iFixit wants to fix McDonald’s ice cream machines for good.

iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald’s ice cream machines::McDonald’s ice cream machines are notorious for breaking all the time, so iFixit wants to help people repair them without the help of the manufacturer.

  • spectradawn77@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    1 year ago

    If I remember correctly I saw a video explaining this. Same goes with the device. Apparently the company that makes the machines and McDonalds have some sort of agreement where McDonald’s gets the machine at a huge discount but they have to use that company for repairs and only them. Win win for both. Company also added script to stop the device from working. Something like that.

    Either way im at the point where I completely forget that McDonald’s has ice cream.

    Here’s the video: https://piped.video/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=F9x-GPjuXEaSk7zO

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      Company also added script to stop the device from working. Something like that.

      I don’t think it’s quite that devious. That kind of “feature” would probably be racketeering and ripe for lawsuit. I think it’s more that the machines are temperamental as fuck and the methods to fix the machines are kept under a very tight lid.

      • blabber6285@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        131·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, an incorrect cleaning procedure can cause a error that requires maintenance personnel to reset the error. They don’t need to do anything else though, it’s completely fine to just do the cleaning again. Stuff like that.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, sounds more like a feature of cheap ice cream machines than malicious intent.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    202·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    But now we may have some glimmer of Shamrock Shake-flavored hope: not only has iFixit performed a teardown of McDonald’s machines, but it’s also petitioning the government to let it create the parts required for people to fix them.

    As shown in a video posted to YouTube, iFixit purchased the same ice cream machine model used by McDonald’s and spent hours trying to get it up and running.

    The machine spit out numerous error codes that iFixit says “are nonsensical, counterintuitive, and seemingly random, even if you spent hours reading the manual.”

    Despite consisting of “easily replaceable parts,” such as three printed circuit boards, a motor and belt, and a heat exchanger, the ice cream machine can only be fixed by its manufacturer — Taylor — due to an agreement it has with McDonald’s.

    While a company called Kytch attempted to remedy this by creating a product to read ice cream machine error codes, iFixit says McDonald’s “sent a letter to all of the franchise owners” instructing them not to use the device.

    “We’d love to be able to make a device like Kytch that can read error codes on the ice cream machine we have, but we can’t because of copyright law,” Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit’s director of sustainability, says in the video.

    The original article contains 405 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • eusousuperior@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    Is this a US only thing? I’ve travelled all over europe and americas and I always try to go to each country’s Mcdonalds to see if they have anything different. NEVER have I encountered a broken ice cream machine.

  • Selmafudd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    Do they really break all the time or they just don’t fucking clean them when they should and they refuse to keep working

    • Confused_Emus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      There’s a 4 hour heat cycle it has to go through as part of the cleaning. In addition, the machines are apparently very temperamental and throw errors a lot, but the error codes are (arguably intentionally) obscure so typical employees just aren’t going to know what’s wrong with it. Also machine servicing is done exclusively by the machine manufacturer, so if any work needs to be done to it they’ve gotta schedule a tech call-out.

  • robocall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    1 year ago

    The ice cream machine at my local McDonald’s always works. I eat their ice cream somewhat regularly and never been told it’s down.

    • meridian@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      At any given moment about 10-13% of machines are down in the United States. Just go to the mcbroken website to see

      By the way, the one near me has been down for like two years…I think they just don’t want to pay the extortion fee to fix it. Or maybe they are too lazy to clean it properly

      • Iron Lynx@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        According to the video (it’s elsewhere in the thread), the standard for uptime for industrial machinery is amazingly close to 100%. Given a million opportunities for such a machine to have a fault, you should want less than a handful of times that it actually craps itself.

        McDonald’s machines are down more than 10% of the time.

        If I was a big industrial conglomerate like GE, VDL or Samsung and I had a machine that was down 10% of the time, and the error reporting was opaque and forced me to call the manufacturer for a service technician, AND all the critical operating parameters are behind some special manual that only their service technicians are allowed to have, I’d fucking sue the manufacturer.

    • wholemilk@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      That’s pretty interesting if it’s true, makes me wonder if they’re doing anything differently from the other stores that keeps their machine working.