Gadgetory

popular youtuber says Apple won't fix his eye Mac 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 check this at all and the worst part is that this is far from over thankfully I've got I fix it I fix its Pro Tech tool kit we'll get you through any electronics repair challenge just visit ifixit.com forward slash - to get your own today so first off I really want to give a huge thank you to everyone out there who contributed 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 or they don't even serve appletinis 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 that's how the go expectation I'm not talking like you know when angry do you guys even know who I am I'm Lennis 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 what 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 said I don't know let's say 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 your repair if that were true I don't think we should buy computers from them at all this kind of stuff industry standard stuff 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 a peas at the time we did our video however it wasn't available to our local AAAS P so that got me thinking well there's my chair maybe this is like a canada-us thing but then I spoke personally to an American ASP 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 apples rolling these programs out to their AAS peas 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 ASP who assured us that they could get the job done at the end so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what - hahaha 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 five thousand five hundred 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 apples old price for this hardware when they sell you the system originally and that is how much they charge the AAS Peas 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 ram swap which makes the ASP look bad in comparison to Apple's own service centers but that's Apple's policy to make matters worse if an ASP 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 apples 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 ASP 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 info in 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 a ASP 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 were 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 two thousand US dollars and here's the kicker if our contact D ghostified because right now he's sort of gone dark if our contract shows back up again and can get us exchanged 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 math for you guys our screen and power supply replacement at the ASP cost was roughly fourteen hundred US dollars including labor and shipping thanks to return pricing at worst we can add another two thousand dollars on top of that so logic board and thirty four hundred 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 anteye partner and possibly looking at what's going on with Wright 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 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 up coming with Wendell from level one time 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 P ia 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