popular youtuber says apple won't fix his imac pro damaged while disassembled
ill-informed youtuber bemoans apple repair policies after breaking imac pro
youtube channel claims apple is refusing to fix its broken imac pro
how is it even possible
that so many people don't get this at
all and the worst part
is that this is far from over
thankfully i've got ifixit
ifixit's protec toolkit will get you through any electronics repair challenge
just visit ifixit.com forward slash Linus to get your own today
so first off i really want to give a huge thank you to everyone out there who
contributed uh advice suggestions or even offered to come and
help us out directly without you guys this update video would not have been
possible and even worse than that i don't think we'd be seeing all the
discussion that we have about our circumstances and what they mean for
right to repair fair repair would open a whole market of reuse for customers and
their electronics the pressures frustrations and limited access of
standing on a line to speak to someone at the genius bar where they don't even
serve appletinis uh will be lifted from consumers okay so a refresher then for
those of you who missed it or forgot we knew that we weren't going to get
warranty service on our imac pro and we're not even talking warranty service
we understood we would have to pay we wanted to pay but
we did at least expect apple to be able to offer us a reasonable repair solution
and i'm gonna talk about expectation i'm not talking like you know when angry do
you guys even know who i am i'm not as texted like i'm not talking about that
kind of thing apple actually averted a similar pr crisis with quinn nelson over
at snazzy Labs by just eating the cost of an imac pro and sending him a new one
but as he pointed out so i did walk out of the store with a brand new imac but i
asked myself the question would they have done this for anyone and our goal
here was to have the normal customer experience
so there have been some arguments in favor
of apple's position here not repairing this
and let's address the main ones before we go any further starting with
apple is refusing to quote you a repair cost because it will be higher than the
cost of a brand new machine you idiot
and my response to that is pretty simple a mac is not special it's not magic it's
just a computer so a broken screen
maybe a fried motherboard and also maybe
a bad power supply does not turn a 5 000
workstation into scrap metal we know from our price breakdown of the
imac pro that apple charges about
market rates actually for their parts when you buy them integrated in a
complete system so even if i picked top of the line components the worst case
scenario parts cost should be about 2
100 us dollars and if they were willing to provide those
parts we'd expect to pay a couple hours of labor for another few hundred dollars
or so definitely not enough to cancel out the
value of the CPU RAM SSD chassis and cooler that are probably
all still working they're not that difficult to repair
the reality of it is we just slipped
these things do happen next up is the liability argument
what about apple's liability for the long-term functionality of that machine
well what about it i mean if you take your computer to
i don't know let's say a geek squad for repairs they'll do the work complete a
wider check of the machine to see if there's anything else wrong with it and
then even then warranty their repairs in case they miss
something i mean is the argument really
that apple of all people can't do a comprehensive check of its own hardware
and has so little faith in the training of its technicians that they can't
guarantee a repair if that were true i don't think we
should buy computers from them at all this kind of stuff
industry standard stuff not that complicated
back to the training bit though that one
was a tough nut to crack so we were actually accused of making false claims
about the availability of apple's repair certification for the imac pro with
other publications going as far as to contact apple authorized service
providers in the states who confirmed
that they already had it so here's what actually happened
it was available to at least some aasps at the time we did our video
however it wasn't available to our local aasp so
that got me thinking oh there's my chair maybe this is like a canada u.s thing
but then i spoke personally to an american aasp technician who said
and this is after our local shop got certified mind you that he wasn't going
to be able to get it for a couple more months so something about the way that apple's
rolling these programs out to their asps isn't quite right here
but for now though we need to get back to addressing the problems that we identified in our first video and fixing
this stupid professional workstation that has been
out of commission for months now is
well that's that's pretty much the problem
so coming back to certifications the
training and parts availability has actually improved dramatically since our
first video and we were finally able to take our imac
to an aasp who assured us that they could get the job done
the end so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to
no i'm just kidding nothing is ever that
easy you see while we managed to get our display
replaced for a reasonable price thanks to qualifying
for what they call return pricing where you send the
original part back to apple for disposal
we actually broke the warranty void if
removed stickers around our CPU socket
this one right here so what that means
is that because of that sticker we didn't qualify for return pricing on our
logic board which it turns out is a really bad thing because apple wants
5 500 canadian rupees plus tax for a new
logic board which for some reason includes both the CPU
and the RAM even though contrary to what
a lot of our detractors thought they are socketed and not soldered on this
particular system so that is about double of apple's own price for this
hardware when they sell you the system originally and that is how much they
charge the aasps so if an authorized service provider
fails to return a defective part during the exchange for any reason they
get dinged for the price of the replacement part in what is a clear
effort to prevent any spare parts from
making their way out into the wild which makes it pretty hard to get your hands
on this stuff and interestingly this is far from the
only punitive measure that apple appears to be willing to inflict upon its
partners from talking to them we were struck by the culture of fear that apple
cultivates among its authorized service providers they explicitly prevent them
from ordering replacement parts for the sake of having them on hand so what that
means is that they require a work order to be placed
before the part will even be shipped which creates massive delays of
potentially weeks for something as simple as a freaking RAM swap
which makes the aasp look bad in comparison to apple's own service
centers but that's apple's policy to make matters worse if an aasp
attempts to order a part that they don't yet have the certification for apple
will send them a fine instead of the parts they ordered and
this is all for the privilege of having access to apple's supply chain oh and
the best part is anyone caught talking about any of this to anybody outside of
apple for them this is grounds for severe
retaliation revocation of aasp status or
certifications fines or even potential legal action
only a handful of brave souls were willing to tell us their names or the
names of the shops they ran or worked for and of course we are going to be
keeping all of that information private in order to protect them by comparison
samsung has a web portal that you can log into and order any replacement phone
parts that you could want so
at that kind of markup over a sticker
the aasp option was obviously out we really would have been better off
ordering a brand new imac pro but
another one of you guardian angels out there who
also shall not be named for legal reasons stepped up to the plate
now we're getting to the point where the solutions that we're working on wouldn't
be available to joe average but even though it was a lot of work we
really wanted to know how deep this rabbit hole goes
so it ended up being a case of i know a guy who knows a guy who knows a
guy so given how much money
was being exchanged i was sketched out to the max
but after a series of back alley deals like almost literally back alley deals
our contact managed to get us
this a brand new imac pro logic board
complete with CPU and RAM for 2 000 us dollars and here's the
kicker if our contact deghostifies because right now he's sort
of gone dark if our contact shows back up again and
can get us exchange pricing that could actually become as low as zero dollars
so uh oh excellent i've got a calculator so let's let's do some quick maths for
you guys our screen and power supply replacement
at the aasp cost was roughly 1400 us
dollars including labor and shipping thanks to return pricing at worst we can
add another two thousand dollars on top of that for the logic board and uh
oh look at that 3 400 us dollars
how much does an imac pro cost again so
sorry haters it looks like you're wrong
i guess if it wasn't for apple's anti-consumer
anti-partner and possibly looking at
what's going on with right to repair in the states right now illegal policies
it would be possible to get the replacement parts for less than the
retail price of a new unit only one thing remains now then
we still don't actually know if our
frankenstein machine works or not and i
could get Anthony to test it but
i think we all know what happened last time
i can't believe that some people thought that this was intended to deceive the
audience by the way it was clearly a csi
style dramatic reenactment i mean look at the sparks
we're not even good at special effects
anyway this video is long enough already
and i think i've got a better idea
and some of you will probably already know where i'm going with this
hey louis i think i've got a fun little project
for us have you ever worked on an imac pro before
we don't stop watching yet i have a teaser and an offer for you the teaser
is we have a video upcoming with wendell from level one tax
gaming on Linux it's better than you think unless you
think it's perfect in which case it's not better than you think but don't worry about that
also pia go check out private internet access for the vpn that does well pretty
much what a vpn does it encrypts your traffic and makes it so that it's harder
to track you on the internet it's great go check it out at the link in the video description
so thanks for watching you guys if you dislike this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed and maybe consider checking
out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description particularly ifixit stuff i'm not sure
if we're recommending the imac pro at this point also down there is our merch
store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you
should totally join