Speaking of waste. I researched about photoresistor (LDR) recently and learned from Wikipedia that cadmium based ones are restricted in EU. I wonder why they are not outlawed in US if the substance is toxic and can leak into water supply, etc.
As to right-to-repair, EU seems ahead on that front but US has one regulation which EU does not which is Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act.
In the US it is illegal to "void" a warranty based on the user swapping a part out with a third party component, or having a third party service the device. There are of course some exceptions.
You can void a waranty with respect to damage caused by impropper servicing, or damage caused by the replacement parts.
Alternatively you can void warranty on basis of using third party parts or servicing if you provide said parts/services for free.
Idea was: Warranty void is non-GM parts are used => Illegal, unless GM provides all parts for free. Waranty void for getting oil changes at a non-dealer => Illegal unless oil changes are provided completely free at the dealers.
While I suspect that most EU countries have similar rules for cars and the like, in the US these rules apply to any consumer good that costs $5 or more with a warranty (there could be some rare exceptions, as the FTC can grant waiver if the manufacturer can show that it is not possible for a third party to provide parts or service that will work properly, and that granting the waiver is in the public interest). Further free parts and services requirement applies to any form of repair and servicing.
In the US, if you don't provide free screen replacement for a cell phone dropped by negligence, then you cannot legally deny warranty on the battery solely because a third party screen was used, unless you can show the third party screen or the process of installing it caused the battery problem. Of course, if you can show the battery problem was caused by dropping it in the first place, then you can deny warranty replacement.
As a someone who goes against anti-right-to-repair laws, I am not so enthused with a mandate that all devices be repairable. Because there maybe cases where devices can’t be repaired.
What kind of problems will something like this create for future device manufacturers?
What are those cases? This is just ensuring that consumers have the option to repair so the manufacturers aren’t mandating waste or planned obsolescence
I make a small specialty electronic device that is optimized for size and weight. Its a side hustle, so I do it just to break even.
It consists of three parts: a 2-piece plastic case, and a single circuit board with around 25 smt components. The user can replace the battery.
I'm not going to publish my schematic or board design because I already open sourced my code, and the device is designed to be stupidly easy to manufacture for my own sake. Basically I don't want people to start making their own. A competent EE could figure it out in a day or two, but a anyone with that ability could design their own in the same amount of time.
If something on the board goes bad, I'm not going to offer guidance to repair it. It isn't worth anyone's time. That said, I do offer a lifetime warranty/buyback option since the unit cost is less than $10.
This is a bit of a contrived example since there is literally only one part that can fail, but the point is that there is a very fuzzy line around how far we can go with repairability. Should I be forced to provide a full schematic/board design (giving away my IP essentially)? Should I be forced to provide 'parts' (there is really only one part, and that is the product itself)?
I'm sympathetic to the 'right to repair' movement, but I'm curious how it would be implemented across such a broad spectrum of products. Perhaps it could just be a transparency rule: planned obsolescence (unrepairable) items should be marked as such and an e-waste tax added. If you want to avoid that marking you have to offer to trade broken parts for new for 5 years after first sale at cost.
At least publishing schematics, providing parts to third parties and allowing third party repair by not using DRM or other locks should not influence how the device is build.
An example would be that if I won 2 identical broken devices/cars I should be allowed to swap parts from one to the other and fix one of them as it was possible before DRM was invented.
Also there should be a "tax" for products with no way to change the battery or one time use electronics.
This is great, although it somehow seems to me to be starting in the wrong end. The underlying problem is that it is more profitable/cheaper to just give you a new product (if something breaks while under warrantee) and then just throw away the old instead of repairing it. I don't know if it is because the externalities of waste are not taxed properly or if it is because manufacturing products that are hard to repair gives more robust products and less waste in the end.
When repair labor costs more than automated production, then it's cheaper to replace whole units than mend parts.
This is very much in line when what the Luddites understood. Fixation on "waste" is a by-product of unrelated worries which are fashionable today, but cheap production at a distance is what labor should worry about, instead.
> Fixation on "waste" is a by-product of unrelated worries which are fashionable today
We have finite resources on this planet. Policies like this that deal with negative externalities aren't driven by fashion, they are driven by our long term needs. And we do need to recycle more and consume less. This is part of the solution.
> cheap production at a distance is what labor should worry about, instead
You're simply describing the status quo. The same status quo which has resulted in the warmest year on record for how many years in a row now...?
It's the most fashionable cause, since it can be shoehorned into anything. Yet carping about warming, and unstated assumptions about efficiency differences between levels of consumption and locations of production, don't guide us to fair labor practices.
>> When repair labor costs more than automated production..
When companies deliberately build products in unrepairable ways then repair labor costs more than automated production.
Imagine if mac butterfly keyboards were replaceable. Or for example I recently fixed my dad's washing machine, but it took a couple hours of labor to replace the pump because you had to remove about 4 other things to get to it (when they could have just made a door on the side/bottom.
It's sort of like if you had to spend an hour disassembling your case to swap the ram in your machine.
"With consumer electronics becoming increasingly more complex, many electronics manufacturers have instituted systems whereby the only means to repair a device or obtain repair parts would be through one of their authorized vendors or original equipment manufacturers (OEM). " [1]
>When repair labor costs more than automated production, then it's cheaper to replace whole units than mend parts
We're not there yet. There are profitable businesses that can do repair and/or replacement of broken soldered IC chips in laptops and smartphones (see YouTube channels of Jessa Jones and Louis Rossmann). So cost of repair is not a barrier in many cases.
The problems they highlight, that should be very easy to fix through regulation, is lack of access to technical manuals, lack of access to diagnostic equipment and tech giants (like Apple) bullying their suppliers to prevent sale of replacement parts to independent repair shops.
Sure - there are repairs where the costs are higher than replacement. There are repairs where the costs are lower than replacement. The latter should be a low-hanging fruit for regulation to assist with. And we have a model how this could be done - car repair. Because of historical factors, there are regulations that mandate car manufacturers to provide diagnostic tools and replacement parts to independent mechanics and though car manufacturers gripe about it, the system works well. And yes, in some cases, your mechanic will tell you that a particular repair isn't worth it because the car isn't worth it.
Independent mechanic shops are also a sizable market (around 150k+ businesses in US alone) providing good paying blue-collar jobs for hundreds of thousands of people .. and this competition also lowers repair costs for consumers.
No reason why it couldn't be the case for electronics.
When the repair costs are controlled by the manufacturer, you shouldn't be surprised when the repair becomes cost prohibitive. This is why having only Ford being able to repair Fords and Apple only able to repair Apple devices is a negative. When they own the monopoly they can make any claim they want and you have no option of a second opinion.
> I don't know if it is because the externalities of waste are not taxed properly or if it is because manufacturing products that are hard to repair gives more robust products and less waste in the end.
It's because our entire economic system is oriented toward growth and puts profit above everything else.
Profit is fine; the problem is that the true costs aren't borne by the consumers. We subsidize by polluting, by relying on forced labor, by relying on people working in dangerous environments and so on
I can't describe how much I hope something comes out of it. Not because I have some illusion of this tackling corporate greed, or helping the environment - devices will likely become more expensive and bulkier as a result, supply chain of replacement parts is generating heaps of waste too.
I simply am surrounded by tens and hundreds of sort-of-broken devices that don't force me to replace yet, but are not fixable either. The laptop overheats, phone compass never works properly, one port in the TV is dead, there is no light in the fridge (but it still works). The list goes on. I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.
But it exists - it's not that stuff is worse now than it was before, you just have to spend the value (not amount) of money you spent back in the 60's. Our family houses are full of stuff that lasts a lifetime and/or can be easily fixed - you just can't buy the first thing the ad in TV suggests.
I had multiple manufacturers of kitchen appliances send me schematics so I could fix it myself instead of paying for a service visit. Many vendors have service guides online, including lists of parts. That's not hostile at all. You have to choose what you're buying, but it's not hard to buy from a solid company.
Disagree. I'm willing to throw heaps of hard earned money to recover my time spent being bothered by such problems. I researched and tried many "premium" brands, with minor exceptions they proved to be planned for obsolence too. I had good experience with small companies/kickstarters. Once they grow to the point of being "popular", economies of scale and CFOs show up to the table and eat your cake.
In all of the following I got a new thing looking for some new feature or because I could I guess, and had the older device outlasted the newer one: Bose headphones, any mobile phone really, Thinkpad laptops, Audi cars, Brother printers, any and all household appliances.
Well... My headphones are 10 years old, my phone is 3 years old and all my previous ones including my Galaxy S2 (my first smartphone) are still in use by family, my kitchen doesn't have anything younger that 15 years - most stuff is 25+ years old - except the fridge, I replaced it because of power efficiency and the old one is at the cottage, nearly 35 years old. None of it was bought from a kickstarter as most of that stuff predates internet.
I really don't see the problem. Like you're saying people are buying new stuff because they want the new stuff, not because old is broken. There are tons of extremely cheap second hand things that could do the job and yet people keep buying new things.
How will this right to repair change anything? How much money was spent making it reality that could've been spent productively?
Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everything on chip combined with economics of scale.
Still it’s a worthwhile pursuit. At some point pocket PCs/phones will be good enough, just as for many a 2014 laptop is still good enough.
They already are. Phones from 2016 for example feel completely usable today. That goes for the repairable ones at least, like the LG G5, but even the older LG G3 holds up well.
If all modern phones were as repairable as those we could eliminate so much garbage!
Right. Repairable hardware is just the one side, security updates needs to be available as well. We need mandated open sourcing of device software (including firmware and drivers + unlocking of the bootloader) after the support timerange, or at the very least alternatively the obligation to continue security updates for decades.
Who is actually going to update this even if it is open source though? There are so many drivers and firmware in a smartphone, nevermind the tens of thousands of models of smartphones out there. It would require an army of people to patch, test and distribute everything. That's even if you can figure out all this code.
We see that happening all the times with devices that are open and popular enough, as much as is possible now. Have a look at the xda forum to see how it is done today.
I agree that the manufacturer or carrier doesn't owe you updates indefinitely, but they definitely should give you all the resources you need to develop these updates yourself if you wanted to.
The landscape can change. Maybe there's going to be a huge open-source project that will make these updates. Maybe someone will figure out a way to automatically handle a large number of hardware configurations at scale (a powerful enough hardware abstraction layer should be able to deal with it). Maybe someone will make a business out of it, providing security updates at a reasonable cost. Either way, there shouldn't be any artificial hurdles against the customer developing and running their own firmware on hardware they paid money for.
It's not about 'who's going to do it' but about 'if I want to do it, I can'.
I would really like to hack on a tablet I have that's 5 years old, but I can't because the firmware and drivers are both closed source.
I think when I buy a device, I should get the source code to it once the manufacturer decides it's not worth it for them to continue patching the software for the device I've bought.
OTOH, you can wind up with stuff like installing an OS that requires more than the device has to offer- like installing the most recent version of Ubuntu Desktop on a Intel Core2 Duo isn't going to go well, nor did installing iOS 7 on iPhone 4's- which I remember eagerly installing without realizing the major slowdown all the new features added that I couldn't undo.
Linux usually works perfectly fine with old hardware, a Intel Core2 Duo should be completely enough. That's even 64 bit hardware. Worst case you have to swap out Gnome with something more minimal, but that's unlikely.
I'm currently running Manjaro with i3wm on a laptop with a core 2 duo. It came with a couple of simple conky widgets enabled by default and those probably took 5-10 seconds to load. Just boxes, one with static text and the other with load statistics. Resizing windows is a little painful, as is opening them.
I3 runs reasonably well, but Gnome would probably be too heavy to make for an enjoyable experience.
Creating those updates costs money. At what point is the cost no longer worth it? It is not realistic for companies to support every phone forever; I think that's something we can all agree on.
Would you be willing to pay whatever your share is of how much generating the update would cost, in order to get it? With a clear indicator when you buy the phone that you automatically get a subscription to 3 years worth of security updates; past that, you pay whatever amount is needed to keep it up to date.
In my opinion, manufacturers who cannot be bothered to provide updates to their software should not be allowed to claim intellectual property rights on the hardware. When support ends, drivers and documentation should be made open source, enforceable by law if need be.
I think that the problem is central to how phones are developed and constructed. Dell doesn't determine how long my XPS 13 gets updated; they provided the hardware, and I can put any software I want on it. It can keep running a secure, up-to-date OS as long as I want it to, until the hardware truly can't keep up (which, based on computer lifetimes these days, is a long time).
Conceptually, I dislike that mobile development hasn't followed a similar path. Samsung should not dictate how many updates my phone gets and for how many years. Practically, I realize that this is a consequence of how we've built SOCs and mobile hardware and there's no incentive for companies to change. That doesn't make it less problematic.
In my case the Manufacturer (LG) already did the updates, the phone was offered on 2 of 3 carriers, of the 2 one of those carriers are still offering updates for it, but because it was a less popular model on the 2nd carrier it is not longer getting updates
I tend to agree if we consider current use cases. Issue comes when we add new use cases which require more processing power or new components.
Also, we’ll have to figure out how to manage with a sort of stagnation.
Essentially this entails curbing change. Curbing change means slowing progress (initially in this niche), but if we extend this into other areas it can mean significant stagnation because since things are good enough we don’t need to improve and progress (ie. we’re at equilibrium )
Sometimes it's more a question of software. On older phones badly made sites like the new reddit for example were unuseable in all browsers - until the new Firefox came along.
But sure. Repairability is one thing, it just means that devices can continue the things they were made for. For new workloads they would need upgradeability, which is a completely different beast.
I don't think having repairability will slow things at all. It will simply prune some behaviors corporations engage in that destroy the planet, like glueing in batteries. Stopping such practices will not even make new devices more expensive - we have old designs that did it right. Falling back to them and innovating there could even save money.
My old phones are often usable, which is why I only upgrade every three years or so. However, when I do upgrade after waiting so long, it's like I've traveled through time with the improvements.
It seems that most people want more than just usable. They may not want to pay more for a device up front, knowing they will be missing out on the latest technology down the road.
They do not need to pay more. The equation that repairable means more expensive for the customer is propaganda. It assumes that every cent companies save by making devices worse lowers the price. That's trickle down economics and has never been true.
People can still buy new stuff earlier if they want. But their old stuff can be reused by those that do not need, want or can afford the new devices. There are many categories of devices where that's a good option for many, not only phones. Besides, it's always good to have the option to repair that thing you have when it breaks even if initially you did not think you would need that. You might have grown to like it.
A large part of that is simply that smartphones entered the market very recently and started out computationally weak compared to existing computers - the first iphone was released less than 14 years ago and had a CPU running at 412MHz!
Smartphones have largely caught up to traditional computers in terms of the time it takes for upgrade-worthy advancements in hardware. I expect we'll see smartphone upgrade cycles continue to lengthen until they mirror desktop/laptop upgrade cycles.
I've had an iPhone since 2009 and I'm definitely familiar with the "time traveling" effect of upgrading phones, but I think it has diminished a lot as the technology has matured.
I've been using a 6S since 2015 (this thread caught my interest because it's now somewhat of a Ship of Theseus as I've replaced so many parts over the years), but the 11 Pro I bought last year was the first time a multi-year-gap upgrade felt rather incremental, especially for $1100. I returned it and expect to continue to use and repair the 6S until they drop iOS support for it.
The processors have changed significantly. I had a OnePlus 3T which I really liked, and recently pulled it out of a box because my daily driver phone broke. The 3T struggled to load modern, bloated apps like Google Maps. The device would chug at most tasks more intensive than scrolling a webpage (and sometimes even then... what a sad state the web is in these days)
By contrast the processor in my work phone (an Iphone) is faster than my laptop.
> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part
This is only partially true. The true cost is hidden and at least by average people like me immeasurable. We are putting a lot of cost out of sight if you consider the environmental impact of e-waste.
> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everything on chip combined with economics of scale.
That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon.
Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace.
"Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved.
Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.
I agree with you; however making things discreet and replaceable will increase costs significantly and slow progress —however, if we consider phones to have reached “good enough” status then that makes sense. Double the price but make it easy to repair or replace components.
> making things discreet and replaceable will increase costs significantly and slow progress
Nobody is asking to split the current, high pin-density SoC into eighty chips with DIP sockets, they're mostly asking for things like:
* Publishing service manuals and schematics
* Making replacement parts available (replacing the SoC isn't that big a deal, the problem is that you often can't get that SoC anywhere)
* Not selling things with an EULA that explicitly prohibits "unauthorized" repairs
"Making things discreet" is pretty much a red herring. Sure, making everything discreet would result in bulkier, pricier, and probably worse phones, but you can massively improve the general public's access to repairs without doing that.
Youtube on my mother in laws Samsung tablet from 2013 has stopped working. It has stopped because it has android 4 and you can't update chrome past V42 and youtube won't load without a later version of chrome. I installed firefox and she has access to youtube through the web for now. The tablet is in immaculate condition physically. if it played youtube in 2013 it should be able to play it now, it cost over €500 at the time. How is this anything else except planned obsolescence. I know there will be comments about security etc but she only needs it for youtube and solitaire.
If you go through the lineageos device list there's literally no samsung tablets from 2013 that's currently supported. If you count the devices that had builds but aren't currently supported you get more devices, but I suspect your odds are still not good considering there's several unsupported models for every supported model.
I sympathize with your (mother-in-law's) situation! I, too, own a Samsung tablet from that period.
Have you checked whether you could install LineageOS or some other custom ROM on the tablet? That way, you might be able to extend its lifetime by another couple years.
That is not planned obsolence. Nobody said this tablet should stop working by 2021. It's simply the result of limiting cost of software development. If you are creating a new version of android, you cant affort to support all devices. If you create a new version of chrome, you cant affort to support all version of android. If you create a new version of youtube, you cant afford to support all versions of chrome, etc, etc.
Agreed. I think there needs to be a better term for the reality of the situation, something like "negligent obsolescence". There's no technological limitation preventing Samsung from updating those for a decade or more, they just don't care. A battery degrading over time isn't planned obsolescence, and while not being able to easily replace the battery might be, more likely it's that they just don't bother to put in the slightly extra effort to make the batteries easier to replace. Right to Repair mandates would be a good start in ensuring manufacturers are properly motivated.
> If you create a new version of chrome, you cant affort to support all version of android. If you create a new version of youtube, you cant afford to support all versions of chrome, etc, etc.
Google is making billions per year, they can certainly afford to support all versions of Android. They just choose to pocket the money and screw their customers instead.
If we properly accounted for environmental externalities, and frankly, the rat race of labor arbitrage (is a good use of people's time in the 2nd world to work 9 days a week to crank out replacements for this shit?), I think we would get there faster.
Though yes, thank goodness the end of Moore's law is here to help.
> there is no light in the fridge (but it still works)
I normally find these types of appliances make parts readily available. I just replaced the locking mechanism on my washing machine for example, it was cheap and easy to order the parts I needed.
That trend has become ubiquitous: cars, laptops, phones...
Nothing is designed to be fixed at home anymore. If there were regulations that required it, we'd still have the same advanced tech, but it'd be repair friendly.
For example HP Elitebooks ond Dell business class laptops have most parts replaceable and the keyboard is secured by screws.
HP Pavilion gaming, ASUS ROG Strix and newer Macbooks have keyboards secured by melting topcase plastic pins or bolts so you can't easily replace keyboard, you need to replace the whole topcase.
And the keyboard is something which degrades by use and can easily be damaged by liquid...
Trust me I'm an engineer? But always happy to have HN debug my fridge, so here we go: turns out the light bulb, when replaced, keeps overheating and even metled the surrounding casing. Some electrical issue I'd have to take the fridge apart to debug. I might be unfair with this one though, it's a 20 year old fridge and is probably serviceable.
It depends. A lot of modern fridges use LEDs and have control boards driving them that cost hundreds of dollars. If the LEDs are out, the likelihood is not that the LEDs are dead, but that something much more expensive failed.
They do the slow fade-in effect when you open the door. That's got to cost something.
I, mistakenly, bought the refrigerator with LED lighting because I hated how old-style bulbs would turn on slowly in the cold. LED lighting should be instant I thought. Oh no, totally on purpose it was made slow.
PWM is trivial to implement, but you can sell it for real money as a feature. Or, in this case, a "feature". Not that it wouldn't be easier to just wire the door switch into the power rail for the internal lighting, but then it wouldn't also be able to play a cute jingle and tweet Elon Musk when the door opens.
Regarding slow starts - not that it's terribly useful to mention now, I grant, but most incandescent appliance bulbs can be replaced with compatible and much less temperature-sensitive LED ones these days.
My guess is that the LEDs are in series on a strip, and one burnt out.
The fridge manufacturer probably assumed it’ll always run cold (it’s a fridge right?) and overdrove them too hard to get just as much light out of 20 LEDs instead of 24.
Could bridge the faulty LED with solder to buy some time, and find a donor LED from a “burnt out” LED light bulb or whatevs and solder it in.
YouTube has been a game changer for me. I’ve repaired my dishwasher, shower handle valve, refrigerator drain, replaced thermal paste in my laptop, all kinds of things. It seems like there’s a decent video for everything, and some random website (or eBay) selling parts.
Sometimes the manufacturer makes it difficult. Replaced the light bulb in my parents' oven last week. The manufacturer only sold the bulb with the entire (expensive) housing as well. A bulb! We managed to find a supplier with a compatible bulb (which meant a quick swap).
I'd like to think there was a reason the manufacturer wanted the entire housing replaced?
My guess is that some product manager somewhere realized that if they only offered the bulb housing assembly they could make a bit higher profit margins
- no service/troubleshooting manual/videos available online
- no way to identify what replacement part to buy unless you're in the know already
- getting access to locking mechanism looked like it would lead to washing machine completely falling apart structurally (there was a somewhat hidden "safety" screw that looked like a last defense against people removing the front panel just by removing the apparent screws and hurting themselves)
So I bailed on this without a proper guide on safe disassembly procedure.
Thankfully wiggling the connector to the locking switch made the lock and thus the washing machine work again, after a first failure since 15 years ago or whatever. It looked just fine inside (surprisingly). Vibrations probably don't allow much dirt to accumulate. No obvious rusting/leakage. I was surprised.
Phone unlocking doesn't get much attention, but it is an integral part that no one wants to address or get their hands dirty with.
There are many more locked phones in drawers or acting as mere paperweights than people actually care to disclose.
Several years back we ran a poll to understand lifetime recycling habits.
People aren't proud of dropping a phone and shattering the screen, but they are less proud of having thrown a phone into a drawer because they couldn't be bothered to run the obstacle course set up by their telco to keep them in check.
Phone right-to-repair should be EXPLICITLY INCLUSIVE of unlocking, otherwise it is only solving a part of the problem.
Carrier locks are an absolute scam. The argument is that it allows carriers to offer subsidised phones and “repossess” them if the customer defaults on their bill by making it unusable.
However, in reality, not only does the carrier not mind if the phone keeps being used (as long as it’s on the carrier’s network) but the lock doesn’t expire once the customer pays off their plan.
Furthermore the process for unlocking a phone is intentionally made convoluted. Until recently, you couldn’t even figure out which carrier an Apple device was locked to without playing brute-force with all the carrier’s SIMs in the entire world and even Apple support couldn’t be of any help. And when you finally figure out which carrier it is, getting in touch with them is a pain and some have stupid policies like keeping the device on their network for 30 days before being able to request an unlock (a scummy attempt at getting some people to give up and just keep using their network past the deadline, or revenge against someone who doesn’t intend to do so by essentially making their device unusable for 30 days).
Absolutely. Remember the "2014 Obama Unlocking Law" [1] ? It was supposed to not only not make it ilegal to carrier unlock a phone, but also forced all carriers to adopt a specific code of conduct to assist users with unlocking.
Fast forward 6 years, and it is much harder to unlock a phone than it was then. The whole thing backfired for consumers. It was actually easier to unlock a phone in a "non-legal" way before the law than it was right after.
This whole new code of conduct for carriers actually made them convert their SIMlock departments to be more like a customer retention lifecycle.
This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.
> This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.
I had no idea this was still a thing, it’s horrible. What mechanism is creating the current situation?
Phones are all unlocked here in New Zealand.
> What mechanism is creating the current situation?
Lack of general consumer protection regulation (or their enforcement), and specifically with regards to telecommunications the regulator who's supposed to oversee the field (the FCC in the US, or OFCOM in the UK for example) is often in bed with the companies it's supposed to regulate.
> However, in reality, not only does the carrier not mind if the phone keeps being used (as long as it’s on the carrier’s network) but the lock doesn’t expire once the customer pays off their plan.
I recently paid off my AT&T iPhone X and the process to unlock it couldn't have been easier.
Notably, you have to have been paid up (somewhat understandable), active for 60 days if postpaid (not really reasonable at all), or if prepaid, active for 6 months (absolutely not reasonable). This basically precludes someone selling a phone secondhand entirely if they haven't unlocked it first by holding the value of the phone hostage (phones are worth less when locked). Completely anti-consumer. And AT&T isn't even the worst about this. I once tried to unlock a phone through Rogers and they wanted $120 to do it! This was back around 2011 so their policy might have changed but given Canada's terrible telco situation I doubt it has changed much.
It's not usually like that - and I've had a few locked phones.
Usually the deal is that a network, say Vodafone, subsidises the handset by £50 of some such in return for you being forced to use Vodafone services for a couple of years, unless you arrange to unlock it.
It's sort of ok as a deal but a pain in many ways if you want to travel and use a local SIM or sell the phone for example.
SIM/operator locks have been already rare (in Europe) for a while, and that's great!
But there are Android phones that come with bootloader/OS lock, which often means old device is stuck with some ancient OS version (and some bundled bloatware), instead of being able to be reflashed to a recent LineageOS.
The new phone lock du jour is the manufacturer's anti theft mechanism.
I recently got two iphones from their owners, pulled out of the drawer to monetize them on classifieds. Both locked and unresettable without the previous owners help (one could be unlocked because I got her account password over the phone, huge nogo but she trusts me to not screw with her account). The other not, account was lost.
Apple also now tags and ties both battery and camera to the logicboard. Shame.
This one is a pretty obvious trade off, does anyone know of good data on the impact of Apples policy on iphone theft rates and/or sales rate of stolen phones?
Mobiles in Europe are generally unlockable by calling the network supplier after the contract expires. In Norway, in my experience at least, this is free.
But the reason I have a handful of paperweight mobiles is not that they are locked but that they are no longer useful. They have low resolution cameras, little memory, small screens, obsolete operating systems, etc. I sometimes try to sell them but no one wants them even free.
I live in the EU and have never encountered a carrier locked phone. It's quite an amusing concept, and the first carrier to come up with it must truly have been evil.
I live in the EU too (France), and any phone you buy directly from a carrier (generally heavily discounted, but tied to a more expensive plan) is carrier-locked, and can only be unlocked after a set amount of time has passed, or earlier by paying a fee (regulated by the EU if my memory serves me well).
Perhaps it's because I was less financially literate in the past, but I remember that as being the only way in the 2000s. There might have been laws passed to limit that practice and its abuses.
The smart solution, provided you have enough money, is to buy the phone elsewhere, and take a plan without a phone. It's always less expensive in the long term.
in Germany, the Telco's gave up locking the phones in 2017. Because it was to expensive. I can not remember if it was a hard lock - as in any other sim card is blocked or just their additions to the OS. bought a phone in 2017/early 2018 - Xperia 10, where on the boot screen a Deutsche Telekom logo appears but otherwise the OS unaffected by vendor edits/additions. But updates are really slow since they go through Telekom instead of directly from sony which is already slow.
Isn't it about trade-offs? As long as my carrier provides my family with free iPhones, I will bear the inconvenience of requesting device unlock every few years. It takes 2 minutes to unlock it. If I am to pay full price for the device I will not get a locked one.
Funny. As I remember from the times of early GSM, that carrier lock was the default, because subsidized by them in exchange for long term contracts like 2 years. Otherwise you had to pay much more intitially, but it could make sense to calculate this, instead of blindly trusting the advertisements.
> I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.
I think this is part of the point you are trying to make, but everything requires maintenance. Not sure what model fridge you have, but a bulb replacement should be not too hard to pull off on your own.
I sincerely hope that providing upgrades to software is also included as part of this. The only device I have which I dont actively use or give away is a Samsung galaxy tab which never received a single Android OS upgrade. I think it is reasonable for a consumer of a software+hardware integrated device to expect upgrades of software for say 3-5 years.
I think a better approach would be to force manufacturers to provide everything necessary for someone (the user or a third-party company) to develop alternative firmware. This means source code, datasheets of the hardware, and a way to bypass locked bootloaders or other code signature checks. Essentially, if you can't provide updates yourself, you should be giving away everything that's necessary for someone else to do it.
Guaranteed upgrade cadence is not enough. I think what would be regulated is that they MUST open source afther that 3-5 years.
Just as we have with pharma patents, after a protection period it should be free game, and they should open-source if they don't intend to continue pushing updates, say evety 6 months or so.
With China clamping down on E Waste imports, the EU may actually be happy to push for something that's pro-environment. I think aligning the incentives properly will be a great thing long term.
Soldering SSDs on the motherboard is a crime! Data storage modules should always be replaceable: 1. because they can fail easily (limited write counts), 2. because people need to wipe data before selling
I have seen a "for parts" Macbook on eBay with bad motherboard where the seller drilled through SSD and T2 chips to "wipe data". While drilling they damaged the topcase as well.
Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years like refrigerators, coffee machines, dishwashers, washers, and dryers, often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases, and could be repaired. We have witnessed the steep decline of device reliability in my lifetime, and our expectations are so low that the latest appliance we buy we consider lucky if no problems develop in 2-3 years. Anything serious requires you to usually toss it out and buy a new one.
Miele appliances (for example) still last decades and all efforts are made by the manufacturer to find you spare parts if you need. But they cost 3-4x more than a budget appliance.
That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances...
The market tends to give consumers what they want.
It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.
> The market tends to give consumers what they want.
The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
Perhaps but that should be an unstable equilibrium, i.e. temporary.
As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die.
It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us.
Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
It should be in theory, but in practice it's pretty stable on relevant time horizons. There are many factors fixing such equilibria. For instance, most consumers aren't rational actors carefully evaluating purchasing decisions. Or, when they pick, they may optimize for multiple targets simultaneously. There are economies of scale that create barriers to entry for new competitors. Trust takes time to develop. Etc.
To use two relevant examples:
Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack.
Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it.
Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends.
--
[0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
Perhaps they cannot price in reliability? How many people know that Miele offers long lasting and repairable appliances, instead of just expensive ones?
I for one "know" this by weighing HN anecdotes I've seen over the years - couple dozen saying that they sell solid stuff, and one or two saying that they used to sell solid stuff, but are now following the trend of replacing metal components with cheap plastics. How do I evaluate that? Brand trust isn't that strong a signal.
The abstract problem is that the market is imperfect due to insufficient customer knowledge. I know my last washing machine lasted X years, but how that will compare to the new one from the same manufacturer, I don't know. The manufacturer also won't (really) tell me, just the usual fluff about quality.
So as a consumer, I am unable to decide objectively, just using rumours if there isn't a hard guarantee or a trustworthy evaluation of the quality of all products I could pick. In that situation, I will price in the uncertainty, I will evaluate the rumours and the tendency to produce crappier stuff over time. And when in doubt, buy 4 cheap short-lived washing machines instead of 1 for 4 times the price.
Not so simple. Many manufacturers advertise a long warranty and then, when things break, drag their feet, blame improper use or wear and tear, offer workarounds instead of repairs, etc.
A long warranty is only good if the manufacturer is trustworthy. But untrustworthy manufacturers are one of the causes of the whole problem.
A fix might be warranty terms defined by law, where the manufacturer can pick the duration and nothing else. Disputes should be settled in court or by a neutral board of experts.
I have not found it to be the case, one of my displays lasted 7 years and still works, the other gave out in 3, both had 1 year warfanty. Dell and asus respectively.
Think of it the other way round. Long warranties are indicative of a durable, long lasting product. A short warranty, however, does not necessarily indicate a crap product.
Of course this is not a perfect measure, but I do think that a correlation would exist here.
Or, they may also be indicative of the company making its money elsewhere, and thus willing to eat the cost of regular warranty replacement just to keep you tied to their hardware, so that they can exploit you elsewhere.
Have you tried asking pe— sorry, “market research”? If you can make something that people want to pay for, that goes down a lot better than trying to make them buy what you're selling via an elaborate multi-agent optimisation algorithm.
And on the producer side, what they market as is distinct from what they make, what they try to make is distinct from what gets shipped, etc.
A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
What I really hate about Miele is their stupid will to push their stupid branding on the retailers (online), it always feels broken and its absolutely a pain to try to navigate any sites that integrates with them.
Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands.
The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.
>Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years [...] often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases
It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.
This is true, but it seems to be mostly consumer preference. That 30 year old refrigerator cost more (normalized) and does less than most of the ones you can buy today. When people offer longer lived, better built versions for more money, most people don't buy them.
The situation is not so clear-cut with domestic appliances. Modern fridges are much more energy-efficient. So there is a tradeoff: either you buy a new fridge, thus polluting the environment with the old fridge, but saving energy. Or you let your good old 30 year old fridge run, saving the resources needed for a new fridge, but burning a lot more energy in the process.
It's a simple calculation. How much energy costs do I save compared to keeping the old one. Also I wouldn't expect any "modern" appliance to last more than 5 years.
I bought an apartment nearly 5 years ago, and so shortly after that went on the appliance shopping trip. I tried to get what I thought were good quality appliances, and everything is still mostly working ok, but there have been teething problems with everything:
- Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements.
- Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins.
- Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller.
- Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason.
- Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new.
- Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.
About any fridge you buy now would last a decade easily. Several decades even, if you bother to invest into its maintenance and repair like people did 40 years ago.
Getting appliances repaired is harder than it once was. Disposability culture drove many repair shops out of business. Many repair shops I and my family used to are now gone or dying. The guy who used to do sewing machine repairs for my mother is gone. The cobbler that used to repair my boots is gone. Furthermore, appliances that used to come with repair manuals no longer do, and finding the manual online is often a real chore. Fewer people will repair things on their own when manufacturers make it difficult to find even basic documentation.
It's a good point, but it's not really a failure of product design. Appliances themselves now are not any less reliable than they were in mid-century. There is no grand conspiracy of manufacturers filing down screw threads to make them fail.
I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
I don't think manufacturers are conspiring. I think this widespread behavior emerges from market circumstances and is not evidence of any sort of collusion between manufacturers. You don't need grand conspiracies to explain things like this, nor have I proposed one!
True, except there are manufacturers like Apple or Sony which won't provide genuine spare parta to retail people (tried that). Then you have to buy parts from "for parts" eBay auctions or counterfait/bad quality batteries from random Chinese seller...
Back in the day it was routine to change the compressor, or even repair the failed one piecewise (bearings, manifolds). Refill the leaked coolant and braze the leaks.
You can still do that on most modern fridges, but it's not worth the effort with appliance prices now. They also don't fail often these days.
We’ve had declines in some areas - IoT being an obvious culprit - but there are two major confounds belying that anecdotal belief:
1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it.
2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better.
Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently?
It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.
All durable consumer goods may apply for a repair QR code. At landfills, items with repair QR codes are scanned and the company is charged 50% of the cost of processing the item.
If one is not applied for, the producer must pay the full cost of processing the item up front.
This would encourage companies to make repair & upgrade and longetivity a priority.
Manufacturers must pay 100% of the cost of safe, environmental disposal of all consumer goods they sell. This is collected in the form of a tax, for all manufacturers over some threshold sales value/volume, based on an impact assessment of disposal cost. The assessment is based on the typical practical burden to disposal facilities to process each SKU.
There's no need to individually account for every item going into waste disposal facilities. It can be assumed that every item sold will eventually be disposed of. And the problem is in primarily bulk sales of consumer items, so accounting in bulk is fine, and considerably cheaper in processing cost.
Bad plan. The problem is not have someone pay for the disposal, but delay disposal for as long as possible. And the ones who make the decision for the disposal are the consumers. Having the manufacturer pay a tax in advance puts little pressure on the consumer.
Moreover, anything that involves an "assessment" is bound to be gamed by the manufactures. See e.g. the recent VW car emission scandal.
The point is that the economic equation will change. Why is it that it's cheaper to buy new than repair old? In part, it's because the cost of disposal has been shifted away, rather than being incorporated into the price of the replacement.
Having the manufacturer pay a tax in advance does put pressure on the consumer, because that tax has to be incorporated into the product pricing.
> Moreover, anything that involves an "assessment" is bound to be gamed by the manufactures. See e.g. the recent VW car emission scandal.
I agree it's a challenge. I wonder if there's some way to close the loop - so that manufacturers who game the system to achieve an artificially low disposal price end up making up the shortfall when the fake price isn't achieved.
>This would encourage companies to make repair & upgrade and longetivity a priority.
not really. if you made a phone that lasts 6 years rather than 3 years, the fees manufacturers pays doesn't decrease by 50%, it remains the same. That's because at the end of the day, everything ends up in a landfill. The only benefit to the manufacturer in this case would be the time value of the deposit fee for 3 years.
If the admin of this site is seeing it, please note that the captcha guard you're using is broken. Not only is it mandating storage of cookies, it is absolutely refusing to accept my answers as correct despite several trials.
First reaction is that this is good news, but I think two things needs to be looked at:
One, what drives people to replace devices? I feel (not scientific at all!) that wanting a new shiny device and, if broken, cost of repair, are higher on the list than not being able to repair.
Two, the law of unintended consequences: Making devices more repairable may increase their footprint in terms of material and thus waste. If people do not have their devices repaired more (e.g. because of (1) above ) then the net result might be worse than the current situation.
If people don’t adopt a mindset of repair/upgrade and just continue to replace devices at the same rate, then sure more material is going to be used. Those devices will be easier to take apart and recycle though.
This isn’t just about phones and laptops, but also appliances, and people aren’t really upgrading fridges or stowes because a new model is available. Many only get new cars because the repair bill now exceed the monthly cost of a new car.
> Those devices will be easier to take apart and recycle though.
That's not a given.
For things like smartphones I would much rather they enact laws to make them more recyclable than more repairable. And, let's be honest, smartphones don't require repairs often, if at all. Most common issue is probably shattered screen and that is already replaceable everywhere.
> and people aren’t really upgrading fridges or stowes because a new model is available.
Indeed, but they may replace an appliance (which already tend to be quite repairable) that is 5-10 years old and that has broken down because the cost of repairing it (parts plus labour) is in the same ball-park as the cost of a new one. Making appliances even more repairable won't change that.
I've had people come to me with broken screens, old batteries, non-functional/muffled earpieces, wonky USB connectors, cracked lenses and other problems. Smartphones do require repairs and people, at least the ones I know, do want to repair them. But when I tell them the part will take a month to arrive and might not have the same quality as the original, not to mention the non-zero risk of cosmetic damage during disassembly, I can't blame them for rather buying a new phone.
My parents have a washing machine that's now over 15 years old. It still gets repairs regularly. The parts cost is going up though, because they haven't been made in a long time now. Imagine how long we could keep this washing machine if the parts were standardised or their CAD files available online, maybe some manufacturer would be making clones of them right now.
At least for me, I wouldn't have bought as many devices over the last few years if they were more repairable, and I do enjoy having a large collection of hardware.
I had to abandon my last few phones due to cracked screens, water damage and other hardware faults. Even if I could find replacements for the damaged parts (and I tried), they wouldn't be official and would likely be of a lower quality. Furthermore, most modern phones are really hard to put together to the original quality standards, requiring for example new pre-cut adhesive and whole new backplates, since the original ones will get scratched during disassembly.
My purchases are (at least partially) driven by wanting a shiny, new-looking device that doesn't have any flaws. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, proper repairability would allow me to maintain my devices in this state for a much longer time, which would lead to me purchasing fewer new devices.
Repairability this good would also be great for the used market. Right now you never know what faults a phone/notebook/other miniaturised device might have and if they're there, getting rid of them might cost as much as the device. This means that people who want 100% working devices are more likely to buy new. For other products (for example desktop PCs), the chance that an irreparable fault exists is much lower, so buying used is safer.
As a person who is living in EU, I didn't know that there's even a discussion about whether you can or can't repair the things you own. Sounds pretty weird. Repairing things is a common practice since I can't remember when.
There really isn’t much debate about “right to repair”, compared to the US. I think most just assume it’s not worth the hassel and cost. I would guess that the cost of repairing the average TV be at least 25 to 50% of the cost of a new TV. Highend stuff have always been repairable.
The focus needs to be on making things repairable by the consumer, and easy to recycle. Both mean that you need to be able to take the item apart, and that will require redesigning almost electronics.
As some have found out if you try to offer repairs of something as a service because it requires a bunch of technical knowledge in a way that the company doesn't like you can get sued into bankruptcy.
Things aren't repairable by consumers however easy it is to take em apart if you can't get official parts (at a reasonable price) and aren't technically allowed to use alternative ones.
You’re right, they are only repairable by manufacturer or a “certified” technicians, so it’s still a problem. It is however going to be easier for a company like B&O who already have a field servicable TV to comply with new regulations
Where? I’d wanted to repair the most popular electric kick scooter in one of the Northern European countries for couple of years and I couldn’t find any place to do it (I asked all the sellers, sent lots of emails to different web shops, etc.). The economy in prosperous countries appears to be such that repair (especially of less fancy products) is so costly that it makes no sense often or is not possible as in the case described above.
If you follow the laptop/smart-phone repair community [1], the problems they run into is lack of access to technical manuals, diagnostic tools and in cases, being prevented from buying replacement parts by suppliers under the direction of Apple (for example). To me, it seems that this is where government or industry regulation would be helpful and provide most value with minimal impact on innovation and market disruption.
On the other hand, I am uneasy with regulators mandating specific designs (e.g. all phones must have replaceable batteries), or specific standards (e.g. all phones need to use USB-C) or doing things like forcing Apple to include a charge cable or headphones with their devices.
[1] I'm thinking of Jessa Jones and Louis Rossmann specifically.
Europe imposed a standard for phone chargers and thanks to that you don't need a different charger per brand, or even per model, like it was 15 years ago. AFAIK they did not specify the exact standard, except that it has to be some common industry standard, so it did not prevent moving from micro-USB to USB-C (and whatever Apple is using).
The rest of the world didn't have to because if the Brussels effect. When the EU legislates it is basically cheaper for companies to just fall in line rather than create separate production lines.
Just yesterday my SO told me the subwoofer was broken. It's a wireless unit, which pairs with the soundbar, which I got with my TV about 5 years ago.
I quickly come to the conclusion the power supply is broken. And of course the power supply is internal.
I tried to open up the thing, being fairly competent with electronics. But try as I might, I just couldn't figure out how this thing comes apart. I don't want to brute force it, thing is stylish and my SO likes that about it, but also a lot of plastic so easy to break.
Ok, I searched the web for a service manual. Nothing. Not even close.
In contrast, the DVD player my mom uses (mostly as a glorified CD player) died before xmas. It's an old Sony unit, bought in 2000 or 2001, and been on ever since (standby or active). I searched and I found a beautiful service manual, with detailed schematics and instructions for disassembly and reassembly. Even the PCB itself has lovely markings making it very clear what is going on where.
Quickly discovered the issue in the power supply and ordered some replacement parts (still waiting).
Sure I could probably have found a second-hand DVD player for cheap. But yeah it just seemed so senseless to toss away a perfectly good unit when by all accounts it just needs $3 worth of parts.
I think the main freewheeling diode went (it's open now), and the resulting switching spikes from the transformer caused the switching converter[1] to fail.
So far those are the only two parts that appear broken.
Louis Rossman owns a repair shop in NYC and has been touring the nation lobbying for Right to Repair. He's rarely sees success though because the lobbyists for places like Apple have deep pockets and there isn't a lot of public outrage.
The article is wrong to give any credit to Apple for being on the side of Right to Repair, as Louis explains in numerous videos.
The problem here isn't just lobbying but that the people in the government that we entrust to make these decisions are complete idiots. The lobbyists' arguments are so flawed that anyone with half a brain or a bit of common sense should be able to say "hold on, this is bullshit!" and yet these people are swallowing it whole.
I'd have more respect for them if they outright turned around and said "yeah we know we're screwing you over but the lobbyists' money is too good to pass up" but in this case they appear to be getting played without even realizing it themselves.
Some of the arguments made by the lobbyists deserve pushback even if you're secretly in their camp just because of how absurd they are.
Given this isn't happening, I'm not 100% convinced the senators are doing this on purpose or if they're legitimately too stupid to understand the argument at play. Furthermore I remember Louis Rossmann saying in one of his videos that one senator turned out to not even be checking his official government e-mail account... that's not someone I would entrust with understanding anything even remotely related to technology.
Well they know corporations are going to be a colossal pain in their ass if they pass something, but that the citizens won't do anything. Might make the local news, but nothing more. If only there was a little enthusiasm in this arena, substantial progress could be made. But there are far too many flashy "causes" out there that eat up the public interest. As a people, we really deserve what we're getting here.
I strongly prefer to repair devices and am reluctant to throw any broken manufactured good out, even when I have poor prospects of repairing them. Instead, I just hold on to them. Phones, stereos, vacuum cleaners, clocks, computers. My shelves are full of broken items, and good intentions, frozen in amber.
Why do I think like this?
I think it is a psychological condition.
It isn't a rational choice. If I apply my educated, articulate self to analysis, I can tell you it's an expression of how I want the world to be, not a realistic evaluation of how modern manufacturing commerce works.
A stereo or an espresso machine that is non-serviceable costs 1/10th as much to buy and performs twice as well as an equivalent device from 50 years ago. The price we pay for that bounty is that 5% of the manufactured items fail early. It costs more to provide repair infrastructure than to run a warranty program, so the dead stuff ends up as waste. I get it.
Still, I don't like waste, and I love repair. My feelings are not economics, they are emotions. And so so they persist. And that's perfectly OK.
> an espresso machine ... performs twice as well as an equivalent device from 50 years ago
This is a terrible example.
How coffee is made has not changed much, so machines don’t need to change much. New hardware trends towards more plastic, more logic boards and at the worst end of the scale, more proprietary parts, including the actual coffee.
I have repaired and built up several 25+ year old espresso machines and grinders, and currently run a 37 year old grinder and a 23 year old espresso machine.
Older machines are easier to service, easy to get parts for and nice to work on. The quality of the coffee is hard to beat and I would need to pay around US$3k for a new version of the machine, where the old one is generally around US$250.
Often the changes over time are few (eg La Cimbali Junior). Brands like La Marzocco, La Cimbali, Rancilio and Mazzer have a lot of great machines going back a very long time. Electric parts often connect with spades or screws, there is documentation and parts are easily ordered and you can usually talk to someone at the supply end about difficult repairs.
New coffee machines at the lower end of the price scale are mostly just disposable crap, and make bad coffee. They are not cheaper over their lifetime.
50 years ago, there were no cheap home espresso machines, only the US$3K commercial versions you work on.
What changed was not the way coffee is made, but the way coffee is sold and consumer grade machines are manufactured at scale. We now have cheap espresso machines which don't last very long, as you have noted. I bought one last week second hand for $70. The new price for that machine was $300, but the guy sold it to me for $70 because it was dripping water whilst idle. I disassembled the head, cleaned the rubber ball end, stretched the spring, reassembled, and now it works like a new $300 machine.
I'm told the quality of the coffee is determined more by the grinder than the espresso machine, assuming the latter is working. There are no good cheap grinders.
> I have repaired and built up several 25+ year old espresso machines and grinders, and currently run a 37 year old grinder and a 23 year old espresso machine.
Awesome! If I knew someone like you who lived near me, I would be the same.
Keep an eye out for Mazzer ones (Super Jolly or Luigi, but other models are also great).
They are indestructible as far as I can tell. While there are better ones out there, there aren’t many that are as inexpensive second hand, whilst also being easy to get parts and instructions for.
I am so in this situation. I love phones. But I haven't bought a new phone in like 3 years. I still use a Nokia N900 and a Nexus 5. My laptop is state of the art from 2010. That thing still flies. For gaming, I got a laptop with eGPU. It is going to to last another 10-15 years. I have so many vga cables, ethernet, nokia phones. They all work. Just change the battery and done.
Manufactured obsolescence is killing us. 2G worked great for things. Those phones had VoIP. I want to get them working with that. Someday...
There is eBay and similar sites where you can list "For parts or noy working" items and get quite a good value out of it.
If you keep it for X-years in your garage, after those years these models won't be actively used anymore and less people will be looking for parts => it will become less worthy to the point you will have to throw them away...
Nice, I broke a mixer cup, and now I had to buy a new mixer with his electronics and motor because there is no way to buy only the cup. My fault for buying a white labeled mixer instead of a recognised brand one, but I don't get why there are so many systems for mixers, there should have a compatible system and mixers and cups should be interchangeable between brands.
This measure shamefully disrespects the needs of shareholders for endless profit and hampers large corporations from exploiting and curtailing the rights of end users.
I just replaced the battery in my Pixel 2 this past weekend. It was a 2-3 hour project that involved a whole kit of tools in addition to the new battery.
It was a PITA, but I am thankful that a) iFixit provided a helpful guide and a kit with all of the things I needed except for the rubbing alcohol and b) it was legal and there weren't any software issues to deal with.
Aside from the aging battery and occasionally running out of storage, the phone was completely fine for my needs. For ~$50 and a few hours of time, I've essentially doubled the lifespan of my $700 phone.
I'm in the same boat. What kept me from replacing the battery is that the device is EOL and won't receive any software updates, including security fixes. Did you also change the firmware?
Not yet - it's currently on stock software, but I've run custom ROMs before and I'm planning to switch back to one soon. I was basically waiting to see if I could successfully replace the battery before putting much effort into the software side.
In general, I am a big proponent of getting used equipment and keeping it running for well after the manufacturer has abandoned it.
Before the Pixel 2, I hadn't purchased a new phone in like 12 years - I had gotten a couple of used Android phones, and used Windows Mobile before that. They all had the issue of essentially 0 support from the manufacturer by the time I got them, so I was dependent on community ROMs to keep them up-to-date. The phone I was using at the time had multiple issues, including an aging battery, physical damage, and something wrong with the GPS sensor.
A couple of the big reasons I bought the new phone rather than another used one were the promise of 3 years of support (which Google delivered) and waterproofing (which has come in handy a few times). I also just liked the phone in general, and there wasn't much on the used market with a similar feature set.
I like tinkering with my phone, but this was shortly before my second child was born and I knew I wasn't going to have the time to mess with custom ROMs to fix whatever was broken that week. Now that my kids are a little bit older and I can sleep through the night most nights, I think I'm ready for that "fun" again.
That is what I have done since my first cell phone over 20 years ago. My Nokia 3310 series lasted 8 years, a Samsung slider 5 years both phone cost up front and pay as you go.(there were 2 to other short term hand me down due to dropped phones)
When the Glass Slabs and WIFI in phone became useful
I bought an unlocked Moto E2 ($200CDN @ Staples 2015) which was replace by a Moto G7 Play ($150CDN @ Costco 2019).
Did I miss anything by buying cheap. Maybe, but no one with a $1100 phone has shown me my life in "Vale of Tears" App that I cannot have.
The G7 is getting updates and works. the E2 still works and was my "Give to American's who had bad outside of the US" plan.
I have been helping friends and family replace their smartphone batteries to give them new life. I recommend all of you who are comfortable with tinkering to do the same, it can go a long way!
I just had my washing machine break. It kept giving error codes and the door won't lock.
I called the company who said the model is way to old to have warrenty, which is true, and then said they couldn't assist me in repairing. They said they could only send a (paid) technician.
I Youtubed the model and found an array of DIY repair videos. I used those to dissassemble the door lock mechanism only to find out it had short circuited. Here's the pics: https://imgur.com/a/ECM5AuI
And after I called for replacement parts they started berating me for trying to fix it myself, saying it could be dangerous and a potential fire hazard.
I hope this new law will help in this aspect; it's ridiculous I have to go to YouTube to find out how to repair a washing machine and the company itself refuses to help...
And 2 year warrenty is way too short anyway. I hope they change it into something dynamic like 1 year per €200 sale price or so.
Gonna say thanks to the European Union for that one. Much maligned, very bureaucratic, somewhat slow but honestly compared to how much tech regulation in the world is solely focused on surveillance and stripping privacy from people the EU still seems to at least have the roughly the right idea most of the time.
We must mandate that all consumer devices can load open source operating systems. That manufacturers provide open design specifications and follow reasonable standards. That is after a few years, manufacturers do not have an incentive to fix the operating system of devices. Unless we can load open source operating systems, old devices will have security holes which is bad for security.
What I want to say is we should be able to fix and repair the hardware and software of devices.
I want to reach out and thank citizens of France for leading the way on repair index!
This is to be commended, though I wish the market itself would provide this value as an emergent feature as it does in some other areas (e. g. Leica cameras and lenses, hundreds of thousands of which are still being used after _decades_ - I'm not sure if it's true, but read somewhere that the used market for Leicas is several multiples of Leicas revenue on new stuff)
Leica cameras are also some of the most expensive cameras in the world. Their reputation for the build quality is part of that. More like a fine watch than an iPhone so there will be discrepancy.
Products are having shorter lifespans with ever decreasing levels of repairability. Like what others have said here, our expectations have become so low that it is commonly expected that the things we buy will only last a year or two before we end up throwing them away. This can be easily resolved if people simply paid more money for better quality products and brands that ensure repairability and longevity. But, of course, as time has shown, cheapness has won over consumer behavior. I'd consider this a market failure. I've always thought that this failure could be corrected by simply increasing the cost of disposal ("throwing things away") via some kind of tax. When my vacuum cleaner, my toaster, or even my coffee maker dies, throwing it away costs very little money. So little money that it is better worth my time to simply dispose it in the trash and buy a new one. But if I find disposing them to be costly, I'll certainly reconsider my options.
There was a simple system for this with bottles: There is a premium which you pay, that is returned when you correctly dispose of the bottle. Perhaps a similar mechanism could be applied. The “cost” of disposing is then the time to get the money back, not the premium itself.
A big issue with paying for disposal is the motivation to avoid payment. It's hard to get people to dispose of trash responsibly. If they had to pay, we'd be surrounded by illegal dumps.
I think there should be disposal fees, but they must be paid upfront. EU actually has recycling fees on purchase, but they seem to be laughably small (like < 1 EUR for a vacuum cleaner).
How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not? High price does not automatically signal longevity.
The other thing is that nothing lasts forever, so eventually you'd need to repair. Most things you can't repair by yourself, so if the repair costs more than new, and the suggested increase for disposal, I'd still end up buying new to save the hassle.
My wishlist is:
- For consumers, incentivize repair over disposal and buying.
- For companies, incentivize manufacturing quality and design for repairability.
All good questions. I am not going to pretend I know the answers here. I'll share my thoughts though.
> How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not?
You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.
Perhaps this could be more elegantly solved by making companies pay for the cost of disposal. That way, the business will be incentivized to optimize down the cost because otherwise they'll have to bake the cost into the product, which disincentivizes consumers from buying it through higher prices. It also gets rid of the information asymmetry because the company definitely knows and is incentivized to know their overall quality so they can account for it.
Paying more isn't enough. Consumers can't cover the liability costs that come along with opening an electrical panel channeling a household's mainline. The cost argument imagines 5% more cost for a few features to aid some simple maintenance. The off-the-shelf cost of those features could well be 5% more. But the support logistics, legal coverage, manual drafting, etc won't be covered by that 5%.
The idea of repairing a washing machine is great. But our world is growing more complex by the day. The average individual is going to lose any hope of having even enough shallow expertise to crack into these devices without endangering themselves and others. If you pursue this fight, I'd put money in the industries developing "needed" technologies that pack toxic gas in vacuum parts to further increase the expertise needed to touch their internals.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadAs to right-to-repair, EU seems ahead on that front but US has one regulation which EU does not which is Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act.
I'm not that familiar with US consumer law. What makes this regulation favourable compared to the equivalent EU laws?
You can void a waranty with respect to damage caused by impropper servicing, or damage caused by the replacement parts.
Alternatively you can void warranty on basis of using third party parts or servicing if you provide said parts/services for free.
Idea was: Warranty void is non-GM parts are used => Illegal, unless GM provides all parts for free. Waranty void for getting oil changes at a non-dealer => Illegal unless oil changes are provided completely free at the dealers.
While I suspect that most EU countries have similar rules for cars and the like, in the US these rules apply to any consumer good that costs $5 or more with a warranty (there could be some rare exceptions, as the FTC can grant waiver if the manufacturer can show that it is not possible for a third party to provide parts or service that will work properly, and that granting the waiver is in the public interest). Further free parts and services requirement applies to any form of repair and servicing.
In the US, if you don't provide free screen replacement for a cell phone dropped by negligence, then you cannot legally deny warranty on the battery solely because a third party screen was used, unless you can show the third party screen or the process of installing it caused the battery problem. Of course, if you can show the battery problem was caused by dropping it in the first place, then you can deny warranty replacement.
What kind of problems will something like this create for future device manufacturers?
It consists of three parts: a 2-piece plastic case, and a single circuit board with around 25 smt components. The user can replace the battery.
I'm not going to publish my schematic or board design because I already open sourced my code, and the device is designed to be stupidly easy to manufacture for my own sake. Basically I don't want people to start making their own. A competent EE could figure it out in a day or two, but a anyone with that ability could design their own in the same amount of time.
If something on the board goes bad, I'm not going to offer guidance to repair it. It isn't worth anyone's time. That said, I do offer a lifetime warranty/buyback option since the unit cost is less than $10.
This is a bit of a contrived example since there is literally only one part that can fail, but the point is that there is a very fuzzy line around how far we can go with repairability. Should I be forced to provide a full schematic/board design (giving away my IP essentially)? Should I be forced to provide 'parts' (there is really only one part, and that is the product itself)?
I'm sympathetic to the 'right to repair' movement, but I'm curious how it would be implemented across such a broad spectrum of products. Perhaps it could just be a transparency rule: planned obsolescence (unrepairable) items should be marked as such and an e-waste tax added. If you want to avoid that marking you have to offer to trade broken parts for new for 5 years after first sale at cost.
An example would be that if I won 2 identical broken devices/cars I should be allowed to swap parts from one to the other and fix one of them as it was possible before DRM was invented.
Also there should be a "tax" for products with no way to change the battery or one time use electronics.
This is very much in line when what the Luddites understood. Fixation on "waste" is a by-product of unrelated worries which are fashionable today, but cheap production at a distance is what labor should worry about, instead.
We have finite resources on this planet. Policies like this that deal with negative externalities aren't driven by fashion, they are driven by our long term needs. And we do need to recycle more and consume less. This is part of the solution.
> cheap production at a distance is what labor should worry about, instead
You're simply describing the status quo. The same status quo which has resulted in the warmest year on record for how many years in a row now...?
When companies deliberately build products in unrepairable ways then repair labor costs more than automated production.
Imagine if mac butterfly keyboards were replaceable. Or for example I recently fixed my dad's washing machine, but it took a couple hours of labor to replace the pump because you had to remove about 4 other things to get to it (when they could have just made a door on the side/bottom.
It's sort of like if you had to spend an hour disassembling your case to swap the ram in your machine.
They don’t. They optimize for production costs, not repairability, that’s all.
And glueing 100,000 iPhones together is faster and cheaper than screwing them together.
"With consumer electronics becoming increasingly more complex, many electronics manufacturers have instituted systems whereby the only means to repair a device or obtain repair parts would be through one of their authorized vendors or original equipment manufacturers (OEM). " [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_right_to_repair
We're not there yet. There are profitable businesses that can do repair and/or replacement of broken soldered IC chips in laptops and smartphones (see YouTube channels of Jessa Jones and Louis Rossmann). So cost of repair is not a barrier in many cases.
The problems they highlight, that should be very easy to fix through regulation, is lack of access to technical manuals, lack of access to diagnostic equipment and tech giants (like Apple) bullying their suppliers to prevent sale of replacement parts to independent repair shops.
When I parted out my 2012 MacBook Air in 2016, I came close to covering the full cost of my brand new 2016 MB Air.
Independent mechanic shops are also a sizable market (around 150k+ businesses in US alone) providing good paying blue-collar jobs for hundreds of thousands of people .. and this competition also lowers repair costs for consumers.
No reason why it couldn't be the case for electronics.
It's because our entire economic system is oriented toward growth and puts profit above everything else.
I simply am surrounded by tens and hundreds of sort-of-broken devices that don't force me to replace yet, but are not fixable either. The laptop overheats, phone compass never works properly, one port in the TV is dead, there is no light in the fridge (but it still works). The list goes on. I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.
Note: whenever throwing those things out, save the knobs. They’re like $10+ each.
In all of the following I got a new thing looking for some new feature or because I could I guess, and had the older device outlasted the newer one: Bose headphones, any mobile phone really, Thinkpad laptops, Audi cars, Brother printers, any and all household appliances.
I really don't see the problem. Like you're saying people are buying new stuff because they want the new stuff, not because old is broken. There are tons of extremely cheap second hand things that could do the job and yet people keep buying new things.
How will this right to repair change anything? How much money was spent making it reality that could've been spent productively?
Still it’s a worthwhile pursuit. At some point pocket PCs/phones will be good enough, just as for many a 2014 laptop is still good enough.
If all modern phones were as repairable as those we could eliminate so much garbage!
This is the worst kind of planned obsolesces
I agree that the manufacturer or carrier doesn't owe you updates indefinitely, but they definitely should give you all the resources you need to develop these updates yourself if you wanted to.
The landscape can change. Maybe there's going to be a huge open-source project that will make these updates. Maybe someone will figure out a way to automatically handle a large number of hardware configurations at scale (a powerful enough hardware abstraction layer should be able to deal with it). Maybe someone will make a business out of it, providing security updates at a reasonable cost. Either way, there shouldn't be any artificial hurdles against the customer developing and running their own firmware on hardware they paid money for.
I would really like to hack on a tablet I have that's 5 years old, but I can't because the firmware and drivers are both closed source.
I think when I buy a device, I should get the source code to it once the manufacturer decides it's not worth it for them to continue patching the software for the device I've bought.
I3 runs reasonably well, but Gnome would probably be too heavy to make for an enjoyable experience.
Would you be willing to pay whatever your share is of how much generating the update would cost, in order to get it? With a clear indicator when you buy the phone that you automatically get a subscription to 3 years worth of security updates; past that, you pay whatever amount is needed to keep it up to date.
Conceptually, I dislike that mobile development hasn't followed a similar path. Samsung should not dictate how many updates my phone gets and for how many years. Practically, I realize that this is a consequence of how we've built SOCs and mobile hardware and there's no incentive for companies to change. That doesn't make it less problematic.
Also, we’ll have to figure out how to manage with a sort of stagnation.
Essentially this entails curbing change. Curbing change means slowing progress (initially in this niche), but if we extend this into other areas it can mean significant stagnation because since things are good enough we don’t need to improve and progress (ie. we’re at equilibrium )
We'll have to grow comfortable with that outlook.
But sure. Repairability is one thing, it just means that devices can continue the things they were made for. For new workloads they would need upgradeability, which is a completely different beast.
I don't think having repairability will slow things at all. It will simply prune some behaviors corporations engage in that destroy the planet, like glueing in batteries. Stopping such practices will not even make new devices more expensive - we have old designs that did it right. Falling back to them and innovating there could even save money.
It seems that most people want more than just usable. They may not want to pay more for a device up front, knowing they will be missing out on the latest technology down the road.
People can still buy new stuff earlier if they want. But their old stuff can be reused by those that do not need, want or can afford the new devices. There are many categories of devices where that's a good option for many, not only phones. Besides, it's always good to have the option to repair that thing you have when it breaks even if initially you did not think you would need that. You might have grown to like it.
Smartphones have largely caught up to traditional computers in terms of the time it takes for upgrade-worthy advancements in hardware. I expect we'll see smartphone upgrade cycles continue to lengthen until they mirror desktop/laptop upgrade cycles.
I've been using a 6S since 2015 (this thread caught my interest because it's now somewhat of a Ship of Theseus as I've replaced so many parts over the years), but the 11 Pro I bought last year was the first time a multi-year-gap upgrade felt rather incremental, especially for $1100. I returned it and expect to continue to use and repair the 6S until they drop iOS support for it.
* OnePlus 3, released in June 2016, 6 GB RAM.
vs
* iPhone 7, released in September 2016, 2 GB RAM.
* iPhone 12 Pro Max, released in October 2020, 6 GB RAM.
From my perspective smartphones have not changed much.
By contrast the processor in my work phone (an Iphone) is faster than my laptop.
The problem is that this has happened despite my usage not changing.
This is only partially true. The true cost is hidden and at least by average people like me immeasurable. We are putting a lot of cost out of sight if you consider the environmental impact of e-waste.
That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon.
Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace.
"Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved.
Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.
Nobody is asking to split the current, high pin-density SoC into eighty chips with DIP sockets, they're mostly asking for things like:
* Publishing service manuals and schematics
* Making replacement parts available (replacing the SoC isn't that big a deal, the problem is that you often can't get that SoC anywhere)
* Not selling things with an EULA that explicitly prohibits "unauthorized" repairs
"Making things discreet" is pretty much a red herring. Sure, making everything discreet would result in bulkier, pricier, and probably worse phones, but you can massively improve the general public's access to repairs without doing that.
Have you checked whether you could install LineageOS or some other custom ROM on the tablet? That way, you might be able to extend its lifetime by another couple years.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipelegacy/
Google is making billions per year, they can certainly afford to support all versions of Android. They just choose to pocket the money and screw their customers instead.
Anyone know why opera can run on android 4 and the latest Chrome can't/wont?
Though yes, thank goodness the end of Moore's law is here to help.
I normally find these types of appliances make parts readily available. I just replaced the locking mechanism on my washing machine for example, it was cheap and easy to order the parts I needed.
That trend has become ubiquitous: cars, laptops, phones...
Nothing is designed to be fixed at home anymore. If there were regulations that required it, we'd still have the same advanced tech, but it'd be repair friendly.
HP Pavilion gaming, ASUS ROG Strix and newer Macbooks have keyboards secured by melting topcase plastic pins or bolts so you can't easily replace keyboard, you need to replace the whole topcase.
And the keyboard is something which degrades by use and can easily be damaged by liquid...
I guess you’ve tried a lower wattage bulb ...
I, mistakenly, bought the refrigerator with LED lighting because I hated how old-style bulbs would turn on slowly in the cold. LED lighting should be instant I thought. Oh no, totally on purpose it was made slow.
Regarding slow starts - not that it's terribly useful to mention now, I grant, but most incandescent appliance bulbs can be replaced with compatible and much less temperature-sensitive LED ones these days.
The fridge manufacturer probably assumed it’ll always run cold (it’s a fridge right?) and overdrove them too hard to get just as much light out of 20 LEDs instead of 24.
Could bridge the faulty LED with solder to buy some time, and find a donor LED from a “burnt out” LED light bulb or whatevs and solder it in.
I'd like to think there was a reason the manufacturer wanted the entire housing replaced?
- no service/troubleshooting manual/videos available online
- no way to identify what replacement part to buy unless you're in the know already
- getting access to locking mechanism looked like it would lead to washing machine completely falling apart structurally (there was a somewhat hidden "safety" screw that looked like a last defense against people removing the front panel just by removing the apparent screws and hurting themselves)
So I bailed on this without a proper guide on safe disassembly procedure.
Thankfully wiggling the connector to the locking switch made the lock and thus the washing machine work again, after a first failure since 15 years ago or whatever. It looked just fine inside (surprisingly). Vibrations probably don't allow much dirt to accumulate. No obvious rusting/leakage. I was surprised.
There are many more locked phones in drawers or acting as mere paperweights than people actually care to disclose.
Several years back we ran a poll to understand lifetime recycling habits. People aren't proud of dropping a phone and shattering the screen, but they are less proud of having thrown a phone into a drawer because they couldn't be bothered to run the obstacle course set up by their telco to keep them in check.
Phone right-to-repair should be EXPLICITLY INCLUSIVE of unlocking, otherwise it is only solving a part of the problem.
However, in reality, not only does the carrier not mind if the phone keeps being used (as long as it’s on the carrier’s network) but the lock doesn’t expire once the customer pays off their plan.
Furthermore the process for unlocking a phone is intentionally made convoluted. Until recently, you couldn’t even figure out which carrier an Apple device was locked to without playing brute-force with all the carrier’s SIMs in the entire world and even Apple support couldn’t be of any help. And when you finally figure out which carrier it is, getting in touch with them is a pain and some have stupid policies like keeping the device on their network for 30 days before being able to request an unlock (a scummy attempt at getting some people to give up and just keep using their network past the deadline, or revenge against someone who doesn’t intend to do so by essentially making their device unusable for 30 days).
Fast forward 6 years, and it is much harder to unlock a phone than it was then. The whole thing backfired for consumers. It was actually easier to unlock a phone in a "non-legal" way before the law than it was right after.
This whole new code of conduct for carriers actually made them convert their SIMlock departments to be more like a customer retention lifecycle.
This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.
[1]: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/08/15/heres-h...
I had no idea this was still a thing, it’s horrible. What mechanism is creating the current situation? Phones are all unlocked here in New Zealand.
Lack of general consumer protection regulation (or their enforcement), and specifically with regards to telecommunications the regulator who's supposed to oversee the field (the FCC in the US, or OFCOM in the UK for example) is often in bed with the companies it's supposed to regulate.
Really? I'm surprised because I'm in AU and there are certainly phones locked to a specific carrier. What about $10 burner phones?
I recently paid off my AT&T iPhone X and the process to unlock it couldn't have been easier.
https://www.att.com/deviceunlock/
https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1262649
Notably, you have to have been paid up (somewhat understandable), active for 60 days if postpaid (not really reasonable at all), or if prepaid, active for 6 months (absolutely not reasonable). This basically precludes someone selling a phone secondhand entirely if they haven't unlocked it first by holding the value of the phone hostage (phones are worth less when locked). Completely anti-consumer. And AT&T isn't even the worst about this. I once tried to unlock a phone through Rogers and they wanted $120 to do it! This was back around 2011 so their policy might have changed but given Canada's terrible telco situation I doubt it has changed much.
It's not usually like that - and I've had a few locked phones.
Usually the deal is that a network, say Vodafone, subsidises the handset by £50 of some such in return for you being forced to use Vodafone services for a couple of years, unless you arrange to unlock it.
It's sort of ok as a deal but a pain in many ways if you want to travel and use a local SIM or sell the phone for example.
UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54692179
EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_Commercial_Practices_Di...
But there are Android phones that come with bootloader/OS lock, which often means old device is stuck with some ancient OS version (and some bundled bloatware), instead of being able to be reflashed to a recent LineageOS.
I recently got two iphones from their owners, pulled out of the drawer to monetize them on classifieds. Both locked and unresettable without the previous owners help (one could be unlocked because I got her account password over the phone, huge nogo but she trusts me to not screw with her account). The other not, account was lost.
Apple also now tags and ties both battery and camera to the logicboard. Shame.
But the reason I have a handful of paperweight mobiles is not that they are locked but that they are no longer useful. They have low resolution cameras, little memory, small screens, obsolete operating systems, etc. I sometimes try to sell them but no one wants them even free.
Perhaps it's because I was less financially literate in the past, but I remember that as being the only way in the 2000s. There might have been laws passed to limit that practice and its abuses.
The smart solution, provided you have enough money, is to buy the phone elsewhere, and take a plan without a phone. It's always less expensive in the long term.
in Germany, the Telco's gave up locking the phones in 2017. Because it was to expensive. I can not remember if it was a hard lock - as in any other sim card is blocked or just their additions to the OS. bought a phone in 2017/early 2018 - Xperia 10, where on the boot screen a Deutsche Telekom logo appears but otherwise the OS unaffected by vendor edits/additions. But updates are really slow since they go through Telekom instead of directly from sony which is already slow.
I know many who can't do math and paid twice the value of the phone for a locked device and some plan they never really used fully.
That has not been the case for a long time. The last phone I had on contract was an iPhone 4.
/me mumbles something about "Kids these days..."
I think this is part of the point you are trying to make, but everything requires maintenance. Not sure what model fridge you have, but a bulb replacement should be not too hard to pull off on your own.
Just as we have with pharma patents, after a protection period it should be free game, and they should open-source if they don't intend to continue pushing updates, say evety 6 months or so.
They have to change the whole motherboard, lose all my data. Price of a new machine...
grumble, grumble
https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos
I have seen a "for parts" Macbook on eBay with bad motherboard where the seller drilled through SSD and T2 chips to "wipe data". While drilling they damaged the topcase as well.
That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances...
The market tends to give consumers what they want.
It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.
The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
So best we can do is observing "revealed preferences", which is what Economists call "what people actually choose".
As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die.
It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us.
Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
To use two relevant examples:
Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack.
Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it.
Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends.
--
[0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
I for one "know" this by weighing HN anecdotes I've seen over the years - couple dozen saying that they sell solid stuff, and one or two saying that they used to sell solid stuff, but are now following the trend of replacing metal components with cheap plastics. How do I evaluate that? Brand trust isn't that strong a signal.
So as a consumer, I am unable to decide objectively, just using rumours if there isn't a hard guarantee or a trustworthy evaluation of the quality of all products I could pick. In that situation, I will price in the uncertainty, I will evaluate the rumours and the tendency to produce crappier stuff over time. And when in doubt, buy 4 cheap short-lived washing machines instead of 1 for 4 times the price.
A long warranty, while not a guarantee, is pretty correlated to the product lifespan.
A long warranty is only good if the manufacturer is trustworthy. But untrustworthy manufacturers are one of the causes of the whole problem.
A fix might be warranty terms defined by law, where the manufacturer can pick the duration and nothing else. Disputes should be settled in court or by a neutral board of experts.
Of course this is not a perfect measure, but I do think that a correlation would exist here.
My strong impression is it's hard to do. People may say the want kale, but end up buying donuts.
They weren't lying about wanting to be the kind of person who buys kale. But at the moment of truth, they got donuts "just this once".
A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands.
The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.
It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.
The same thing happened to furniture.
- Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements.
- Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins.
- Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller.
- Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason.
- Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new.
- Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.
I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
You can still do that on most modern fridges, but it's not worth the effort with appliance prices now. They also don't fail often these days.
1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it.
2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better.
Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently?
It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.
All durable consumer goods may apply for a repair QR code. At landfills, items with repair QR codes are scanned and the company is charged 50% of the cost of processing the item.
If one is not applied for, the producer must pay the full cost of processing the item up front.
This would encourage companies to make repair & upgrade and longetivity a priority.
It's a rough idea.
Manufacturers must pay 100% of the cost of safe, environmental disposal of all consumer goods they sell. This is collected in the form of a tax, for all manufacturers over some threshold sales value/volume, based on an impact assessment of disposal cost. The assessment is based on the typical practical burden to disposal facilities to process each SKU.
There's no need to individually account for every item going into waste disposal facilities. It can be assumed that every item sold will eventually be disposed of. And the problem is in primarily bulk sales of consumer items, so accounting in bulk is fine, and considerably cheaper in processing cost.
Moreover, anything that involves an "assessment" is bound to be gamed by the manufactures. See e.g. the recent VW car emission scandal.
Having the manufacturer pay a tax in advance does put pressure on the consumer, because that tax has to be incorporated into the product pricing.
> Moreover, anything that involves an "assessment" is bound to be gamed by the manufactures. See e.g. the recent VW car emission scandal.
I agree it's a challenge. I wonder if there's some way to close the loop - so that manufacturers who game the system to achieve an artificially low disposal price end up making up the shortfall when the fake price isn't achieved.
What if the QR code is mutilated?
>At landfills, items with repair QR codes are scanned and the company is charged 50% of the cost of processing the item.
This already exists in some jurisdictions, but the fee is levied at purchase time. eg. https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/ewfaqsgen.htm
>This would encourage companies to make repair & upgrade and longetivity a priority.
not really. if you made a phone that lasts 6 years rather than 3 years, the fees manufacturers pays doesn't decrease by 50%, it remains the same. That's because at the end of the day, everything ends up in a landfill. The only benefit to the manufacturer in this case would be the time value of the deposit fee for 3 years.
One, what drives people to replace devices? I feel (not scientific at all!) that wanting a new shiny device and, if broken, cost of repair, are higher on the list than not being able to repair.
Two, the law of unintended consequences: Making devices more repairable may increase their footprint in terms of material and thus waste. If people do not have their devices repaired more (e.g. because of (1) above ) then the net result might be worse than the current situation.
This isn’t just about phones and laptops, but also appliances, and people aren’t really upgrading fridges or stowes because a new model is available. Many only get new cars because the repair bill now exceed the monthly cost of a new car.
That's not a given. For things like smartphones I would much rather they enact laws to make them more recyclable than more repairable. And, let's be honest, smartphones don't require repairs often, if at all. Most common issue is probably shattered screen and that is already replaceable everywhere.
> and people aren’t really upgrading fridges or stowes because a new model is available.
Indeed, but they may replace an appliance (which already tend to be quite repairable) that is 5-10 years old and that has broken down because the cost of repairing it (parts plus labour) is in the same ball-park as the cost of a new one. Making appliances even more repairable won't change that.
I've had people come to me with broken screens, old batteries, non-functional/muffled earpieces, wonky USB connectors, cracked lenses and other problems. Smartphones do require repairs and people, at least the ones I know, do want to repair them. But when I tell them the part will take a month to arrive and might not have the same quality as the original, not to mention the non-zero risk of cosmetic damage during disassembly, I can't blame them for rather buying a new phone.
My parents have a washing machine that's now over 15 years old. It still gets repairs regularly. The parts cost is going up though, because they haven't been made in a long time now. Imagine how long we could keep this washing machine if the parts were standardised or their CAD files available online, maybe some manufacturer would be making clones of them right now.
I had to abandon my last few phones due to cracked screens, water damage and other hardware faults. Even if I could find replacements for the damaged parts (and I tried), they wouldn't be official and would likely be of a lower quality. Furthermore, most modern phones are really hard to put together to the original quality standards, requiring for example new pre-cut adhesive and whole new backplates, since the original ones will get scratched during disassembly.
My purchases are (at least partially) driven by wanting a shiny, new-looking device that doesn't have any flaws. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, proper repairability would allow me to maintain my devices in this state for a much longer time, which would lead to me purchasing fewer new devices.
Repairability this good would also be great for the used market. Right now you never know what faults a phone/notebook/other miniaturised device might have and if they're there, getting rid of them might cost as much as the device. This means that people who want 100% working devices are more likely to buy new. For other products (for example desktop PCs), the chance that an irreparable fault exists is much lower, so buying used is safer.
Did I miss anything?
The focus needs to be on making things repairable by the consumer, and easy to recycle. Both mean that you need to be able to take the item apart, and that will require redesigning almost electronics.
As some have found out if you try to offer repairs of something as a service because it requires a bunch of technical knowledge in a way that the company doesn't like you can get sued into bankruptcy.
Things aren't repairable by consumers however easy it is to take em apart if you can't get official parts (at a reasonable price) and aren't technically allowed to use alternative ones.
Where? I’d wanted to repair the most popular electric kick scooter in one of the Northern European countries for couple of years and I couldn’t find any place to do it (I asked all the sellers, sent lots of emails to different web shops, etc.). The economy in prosperous countries appears to be such that repair (especially of less fancy products) is so costly that it makes no sense often or is not possible as in the case described above.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repair_caf%C3%A9
[2] https://www.repaircafe.org/en/visit/
On the other hand, I am uneasy with regulators mandating specific designs (e.g. all phones must have replaceable batteries), or specific standards (e.g. all phones need to use USB-C) or doing things like forcing Apple to include a charge cable or headphones with their devices.
[1] I'm thinking of Jessa Jones and Louis Rossmann specifically.
The rest of the world didn't and yet I hadn't needed to get a different charger per brand for, I'd say, a decade or more.
What's the utility of creating a regulatory and enforcement framework for something that happened anyway?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
I quickly come to the conclusion the power supply is broken. And of course the power supply is internal.
I tried to open up the thing, being fairly competent with electronics. But try as I might, I just couldn't figure out how this thing comes apart. I don't want to brute force it, thing is stylish and my SO likes that about it, but also a lot of plastic so easy to break.
Ok, I searched the web for a service manual. Nothing. Not even close.
In contrast, the DVD player my mom uses (mostly as a glorified CD player) died before xmas. It's an old Sony unit, bought in 2000 or 2001, and been on ever since (standby or active). I searched and I found a beautiful service manual, with detailed schematics and instructions for disassembly and reassembly. Even the PCB itself has lovely markings making it very clear what is going on where.
Quickly discovered the issue in the power supply and ordered some replacement parts (still waiting).
Sure I could probably have found a second-hand DVD player for cheap. But yeah it just seemed so senseless to toss away a perfectly good unit when by all accounts it just needs $3 worth of parts.
I think the main freewheeling diode went (it's open now), and the resulting switching spikes from the transformer caused the switching converter[1] to fail.
So far those are the only two parts that appear broken.
As for the sub, I'd love to know!
[1]: integrated switch, I misspoke earlier
The article is wrong to give any credit to Apple for being on the side of Right to Repair, as Louis explains in numerous videos.
https://youtu.be/zFA3szW9nWk
I'd have more respect for them if they outright turned around and said "yeah we know we're screwing you over but the lobbyists' money is too good to pass up" but in this case they appear to be getting played without even realizing it themselves.
Given this isn't happening, I'm not 100% convinced the senators are doing this on purpose or if they're legitimately too stupid to understand the argument at play. Furthermore I remember Louis Rossmann saying in one of his videos that one senator turned out to not even be checking his official government e-mail account... that's not someone I would entrust with understanding anything even remotely related to technology.
"robust conversations"
Why do I think like this?
I think it is a psychological condition.
It isn't a rational choice. If I apply my educated, articulate self to analysis, I can tell you it's an expression of how I want the world to be, not a realistic evaluation of how modern manufacturing commerce works.
A stereo or an espresso machine that is non-serviceable costs 1/10th as much to buy and performs twice as well as an equivalent device from 50 years ago. The price we pay for that bounty is that 5% of the manufactured items fail early. It costs more to provide repair infrastructure than to run a warranty program, so the dead stuff ends up as waste. I get it.
Still, I don't like waste, and I love repair. My feelings are not economics, they are emotions. And so so they persist. And that's perfectly OK.
People can have trouble letting go of obsoleted, unneeded object due to some emotional attachment.
[Unless you hoard socially acceptable items, like status symbols or plain money, in that case most people will not see the problem]
> an espresso machine ... performs twice as well as an equivalent device from 50 years ago
...or not. A rational reason for fixing stuff is that many products are objectively worse.
> My feelings are not economics, they are emotions
Another perfectly rational reason is prevent environmental collapse. It does not get more reasonable than that.
This is a terrible example.
How coffee is made has not changed much, so machines don’t need to change much. New hardware trends towards more plastic, more logic boards and at the worst end of the scale, more proprietary parts, including the actual coffee.
I have repaired and built up several 25+ year old espresso machines and grinders, and currently run a 37 year old grinder and a 23 year old espresso machine.
Older machines are easier to service, easy to get parts for and nice to work on. The quality of the coffee is hard to beat and I would need to pay around US$3k for a new version of the machine, where the old one is generally around US$250.
Often the changes over time are few (eg La Cimbali Junior). Brands like La Marzocco, La Cimbali, Rancilio and Mazzer have a lot of great machines going back a very long time. Electric parts often connect with spades or screws, there is documentation and parts are easily ordered and you can usually talk to someone at the supply end about difficult repairs.
New coffee machines at the lower end of the price scale are mostly just disposable crap, and make bad coffee. They are not cheaper over their lifetime.
What changed was not the way coffee is made, but the way coffee is sold and consumer grade machines are manufactured at scale. We now have cheap espresso machines which don't last very long, as you have noted. I bought one last week second hand for $70. The new price for that machine was $300, but the guy sold it to me for $70 because it was dripping water whilst idle. I disassembled the head, cleaned the rubber ball end, stretched the spring, reassembled, and now it works like a new $300 machine.
I'm told the quality of the coffee is determined more by the grinder than the espresso machine, assuming the latter is working. There are no good cheap grinders.
> I have repaired and built up several 25+ year old espresso machines and grinders, and currently run a 37 year old grinder and a 23 year old espresso machine.
Awesome! If I knew someone like you who lived near me, I would be the same.
Manufactured obsolescence is killing us. 2G worked great for things. Those phones had VoIP. I want to get them working with that. Someday...
If you keep it for X-years in your garage, after those years these models won't be actively used anymore and less people will be looking for parts => it will become less worthy to the point you will have to throw them away...
It's the most un-american thing I've ever seen.
It was a PITA, but I am thankful that a) iFixit provided a helpful guide and a kit with all of the things I needed except for the rubbing alcohol and b) it was legal and there weren't any software issues to deal with.
Aside from the aging battery and occasionally running out of storage, the phone was completely fine for my needs. For ~$50 and a few hours of time, I've essentially doubled the lifespan of my $700 phone.
Before the Pixel 2, I hadn't purchased a new phone in like 12 years - I had gotten a couple of used Android phones, and used Windows Mobile before that. They all had the issue of essentially 0 support from the manufacturer by the time I got them, so I was dependent on community ROMs to keep them up-to-date. The phone I was using at the time had multiple issues, including an aging battery, physical damage, and something wrong with the GPS sensor.
A couple of the big reasons I bought the new phone rather than another used one were the promise of 3 years of support (which Google delivered) and waterproofing (which has come in handy a few times). I also just liked the phone in general, and there wasn't much on the used market with a similar feature set.
I like tinkering with my phone, but this was shortly before my second child was born and I knew I wasn't going to have the time to mess with custom ROMs to fix whatever was broken that week. Now that my kids are a little bit older and I can sleep through the night most nights, I think I'm ready for that "fun" again.
Did I miss anything by buying cheap. Maybe, but no one with a $1100 phone has shown me my life in "Vale of Tears" App that I cannot have.
The G7 is getting updates and works. the E2 still works and was my "Give to American's who had bad outside of the US" plan.
I just had my washing machine break. It kept giving error codes and the door won't lock.
I called the company who said the model is way to old to have warrenty, which is true, and then said they couldn't assist me in repairing. They said they could only send a (paid) technician.
I Youtubed the model and found an array of DIY repair videos. I used those to dissassemble the door lock mechanism only to find out it had short circuited. Here's the pics: https://imgur.com/a/ECM5AuI
And after I called for replacement parts they started berating me for trying to fix it myself, saying it could be dangerous and a potential fire hazard.
I hope this new law will help in this aspect; it's ridiculous I have to go to YouTube to find out how to repair a washing machine and the company itself refuses to help...
And 2 year warrenty is way too short anyway. I hope they change it into something dynamic like 1 year per €200 sale price or so.
Good ... those fricking drivable iPhones need to be opened up.
What I want to say is we should be able to fix and repair the hardware and software of devices.
I want to reach out and thank citizens of France for leading the way on repair index!
A big issue with paying for disposal is the motivation to avoid payment. It's hard to get people to dispose of trash responsibly. If they had to pay, we'd be surrounded by illegal dumps.
I think there should be disposal fees, but they must be paid upfront. EU actually has recycling fees on purchase, but they seem to be laughably small (like < 1 EUR for a vacuum cleaner).
The other thing is that nothing lasts forever, so eventually you'd need to repair. Most things you can't repair by yourself, so if the repair costs more than new, and the suggested increase for disposal, I'd still end up buying new to save the hassle.
My wishlist is:
- For consumers, incentivize repair over disposal and buying.
- For companies, incentivize manufacturing quality and design for repairability.
But the question still stands how to do either?
> How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not?
You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.
The idea of repairing a washing machine is great. But our world is growing more complex by the day. The average individual is going to lose any hope of having even enough shallow expertise to crack into these devices without endangering themselves and others. If you pursue this fight, I'd put money in the industries developing "needed" technologies that pack toxic gas in vacuum parts to further increase the expertise needed to touch their internals.