Stephan Steins' Nerd.Tool.1 Aims to Break Apple's Repair Walls with a Sleep Sensor Calibration Tool

Stephan Steins, of laptop repair specialist Notebook Nerds, has developed a tool designed to end Apple's seemingly anti-competitive control of the repair market: the nerd.tool.1, for calibrating sleep sensors on MacBook Air and MacBook Pro devices.

"In a video that I did a few months ago I was going over how the angle sensor, which is the sleep sensor, [in] MacBooks requires calibration," YouTuber Louis Rossmann explains of the problem, in a video which brought Steins' creation to our attention. "And that calibration tool is only made available by Apple to Apple authorized service providers. If you want that repair I can no longer just replace your corroded sleep sensor."

The problem isn't exclusive to the sleep sensor but to many of the otherwise-replaceable components in Apple devices, from laptops to smartphones. The company says the parts need to be calibrated and linked to the devices in which their fitted to ensure full performance and the user's security, but those in the repair industry — like Steins — argue it's more about pushing those looking for repair out of the cheaper third-party ecosystem and into Apple's walled garden.

"I'm a little bit of a tinker," Steins explains, "[and] I was thinking about how this could be fixed, and then I was tinkering around a bit with Arduino and so on, and finally we found a solution after doing some research and built the first prototype. I got some people who really know what they are doing and [who are] not just tinkering around like me, and then we got this second prototype which is called the nerd.tool.1."

The nerd.tool.1 is designed as a readily-available alternative to Apple's in-house calibration tool. Using it, Steins claims, requires only a single minute, and it fully calibrates third-party sleep sensors for use in MacBook Air and MacBook Pro devices from 2019 onwards. It's the first device to promise such a thing, but is unlikely to be the last as repair technicians figure out ways to bypass Apple's protections in the name of right-to-repair.

More information on the device is available on the Notebook Nerds website, where it can be pre-ordered for €169; if Steins receives at least 350 orders, he has pledged to release the device's source code under an open source license.