All the best to them. I was involved with a few Vice projects in 2011-2014 and it was honestly leadership that let them down. They have great talent but it's not easy in this day and age to run any kind of content site.
Netflix the contender for our limited attention and only one of an ever growing number of subscriptions whose cost needs to be justified. I'm guessing a streaming service, even one with netflix's catalogue, is going to provide a lot more bang for your buck in terms of minutes of quality content per dollar.
Netflix has nothing to do with newspapers or other digital content and services that aren't video streaming.
People seem to make the comparison only because the things are accessed by using a screen, which seems to be a very simple perspective. Just because Netflix is a great bargain (for those who like their content), doesn't mean you can conclude that everything else is expensive.
Value for money and value for time will apply regardless.
Both entertainment and reading in-depth paid news are one and the same: luxuries one does in their (typically) scarce spare time using an (often) modest budget.
That's not my attitude to paid news at all. Quality news are often essential in order to understand things that are happening in your vicinity, that will have a direct impact on your life and on the life of people close to you. It is not necessarily about entertainment or wasting some time. Mostly low quality news media will have a focus on entertaining.
If we use Netflix as a benchmark, you shouldn't spend money on anything except for on Netflix, since almost nothing gives the same amount of hours of use per cent paid. Exceptions for lightbulbs, which are not that entertaining to watch.
I think most people sometimes go out for a drink, a meal, or a coffee - without agonizing much about the price, even though you could get many days glued to Netflix for the same price as that drink with friends.
I wrote a long a comment theorising why $100/year is a great starting point and then discovered you can toggle between "yearly" and "monthly". So they do offer $10/month -- it's just hidden behind a toggle.
Only viewing total cost misses the point. For some people, it may be more reasonable for them to want to pay a fraction of the cost monthly vs. one big sum every 12 months. $10/month is more expensive, in total, over a year. However, $100 is more expensive in the short-term.
Also, paying monthly is only more expensive if the person paying decides to stay that long. Monthly payments allow flexibility to cancel rather than committing to a year.
For it to make sense to you, imagine somebody buying a pizza:
- How much is the pizza?
- It's 10 dollars.
- I don't think it's worth 10 dollars!
- Uhm, okay then don't buy it.
- But I really need that pizza, it's really important that I get it!
- Then pay 10 dollars?
- That's too expensive, it's worth nowhere near that!
- If it's not worth 10 dollars why is it important to you?
- It's extremely important that I get that pizza and I really want it, but also you have to understand that it's not worth 10 dollars, so give it to me for free now!
...ad infinitum.
If it still doesn't make sense, then it will never make sense.
It will never make sense because it's nonsense: you can eat dozens of pizzas for $10, so it makes no sense to say that if you don't want to pay $10 for just a single pizza means you don't value pizza (and no one was talking about "give it to me for free now")
I think that if you can eat dozens of pizzas for $10, then you could probably write dozens of articles for the same price. So then buying an article from some magazine shouldn't be of any interest.
$100 sounds much worse than phrasing it as 27 cents a day.
(cue cheesy music): "For just a quarter a day, you can save a struggling journalist from corporate overlords, submarine PR pieces, and human interest stories"
If anybody has the magic formula for pricing, I'd be all ears. Yeah, $100 a year seems steep - but OTOH are twice as many people going to subscribe for $50? Five times as many for $20? (Or more...)
I don't know what the answer / formula is, but I pay more than that per year for my LWN.net subscription and for a few other publications. Less than that for others, but I really don't know what the "right" level would be to maximize revenue so they're able to pay themselves a decent salary and keep the lights on.
The site is built with Ghost[0] and subscriptions are managed by Outpost[1].
Design is clean, loads fast, and articles are stacked, so I wish them luck. It's pretty ruthless out there, but a few good stories on HN front-page[2] should at least get this syndicated in all the best places.
[0]: https://ghost.org/ (they've also forgotten to change the default article:publisher URL which leads to Ghost's FB page)
I used to really like Motherboard, so I'm rooting for them.
I haven't been totally happy with my tech newsfeed the past while but I'm clutching onto my Defector subscription for all that it's worth. I hope they can make this work similarly.
I signed up as paying member. These are some of the good journalists who need encouragement to go independent. Hopefully now that they are free of billionaire benefactors, they will not need to weave in partisan attacks and other mandatory messages.
>These types that are deceitful, immoral and tear society apart with their paymaster propaganda don’t deserve another position of trust.
You are fortunate if you have never needed to do anything against your principles because your job required it. I have worked for companies I am not proud of. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and a chance to use their new found independence for good. If they fuck it up, I won't renew membership.
We know that it has an audience because millions of people read our journalism at Motherboard every month. We are making a bet that a small fraction of those people will be willing to pay for accountability journalism and offbeat stuff that people care about (porn, for one, but lots other things) but that might make advertisers nervous.
We are under no illusion that this will be easy but we are excited to give it a shot. The worst thing that can happen is that we tried our best on something we really believe in and enjoy doing, it doesn't work financially, and we ultimately have to go do something else. We are hopeful and optimistic that we CAN make it work, but already we are overwhelmed and thrilled with the response. It's only our second day but we're committed to becoming a vital publication for people who care about how tech impacts humans, and how humans impact tech. We understand we will need to prove this day in and day out for people to feel like they are getting their money's worth, or that their money is supporting a force for good in the world/the internet. But we really want to make that happen. Thanks for the kind words
Hey there, Jason from 404 Media here. We're humbled that someone posted this and just wanted to say I'll stick around for an hour or so before I have a few interviews for articles scheduled, if anyone has any questions/thoughts/feedback. We're very grateful for the support and thrilled to be here
Any chance you could not be vicious tech haters? There's a hole for Michael Arrington era TechCrunch reporting which just focused on factual information about companies and people. What the innovation is, how far the company has gotten with it, what people are trying to accomplish. If a company is boring instead of making a hit piece out of it just don't write about it.
Do you plan to do any investigative pieces on AI alignment? I’d be interested in a piece that interviewed people like Paul Christino, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Chris Olah and the like. Covering opposing views from doomerism to e/acc.
This fully fully depends on the article. We want to respect our readers' time, so while we love doing big investigations, it's a lot to ask people to ONLY read 2,000-5,000-word articles about complicated topics. We want to have a lot of short posts that are insightful or about the news. So, for example, this was a breaking story I did yesterday:
This article took me 20-30 minutes to write, edit, and publish. It's still news, but it's more of an update on something I've covered and written about literally hundreds of times before. So I am providing some of the context about the decision that I can recite from memory (I check the specifics, of course), telling people what's new, and providing them the document.
This article I published earlier today, meanwhile, is something I've been poking along on for weeks, talked to a lot of sources on, read a lot of academic papers on, etc.
At Motherboard our main way of operating was to always have a big investigation or narrative feature going on in the background, but to be on the lookout for news or timely things to do that align with our "beats" (the things we cover day-to-day, the topics we know inside and out). Usually features are something that you poke along on for weeks or months and go through a very rigorous back-and-forth editing process.
FOIA stuff can "take" months or years, but often very little of that is active work time. The way that works is you file a request, wait for the agency to respond, and bug them a bunch when they miss deadlines or don't respond. I've had FOIA requests returned the same day, and I've had others returned five years after I file them.
On LibreWolf, the scrolling is really messed up on this page, and on the home page. Out of curiosity, are you Rolling Your Own Scrolling(TM)? That's generally a no-no.
>Much has been written about the failing business model of new media. We have watched how new media companies fail, and it’s not because of a lack of audience, revenue, impact, or vital work. New media companies fail because of a growth-at-any-cost mentality, and venture capital investments made at absurd valuations. Most importantly, astronomical overhead costs make it impossible for journalists to out-earn the cost of expensive office space, the ever-changing whims of management, executives’ salaries, the cost of unnecessary enterprise software, and an endless parade of consultants brought in to figure out what’s wrong.
>It doesn’t have to be this way, and at 404 Media, it will not. We propose a simple alternative: pay journalists to do journalism.
We're going to join Mastodon I promise. Honestly the reason we haven't joined Mastodon yet is because there have been a million little things to adjust/fix in the days leading up to launch to make sure the site didn't break, to edit the stories, get art done, backend business stuff as well.
There are a lot of things we wanted to launch with that we haven't had time to do yet, which doesn't mean it's not a priority. As you can imagine we've had a few (very minor) urgent fires in the leadup to launch, so tbh our social media accounts across the board have taken a temporary backseat. Mastodon is high on our list and I'm sure we'll be there by the end of the week if not the end of the day.
This was not about Mastodon. It was a general comment about X and the fact that journalists have not abandoned it en masse for reasons that should be obvious to anyone paying attention by this point. They remain on X. They took control of their publishing, and I would recommend taking control of their social by running their own ActivityPub server instead of relying on enshittified platforms who are not their friends, and who view them as the enemy. I’m surprised that every news org hasn’t already done this.
I feel like journos & editors are single-handedly keeping X afloat, as they need and crave what is offers. Its a tough and abusively relationship that I, like you, feel they need to break away from. However, at the same time I do how their businesses might suffer from it. Tough situation.
They handed control of their audience to platforms without thinking about where that could lead. Now they are in a tough spot. But starting a new venture by doubling down on that twenty-teens mistake seems to especially ignore the history
I mean, setting up a new publication/company is a little more involved than just idly clicking though setting up a blog on wordpress.com and shitting out a singular 5 paragraph essay if that's what you mean.
Where are they getting the money to pay the journalists? Isn't that the main issue, that people don't pay for journalism, hence why media outlets take VC in the first place? Seems like VC funding is a consequence, not the cause.
Peanut gallery reporting in. It always felt sort of weird that vice had a technology section, but I think there is space for tech coverage with a more edgy slant (eg. Beto O'Rourke and his hacker background).
Why would you name your website after a website error code? Appreciate the easter egg on the actual 404 page.
Not really direct feedback but when the Verge launched they made a big splash with in-depth, long form stories like "Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS" from 2012. I hope you guys could dig up some stories like this, and your commitment to filing FOIA requests seems promising.
Naming the site was a big struggle sesh. Lots of good names are taken, weren't the right vibe, etc. We sort of made the joke "404 Media Company Not Found" to ourselves but, I think to be honest we:
1) Like how it sounds
2) People get it right away, even folks I know who don't care a lot about tech journalism or aren't super internet savvy (maybe they are even more likely to find themselves on 404 pages!)
3) This is a little pretentious and not the actual reason we chose it (i.e. we realized it later), but we really do want to tell stories from "hidden" parts of the internet / tech and the undercovered parts of it. 404 pages are full of easter eggs, and maybe it's just something about accidentally stumbling onto a community or wold you didn't previously know existed.
404 has become a sign of censorship as we are seeing more pages taken down from Internet Archive and other places. I am excited to see you continue on surveillance and perhaps broaden into censorship and propaganda now that you are freed from some of the forces behind it.
I am not sure about Russian hosted, but an alternative to archive.org is archive.is. Centralized services eventually get compelled or corrupted. I setup https://archivebox.io/ on my server. Some other options have been reported here.
Wow, the full article in the RSS summary... I'm deeply touched. It reminds me of an old, not hostile web. Maybe it's a configuration error, in which case thanks for the experience :D
Same, I was like “wow the RSS FEED is in the NAVIGATION MENU”, and then getting ready to have Miniflux fetch full article content “oh wait it’s a proper full feed is this a config error?!!”
Did you look at other groups which have done something similar? Im curious to see how this type of project works even if not all of them are for me. So many people bemoan the structure of news and media businesses but I wonder if there needs to be more of a cycle of business destruction and creation to keep things from getting ossified and having the wrong priorities.
Seeing this reminded me of https://escapecollective.com/ which came from the implosion of Cycling tips after being purchased by Outside.
Hey Jason, cool to see you pop up here! Congrats on the launch, I'm happy to be able to join up as a new paid subscriber. Really glad y'all included RSS feeds for the articles and premium podcast feed; there are dozens of us who still use RSS - dozens! :P
I have a small suggestion: Would you consider adding a perk for premium subscribers to be able to suggest (not demand) story pitches/ideas, and maybe vote for them to indicate which ideas have more interest? It's kind of an extension of what you're planning to do with the FOIA requests forum, and similar to how some FOSS projects try to prioritize features that are requested or bountied by supporting donors. Also, it could be a nice way to crowdsource ideas from your pre-vetted audience, so you don't drown in spam and vote manipulation.
I was wondering before clicking the link if I might see Joseph Cox there. For me Joseph _IS_ Motherboard, because the only time MB pops up in my feed it's because Joseph's content. well done and best of luck with the new endeavor guys!!
> We hope these stories will take over the internet, impact public policy, and expose bad actors.
I think one of the main problems with modern journalism is that it has ventured too far into activism. Journalism is there to report on politics, not become a political actor.
I think a mistake that has been made is paywalls - if you don't get your story out there, somebody else will with their agenda on top. Make your content as shareable as possible and 1:X consumers you can convert into a customer. Once you have more users in the comments section, you could prioritize paid users.
You have a techy edge anyway, assume everybody runs ad blockers and can use archive links. Believe it or not, hosting images of ads bypasses ad blockers, protects privacy and cuts out the likes of Google (see top of EEVBlog [1]). Once you have a niche audience you can advertise a niche product quite effectively.
Based on the top Substack authors, there is an audience willing to pay $5/mo for low effort opinions based on other people's investigations.
In a sense ProPublica won. Its mission is to do real investigative journalism and get as many people to hear about it as possible. They are winning when people take their X and repackage it into dumbed down Y. They coexist with the low effort Substack ecosystem.
Even if zero people pay for 404 Media, who is going to be like, "oh man, these guys cracked open the Right to Repair story, I should hire them." That sounds like teeing yourself for content marketing at iFixit at worse, Microsoft at best. Why?
I was super confused while I was reading the story posted here yesterday regarding ID theft via credit reports; it's a quality piece but I couldn't stop asking myself "where the hell did 404 Media come from?"
I just want to personally vouch for Jason and company as being solid folks who do great work. I have freelanced for Motherboard for 7+ years and Jason and/or Emanuel worked with me on about 90 percent of my stories over that time, which included extremely weird things like a step-by-step for Hackintoshing a laptop that ended up far longer than any of us were expecting, and a deep dive into the backstory of NESticle.
They are truly great at what they do, and I’m excited to see what comes of it now that they have their own plot on the open internet.
Tech nitpick: I was a bit annoyed though that the green buttons to subscribe are then replaced by green buttons to "gift to a friend" or subscribe to newsletter. It's easy to add to uBlock, but it would be nice to not have annoyances that distract from reading. I really like the long form of articles.
I almost immediately closed the window because I thought it was 404ing and it was a dead link. Curious how much traffic they'll accidentally lose with this name.
Coincidentally my company was called 'Bad Gateway', and there's a company near me called 200 OK so welcome to the club =)
I made a similar comment on the story about apple and right to repair. Although I think this is interesting and has potential, the trust and absolute statements in their reporting worries me greatly.
As a journalist, your job is to inform and question. They don't seem to be questioning.
In their apple article on apple support RTR, they write, "This is a landmark shift in policy from Apple." [1]
It's not. They have played this game before; creating RTR "friendly" programs and then forcing signing of strict NDAs, and requirements that leave repair shops worse then they would without the program. [2-5]
Also, "It means, effectively, that consumers have won". Wow, I have never heard that before, only for it to fail or be false. Remind you of the New York bill which was kneecapped at "last minute by Gov. Kathy Hochul"? [6]
100 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadHope they pull it off.
Supporting 404 feels better than sending money to some corp where it gets pocketed by the c suite.
People seem to make the comparison only because the things are accessed by using a screen, which seems to be a very simple perspective. Just because Netflix is a great bargain (for those who like their content), doesn't mean you can conclude that everything else is expensive.
Both entertainment and reading in-depth paid news are one and the same: luxuries one does in their (typically) scarce spare time using an (often) modest budget.
If we use Netflix as a benchmark, you shouldn't spend money on anything except for on Netflix, since almost nothing gives the same amount of hours of use per cent paid. Exceptions for lightbulbs, which are not that entertaining to watch.
I think most people sometimes go out for a drink, a meal, or a coffee - without agonizing much about the price, even though you could get many days glued to Netflix for the same price as that drink with friends.
Ad-free Netflix is more expensive.
No comment on whether either is reasonable but responding to “it costs too much” with a more expensive option is an interesting choice.
Also, paying monthly is only more expensive if the person paying decides to stay that long. Monthly payments allow flexibility to cancel rather than committing to a year.
- How much is the pizza?
- It's 10 dollars.
- I don't think it's worth 10 dollars!
- Uhm, okay then don't buy it.
- But I really need that pizza, it's really important that I get it!
- Then pay 10 dollars?
- That's too expensive, it's worth nowhere near that!
- If it's not worth 10 dollars why is it important to you?
- It's extremely important that I get that pizza and I really want it, but also you have to understand that it's not worth 10 dollars, so give it to me for free now!
...ad infinitum.
If it still doesn't make sense, then it will never make sense.
(cue cheesy music): "For just a quarter a day, you can save a struggling journalist from corporate overlords, submarine PR pieces, and human interest stories"
I don't know what the answer / formula is, but I pay more than that per year for my LWN.net subscription and for a few other publications. Less than that for others, but I really don't know what the "right" level would be to maximize revenue so they're able to pay themselves a decent salary and keep the lights on.
Design is clean, loads fast, and articles are stacked, so I wish them luck. It's pretty ruthless out there, but a few good stories on HN front-page[2] should at least get this syndicated in all the best places.
[0]: https://ghost.org/ (they've also forgotten to change the default article:publisher URL which leads to Ghost's FB page)
[1]: https://outpost.pub/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37222672
PS Does The Information still exist?
I haven't been totally happy with my tech newsfeed the past while but I'm clutching onto my Defector subscription for all that it's worth. I hope they can make this work similarly.
Agreed.
> Hopefully now that they are free of billionaire benefactors, they will not need to weave in partisan attacks and other mandatory messages.
These types that are deceitful, immoral and tear society apart with their paymaster propaganda don’t deserve another position of trust.
You are fortunate if you have never needed to do anything against your principles because your job required it. I have worked for companies I am not proud of. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and a chance to use their new found independence for good. If they fuck it up, I won't renew membership.
We are under no illusion that this will be easy but we are excited to give it a shot. The worst thing that can happen is that we tried our best on something we really believe in and enjoy doing, it doesn't work financially, and we ultimately have to go do something else. We are hopeful and optimistic that we CAN make it work, but already we are overwhelmed and thrilled with the response. It's only our second day but we're committed to becoming a vital publication for people who care about how tech impacts humans, and how humans impact tech. We understand we will need to prove this day in and day out for people to feel like they are getting their money's worth, or that their money is supporting a force for good in the world/the internet. But we really want to make that happen. Thanks for the kind words
https://www.404media.co/biden-administration-changes-mind-sa...
This article took me 20-30 minutes to write, edit, and publish. It's still news, but it's more of an update on something I've covered and written about literally hundreds of times before. So I am providing some of the context about the decision that I can recite from memory (I check the specifics, of course), telling people what's new, and providing them the document.
This article I published earlier today, meanwhile, is something I've been poking along on for weeks, talked to a lot of sources on, read a lot of academic papers on, etc.
https://www.404media.co/instagram-ads-illegal-content-drugs-...
At Motherboard our main way of operating was to always have a big investigation or narrative feature going on in the background, but to be on the lookout for news or timely things to do that align with our "beats" (the things we cover day-to-day, the topics we know inside and out). Usually features are something that you poke along on for weeks or months and go through a very rigorous back-and-forth editing process.
FOIA stuff can "take" months or years, but often very little of that is active work time. The way that works is you file a request, wait for the agency to respond, and bug them a bunch when they miss deadlines or don't respond. I've had FOIA requests returned the same day, and I've had others returned five years after I file them.
Good question!
On LibreWolf, the scrolling is really messed up on this page, and on the home page. Out of curiosity, are you Rolling Your Own Scrolling(TM)? That's generally a no-no.
>Much has been written about the failing business model of new media. We have watched how new media companies fail, and it’s not because of a lack of audience, revenue, impact, or vital work. New media companies fail because of a growth-at-any-cost mentality, and venture capital investments made at absurd valuations. Most importantly, astronomical overhead costs make it impossible for journalists to out-earn the cost of expensive office space, the ever-changing whims of management, executives’ salaries, the cost of unnecessary enterprise software, and an endless parade of consultants brought in to figure out what’s wrong.
>It doesn’t have to be this way, and at 404 Media, it will not. We propose a simple alternative: pay journalists to do journalism.
Also, y u no Mastodon?
There are a lot of things we wanted to launch with that we haven't had time to do yet, which doesn't mean it's not a priority. As you can imagine we've had a few (very minor) urgent fires in the leadup to launch, so tbh our social media accounts across the board have taken a temporary backseat. Mastodon is high on our list and I'm sure we'll be there by the end of the week if not the end of the day.
Thank you for your support!
Did you even read the comment you replied to?
Why would you name your website after a website error code? Appreciate the easter egg on the actual 404 page.
Not really direct feedback but when the Verge launched they made a big splash with in-depth, long form stories like "Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS" from 2012. I hope you guys could dig up some stories like this, and your commitment to filing FOIA requests seems promising.
1) Like how it sounds
2) People get it right away, even folks I know who don't care a lot about tech journalism or aren't super internet savvy (maybe they are even more likely to find themselves on 404 pages!)
3) This is a little pretentious and not the actual reason we chose it (i.e. we realized it later), but we really do want to tell stories from "hidden" parts of the internet / tech and the undercovered parts of it. 404 pages are full of easter eggs, and maybe it's just something about accidentally stumbling onto a community or wold you didn't previously know existed.
That surprises me, but I suspect you are more likely to know the answer to that than I am, so it also makes me a bit sad.
I have a small suggestion: Would you consider adding a perk for premium subscribers to be able to suggest (not demand) story pitches/ideas, and maybe vote for them to indicate which ideas have more interest? It's kind of an extension of what you're planning to do with the FOIA requests forum, and similar to how some FOSS projects try to prioritize features that are requested or bountied by supporting donors. Also, it could be a nice way to crowdsource ideas from your pre-vetted audience, so you don't drown in spam and vote manipulation.
Edit: Oh there's also plenty of references in the HTML, as well as it literally saying "Published with Ghost" in the footer which I just noticed haha
https://404-media.ghost.io/ redirects to the main 404media site, as well.
I think one of the main problems with modern journalism is that it has ventured too far into activism. Journalism is there to report on politics, not become a political actor.
I think a mistake that has been made is paywalls - if you don't get your story out there, somebody else will with their agenda on top. Make your content as shareable as possible and 1:X consumers you can convert into a customer. Once you have more users in the comments section, you could prioritize paid users.
You have a techy edge anyway, assume everybody runs ad blockers and can use archive links. Believe it or not, hosting images of ads bypasses ad blockers, protects privacy and cuts out the likes of Google (see top of EEVBlog [1]). Once you have a niche audience you can advertise a niche product quite effectively.
Good luck!
[1] https://www.eevblog.com/
In a sense ProPublica won. Its mission is to do real investigative journalism and get as many people to hear about it as possible. They are winning when people take their X and repackage it into dumbed down Y. They coexist with the low effort Substack ecosystem.
Even if zero people pay for 404 Media, who is going to be like, "oh man, these guys cracked open the Right to Repair story, I should hire them." That sounds like teeing yourself for content marketing at iFixit at worse, Microsoft at best. Why?
Excited to see where this goes.
So as a question, is Joseph to the left of Samantha in that image? This image is perfect for training data for VAR offside decisions.
They are truly great at what they do, and I’m excited to see what comes of it now that they have their own plot on the open internet.
Tech nitpick: I was a bit annoyed though that the green buttons to subscribe are then replaced by green buttons to "gift to a friend" or subscribe to newsletter. It's easy to add to uBlock, but it would be nice to not have annoyances that distract from reading. I really like the long form of articles.
Coincidentally my company was called 'Bad Gateway', and there's a company near me called 200 OK so welcome to the club =)
As a journalist, your job is to inform and question. They don't seem to be questioning.
In their apple article on apple support RTR, they write, "This is a landmark shift in policy from Apple." [1]
It's not. They have played this game before; creating RTR "friendly" programs and then forcing signing of strict NDAs, and requirements that leave repair shops worse then they would without the program. [2-5]
Also, "It means, effectively, that consumers have won". Wow, I have never heard that before, only for it to fail or be false. Remind you of the New York bill which was kneecapped at "last minute by Gov. Kathy Hochul"? [6]
1: https://www.404media.co/apple-endorses-california-right-to-r...
2: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/18/we-are-lo...
3: https://www.howtogeek.com/894168/apples-self-repair-program-...
4: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjdjnv/apples-independent-re... (ironically from vice, lol)
5: https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/28/apple_selfservice_sla...
6: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7gdwb/new-yorks-right-to-re...