And phones are not a great example anyway, anything that is extremely miniaturized is difficult to repair, but even in laptops Apple devices have been historically harder to modify, requiring you purchase specialty parts and remove more things to do RAM/HDD/battery upgrades. I know people who have replaced their laptop screens entirely because the machine was fine after a few years but the connector was flaky. Batteries will die. Why should these be hard to replace? Replacement parts cost a small fraction of the device cost
As an IT guy, I have to make sure that any new Apple laptop I buy has its RAM maxed out, because it's soldered onto the logic board nowadays and can't be upgraded. That plus all the other egregious shit Apple has been doing with their laptops nowadays means our office will probably drift back towards Thinkpads over the next few years.
I didn't know apple actually soldered in the ram now.
Okay that's pretty dumb.
Like there's not even an upgrade slot?
SO-DIMM slot means they have to make the laptop like 3mm thicker, which is obviously unacceptable.
And phones are not a great example anyway, anything that is extremely miniaturized is difficult to repair, but even in laptops Apple devices have been historically harder to modify, requiring you purchase specialty parts and remove more things to do RAM/HDD/battery upgrades. I know people who have replaced their laptop screens entirely because the machine was fine after a few years but the connector was flaky. Batteries will die. Why should these be hard to replace? Replacement parts cost a small fraction of the device cost
As an IT guy, I have to make sure that any new Apple laptop I buy has its RAM maxed out, because it's soldered onto the logic board nowadays and can't be upgraded. That plus all the other egregious shit Apple has been doing with their laptops nowadays means our office will probably drift back towards Thinkpads over the next few years.
I didn't know apple actually soldered in the ram now.
Okay that's pretty dumb.
Like there's not even an upgrade slot?
For the time being, I believe iMacs and Minis and Mac Pros can still be upgraded, but the new Macbooks, Macbook Pros, and the last couple generations of Air have not been upgradeable.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
I kind of get it with the air because that's basically an overpriced chromebook but as an IT that's still dumb as hell.
Its also important to note that "modifying" various things (which depends on your definition of repair i suppose) is a HUGE industry and to get rid of that would be bad for the economy.
I'll leave cars and motorcycles out of it for a second, and take computers.
The Apple machines are notoriously hard to modify/repair if needed. Everything is sealed or proprietary.
PC's on the other hand have entire sections of the industry thriving on the very idea of modification/repair. Shoot, the whole pc gaming market is almost a symbiote of the pc upgrade market. They both feed off each other.
When you get into anything mechanical it gets even more insane. Every employee from Advanced Auto Parts, to the local drag strip, to the SEMA show in Vegas depends on the end users ability to change/modify/repair their vehicles at will.
And phones are not a great example anyway, anything that is extremely miniaturized is difficult to repair, but even in laptops Apple devices have been historically harder to modify, requiring you purchase specialty parts and remove more things to do RAM/HDD/battery upgrades. I know people who have replaced their laptop screens entirely because the machine was fine after a few years but the connector was flaky. Batteries will die. Why should these be hard to replace? Replacement parts cost a small fraction of the device cost
As an IT guy, I have to make sure that any new Apple laptop I buy has its RAM maxed out, because it's soldered onto the logic board nowadays and can't be upgraded. That plus all the other egregious shit Apple has been doing with their laptops nowadays means our office will probably drift back towards Thinkpads over the next few years.
I didn't know apple actually soldered in the ram now.
Okay that's pretty dumb.
Like there's not even an upgrade slot?
SO-DIMM slot means they have to make the laptop like 3mm thicker, which is obviously unacceptable.
Don't all current MacBooks use LPDDR3? Which, afaik, doesn't exist in so-dimm format and is required to be soldered to the board?
1.2V vs 1.35V (LPDDR3 vs DDR3L) is a pretty significant power savings. On top of that, my understanding of LPDDR3 is that standby power use is crazy low compared to DDR3L (like 80-90% lower)
Apple caught a ton of flack on the most recent MacBook Pro update because the machines are all capped at 16gb of RAM. This is mainly because the processors they chose to use don't support LPDDR4, an Apple appears to value battery life over a ram ceiling that I'd be willing to bet almost no one would actually buy (though those few are the diehard users usually, who evangelize to others, so I bet apple will offer it again when they can wth LPDDR4)
Like I get that apple makes a lot of decisions that baffle and aggravate people, but it's not like one of the most profitable companies on earth makes decisions in a vacuum without a ton of data backing it up.
If you want to target them for anti-consumer practices on their laptops, go after them for things like slathering their battery banks in so much glue you have to buy a gel-filled roller that you heat up in the microwave to loosen them for removal. That's something that you would actually need/should be able to replace yourself, and does seem to be needlessly difficult to do. The ram thing seems to have been done for the purpose of furthering battery life, not removing repair-or-upgradability
A company should have no obligation, ZERO, to provide support for you to repair your own stuff.
If a person wants to make a third party repair company they will have to reverse engineer everything and find their own supply chains.
If you want to repair stuff buy a repair friendly product in the first place.
Is there a reasoning behind this strong anti-consumer, pro-corporation stance?
Because that's a bold belief to hold without explaining why.
It's not that bold really. Requiring corporations to make products repairable creates unnecessary hassle and slows development.
I'm not saying corporations can't do that or shouldn't, just that we should have NO requirement for them to do so.
There are corporations that could decide to make all their products repairable and make THAT they're differentiator.
This isn't a case where companies are being forced to make their products repairable. Rather these products are already repairable and the manufacturers have a monopoly on the ability to repair them. The Nebraska bill says that they have to be willing to sell the same parts and repair manuals being made available to manufacturer licensed repair stores to other stores.
An iPhone is repairable, a tractor is repairable, and yet the two big names fighting this are Apple and John Deere. There's nothing in the law forcing these manufacturers to change how they make the product, just that if someone wants to repair it themselves then they should have access to the materials that the manufacturer already makes but currently only sells to people who give them a cut.
If you want to repair stuff buy a repair friendly product in the first place.
You say that like that's a choice we can make these days. Show me the smart phones on the market that we can buy from a store in the United States that's repair-friendly. This isn't just a matter of increased complexity in devices, it's manufacturers intentionally no longer caring about making devices that are durable and long-lasting, because all they care about is that the device doesn't break for 3 years before the next model is available and you are due a phone upgrade via your phone contract anyway.
Because, as it turns out, 3 years is a long time for phones currently. People aren't just replacing the phone because it's old, but because it's actually obsolete. And there's the fact that to get the level of power and size that we see now, it requires a level of integration that makes the devices harder to repair. And there have been attempts to make more repair-friendly smartphones - but it turns out they wind up sort of clunky and unattractive, for a few reasons.
"Clunky and unattractive" is a matter of opinion. The same with "obsolete."
First and second gen iPhones are being used right now by goatherders in Africa just fine.
Among other things, I fix phones for a living. You can guess what side of this debate I come down on. But I did want to just put in a few points about Apple.
The newer iPhones are actually SUPER repairable. Apple is of course notoriously third-party repair unfriendly, but starting with the 5, a child could fix any number of iPhone issues (not just broken screens) if he can follow directions and has the parts. Part availability is the real issue we see. I can get parts, and honestly, for most of the phones the parts are dirt cheap due to a fairly complex third-party supply chain that deserves its own post. But parts for the current phone are always way more expensive. I haven't checked in a while but I think Apple is fixing broken screens on the 7 for somewhere in the $150-$200 range. My part cost is more than that, not counting markup or labor.
The other big issue you see with Apple is that the fingerprint sensor in the home button is married to the board. Apple stores have a tool to remarry replacements. No one else can.
Samsung (and most android phones, while we are at it) on the other hand makes an unrepairable phone. I have practice and can do it fairly confidently now, but their phones are a mess of booby-traps just waiting for you to damage more parts unrelated to the repair if you aren't prepared for them. And part availability is horrible as well. An S5 screen is more expensive than an iPhone 6s+ screen.
I guess I don't really know what I'm trying to convince you of here. I just see a lot of "iPhones aren't fixable" examples when they are (in spite of Apple's hatred of third party repair) some of the easiest phones I've fixed.
This is of course all just part-replacement repair. Not board-level. I am capable and we have the tools to do board-level repairs, but the labor sink almost always makes it either cheaper to replace the entire part, or the phone.
We're not talking about soldering chips onto a board, either. Simple things, a screen replacement, are made unnecessarily difficult through things like pentalobe screws and use of massive amounts of adhesive to hold components to the frame.
My son got a toy, a small school bus with a couple buttons on top that made horn and engine noises. It stopped working after about a week, so I decided to take it apart. Something as simple as an $8 Tonka school bus used both philips and tri-lobe screws, along with glue/press on wheels to the axle that were not removable without breaking the wheels, which was necessary to get to the two screws hidden in the wheel wells of the bus. All to access the hair-thin wires used to attach the speaker to the control board, one of which had detached.
Those are the things that are the problem. Purposeful, unnecessary steps to make doing a repair yourself more difficult, if not impossible.
Yeah, that's my point, actually. Thank you for helping me figure it out!
It's Apple's attitude that is the issue. They are actually engineered very well from a repair standpoint. The pentalobes are a discouragement, not a prevention. And I'm okay with that. I don't want most of my clients' kids opening up their phones just to see how they work. I want them to have to work a little to get it open. Once you are in though, it's all philips. (although the 7 does have a few tri-wing as well, which thank you for reminding me, I need to order a few more of!) And the adhesive is literally non-existent up until the 6s, and then it is only in service of waterproofing, not a barrier to entry. (For real, it isn't hard to get through, and you don't risk damage to any components. The 6s is surprisingly water resistant though, but Apple didn't want to advertise it because it isn't waterproof).
Again, it is the Samsung side of the world that is engineered purposely to be hard to repair. And the shame of it is, the S4 was easy, and the S5 wasn't bad. Apple has been getting easier and easier, and Samsung has been getting harder and harder.
I did a charge-port replacement on an S6 edge the other day. You can't understand how much you hold your breath when you are doing an $80 repair that could easily, and in fact if you didn't know the dangers ahead of time, would break a $200 screen in the process.
It should be an $80 repair based on part cost and labor time. We actually charge $150 to offset the danger of eating a broken screen.
But yes, 100%. I would love if devices weren't just full of booby-traps and pitfalls. From an engineering vs legislation viewpoint I don't see how you can come anywhere close to putting anything enforceable together around that.
You could require open availability on part-level schematics, and that would go a long way.
I would love to see required fair and open selling of parts to third-part suppliers as well. But I can't imagine what that looks like in real life.
Realistically, I just want to see the end of firmware married parts.
If companies dont want to have the responsibility of enabling repair, then they shouldnt be able to lay copyright on the components to enable third parties to reverse and create their own.
All this anti-repair has been, from the start, is a desire to make more profits from this disposable electronic culture thats sprouted up around bullshit like new iDoodads every 3 months and overloading the old ones so they bog down and stop being usable.
Its anti-consumerist and an example of massive corporate greed.
Not only that, but its ecologically unsound, sending all kinds of still salvageable equipment to landfills
The market has clearly gone away from fix it yourself and towards disposable in most sectors, even in those with sectors with good amounts of competition. Forcing companies to reengineer things so that the minority of people with the desire and ability to repair things can is silly.
This is distinct from a provision requiring the fair sale and distribution of parts, which seems like a better idea if implemented well.
The market has clearly gone away from fix it yourself and towards disposable in most sectors, even in those with sectors with good amounts of competition. Forcing companies to reengineer things so that the minority of people with the desire and ability to repair things can is silly.
This is distinct from a provision requiring the fair sale and distribution of parts, which seems like a better idea if implemented well.
Its not forcing them to reengineer anything, its forcing them to not lay copyright claims and monopoly on components needed to repair shit.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
It's nice that we're all discussing consumer electronics, but this bill is primarily about tractors. Farmers can't repair their own tractors because of digital locks, the kind which if broken would get them ludicrously mega-fined under DMCA like a kid who downloaded a song, but time lost is crops lost and farming is usually under extremely tight margins.
The market has clearly gone away from fix it yourself and towards disposable in most sectors, even in those with sectors with good amounts of competition. Forcing companies to reengineer things so that the minority of people with the desire and ability to repair things can is silly.
This is distinct from a provision requiring the fair sale and distribution of parts, which seems like a better idea if implemented well.
They don't have to reengineer anything because the market never moved away from repairable items. Instead the companies realized that they could try to monopolize the market via warranty deals. They realized that they had the ability to make parts that required specific tools, then they could manufacture the tools and force the customer to come to them for repairs.
Pick up a warranty on an item that does work and almost every time you will see a section for repairs and refurbishment. Send them the item, and they try to repair it, or if it's broken in a place that can't be repaired easily then they send you a new one, replace the broken component on the old one and sell the old one as 'refurbished'. Even some of the most advanced consumer items are not made to be unrepairable. They're simply made to have just enough extra steps that they require someone with specialized tools and replacement parts to repair it. Companies make these tools and instructions on how to repair the items for internal use and licensed repair services already.
Even as onboard computers in cars advanced people found ways of modifying them by either using the computer, going around, or ignoring it. People find a way to fix things on their own regardless of the advancements. What's been happening isn't market forces, it's hardware DRM that companies have been adding to try to make it so people aren't able to fix it through anyone but them. But, just with software DRM, you can't make an unhackable tractor.
It's nice that we're all discussing consumer electronics, but this bill is primarily about tractors. Farmers can't repair their own tractors because of digital locks, the kind which if broken would get them ludicrously mega-fined under DMCA like a kid who downloaded a song, but time lost is crops lost and farming is usually under extremely tight margins.
This isn't really a thread specifically about the Nebraska Bill, it's more about the ongoing Right to Repair discussion that's had several names over the years and the bill is simply a jumping off point for the current state of the discussion.
I will modify the OP to make this a bit more clear.
I also think there's a distinction to be made between "making it possible for everyone to fix", which is likely impossible for some of these items, and "not making it impossible for third parties with specialized tools and knowledge, were the parts available".
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
And phones are not a great example anyway, anything that is extremely miniaturized is difficult to repair, but even in laptops Apple devices have been historically harder to modify, requiring you purchase specialty parts and remove more things to do RAM/HDD/battery upgrades. I know people who have replaced their laptop screens entirely because the machine was fine after a few years but the connector was flaky. Batteries will die. Why should these be hard to replace? Replacement parts cost a small fraction of the device cost
As an IT guy, I have to make sure that any new Apple laptop I buy has its RAM maxed out, because it's soldered onto the logic board nowadays and can't be upgraded. That plus all the other egregious shit Apple has been doing with their laptops nowadays means our office will probably drift back towards Thinkpads over the next few years.
I didn't know apple actually soldered in the ram now.
Okay that's pretty dumb.
Like there's not even an upgrade slot?
How else are you going to be protected against earthquake based failure?
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Digital locks I think should be outlawed. We used to break into them when I was working on elevators, 2 very large elevator companies have ransomeware installed on their controllers, which if the final payment and all change orders aren't paid the elevator is locked out for all but 1 car (required for fire code) we had ways of bypassing it but it was some gray legality type things, and it was usually cheaper to pay the change orders.
I feel like there is going to be a company that will eventually license your car to you. Not now but with robot cars pay 69 bucks a month or your navigation doesn't work. You know car companies are going to bury some insidious fine print and malware in their os.
In terms of other items I think end users should have the right to repair and modify, I'm not sure to what level the manufacturer needs to assist.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
edited March 2017
This thread is the first time I've heard of "digital locks". That legislation designed to prevent music and video piracy covers tractors is the stupidest goddamn thing I've heard all year. Someone needs to compile a list of every idiot judge who approves these things so we can vote them all out.
Small appliances could really benefit from being made repairable again. I had a fan break, there was a little plastic gear inside that could have been replaced for very cheap. Way cheaper than buying a new 40-50 buck fan.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't remember the model anymore but dad had a car where it took me and him 3-4 hours to change the headlight lightbulbs. We're not bad at mechanical stuff either, and it didn't lack tools per se. Problem with stuff like that, which should be easy, is they'll use a specific screwhead that's a specific length before a 90 degree angle before another specific length. All of which is custom and not available in any hardware stores. Or, somehow, you must remove 12 other things to get access. Cars have improved greatly in complexity but it's also really apparent that they intentionally go FUCK YOU and obfuscate to make everything inaccessible so that you visit their workshop franchise of choice.
I don't remember the model anymore but dad had a car where it took me and him 3-4 hours to change the headlight lightbulbs. We're not bad at mechanical stuff either, and it didn't lack tools per se. Problem with stuff like that, which should be easy, is they'll use a specific screwhead that's a specific length before a 90 degree angle before another specific length. All of which is custom and not available in any hardware stores. Or, somehow, you must remove 12 other things to get access. Cars have improved greatly in complexity but it's also really apparent that they intentionally go FUCK YOU and obfuscate to make everything inaccessible so that you visit their workshop franchise of choice.
Yeah, its stupid how overcomplex they've made a lot of things that should be owner serviceable on modern cars.
I know several people who have to take their cars to the mechanics to get the batteries changed because accessing it requires practically disassembling the front end.
Small appliances could really benefit from being made repairable again. I had a fan break, there was a little plastic gear inside that could have been replaced for very cheap. Way cheaper than buying a new 40-50 buck fan.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
Are you sure it was glue? and not... like... just plastic stuck together using, like, sonic welding? Kinda neat super common, you use a thermalplastic, errr, plastic and just stick bits together, shoot sound at them and you get a permanent bond without using any supplies pretty much instantly.
I don't remember the model anymore but dad had a car where it took me and him 3-4 hours to change the headlight lightbulbs. We're not bad at mechanical stuff either, and it didn't lack tools per se. Problem with stuff like that, which should be easy, is they'll use a specific screwhead that's a specific length before a 90 degree angle before another specific length. All of which is custom and not available in any hardware stores. Or, somehow, you must remove 12 other things to get access. Cars have improved greatly in complexity but it's also really apparent that they intentionally go FUCK YOU and obfuscate to make everything inaccessible so that you visit their workshop franchise of choice.
Yeah, its stupid how overcomplex they've made a lot of things that should be owner serviceable on modern cars.
I know several people who have to take their cars to the mechanics to get the batteries changed because accessing it requires practically disassembling the front end.
I have a Fiat 500. I uses a headlamp bulb assembly that is shared by exactly one other car. Headlamps assemblies can be replaced without any tool, or smashing nuckles, or stupid detent clips. Unscrew a housing cover, turn the cable 90% , pop out the old head lamp assembly and snap the new on into the socket.
I took me less than a minute for me to replace the first one without even looking at instruction first. I popped the hood to take a first look around, and I had the old one out and the new one in faster than I could pull up a youtube video. It's brilliant.
They cost $45, which is something like triple the normal price for a headlamp. There's all sorts of plastic housings with detents and extra connectors.
I honestly don't know if it is worth it or not, but it is an example of the other side of the spectrum. Maybe it would be cheaper if there was competition on sources(driven by wide adoption). Are these over priced components with overly specific usages rent seeky?
I like being able to fix things. I run a lot of opensource software, and use PCs. I use an android phone. I know how solder and code and sew.
and I buy crap off amazon, without having touched it or looked reviews that care about repairability. I am a lazy consumer, and if I don't even make purchases qualities I like to think I care about I can't really expect companies to cater to these things.
So what we should do, is do what sweden just started doing create a tax incentive for repairs. Maybe even increase the tax on new items and apply that tax break to repaired products. Possibly in the form a including an unfront disposal cost tax charged on items at initial sale.
These sorts of things would cause consumers to more highly value repairable items, encouraging the masses to make choices based on things I care about, and then I wouldn't have to put in the effort of doing research because repairability would become part of how people rated products they purchased on amazon(at least informally).
Its also important to note that "modifying" various things (which depends on your definition of repair i suppose) is a HUGE industry and to get rid of that would be bad for the economy.
I'll leave cars and motorcycles out of it for a second, and take computers.
The Apple machines are notoriously hard to modify/repair if needed. Everything is sealed or proprietary.
PC's on the other hand have entire sections of the industry thriving on the very idea of modification/repair. Shoot, the whole pc gaming market is almost a symbiote of the pc upgrade market. They both feed off each other.
When you get into anything mechanical it gets even more insane. Every employee from Advanced Auto Parts, to the local drag strip, to the SEMA show in Vegas depends on the end users ability to change/modify/repair their vehicles at will.
My father is always showing some new handmade exhaustpipe or other.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
Its also important to note that "modifying" various things (which depends on your definition of repair i suppose) is a HUGE industry and to get rid of that would be bad for the economy.
I'll leave cars and motorcycles out of it for a second, and take computers.
The Apple machines are notoriously hard to modify/repair if needed. Everything is sealed or proprietary.
PC's on the other hand have entire sections of the industry thriving on the very idea of modification/repair. Shoot, the whole pc gaming market is almost a symbiote of the pc upgrade market. They both feed off each other.
When you get into anything mechanical it gets even more insane. Every employee from Advanced Auto Parts, to the local drag strip, to the SEMA show in Vegas depends on the end users ability to change/modify/repair their vehicles at will.
My father is always showing some new handmade exhaustpipe or other.
In the automobile industry I have seen a world of difference between manufacturers. My fiancé has an accord and replacing the air filter takes a minute, 1 screw. I used to have a Buick and it was some wing nuts no tool required. My chevy I have now has this cover over part of the engine (including the filter) and it takes the guy at my oil change place a few minutes with the specialty anti tamper tools to get it off so they can get at the air filter. It seams like the whole purpose of it is to make it hard to get to the battery and the air filter.
This thread is the first time I've heard of "digital locks". That legislation designed to prevent music and video piracy covers tractors is the stupidest goddamn thing I've heard all year. Someone needs to compile a list of every idiot judge who approves these things so we can vote them all out.
Unfortunately the constitution doesn't ban stupid laws. And the DMCA is a prime example of it (though I think a great deal of the issue is that the corporate lobbyists writing it just didn't care about unintended consequences... this is hardly the first area it's caused problems for).
And all the important judges for this are federal and appointed anyways - anyone below the circuits has their hands tied by precedent on it. Would be nice to see SCOTUS just kill that clause for vagueness.
Normally I'm not ageist but this is exactly what happens with new technology and old people.
Computers are not new technology though, they haven't been for a while now. At this point when old people talk about computers it is just willful ignorance of an established market.
Normally I'm not ageist but this is exactly what happens with new technology and old people.
Computers are not new technology though, they haven't been for a while now. At this point when old people talk about computers it is just willful ignorance of an established market.
Computers didn't start becoming common household items until the 90s. A lot of people in charge grew up in the 50s, and have no desire to adapt to things that didn't even show up on their radar until their mid-life crisis.
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syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Productsregular
So, obviously my post history would point towards me being on apple's side, and on a few points I am, but I do believe that one company should not be 100% in control of the repair market for their devices.
Apple is in a somewhat unique state because their completely closed ecosystem is partly how they got away with setting up secure payments and other fairly advanced security capabilities.
Also, I don't want apple to have to compromise on design so that people can more easily repair/replace. Swappable batteries means reducing waterproofing and device integrity and form factor, for instance.
A compromise I would be 100% cool with would be letting 3rd parties buy factory parts, but unless they are authorized apple repair technicians, any modification to the hardware that impacts the security chain (new processor, new touch ID sensor, etc) disables a bunch of stuff like touch ID and apple pay; still a 100% usable device, but nothing that could compromise the security for the rest of their userbase should remain available after modification.
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Small appliances could really benefit from being made repairable again. I had a fan break, there was a little plastic gear inside that could have been replaced for very cheap. Way cheaper than buying a new 40-50 buck fan.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
Are you sure it was glue? and not... like... just plastic stuck together using, like, sonic welding? Kinda neat super common, you use a thermalplastic, errr, plastic and just stick bits together, shoot sound at them and you get a permanent bond without using any supplies pretty much instantly.
Could have been. At any rate, my point was that when you have to destroy the casing to open the thing to fix the thing then....
I'm not sure if it is because we don't value repair as a society or if it is more top down, or even if it is capitalism making people only see the dollar less price on nonrepairable items.
There has been a cultural shift away from repair, but I don't think a cultural shift back is impossible.
and I wonder about my neighbors even though I don't have them
but they're listening to every word I say
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Small appliances could really benefit from being made repairable again. I had a fan break, there was a little plastic gear inside that could have been replaced for very cheap. Way cheaper than buying a new 40-50 buck fan.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
The bold part is the whole point of having a business. The decisions have been made because it makes them more money short term (especially if they are publicly traded!) than having a device that is reparable. Companies as an entity don't care about the user, or the environment or anything except making money. Any altruistic tendencies are going to be from a decision making process that says those tendencies will make more money in X time frame than doing it otherwise.
I work in electronics manufacture and we went to torx screws from Phillips because the screws are tiny and it's less likely to strip out a Torx screw during assembly than it is a Phillips, so Torx it is! Hey we glued something down, we did it because it was cheaper, faster or both! Did we use too much? It's probably to cover our butts because 1% of devices were coming apart and that is too much failure rate!. We don't design to make things harder to repair, but a lot of side effects of making things cheaper and faster is that they are harder to repair.
Like the example of of adding a dollar to make a fan repairable. If they sell a million fans that is a million dollars lost in profit. Multiply that by dozens of design decisions. Now if a competitor was making a more repairable fan and they were succeeding in the market, well that might make change, but even that would take time to happen as companies tried to figure out if the one company was succeeding because they were repairable, or just had better features/operation than the one they were selling.
That all said, I would love to see more stuff get made easier to repair again within reason. Hell go watch James May's new youtube show where he re-assembled shit. It is awesome! The only way companies are going to change though is through consumer backlash and government regulation. It's been shown time and time again that the majority of consumers just don't care. That android phone where the bottom came off and you could change batteries and other modules was cool, but it tanked hard. I'm sure it has some level of devoted following but people currently see phones and other appliances as replaceable, so companies don't have incentive to change there. I would love to see the warranty and self repair laws publicized more though so consumers know their rights when it comes to repairing devices and things like tamper seals and such aren't enforceable when submitting things for warranty work.
In the long run there needs to be a societal change towards longevity in product design and the ability to repair things (within reason), but this goes counter to an economy that has to keep growing and a society that prizes the "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality.
Now of course I'm speaking in generalities when talking about society as a whole, as it obviously doesn't represent everyone, but as far as society as a decision making force, it is all about disposable product design.
Because, as it turns out, 3 years is a long time for phones currently. People aren't just replacing the phone because it's old, but because it's actually obsolete. And there's the fact that to get the level of power and size that we see now, it requires a level of integration that makes the devices harder to repair. And there have been attempts to make more repair-friendly smartphones - but it turns out they wind up sort of clunky and unattractive, for a few reasons.
Three years is a long time for smartphones. There's been a persistent market for dumbphones - around 15%-20% of cell phone network access in industrialized countries is for dumbphones. There are a few different reasons why somebody might prefer a dumbphone, but a major one is that they last longer than smartphones.
Also, as the Guardian points out in an article about dumbphones, the growth curve for new smartphone technology is flattening. We've already seen this with PCs: in the 1990s, a five-year-old PC was ancient. The difference between a 1992 PC and a 1997 PC was leaps and bounds; today in 2017 plenty of people are doing fine with 2012 PCs.
I think we just barely passed this point with smartphones. The features that used to sell new smartphones were better screens and faster networks. Well, the iPhone has supported LTE since the 5s in 2013, which also happens to be the same model that introduced a Retina display. I think this is a major reason that the iPhone 6 had disappointing sales. It just wasn't the same leap forward from the 5 that the 5 was from the 4.
I'd also argue that the primary driver of short smartphone longevity today (as opposed to, say, in 2015) isn't bona fide obsolescence. Anecdotally, the most common reason I hear today for replacing a smartphone is battery life. But batteries lose long-term life, that's just what batteries do, and if batteries were more easily replaceable then I think more and more customers would opt for that instead.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Another note about the flattening growth curve for PC hardware: it's trivial to notice that in lieu of faster, computer manufacturers (and especially chip manufacturers) are pushing on lower-energy, lower-heat hardware.
Laptop users like this because lower energy consumption means longer battery life.
Businesses like this because lower energy consumption means cheaper utility bills.
Datacenters like this because less heat means less money spent on air conditioning. (And cheaper utility bills.)
Gamers like this because less heat means safer overclocking and quieter cooling systems.
I bring this up because it's an example of effective green marketing. Through a combination of market incentives (lower electricity costs) and savvy advertising, computer manufacturers have managed to make sustainability cool. (No pun intended.)
That's been on my mind in this thread because of numerous comments about throwing away old hardware. I don't mean to pick on any of these posts, they're just good points to bounce off from:
The market has clearly gone away from fix it yourself and towards disposable in most sectors, even in those with sectors with good amounts of competition.
Unlike electricity, we haven't really been able to internalize disposal costs for consumer electronics.
Raw materials cost money. So does disposal of a piece of consumer electronics. But at both the beginning and the end of the lifecycle, we've been able to insulate our consumers from those costs.
For example, one of the attempts at a repairable smartphone is the Fairphone. It's a decent phone, but because of the high price and clunky features the sales numbers for both the first and second-gen Fairphones are measured in 10,000s. One of Fairphone's objectives is sourcing ethically-mined raw materials all the way down the supply chain, and as The Verge reports, that's easier said than done: http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11414936/fairphone-2-review
Fairphone’s setup isn’t perfect, of course. The company still sources individual components from firms it has no control over, and even within its own supply chains there are black holes where it can’t follow. For example, during the electroplating process used to create the circuit boards, the company’s ethically-sourced gold is mixed in with gold from other sources. This means that while buying a Fairphone 2 supports proper supply chains, the device that actually ends up in your hand might not be built from these same materials. Global supply chains are convoluted and often impenetrable. Figuring out exactly how to be perfectly ethical is an impossibility.
Some of the metals used in your phone were likely mined by literalslavelabor and there is no way for you, or the phone manufacturer, to know exactly how much.
This is an e-waste worker in Ghana burning the plastic off of a bundle of wires so he can sell the copper.
Many e-waste recycling firms in the US will sell some or all of their donated items to larger firms who will bundle them together and ship them overseas (remember, boat transport is cheap) where impoverished workers pick through them for precious metals.
Of course, the reason we "recycle" these items in the first place is because they contain toxic materials that, when sitting in landfills, will leech into soil and water. So instead we send them to poor countries where children can burn them in the open air. :rotate:
If we were able to internalize these costs; if consumers had to bear the burdens of finding ethically-sourced minerals and of safe disposal; if we made cradle to cradle design sexy in the same way we've made low power consumption sexy (tagging @moniker because he's a fan of the book Cradle to Cradle), then the market demand for easily-repairable devices would be much higher.
(edit: BBcode fixes)
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Small appliances could really benefit from being made repairable again. I had a fan break, there was a little plastic gear inside that could have been replaced for very cheap. Way cheaper than buying a new 40-50 buck fan.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
I'd really like to highlight the bolded.
To me, the right to repair has a huge amount to do with environmentalism. Just because it can be made slightly cheaper by making it disposable, doesn't mean it should. Especially with the proliferation of 3D-printing technology, some of these things are going to need to be mandated by law, if only because we need to do our best to prevent products from ending up in the trash. Either that, or the government needs to impose stricter recycling standards both on manufacturing and the consumers that discard the product.
Small appliances could really benefit from being made repairable again. I had a fan break, there was a little plastic gear inside that could have been replaced for very cheap. Way cheaper than buying a new 40-50 buck fan.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
I'd really like to highlight the bolded.
To me, the right to repair has a huge amount to do with environmentalism. Just because it can be made slightly cheaper by making it disposable, doesn't mean it should. Especially with the proliferation of 3D-printing technology, some of these things are going to need to be mandated by law, if only because we need to do our best to prevent products from ending up in the trash. Either that, or the government needs to impose stricter recycling standards both on manufacturing and the consumers that discard the product.
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every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
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SO-DIMM slot means they have to make the laptop like 3mm thicker, which is obviously unacceptable.
For the time being, I believe iMacs and Minis and Mac Pros can still be upgraded, but the new Macbooks, Macbook Pros, and the last couple generations of Air have not been upgradeable.
Apple's always had an issue with form over function for decades.
I'll leave cars and motorcycles out of it for a second, and take computers.
The Apple machines are notoriously hard to modify/repair if needed. Everything is sealed or proprietary.
PC's on the other hand have entire sections of the industry thriving on the very idea of modification/repair. Shoot, the whole pc gaming market is almost a symbiote of the pc upgrade market. They both feed off each other.
When you get into anything mechanical it gets even more insane. Every employee from Advanced Auto Parts, to the local drag strip, to the SEMA show in Vegas depends on the end users ability to change/modify/repair their vehicles at will.
Don't all current MacBooks use LPDDR3? Which, afaik, doesn't exist in so-dimm format and is required to be soldered to the board?
1.2V vs 1.35V (LPDDR3 vs DDR3L) is a pretty significant power savings. On top of that, my understanding of LPDDR3 is that standby power use is crazy low compared to DDR3L (like 80-90% lower)
Apple caught a ton of flack on the most recent MacBook Pro update because the machines are all capped at 16gb of RAM. This is mainly because the processors they chose to use don't support LPDDR4, an Apple appears to value battery life over a ram ceiling that I'd be willing to bet almost no one would actually buy (though those few are the diehard users usually, who evangelize to others, so I bet apple will offer it again when they can wth LPDDR4)
Like I get that apple makes a lot of decisions that baffle and aggravate people, but it's not like one of the most profitable companies on earth makes decisions in a vacuum without a ton of data backing it up.
If you want to target them for anti-consumer practices on their laptops, go after them for things like slathering their battery banks in so much glue you have to buy a gel-filled roller that you heat up in the microwave to loosen them for removal. That's something that you would actually need/should be able to replace yourself, and does seem to be needlessly difficult to do. The ram thing seems to have been done for the purpose of furthering battery life, not removing repair-or-upgradability
This isn't a case where companies are being forced to make their products repairable. Rather these products are already repairable and the manufacturers have a monopoly on the ability to repair them. The Nebraska bill says that they have to be willing to sell the same parts and repair manuals being made available to manufacturer licensed repair stores to other stores.
An iPhone is repairable, a tractor is repairable, and yet the two big names fighting this are Apple and John Deere. There's nothing in the law forcing these manufacturers to change how they make the product, just that if someone wants to repair it themselves then they should have access to the materials that the manufacturer already makes but currently only sells to people who give them a cut.
"Clunky and unattractive" is a matter of opinion. The same with "obsolete."
First and second gen iPhones are being used right now by goatherders in Africa just fine.
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The newer iPhones are actually SUPER repairable. Apple is of course notoriously third-party repair unfriendly, but starting with the 5, a child could fix any number of iPhone issues (not just broken screens) if he can follow directions and has the parts. Part availability is the real issue we see. I can get parts, and honestly, for most of the phones the parts are dirt cheap due to a fairly complex third-party supply chain that deserves its own post. But parts for the current phone are always way more expensive. I haven't checked in a while but I think Apple is fixing broken screens on the 7 for somewhere in the $150-$200 range. My part cost is more than that, not counting markup or labor.
The other big issue you see with Apple is that the fingerprint sensor in the home button is married to the board. Apple stores have a tool to remarry replacements. No one else can.
Samsung (and most android phones, while we are at it) on the other hand makes an unrepairable phone. I have practice and can do it fairly confidently now, but their phones are a mess of booby-traps just waiting for you to damage more parts unrelated to the repair if you aren't prepared for them. And part availability is horrible as well. An S5 screen is more expensive than an iPhone 6s+ screen.
I guess I don't really know what I'm trying to convince you of here. I just see a lot of "iPhones aren't fixable" examples when they are (in spite of Apple's hatred of third party repair) some of the easiest phones I've fixed.
This is of course all just part-replacement repair. Not board-level. I am capable and we have the tools to do board-level repairs, but the labor sink almost always makes it either cheaper to replace the entire part, or the phone.
$0.02
My son got a toy, a small school bus with a couple buttons on top that made horn and engine noises. It stopped working after about a week, so I decided to take it apart. Something as simple as an $8 Tonka school bus used both philips and tri-lobe screws, along with glue/press on wheels to the axle that were not removable without breaking the wheels, which was necessary to get to the two screws hidden in the wheel wells of the bus. All to access the hair-thin wires used to attach the speaker to the control board, one of which had detached.
Those are the things that are the problem. Purposeful, unnecessary steps to make doing a repair yourself more difficult, if not impossible.
It's Apple's attitude that is the issue. They are actually engineered very well from a repair standpoint. The pentalobes are a discouragement, not a prevention. And I'm okay with that. I don't want most of my clients' kids opening up their phones just to see how they work. I want them to have to work a little to get it open. Once you are in though, it's all philips. (although the 7 does have a few tri-wing as well, which thank you for reminding me, I need to order a few more of!) And the adhesive is literally non-existent up until the 6s, and then it is only in service of waterproofing, not a barrier to entry. (For real, it isn't hard to get through, and you don't risk damage to any components. The 6s is surprisingly water resistant though, but Apple didn't want to advertise it because it isn't waterproof).
Again, it is the Samsung side of the world that is engineered purposely to be hard to repair. And the shame of it is, the S4 was easy, and the S5 wasn't bad. Apple has been getting easier and easier, and Samsung has been getting harder and harder.
I did a charge-port replacement on an S6 edge the other day. You can't understand how much you hold your breath when you are doing an $80 repair that could easily, and in fact if you didn't know the dangers ahead of time, would break a $200 screen in the process.
But yes, 100%. I would love if devices weren't just full of booby-traps and pitfalls. From an engineering vs legislation viewpoint I don't see how you can come anywhere close to putting anything enforceable together around that.
You could require open availability on part-level schematics, and that would go a long way.
I would love to see required fair and open selling of parts to third-part suppliers as well. But I can't imagine what that looks like in real life.
Realistically, I just want to see the end of firmware married parts.
All this anti-repair has been, from the start, is a desire to make more profits from this disposable electronic culture thats sprouted up around bullshit like new iDoodads every 3 months and overloading the old ones so they bog down and stop being usable.
Its anti-consumerist and an example of massive corporate greed.
Not only that, but its ecologically unsound, sending all kinds of still salvageable equipment to landfills
The market has clearly gone away from fix it yourself and towards disposable in most sectors, even in those with sectors with good amounts of competition. Forcing companies to reengineer things so that the minority of people with the desire and ability to repair things can is silly.
This is distinct from a provision requiring the fair sale and distribution of parts, which seems like a better idea if implemented well.
Its not forcing them to reengineer anything, its forcing them to not lay copyright claims and monopoly on components needed to repair shit.
They don't have to reengineer anything because the market never moved away from repairable items. Instead the companies realized that they could try to monopolize the market via warranty deals. They realized that they had the ability to make parts that required specific tools, then they could manufacture the tools and force the customer to come to them for repairs.
Pick up a warranty on an item that does work and almost every time you will see a section for repairs and refurbishment. Send them the item, and they try to repair it, or if it's broken in a place that can't be repaired easily then they send you a new one, replace the broken component on the old one and sell the old one as 'refurbished'. Even some of the most advanced consumer items are not made to be unrepairable. They're simply made to have just enough extra steps that they require someone with specialized tools and replacement parts to repair it. Companies make these tools and instructions on how to repair the items for internal use and licensed repair services already.
Even as onboard computers in cars advanced people found ways of modifying them by either using the computer, going around, or ignoring it. People find a way to fix things on their own regardless of the advancements. What's been happening isn't market forces, it's hardware DRM that companies have been adding to try to make it so people aren't able to fix it through anyone but them. But, just with software DRM, you can't make an unhackable tractor.
I will modify the OP to make this a bit more clear.
How else are you going to be protected against earthquake based failure?
I feel like there is going to be a company that will eventually license your car to you. Not now but with robot cars pay 69 bucks a month or your navigation doesn't work. You know car companies are going to bury some insidious fine print and malware in their os.
In terms of other items I think end users should have the right to repair and modify, I'm not sure to what level the manufacturer needs to assist.
If I could have gotten a replacement part or even the specs for the gear to have it 3d printed, it would have saved me a bunch of money and saved the environment a bunch of trash. But the housing was impossible to take apart. It was all glued together.
Now some might make the argument that the gluing process I more efficient and making the fans cheaper. But I seriously doubt that. Even if it were to add say a dollar to each fan to have it use screws, I'd still have netted significant savings being able to repair it over buying new.
Blenders and mixers often share similar issues and are usually very hard to repair. And yet a repair would see significant savings for the comsumer.
It's all about the money and selling more.
but they're listening to every word I say
Yeah, its stupid how overcomplex they've made a lot of things that should be owner serviceable on modern cars.
I know several people who have to take their cars to the mechanics to get the batteries changed because accessing it requires practically disassembling the front end.
Are you sure it was glue? and not... like... just plastic stuck together using, like, sonic welding? Kinda neat super common, you use a thermalplastic, errr, plastic and just stick bits together, shoot sound at them and you get a permanent bond without using any supplies pretty much instantly.
I have a Fiat 500. I uses a headlamp bulb assembly that is shared by exactly one other car. Headlamps assemblies can be replaced without any tool, or smashing nuckles, or stupid detent clips. Unscrew a housing cover, turn the cable 90% , pop out the old head lamp assembly and snap the new on into the socket.
I took me less than a minute for me to replace the first one without even looking at instruction first. I popped the hood to take a first look around, and I had the old one out and the new one in faster than I could pull up a youtube video. It's brilliant.
They cost $45, which is something like triple the normal price for a headlamp. There's all sorts of plastic housings with detents and extra connectors.
I honestly don't know if it is worth it or not, but it is an example of the other side of the spectrum. Maybe it would be cheaper if there was competition on sources(driven by wide adoption). Are these over priced components with overly specific usages rent seeky?
and I buy crap off amazon, without having touched it or looked reviews that care about repairability. I am a lazy consumer, and if I don't even make purchases qualities I like to think I care about I can't really expect companies to cater to these things.
So what we should do, is do what sweden just started doing create a tax incentive for repairs. Maybe even increase the tax on new items and apply that tax break to repaired products. Possibly in the form a including an unfront disposal cost tax charged on items at initial sale.
These sorts of things would cause consumers to more highly value repairable items, encouraging the masses to make choices based on things I care about, and then I wouldn't have to put in the effort of doing research because repairability would become part of how people rated products they purchased on amazon(at least informally).
My father is always showing some new handmade exhaustpipe or other.
Unfortunately the constitution doesn't ban stupid laws. And the DMCA is a prime example of it (though I think a great deal of the issue is that the corporate lobbyists writing it just didn't care about unintended consequences... this is hardly the first area it's caused problems for).
And all the important judges for this are federal and appointed anyways - anyone below the circuits has their hands tied by precedent on it. Would be nice to see SCOTUS just kill that clause for vagueness.
Congress is awful at legislating computers.
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Computers didn't start becoming common household items until the 90s. A lot of people in charge grew up in the 50s, and have no desire to adapt to things that didn't even show up on their radar until their mid-life crisis.
Apple is in a somewhat unique state because their completely closed ecosystem is partly how they got away with setting up secure payments and other fairly advanced security capabilities.
Also, I don't want apple to have to compromise on design so that people can more easily repair/replace. Swappable batteries means reducing waterproofing and device integrity and form factor, for instance.
A compromise I would be 100% cool with would be letting 3rd parties buy factory parts, but unless they are authorized apple repair technicians, any modification to the hardware that impacts the security chain (new processor, new touch ID sensor, etc) disables a bunch of stuff like touch ID and apple pay; still a 100% usable device, but nothing that could compromise the security for the rest of their userbase should remain available after modification.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Could have been. At any rate, my point was that when you have to destroy the casing to open the thing to fix the thing then....
I'm not sure if it is because we don't value repair as a society or if it is more top down, or even if it is capitalism making people only see the dollar less price on nonrepairable items.
There has been a cultural shift away from repair, but I don't think a cultural shift back is impossible.
but they're listening to every word I say
The bold part is the whole point of having a business. The decisions have been made because it makes them more money short term (especially if they are publicly traded!) than having a device that is reparable. Companies as an entity don't care about the user, or the environment or anything except making money. Any altruistic tendencies are going to be from a decision making process that says those tendencies will make more money in X time frame than doing it otherwise.
I work in electronics manufacture and we went to torx screws from Phillips because the screws are tiny and it's less likely to strip out a Torx screw during assembly than it is a Phillips, so Torx it is! Hey we glued something down, we did it because it was cheaper, faster or both! Did we use too much? It's probably to cover our butts because 1% of devices were coming apart and that is too much failure rate!. We don't design to make things harder to repair, but a lot of side effects of making things cheaper and faster is that they are harder to repair.
Like the example of of adding a dollar to make a fan repairable. If they sell a million fans that is a million dollars lost in profit. Multiply that by dozens of design decisions. Now if a competitor was making a more repairable fan and they were succeeding in the market, well that might make change, but even that would take time to happen as companies tried to figure out if the one company was succeeding because they were repairable, or just had better features/operation than the one they were selling.
That all said, I would love to see more stuff get made easier to repair again within reason. Hell go watch James May's new youtube show where he re-assembled shit. It is awesome! The only way companies are going to change though is through consumer backlash and government regulation. It's been shown time and time again that the majority of consumers just don't care. That android phone where the bottom came off and you could change batteries and other modules was cool, but it tanked hard. I'm sure it has some level of devoted following but people currently see phones and other appliances as replaceable, so companies don't have incentive to change there. I would love to see the warranty and self repair laws publicized more though so consumers know their rights when it comes to repairing devices and things like tamper seals and such aren't enforceable when submitting things for warranty work.
In the long run there needs to be a societal change towards longevity in product design and the ability to repair things (within reason), but this goes counter to an economy that has to keep growing and a society that prizes the "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality.
Now of course I'm speaking in generalities when talking about society as a whole, as it obviously doesn't represent everyone, but as far as society as a decision making force, it is all about disposable product design.
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Three years is a long time for smartphones. There's been a persistent market for dumbphones - around 15%-20% of cell phone network access in industrialized countries is for dumbphones. There are a few different reasons why somebody might prefer a dumbphone, but a major one is that they last longer than smartphones.
Also, as the Guardian points out in an article about dumbphones, the growth curve for new smartphone technology is flattening. We've already seen this with PCs: in the 1990s, a five-year-old PC was ancient. The difference between a 1992 PC and a 1997 PC was leaps and bounds; today in 2017 plenty of people are doing fine with 2012 PCs.
I think we just barely passed this point with smartphones. The features that used to sell new smartphones were better screens and faster networks. Well, the iPhone has supported LTE since the 5s in 2013, which also happens to be the same model that introduced a Retina display. I think this is a major reason that the iPhone 6 had disappointing sales. It just wasn't the same leap forward from the 5 that the 5 was from the 4.
I'd also argue that the primary driver of short smartphone longevity today (as opposed to, say, in 2015) isn't bona fide obsolescence. Anecdotally, the most common reason I hear today for replacing a smartphone is battery life. But batteries lose long-term life, that's just what batteries do, and if batteries were more easily replaceable then I think more and more customers would opt for that instead.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Laptop users like this because lower energy consumption means longer battery life.
Businesses like this because lower energy consumption means cheaper utility bills.
Datacenters like this because less heat means less money spent on air conditioning. (And cheaper utility bills.)
Gamers like this because less heat means safer overclocking and quieter cooling systems.
I bring this up because it's an example of effective green marketing. Through a combination of market incentives (lower electricity costs) and savvy advertising, computer manufacturers have managed to make sustainability cool. (No pun intended.)
That's been on my mind in this thread because of numerous comments about throwing away old hardware. I don't mean to pick on any of these posts, they're just good points to bounce off from:
Unlike electricity, we haven't really been able to internalize disposal costs for consumer electronics.
Raw materials cost money. So does disposal of a piece of consumer electronics. But at both the beginning and the end of the lifecycle, we've been able to insulate our consumers from those costs.
For example, one of the attempts at a repairable smartphone is the Fairphone. It's a decent phone, but because of the high price and clunky features the sales numbers for both the first and second-gen Fairphones are measured in 10,000s. One of Fairphone's objectives is sourcing ethically-mined raw materials all the way down the supply chain, and as The Verge reports, that's easier said than done: http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11414936/fairphone-2-review
Some of the metals used in your phone were likely mined by literal slave labor and there is no way for you, or the phone manufacturer, to know exactly how much.
On the other end of the lifecycle, a lot of so-called ewaste recycling looks like this:
This is an e-waste worker in Ghana burning the plastic off of a bundle of wires so he can sell the copper.
Many e-waste recycling firms in the US will sell some or all of their donated items to larger firms who will bundle them together and ship them overseas (remember, boat transport is cheap) where impoverished workers pick through them for precious metals.
Of course, the reason we "recycle" these items in the first place is because they contain toxic materials that, when sitting in landfills, will leech into soil and water. So instead we send them to poor countries where children can burn them in the open air. :rotate:
If we were able to internalize these costs; if consumers had to bear the burdens of finding ethically-sourced minerals and of safe disposal; if we made cradle to cradle design sexy in the same way we've made low power consumption sexy (tagging @moniker because he's a fan of the book Cradle to Cradle), then the market demand for easily-repairable devices would be much higher.
(edit: BBcode fixes)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'd really like to highlight the bolded.
To me, the right to repair has a huge amount to do with environmentalism. Just because it can be made slightly cheaper by making it disposable, doesn't mean it should. Especially with the proliferation of 3D-printing technology, some of these things are going to need to be mandated by law, if only because we need to do our best to prevent products from ending up in the trash. Either that, or the government needs to impose stricter recycling standards both on manufacturing and the consumers that discard the product.
your avatar with this post:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.