Submitted by An update to the Rossman story we talked about earlier this week:
I am told by my attorney that Apple & the firm like my channel, are fans of it, and are friendly.
I am as surprised by this as any of you are.
I’m still interested in the precise issue they have with the channel, as it isn’t often customary for high end Manhattan lawfirms to reach out to me to tell me that they’re fans. It is persistently clear that there is an issue they have with the content, but I don’t know what it is yet. That in and of itself is bothersome and unnerving, but whatayagannado.
Peculiar case.
Thom said:
Is it though? Louis posted a cryptic video when he wasn’t in possession of any more facts than that Apple’s lawyers wanted to have a word with him.
The next day he posts an update saying that he isn’t being sued. The same day iFixit picks up the story and runs with it. Later that day they post a correction.
So in the absence of any real data here, I don’t think there is a there there.
I am disappointed that neither Thom or the OSAlert community posted 47 comments over multiple days, and none of them bothered to notice there was an update to the story
I actually have a company to run, a social life to manage, and health to maintain. So I am so very, very, very sorry I didn’t drop everything and stopped dead in my tracks because poor Apple, the world’s richest company, may have been seen in some bad light on a small website.
Ugh.
All your talk about companies not having integrity and when the time comes for you to say “hey, I’m sorry, I was wrong” — you’re too busy.
LOL, hypocrite.
Then maybe it is time to give up OSAlert. I was actually trying to criticize the community more than you, but no one is making you run this place.
And thanks for making it sound like I am some kind of Apple shill. I, you, and the whole OSAlert community should be interested in accuracy.
If the situation had been worse than described, and Apple pressed criminal charges, it still would have gone unnoticed. So you argument still doesn’t hold water.
Your comment really made me annoyed. You were clearly criticising him.
Are you paying for OSAlert? Do you expect up-to-the-minute details on everything for free!?
Get a clue.
Tell me where I can pay, right now, and I will. Especially if it means I can hold OSAlert to a higher standard.
jockm,
http://www.osnews.com/subscribe
I’m sure Thom would appreciate it if you contributed $20 or $100 bucks. But let’s be honest, at that level you shouldn’t expect many changes unless it gets multiplied 1000 times over for someone to even consider quitting one’s day job to focus on quality tech journalism. The problem is that journalism doesn’t pay very much these days. It sucks, but what are you going to do?
Still hold yourself to a better standard than this?
OSAlert has been dying since 2001, according to commenters. I don’t even flinch when people say this
.
That being said – all this doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to change things, but that’s just not going to happen. We’ve been trying to completely redesign the site for literally (no joke!) ten years now (check the archive), but that’s not going to happen – so the site stays as it is.
And I feel very happy with how OSAlert works right now. It’s a relatively small community, we have good discussions that are often harsh and direct (just the way I like it – we’re all adults here), but are always interesting. We have interesting stuff up, at a good enough pace that I find works well for a site of our size, and I can sprinkle in some interesting flavour every now and then by going off-topic.
In any event, if you think OSAlert will ever go back to just posting links to boring shit like it did way back – sorry, not going to happen.
Thom Holwerda,
I for one liked it when there was original content. Ideally for me there would be more. Snippets of interesting stories can be ok but all too often it’s just references to google this, iphone that, facebook here, ms there. It all seems to get repetitive without a more creative twist. I realize it probably didn’t work for you, but even the old osnews cartoon would be welcome by me.
jockm,
Well sure, osnews could benefit from new blood, a full time editor and even tech journalists would certainly help liven things up. I’ve had fun ideas for osnews too. And as much as I’d like to see all of it happen, these kinds of operations are becoming less viable when ad revenue keeps falling every year. I for one don’t like it, but the economics favors the copy/paste aggregators over the content creators and hard working journalists. It’s a race to the bottom, one where many good tech magazines have already become defunct. It sucks and this is something the entire news industry is struggling with, even outside of tech.
On some levels I can agree with what you are saying, but I just find this sense of entitlement over someone else’s work and life balance to be over the top, you know?
It’s easy to say, but do you think your priorities would be that different if you still needed to make a living and had a life outside of osnews?
I used to run the third post popular play by email boardgame site on the internet (Pocket-Monkey.com). I ran it for years, unpaid. I worked 60 hours a week and put in nearly 40 on the site.
And when i realized I couldn’t keep up standards, I sold it to a friend. I then watched the site slowly die as he got busier and busier and couldn’t put in the time. I know what I am talking about
jockm,
So it sounds like your answer to the question today would be ‘no’ because it’s not worth putting in the unpaid time on top of your day job.
I want you to understand this is not a criticism, but I hope you can see that’s exactly the problem everyone faces. It’s a thankless job and unless you are independently wealthy you can’t give up your day job, that’s not a sustainable way to live. Your site died without you, do you really want Thom following in your footsteps?
Edited 2016-07-08 00:51 UTC
I want someone with the passion to keep it going to a better standard than this. That is the point. Simply maintaining is not better.
That is the point I keep trying to make.
jockm,
Yes I’ve understood this all along, but I still think it was a fair counterpoint: if it wasn’t sustainable for you & your site, why would you assume it would work elsewhere?
I get what you are asking for and speaking broadly as a reader/user/consumer, I’d love for *everything* to be held to higher standards. However the world being what it is, the economics don’t always favor that. Whether we like it or not amateur blogging/video has taken a huge chunk of mindshare away from higher quality professional journalists. A cheap knockoff article can make the same ad revenue (maybe even more) per visitor than an in-depth article that took hours/days to research and write about. So where’s the incentive? It’s a race to the bottom.
If nothing else, then can we just agree that getting higher standards is much easier said than done?
As someone who is a sometimes contributor to this site, and others, I don’t think people appreciate how much time even doing something like regularly maintaining a blog is much less a site like this. It’s especially rich to see these two commentators whining like this is CNet or Ars with a full time staff whose job it is to maintain the site. And no, the world shouldn’t be full of sites that only exist in that business model but also part time models with free time contributions. Their comments remind me of the same sort of people that bitch about their open source software having some bug but not doing anything to contribute anything towards any project whatsoever except negative comments and negative energy. You tell Thom to drop off if he doesn’t have time to do this full time. I tell you to pick up a pen and try contributing more than just bitching, or at least try to maintain a constructive dialog instead of putting down people that are donating their time and energy towards efforts like this.
Edited 2016-07-07 11:47 UTC
Tell ya what. Let’s take Thom out of this. Say I give him a free pass for all the reasons you mentioned.
The community went on for 47 posts for days without ever checking the facts or mentioning that the story was updated.
No one commented that there was no real information, that maybe we should reserve judgement until something real is known.
But none of that happened. The community ran to their ideological corners and shouted. We all should do better.
jockm,
Well, someone did catch it, namely you. And Thom did post an update. To me, this turnaround time seems reasonable for a site that normally updates once or twice a week anyways. This is not slashdot where things get caught in real time. I don’t reread the source article every time I comment, I usually read it once and that’s it. This seems fairly blown out of proportion, IMHO.
I was about to post this comment without checking upstream sources for updates, but I checked the channel for updates just now and can attest for you that there are no updates to this story as of this time.
I follow OSAlert because having a sharp eye on what actually is news. The field is inundated on agenda & PR.
Yea, Thom has actually showed thin skin. But is this thin skin what allow him to feel the changing winds, the weird smells, the mysterious silences.
I’m OK with Thom thin skin.
“We all should do better.”
Totally agree, jockm.
I noticed, but it was such a non-story in the first place. As I said, I like and respect Louis, and have been watching his videos for quite a few months (I want to say over 4, but I don’t actually know – long before this story at any rate.) I know from watching his videos that he has a few tendencies, one of which is to post non electronics opinion pieces. This just seemed in that vein to me. He repairs Apple products without being licensed and so he knows that he it on the edge of what Apple would see is “legal”. He fills a gap that should not exist. He is very critical of Apple and Apple’s designs. It’s all stuff that was going to stir the hornet’s nest at some point…. But as usual, Apple rattles sabres and then stood down. It’s rare they go after one guy. More often than not it doesn’t really make much of an interesting story once the initial storm subsides.
I’m more interested that Thom hasn’t mentioned Spotify and Apple fighting over in-app purchases. Surely that was at least somethign that could have been tagged on to the end of this story – even if it wasn’t worth a piece of its own?
Spotify vs Apple surely was/is worth a news item. Luckily enough there are plenty of sources out there that provide just that
Just a couple of points of clarification. No “License” is need to fix apple products. Louis has no intention to become an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP), because the agreement/contract he would have with Apple wouldn’t allow him to to repair motherboards as he currently does and would have to repair Apple products the Apple way (i.e. swapping out parts). His current work would be seens as unauthorized by Apple, if he or anyone else wants to be an AASP, but it is not “illegal”.
Probably the only issue they have with him is that he has shown on his channel, schematics, which are Apple IP.
Sorry – this is why I said “legal” with quotes. I don’t think it’s illegal, but as Apple don’t seem to really want unauthorised repairs, as such they might have seen this as a “legal issue”. Seems not though, so storm in a teacup, move along
“…He fills a gap that should not exist…”
Wow!
Almighty Apple. Please forgive us miserable scum!
Haven’t seen this line of thought since studying Stalin.
Maybe Apple doesn’t have a problem you, Louis. Those following through your videos are the few with the experience, warm hands, sharp eye, stable pulse.
I wouldn’t send my Pretorian Guards to say You everything is OK between Us, if not wanting to send an additional message.
Maybe They’re OK with your teachings, but not that much with the tone.