I worked at iFixit for a while, and these kind of articles don’t even scratch the surface of the insanity we had to go through to get manufacturer repair guides they authorized us to get.
I remember being called over to the tech writers (I was working as an intern) to help them navigate a manufacturer’s site. The buttons didn’t work right before you got to the guide, and downloading a guide took something like 5 clicks, each with a considerable amount of lag. It was complete and utter garbage. After a bit of work I think I wrote a bit of js for the writers to use that fixed the site and made it easy to download files. If any of their other sites worked this poorly it would’ve been fixed, but saying they provide the manuals (good press) doesn’t actually mean they want to put in the work to make it easy.
Some companies have pretty nice, well organized documentation, like ThinkPads used to have. If you want to remove a part you look it up and it has all the steps you have to go through in order (and the manual is ordered so you always go forwards in it). That said, Lenovo is full of malware now, which is unfortunate.
Thank goodness I live in Australia where we are allowed to fix gadgets and even reverse engineer hardware and software for personal use and compatibility reasons.
I worked at iFixit for a while, and these kind of articles don’t even scratch the surface of the insanity we had to go through to get manufacturer repair guides they authorized us to get.
I remember being called over to the tech writers (I was working as an intern) to help them navigate a manufacturer’s site. The buttons didn’t work right before you got to the guide, and downloading a guide took something like 5 clicks, each with a considerable amount of lag. It was complete and utter garbage. After a bit of work I think I wrote a bit of js for the writers to use that fixed the site and made it easy to download files. If any of their other sites worked this poorly it would’ve been fixed, but saying they provide the manuals (good press) doesn’t actually mean they want to put in the work to make it easy.
Some companies have pretty nice, well organized documentation, like ThinkPads used to have. If you want to remove a part you look it up and it has all the steps you have to go through in order (and the manual is ordered so you always go forwards in it). That said, Lenovo is full of malware now, which is unfortunate.
Not on ThinkPads, which essentially act autonomously within Lenovo.
Hmmm, I thought that there was that new malware-like feature of lenovo bioses?
Although selling a business laptop that comes preinstalled with a rootkit seems like it would be hard.
It is hard, but somebody’s got to do it.
Thank goodness I live in Australia where we are allowed to fix gadgets and even reverse engineer hardware and software for personal use and compatibility reasons.