lawrence’s advocation for equal pay, women are still only worth 4.56 potatoes to the man’s 12.5 potatoes.

goddamn nerd

by Francesco Mattina

by Gabriele Dell’Otto on Tumblr

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SOOOOOOOOOOOO ME!!!!

dont give children’s coloring books to college students

These are awesome

30 Day DC Challenge : Day Five: Favorite family    ∟  BATFAMILY

I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Free Speech

For those of us who converse of the beauty that lies in thundering storms.

Omg I love these!

Jon Stewart on the Charleston shooting:

I didn’t do my job today. I’ve got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds because of what happened in South Carolina. And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral. But I didn’t.

I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident though, that by acknowledging it – by staring into that and seeing it for what it is…We still won’t do jack shit. Yeah, that’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind.

I don’t want to get into the political argument of guns and things. What blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves…

If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our [narrative]. We invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and [lost] thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different counties, all to keep Americans safe. We’ve got to do whatever we can – we’ll torture people. We’ve got to do whatever we can to keep Americans safe. But nine people shot in a church, what about that? “Hey, what are you going go to do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?”

That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around. And you know it’s gonna go down the same path. “This is a terrible tragedy.” They are already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this.

This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for a hundred and some years and has been attacked viciously many times – as many black churches have. And to pretend that – I heard someone on the news say – “tragedy has visited this church”. This wasn’t a tornado. This was a racist. This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater. So the idea that – I hate to even use this pun – but this one is black and white. There’s no nuance here. And we’re gonna keep pretending like, “I don’t get it, what happened. This one guy lost his mind.”

But we are steeped in that culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it. And I cannot believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity. That’s racial wallpaper. You can’t allow that.

Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them – who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina and the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels his country’s being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves.

And that’s the thing – Al Qaeda, all those guys, ISIS – they’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.

Yesterday I was looking at a publisher’s website and found a thread from some readers who were angry about how I had ‘ruined’ Red Sonja by making her want to drink and have sexy times.

Fair enough, I guess. But one of the guys said he can’t read the book because I “hate voluptuous women.”

This is my favorite post of all time. 

:)

I think my favorite part about gailsimones Red Sonja was her constant want for drink and sexytimes, idek why, maybe it made her more awesome because “I can beat you with my hands tied behind my back” is cliche but “I can beat you while incredibly drunk and horny” the best thing ever

Seriously, what’s more fun than Sonja, this goddess, being sloppily trying to get laid?  Why can’t we have new takes on female heroes? It’s weird.

I hate to lay this card down, but honest to god, no one would even bat an eye if it were a male character.

Jessica: What’s the plan? Natasha: They’re on partial power and limited sensors now. Secondary overload will fire in 30 seconds or so. We’ll have ten seconds of darkness before their backup generators restore everything. Jessica: ten seconds to incapacitate as many as we can and secure the rest so once the lights are up we can get them to talk. Anya: How are we going to make them talk? Natasha: heh heh heh heh heh. Anya: Is she always this terrifying? Jessica: Ayyyyyyyyep. – From Avengers Assemble #21 written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, art by Matteo Buffagni, coloured by Nolan Woodard

This book was so much fun to write.

Bill and Ted