tobias_platen's blog
Tobias Alexandra Platen's software freedom blog
Freedom to repair.
On the I love Free Software day iFixit posted an article “iFixit Loves Repair”. For me repair is freedom. The freedom to repair is just as important as Stallman’s four freedoms. I think that computers should come with free repair manuals.
Many Apple products are hard to impossible to repair. Repair at certified shops is expensive, but you can repair them yourself if you use tools and manuals from iFixit.
I once had a Mac that had a mechanical defect and I could not buy replacement parts and I did not have a repair manual at that time.
But I was able to change the battery without using any tools.
With newer hardware such as the iThings users cannot replace the battery without the use of a special screwdriver for the pentalobe screws.
In the Apple world everything is proprietary. The Lightning connector is only found on Apple hardware and incompatible with standardized USB ports.
There is also an authentification chip that implements a hardware DRM. By contrast the Fairphone uses USB which has a standardizes charging protocol.
You just need to add an 200 Ohms resistor between the data lines and connect the two power lines to 5 Volts. I once built this circuit on a breadboard.
Changing the battery is easy, no tools are needed.
On many laptops it is not easy to replace the harddisk, keyboard or RAM. But on some ThinkPads supported by libreboot you have only to remove four screws to replace the keyboard.
Flashing libreboot for the first time requires removing more screws, but this only needs to be done once.
