This is a nice win for self-repair hardware rights.
For context, see their old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uCpY3tFTIA
That’s great, but I’m sure Taylor (ice cream machine manufacturer) will still void your warranty, and McDonald’s corporate will still tell you you’re required to have Taylor service it. There were blackboxed control bypass devices for these machines that let them run longer and self-clean better, but McDonald’s sent out a memo requiring all franchisees to remove them and only allow Taylor to work on those machines.
Sweet! Sub par soft-serve for everyone!
It’s not even cheap anymore :(
Costco’s soft-serve is way better than McD’s and actually is cheap.
Maybe not now since we can hack it
McDonald’s franchisees being forced to buy one specific problematic ice cream machine is ducked up on it’s own. Let them choose what works.
The whole situation is ducked IMO.
My ice cream came with bronzer smeared all over the cone last time I went there.
No extra charge?
“You are allowed to repair the thing you own”
Why would you buy an ice cream machine from McDonalds? They have bland food and cut cola with hygiene problems in their ice machines.
Why would anyone even eat there?
I don’t think I’ve ever ordered ice-cream from McDonald’s. Not exactly the type of product I’d go to a hamburger joint for.
While McDonald’s ice cream isn’t great, hamburger joints are usually a great spot for ice cream and milkshakes
That’s all I used to go there for, but not sure if it’s different ice-cream in Europe.
Their ice cream and McFlurry is used to be really good for the value
I say used to because they more or less butchered the McFlurry in the past 7 years they no longer have the iconic spoons they’ve removed the packaging replacing it with a slightly smaller packaging and they’ve increased the cost by about double.
Thumbnail isn’t even a Mcds unit.
Well they weren’t allowed to before
Ah this bit is sad. The exception only covers bypassing DMCA protections to fix your own stuff not distributing the tooling for it.
It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame. The ruling doesn’t change the underlying statute making it illegal to share or sell tools that bypass software locks. This leaves most of the repair work inaccessible to the average person, since the technical barriers remain high. Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.
This company sure has been making the rounds on the internet. I estimate maybe 1-2 years before they decide to cash in on their goodwill with some kind of monetary product
Ifixit? They’ve been selling tools for years, and they’re great.
I am honestly not sure if you’re joking or not
I’m not really. Who are these guys and why am I hearing about them on every social media outlet.
They’re a company whose sole aim is to make money. Right now they’re in the goodwill phase of building community trust, but what’s their endgame? Is this an emerging market they’re cornering.
I know these sound like sarcastic questions, but I’m genuinely wondering.
Ifixit has been a community driven repair site for over 20 years. It was indispensable for repairing apple laptops when they were still transitioning to Intel from PowerPC. I haven’t kept up with all the changes, but they sell tools and parts now. Even from a jaded perspective one can see the right to repair is in their best interest.
Well, that sounds promising at least. I hope their interests continue to align with their consumer-base for another 20 years, and doesn’t nosedive into the CEO rot we’ve seen with Mozilla
So far they haven’t shown any form above declined. In fact the actually just decided to separate from being an official Samsung repair partner, because Samsung was trying to dictate how much they were charging for the repair costs and were actively hinderings efforts regarding repairing Samsung products, so they decide that Samsung wasn’t aligned with their programs values and decided to drop the program. This doesn’t mean that they dropped how to repair Samsung devices, it just means that they no longer offer second party access to Parts it’s now third party and Samsung themselves aren’t providing the repair manuals anymore (not that they really did in the first place)
While I find their tools pretty steep in pricing, there’s still nowhere near cost of doing it through Apple or Samsung
Thanks for the informed context – I think my brain is just predisposed towards seeing such efforts as disingenuous, but I should learn to criticize companies after they do bad things, and not before.
