Tag: blog

BBC’s The Repair Shop

I recently caught an episode of The Repair Shop on BBC 1, in which the cameras capture the restoration of items which have seen better days. The BBC’s programme page says:

Enter a workshop filled with expert craftspeople, bringing loved pieces of family history and the memories they hold back to life. A heartwarming antidote to throwaway culture.

When I tweeted about seeing the show, a couple of friends said ‘I can’t believe you’ve never watched this before! That’s right up your street!’

I guess so. I did love seeing expert repairers problem-solving and breathing new life into some incredibly cool old stuff – including using some amazing, niche techniques to match the original style or construction of the item. I do love the idea of a major media outlet encouraging people to hold onto what they have, rather than throwing things away and replacing them. But I’m afraid I do also have a problem with the show’s messaging.

The BBC’s parade of family heirlooms and one-of-a-kind curios being lovingly restored to their former glory through the most exsquisite craftsmanship available is certainly great television. But it sends a message that repairing an object is a rarefied skill which takes a lot of specialised, intricate work – and that only the most unique, expensive, or sentimentally-valuable items are worthy of such privileged treatment.

I’m not saying it isn’t amazing to watch these people at work, and to see the results of their craftsmanship – but if the goal really is to challenge ‘throwaway culture’ and help foster an attitude of sustainability, the BBC has got the balance and focus of the show wrong.

It may not be as glamorous to watch somebody change a laptop trackpad or put a new door on their fridge. And those ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots certainly won’t astound the viewers in the same way, when it looks like a simple process that anyone can do. But that is precisely the point!

If we really want to encourage people to repair more and replace less, we don’t need to show them how precious the art of restoring beautiful antique furniture is – we need to show them how easy and manageable it can be to change a car headlamp bulb, or a phone battery. Repair is for everyone; and for everything!

The restorations showcased on The Repair Shop are incredible, one-in-a-million works of art, performed by true masters of their craft. I love to watch that, I have the utmost respect for the people doing that work, and I can totally understand why the BBC want to show that on national television. But that doesn’t match up to the show’s stated aims.

Changing our throwaway culture means making repair ordinary; everyday; humdrum. I would just as much love watching a BBC programme which puts the simple, functional repairs that anyone can do front-and-centre – and which aims to encourage anyone who isn’t sure they can do it yet to have a go.

Why The mid-2012 Is Still The Best MacBook

That maybe a nigh-on ten-year-old design, but the mid-2012 MacBook Pro (A1278) is still the best laptop Apple have made. There are people who say that the model which superseded it (the A1502 Retina MacBook Pro) is the best one. I won’t fight them on that – those 2015 MacBook Pros are still excellent machines, with many of the same attractive qualities as the A1278 – but they are wrong.

The A1278 is more serviceable and more upgradeable. You can easily change the battery when its performance inevitably starts to wear out (as happens to all batteries). You can change and upgrade the storage (in my own mid-2012 MacBook Pro, I have fitted a 1TB SSD as a system drive, plus a 2TB SATA disk in place of where the original optical drive used to be). And you can change the RAM up to an actual maximum of 16GB in a matter of moments.

With the A1502 model, on the other hand, changing the battery is difficult as the original battery is glued in place – and a replacement battery can cost up to five times what a new battery for a mid-2012 MacBook Pro costs. You can still change or upgrade the storage – but the NVMe SSD this model requires also costs a lot more. RAM is soldered onto the Logicboard and cannot be replaced or upgraded. And although you gain onboard HDMI and more Thunderbolt 2 ports (compared to the A1278), you lose Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports.

However, if you are content with your specs (or happy to spend more time and money on maintenance) the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro is still a very good machine, and very nice to use. It’s after 2015 that things really start to go downhill…

For the last five years, Apple have insisted on producing worse laptops than they did in the past. Gradually removing all the features people actually liked and used, whilst at the same time making the machines all but impossible to repair or maintain.

Consider some of the features of the older MacBooks I have mentioned which no longer appear on the newer models… Apple’s MagSafe charger design is a work of true genius. It’s subtle pieces of brilliance in design like MagSafe which in the past have set Apple’s products apart from the herd, and made it worth paying the premium for their brand. So in 2016, Apple discontinued this universally-acclaimed design in favour of charging over USB-C on their new A1707 MacBooks (which iFixIt scores a lousy 1/10 for repairability).

Likewise, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro and the earlier Retina models produced alongside it feature a scissor-style keyboard using a mechanism Apple calls a ‘Magic Keyboard’, which in my opinion is an absolute joy to type on. In 2015, Apple started using their ‘Butterfly Keyboard’ mechanism instead – a keyboard mechanism which is painful to use, received consistently negative reviews, and was actually the subject of a lawsuit – purely for the sake of slightly thinner MacBooks.

This single-minded pursuit of thin and lightweight has resulted in laptops which are less repairable, less upgradeable, have keyboards which hurt your hands, and feature next to no connectivity (a MacBook Pro which has four USB ports – one of which has to be used for the charger – and nothing else is not, in my opinion, Pro at all).

So although they may seem chunky by today’s standards, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro is still a vastly more Pro device than almost all the MacBook models released after it. The specs are still comparable to much more recent machines – and if you happen to buy one with lower specs, you can upgrade it to the maximum for around £100, with less than an hour’s work. You can plug in almost everything you might need to plug in, without having to take out a mid-sized bank loan to purchase Apple’s own cable adaptors. And you get all the advantages of some of Apple’s best design work – especially the MagSafe charger.

The only serious downside of the older A1278 is that the onboard graphics chip seriously limits performance if you are running a very graphics-intense workflow (video editing or rendering, for example). It is possible to get around this, although the workaround is a clunky and not-especially-portable solution.

A couple of years ago, Apple finally opened up the use of external graphics cards with MacBooks, recognising that thermal throttling on graphics issues is one of the biggest causes of loss of performance for MacBook users. Officially, eGPUs are only supported on Thunderbolt 3 enabled Macs running macOS 10.13.4 (‘High Sierra’) or later. However, it is possible to force eGPU support on Thunderbolt 2 Macs (including the A1278 MacBook Pro) using the PurgeWrangler script, which is something I have done successfully prior to my Cheesegrater Mac Pro build.

(I should note that since I did that, Mayank Kumar who designed the PurgeWrangler script has released a new version called Kryptonite, which supersedes PurgeWrangler as it does not need root level kernel modifications requiring System Integrity Protection to be disabled on your Mac. I have not personally tried Kryptonite, as I have not used my eGPU much recently.)

I would not recommend taking this route unless you know that you are going to be running lots of heavy-duty graphics on your Mac. But it is always worth being aware that these types of modifications are available for certain specific use cases.

In conclusion, the only thing you gain by opting for a MacBook built in 2015 or later is a marginal saving in terms of size and weight. Personally, I would always rather have a computer which is slightly bulkier, but is actually fit for purpose and which can be repaired when it goes wrong.

Thoughts On Apple’s Self Service Repair Announcement

As a longtime and loyal Apple user – but one who abhors the company’s proprietary instincts and lack of transparency around parts and repairs – the announcement earlier today that Apple would soon launch their Self Service Repair programme, making specialist parts, tools and diagrams available to the public should have had me jumping for joy.

And it did! I was genuinely cheered by the news when I read it. It’s a remarkable change of tune from a company who have previously been so wildly hysterical on the topic of repair – as the iFixIt blog on the matter was quick to point out…

This move invalidates many of the arguments Apple and other manufacturers have used against the right to repair. Liability? You understand the risks, and won’t sue Apple if you damage your device, or stab yourself in the palm with a screwdriver. Warranties? Although it’s illegal to void a warranty for a DIY repair, people worry. Apple’s program should tell motivated fixers that their warranty is intact.

But there are some serious caveats, too. As the European Right To Repair campaign’s response says, the devil is very much in the details. Their website wonders whether the announcement might end up being too good to be true.

For my part, I don’t think ‘too good to be true’ is quite fair. I think this is genuine, and I think that is legitimately good news – but I think it does not go anywhere near far enough, and I think Apple’s motivations still owe more to safeguarding their market share than helping their consumers. That is their right – but it is also our right to keep campaigning for binding right to repair legislation which serves the public, not just vested interests.

Apple are releasing only the schematics and spare parts for the newest iPhone and MacBook models (at least to begin with). The message is clear: Buy our new stuff, and you’re much better off! You’ll even get to fix it, too!

But those of us who care about repair and sustainability don’t want to be forced into upgrading to new devices so we can get the cool new toys. In fact, that is exactly the type of attitude we are trying to get away from! If Apple’s damascene conversion were serious, they would want to help us keep older devices running better for longer.

What cheers me most about the whole thing is that it shows we are winning. Apple is a smart. Smart, with a carefully-honed image of slick, polished competence. In my view, what’s happening here is that Apple have spotted which way the wind is blowing; they want to get out in front of any legislation which maybe coming down the line to do things on their own terms; they want to jump before they are pushed. Well, good. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still push.