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TBD | I Bought It. Why Can't I Fix It?

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

News, Business, Society & Culture

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Whether it’s a phone screen or a coffee machine, why is it so hard to fix our own stuff? And what can we do to make it a bit easier?


Guest: Jason Koebler, editor-in-chief of Motherboard and contributor to the CYBER podcast


Host

Lizzie O’Leary


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:34.8

Again, that is slate.com slash what next plus.

0:43.1

Several years ago, journalist Jason Kebler was on his very first work trip. He was an intern at US News and World Report at the time, and he was excited.

0:51.9

We did karaoke the first night, and I got a little bit drunk, nothing crazy, but I fell

0:58.8

asleep with my laptop in my bed watching comedy or something like on Netflix.

1:04.6

When Jason woke up, the laptop had moved down to the edge of the bed without him realizing

1:09.0

it.

1:09.6

And what happened next has that painful,

1:12.0

almost slow motion quality that anyone who has broken anything expensive knows all too well.

1:18.4

I kicked it off the edge of the bed and the LCD broke on the laptop. So the screen wasn't broken,

1:25.9

but like if you opened it, it was just all kinds of

1:28.1

crazy colors. And I took it to the Apple store and they wanted $700 to fix it.

1:33.8

Money that Jason, an intern, did not have. So he figured, why not try to fix this thing myself?

1:40.7

He went on eBay and found a replacement LCD screen for 50 bucks, a fraction of the price that Apple had quoted him.

1:47.6

And then he found some instructions online.

1:49.8

It actually took me like 10 hours to do.

1:52.3

Like I couldn't get the screen off.

1:54.7

And I remember at one point it was like four in the morning and I grabbed an exacto knife,

...

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