WSJ: We Need the Right To Repair Our Gadgets 345
An anonymous reader writes: An editorial in the Wall Street Journal rings a bell we've been ringing for years: "Who owns the knowledge required to take apart and repair TVs, phones and other electronics? Manufacturers stop us by controlling repair plans and limiting access to parts. Some even employ digital software locks to keep us from making changes or repairs. This may not always be planned obsolescence, but it's certainly intentional obfuscation." The article shows that awareness of this consumer-hostile behavior (and frustration with it) is going mainstream. The author links to several DIY repair sites like iFixit, and concludes, "Repairing stuff isn't as complicated as they want you to think. Skilled gadget owners and independent repair pros deserve access to the information they need to do the best job they can."
Good example (Score:5, Informative)
A good example is removable batteries in mobile phones. I was shopping around a few days ago and the only major Smartphones that still have removable batteries are the LG G3/G4, Samsung S5 (not the S6), and I think the Moto X. Everyone else has jumped on the Apple ship and denied you access to the smartphone battery, preventing a hard reset.
Stop copying Apple, you lemmings!!
Unibody? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since we love car analogies here, do you think the trend towards non-removable batteries is comparable to the changes in car body design?
It seems older cars used body-on-frame and other designs that basically allowed the person performing the repair to unbolt parts, work on them or replace them, and then bolt them back on.
The disadvantage to this was a weaker body, or a heavier one.
That seems to be the trend with phones: A lightweight and small phone means a sealed case.
Re: Unibody? (Score:2)
Manufacturing these days allows for such designs which improve them in many other ways such as energy usage, material usage and weight.
You can still fix those cars/devices, it's just a little harder, especially for the people used to the old 'bolt and ratchet' style.
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The maker and hacker communities do a good job of spreading non-official/unsanctioned information about repair/modding/refurbishing many, many items.
It's true that vendors limit parts stocks, as the life of a product is maybe nine months in the marketplace until something new emerges, as consumerism has as its addiction, new stuff with one-upmanship. This means that the parts stocked for any particular model are as absolutely as slim as possible, lest they go into a dumpster, landfill, or on a good day, to
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But they don't even do that-- want to earn any revenue on modders. Think of how many electronic devices you have in your house this moment, and how many of those vendors supply a schematic. In days gone by, vendors would include a schematic in the manual or glued to the back of a washing machine or inside of a TV set. No more.
They want to control their entire revenue stream, and that doesn't mean give information to third parties.
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You can still fix those cars/devices, it's just a little harder, especially for the people used to the old 'bolt and ratchet' style.
The same exact thing can be said for phones in this case... If all you have is a n00bs experience and the 30 dollar Radio Shack toolkit you're going to have a hard time of it. We see plenty of non-manufacturer-trained techs out there setting up businesses for replacing screens, batteries, etc. I guess the "lock-in" is more a matter of "I can't do it as easily as I coul
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When's the last time you seen a consumer level PC with a discrete ethernet card or sound card?
About 5 minutes ago. The built-in ethernet failed so I stuck a card in it.
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Cars are fucking modular! You can take them apart and you can service them. They are not sealed.
yeah let's look at a web site that tells you many ways to fix your own car
http://www.thesaabsite.com/faqs/9-5%20%289600%29/FAQs.html
Do you see where it says:
"ABS brakes are HIGH PRESSURE & should only be worked on by Authorized mechanics!"
"Saabs are specifically designed to have axles that weigh a certain amount & they should be certain lengths for balance reasons and most rebuilt axles are done without taking this into consideration. We have seen issues with these rebuilt axles flying out of the in
Re:Unibody? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unibody? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unibody? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a bunch of BS. Cars built in the last 2 decades are lasting longer than ever and easily going 100-200,000 miles without any major repairs. And who cares about reverse-engineering the software in your power steering controller anyway? If it goes bad (which it doesn't, because there's no hydraulic pump any more and rubber hoses to degrade, just an electric motor), then you just replace the parts; it's a simple bolt-in affair, and certainly much easier than messing around with hydraulic fluid taking a circuitous route around the engine compartment.
Honestly, things are *simpler* now, from a repair perspective, and far improved in reliability. Those shitty old cars needed a LOT of work all the time; constant "tune ups" and adjustments, which modern cars don't ever need.
Finally, electronics never fail, unless you have bad capacitors. No moving parts, remember?
Re:Unibody? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish that were all true, but...
Time required to change headlight bulb in my car 15 years ago: 1-2 minutes.
Time required to change headlight bulb in my current car: usually faster to drop by the dealer, because they seem to know a shortcut for doing it without disassembling the entire front of the car per the handbook and have whatever tools they need to take that shortcut.
Time required to change headlight bulb in next generation car with state-of-the-art lighting: it's not one headlight bulb, it's a whole assembly with multiple lighting components, associated sensors, and software. And you'll be needing a mortgage if it ever goes wrong.
Also, MTBF for headlight bulbs in my car 15 years ago was probably 2-3 years, while for my current car it's probably under a year despite all the claims that bulbs in modern cars should last the lifetime of the vehicle. $DEITY help the poor schmuck who gets a shiny new executive car with the cool new lighting technologies if those lights are similarly unreliable, though.
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Dude, just squeeze the glove box and let it fall down. Preferably after you have removed the customer's shit and put it in a bag. :) Takes about 15 seconds to find the catches.
Now, if you said you were removing the heater core, I'd be down with your advice. Seems in most factories they hang up a heater core and build the car around that.
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Modern cars suffer from the same problem electronic gadgets are - manufacturers intentionally making it harder to work on them. Any car is modular - you have individual components that make a whole, and there is no reason why any of these components couldn't be taken out and replaced. You have bolt-on components like alternators, exhaust, AC compressor, radiator, struts... and you have integrated components like
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manufacturers intentionally making it harder to work on them. Any car is modular - you have individual components that make a whole, and there is no reason why any of these components couldn't be taken out and replaced. .
you really don't know the first thing about mechanical engineering. Shafts that rotate at high speed, like turbocharger shafts and drive axles, cannot be manufactured economically with the tolerances required for interchangability. These parts must be carefully matched to each other in order to avoid vibration and early failure.
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You've never heard of having brake rotors turned? You've never heard of 3rd party brake rotors? There's nothing about any of those parts that precludes a 3rd party making replacements.
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Phones aren't unibody, in that they always have a front and back. The front may be the screen itself, but it still exists. (There would be no way to get the electronics and battery inside if it were not so.)
The iPhone 4 was probably the easiest iPhone to disassemble, and to compensate for that, Apple used proprietary pentalobe screws to deter the casual user. Still, with a pentalobe screwdriver and a suction cup, it was trivial to open the phone. The connections inside, however, required a degree of dex
Re:Unibody? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, to reach apple level, the manufacturers would have to do away with the openable hood as well. If it needs an oil change, throw it away and buy a new one.
Re: Good example (Score:3)
People don't care about battery replacement and you can still do a hard reset on iDevices. A typical battery these days has a 5-10 year lifespan, by then your device is sorely obsoleted and most plans will have paid for a 'free' replacement twice over by then.
Re: Good example (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong
A typical lithium ion battery will show noted loss of capacity even after 2y. And it's not just about the overall lifespan of the battery: it's about being able to quickly pop in a freshly-charged spare and get on with your day without having to be stuck tethered to a charging cable.
Or, if you work remotely from charging sources for extended periods, having a handful of $10 charged batteries handy is a lifesaver.
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A typical lithium cell used in a phone is good for about 500 full cycles. If your phone gets down to 10% every day you will hit your 500 cycles pretty fast, like 18 months.
Batteries are consumable items. The EU should mandate that they be replaceable, just like they mandated USB for charging, because a lot of otherwise perfectly good devices end up in landfill when the batter dies after a couple of years.
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Batteries are consumable items. The EU should mandate that they be replaceable,
given that the battery is NOT replaced in the vast majority of phones, what you say would actually INCREASE the amount of waste because all phones would be bigger and use more materials to accomodate a battery access door that will never be used.
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That's all true. And it is also a niche use case. Hence the dearth of phones that have removable batteries. It isn't a conspiracy; it is that more people would rather have a thinner phone (or a more solid feeling one) than would rather have a replaceable battery. It is the market working correctly.
I don't believe it's that hard to design an equally thin phone (or one that is trivially thicker) but with a user-replaceable battery. It just won't look as nice because it will have screws in the case.
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There are design advantages to not having the battery removable - the obvious (for example, not having to have weight and space for a hinging or slide-latch mechanism) and the less obvious (for example, waterproofing and dustproofing - the fewer openings, the better). When last shopping for cell phones I picked a model with no replaceable battery because, no surprise, the phones with the best waterproofing on the market also didn't have replaceable batteries.
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Informal polling would tend to disagree with you.
http://www.phonearena.com/news... [phonearena.com]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
http://www.androidcentral.com/... [androidcentral.com]
http://www.androidcentral.com/... [androidcentral.com]
http://forums.androidcentral.c... [androidcentral.com]
http://www.neowin.net/forum/to... [neowin.net]
http://www.phonearena.com/news... [phonearena.com]
Re: Good example (Score:5, Insightful)
it is that more people would rather have a thinner phone
What is it with that, can anyone explain to me? My LG G3 is maybe a centimetre thick and I don't need it to be any thinner. Honestly, why do you need your phone to be thinner than that (and probably more likely to bend)? Are you planning to use it as a credit card?
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What is it with that, can anyone explain to me?
Who doesn't want to shave with their phone?
Apple Pay + bendgate (Score:2)
Honestly, why do you need your phone to be thinner than that (and probably more likely to bend)? Are you planning to use it as a credit card?
You mean like the millions of people who accepted bendgate on new iPhones in order to be able to use Apple Pay?
Re: Good example (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing you do miss is the ability to pull the battery from your phone if you suspect it has been compromised and is spying on you. With baseband hacks you can never be sure if the phone is completely off the way you could back when you could yank the battery.
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Both modifications are conceptually trivial; but the sort of thing that would look like a mess of dremel hackwork and uneven epoxy wor
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If you're really that paranoid about the phone spying on you, it's probably better just to leave the phone behind. I mean, what's to stop them from placing a smaller secondary battery that still powers necessary components for snooping when you yank the battery? Are you going to completely disassemble the phone to make sure it's not there? You're better off just leaving it at home for your ultra secret espionage excursions.
Laugh at those fixed battery folks (Score:2)
Everytime someone drops a phone into water, the first thing I say "Take the battery out and dry the phone for a couple days." Unless they have an "iPhone", in which case I laugh and say, "You're screwed."
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Rice works best [memecrunch.com].
Re:Good example (Score:4, Interesting)
This is precisely why I got the S5 even though if I had waited a month I could've gotten the S6. I knew the S6 wouldn't have a removable battery, and with that being a critical feature I made sure I voted with my wallet.
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When you may need to bridge a long time without access to power, what's the difference, really, between carrying around multiple batteries for a device that has exchangeable batteries and carrying an external battery?
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The NSA doesn't want you to pull the battery whenever you want to go 'off the grid' for a few hours. It's possible to compromise phone firmware to appear as though it has been turned off, but still respond to network pings from a Stingray,
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Well at least I know who the idiot AC has always been
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Product Liability (Score:2)
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FCC's trying to break improving router firmware (Score:5, Informative)
The FCC is currently trying to end 3rd-party wifi router firmware (think Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.), by requiring manufacturers to build devices that only accept firmware updates signed with the manufacturer's keys.
This means you'll only be able to install software the manufacturer has certified comes with their own bugs, embedded backdoors and security #fails, rather than be able to put something better on your hardware.
It also may mean that router manufacturers will be required to place NSA backdoors in the firmware and be unable to tell consumers about them due to National Security Letters.
The WSJ is right: We Need The Right To Repair Our Gadgets.
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I guess then it's back to running an old piece of hardware with two NICs if you want to be safe.
Spectrum and interference (Score:5, Informative)
Blame people using frequencies and EIRP they're not supposed to and interference generated as a result. That's the downside to the software defined radio approach; the software needs to be locked to maintain compliance with FCC regulations.
Has nothing to do with networking or repair.
You can always get a router that takes a FCC-approved wireless card and route to your heart's content.
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None of these routers are doing SDR. The concern comes from power levels the routers use, and that only in the 5GHz band.
Many wireless cards control power emissions in the same way the cheap wifi routers do, via a simple register. Should we lock down every PC to ensure no one ever drives power levels above the rated maximum?
Re:FCC's trying to break improving router firmware (Score:5, Informative)
They're trying to end 3rd party *radio* firmware, because so many of them allow you to boost power levels well beyond what is allowed by current regulations.
They don't give a whit about router firmware. Of course, the end result will probably be manufacturers locking down router firmware entirely, but all they would need to do is lock down the radio itself.
This is incorrect. (Score:3)
The FCC is currently trying to end 3rd-party wifi router firmware (think Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.), by requiring manufacturers to build devices that only accept firmware updates signed with the manufacturer's keys.
This is incorrect.
What the FCC is wanting to require is that the SDR chips in these devices only accept radio firmware loads that are signed.
This is because they license the radios, and the radios are licensed as a combination of hardware and software, Loading different firmware into the radio part makes it an unlicensed radio, and permits it to receive signals in prohibited ranges, as well as transmit signals to interfere with the allowed signals in those prohibited ranges, or in bands which require a lic
TLDR: quit buying Apple products (Score:5, Interesting)
I only buy Android phones for me and my family that cost less than $100. If they break (and it has yet to happen), oh well - I'll just buy another one. Ditto tablets (though I've tossed and replaced two of those). Our laptops are also cheapy Toshiba/HP's that cost maybe $300 each.
All of these have replaceable batteries, and I can generally replace the disk, screen, keyboard and other major parts of the laptops for $60.
The common thread here? None of these are Apple products.
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I can repair apple products. I've replaced screens, buttons, and batteries in a number of iPhones and tablets. It's usually not any harder than Android based devices of the same type. The issue is obtaining the parts, which is drop dead easy for nearly all Apple products, just look on EBay...Android devices are harder to get parts for, mainly because there are so many variants out there and they sell less of each type as a result, which makes it less cost effective to build replacement parts so less andro
Nonsense! (Score:3, Funny)
Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.
Now for my mid-morning soma break.
Saw the handwriting on wall in early 1990's (Score:2)
I was studying electronics at the community college in the early 1990's when I came to the conclusion that future electronic devices won't be repairable and being an electronic technician was a dead end job. General electronics, repairing TVs and lasers were still big back then, taking up a whole building and five pages in the schedule catalog. I switched my major and didn't look back. When I came back ten years later to learn computer programming, The electronics program was a former shadow of itself, taki
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Bring Radio Shack back (Score:2)
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Radio Shack stopped carrying parts* a few decades ago.
*Excepting the one cabinet of fuses and light bulbs sitting in the corner.
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Hostility towards Consumers (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital media such as music, books, video or films?
While there is an immense catalog of choice with what we can consume, we are are getting less and less able to have control over their choices, due to how "rights holders" and others corral us into their vision of how to consume and deliver this media.
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Because you're supposed to buy. And you are supposed to use what you buy only in the way intended by its maker, so he can sell it to you again in case marketing finds out that you would want to use it in another way, too.
'Skilled gadget owners' (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course I'm going to be reminded that nobody is trying to repair the circuit board in their phone, they just want to replace the battery or cracked screen or whatnot. Manufacturers have never wanted consumers repairing their own devices, so yes they make it as difficult as possible sometimes. It's always been like that. Don't expect that to change, either. You're always going to have to go to 3rd party sources for parts and supplies and information. When we really need to cry 'Foul!' is if they try to make it illegal, though.
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Actually I cry foul if they deliberately make it hard. I don't complain about SMCs, that's something you can hardly influence as a manufacturer. After all, the phone should be small, so the parts have to be. And you can actually hand solder most SMCs with a bit of practice. Not with the naked eye and you do need a bit of equipment, but it is possible and nothing to blame a manufacturer for.
What I do blame them for is pointlessly gluing parts together, filing down chips so you can't read their part ID or enc
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What I do blame them for is pointlessly gluing parts together,
consumers say "I want my battery to last longer" and so they mercilessly reduce the size of the other components to fit in more batteries
so you prefer consumer electronic companies that don't make the products their consumers want?
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Explain to me how a blob of epoxy on a chip increases battery life or makes the whole mess smaller?
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Explain to me how a blob of epoxy on a chip increases battery life or makes the whole mess smaller?
gluing the parts together with thermally conductive glue is by far the cheapest and easiest way to ensure heat dissipation and achieve structural integrity
people want phones that are small and light with long battery life and a low price
they really don't give a shit about whether or not you can open and fix it
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my 1st gen kindle fire doesn't charge any more (Score:5, Interesting)
it's a well-known issue
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers... [ifixit.com]
amazon said they'd give me $15 off the purchase of a new one because it doesn't charge any more. instead i purchased the $5 repair USB port:
http://www.amazon.com/Charging... [amazon.com]
looked through some videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
and tried it out
in the first 15 minutes, i succesfully broke a tiny plasticzif connector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
great, nothing to see here, move along, cross your fingers it will stay with some rubber cement
then i made a hilariously inept attempt to solder tiny connections of the new USB port with a fat soldering iron and some eye glass repair magnifying glass
but lo and behold it worked. it charged! ...for half an hour. now it's dead as a door knob
here's the real issue:
i don't have the time to do this shit, and the cost of modern electronics makes the cost of new electronics compared to the time investment to attempt a repair means repair is not an option
go to repair places and the cost of a repair is also prohibitively expensive as compared to the cost of a new item
therefore: welcome to our throwaway culture
i tried. i really did
i just don't have the time or patience anymore, not to join now myself
sorry
Re:my 1st gen kindle fire doesn't charge any more (Score:5, Funny)
I'll fix your SHIFT keys for free.
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I take it you turned his offer down then?
How about a manual at least? (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends on the device and user (Score:3)
"Easily fixable" is in the eye of the beholder, but given the nature that this is a tech blog, I'm not surprised most people assume this is common; lots of people think they can handle something until they get elbows deep in it, and then find themselves out of their depth. Then they're likely to try to button things back up as best they can, and return the item as defective: if it was defective in the first place, they probably just made it several times worse; but if they were trying to hack or mod it, there's no excuse for returning it after they broke it. Companies are not going to settle for eating these costs, and their legal teams are there to prevent this sort of thing. I used to be a bench tech, repairing consumer electronics (chiefly VCRs, but stereos, preamps, cassette decks, etc.. as well) and, outside of head cleanings (which are also tricky on helical scanning head), idler/belt replacements, or minor alignments, the repairs I made were typically outside the capability of the average buyer (and how many people have an oscilloscope and function generator in their house?) I think it would be opening a can of worms to court their tinkering by say, posting schematics publicly on a website. But it also depends on the device and it's complexity.
On the other hand, some simple things, i.e. lack of access to batteries, is ridiculous. Also, if schematics were made available upon request (an email for example), that would probably nip a lot of the impulsive weekend hackers in the bud while still allowing serious techs access to them.
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or they can deliberately design products so that you will inevitably destroy them if you attempt to fix them yourself:
https://www.ifixit.com/blog/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-plan-to-screw-your-iphone/
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I used to be a service writer for a repair service, and I have to agree with you - the degree of DIY
Consumers made this decision ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Consumers helped to make this decision a long time ago when they decided that it was better to replace than to repair. Yes, there were external factors. This includes things like the cost of getting someone to make repairs and the faster turn around of buying a replacement. On the other hand, their inability to conduct the most basic repairs on their own (e.g. fixing a frayed cable or swapping a replaceable component) went a long way in convincing manufacturers that planned obsolescence can be a viable business model. The prioritization of compact and more integrated devices over serviceability is also a huge factor. Computers are an excellent example of that. Contrast an early 80's computer, where nearly everything was in a socket or soldered through-hole, to a modern phone where there is barely enough space for a plug and socket for the battery.
We also can't claim that consumers didn't see this coming. Again to the computer example: there was a shift from the early 80's computers to modular desktops of the late 80's and early 90's (where the modules were more or less standardized), to the laptops of the late 90's and early 2000's (where the modules were less standard), to the present day. Ah, the present day: a time when a replaceable battery or an SD card for memory expansion (not so much to repair as to extend the service life of a product) is considered an anti-feature by some.
Manufacturers may have implemented these decisions, but it was the consumer who made the decision.
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Consumers helped to make this decision a long time ago
consumers purchase what is shoved in front of them. let's look at cars. people in the 1960s were happy to buy unsafe, unreliable cars that got terrible gas mileage. they didn't know any better and they didn't care. now the government comes along and tells the car makers that they must improve gas mileage and they must improve safety. now suddenly safety and gas mileage are important to consumers! why? because they were programmed to like safety and gas mileage
modular computing (Score:2)
interesting timing. i've been working on designing modular computer products for the past five years, and just wrote up a white paper yesterday on exactly this topic
http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep... [rhombus-tech.net]
the fairphone 2 is designed as "modular" - it's not exactly "modular", it's (very unusually, for a smartphone) designed to be repairable. you have to have a screwdriver, but that's a lot better than a hermetically-sealed unit that needs a saw or scalpel followed by epoxy resin to undo the damage caused by getti
FTC Does Nothing (Score:2)
I don't know how in good conscious the Federal Trade Commission can accept our money.
Consumers are demanding throwaway junk (Score:2)
When the original Surface Pro came out, iFixit did a teardown and declared it "extremely difficult" to repair. Basically, most surfaces in the case were attached by a huge layer of epoxy, making it nearly impossible to replace screens, batteries, etc.
I think this is mainly driven by consumer demand. Consumers want cheap, small, light portable devices that have impossibly long battery lives. They also will happily pay Apple every single time a new model comes out and just throw away the old one. A manufactur
nobody cares (Score:2)
nobody cares about fixing cheap electronic gear
you can argue about whether or not this is right, but statistically speaking, nobody cares
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Just the opposite. Of course you won't fix a dead pixel. But very often, the failing part is a really dumb component.
In those frequent cases, it is very frustrating to throw away a wonderful piece of technology (the OLED screen) because a stupid capacitor or resistor that is broken somewhere (but you don't know which one, of course).
Re:For a reason..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you have to depend on the aftermarket, it pays to have a different failure than the majority of owners.
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It's not "you" that you need to be considering though - it's "your buddy that's good at fixing things". Slip her a twenty or two and she'll tear it apart and probably get it working again for you. My mom used to do that all the time in the 80s, and she didn't know the first thing about appliances: Just tear it apart, look for obviously broken parts, slipped belts, etc, and put it back together again. Probably 4 times out of 5 it would work fine after that, even if she wasn't sure what she had done. Gran
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The bigger question here is why is the fuse blowing? If the fuse is blowing under normal operation, then it's either improperly sized or the design requirements were misinterpreted (drawing more than originally spec'd out, etc.)
Granted, you're being safe by putting the exact type fuse back in (rating and what not) but if it were me, I'd either try to figure out what was blowing said fuse - or I'd put one in with a slightly higher rating. Slightly being 10% or so, just enough to give headroom but not enoug
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Unfortunately, these days it'd be a fancy new laser printer with a binary driver, a EULA forbidding everything including running 'strings' against it, and a vendor hellbent on asserting that copyright, patent, or both, rights allow them eternal control over what c
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cars are much more reliable today, in the past people had to do stuff like dry out distributor caps and spray carb cleaner just to get their cars to start in the morning.
today there is a lovely computer to tweak a hundred engine settings simultaneously and my car starts instantly in 100F weather and -40F weather on the first turn of the key
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Washing machines are not low tech. They include circuit boards now for controlling the cycles.
washing machines from the 1960s have circuit boards in them
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Not everything is as tough to fix as a washing machine. For example, I live in a little island country and imported low-volume goods are very expensive. A hinged plastic door on the cheese compartment has now twice fallen out of my refrigerator - whether the hinge breaks first or after it hits the ground I don't know, but it's some sort of design flaw. It's just a little piece of thin plastic, but getting a replacement costs about $40 USD. It would be a lot cheaper to 3d print a new one... but of course, li
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You left out one big point: did you call your local back-yard washing appliance repairman to see what the repairs would cost before giving up?
It's all part of the same phenomena:
- They don't make repair information readily available except to overpriced "Factory authorized" repair centers, if at all
- They usually don't design the machines to be repaired in the first place, why would they when nobody repairs them cost effectively?
because
- They make a lot more money if you buy a new machine rather than repair
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And this is why we have an environmental problem. If people would fix what they have instead of constantly replacing it, lots of environmental damage caused by manufacturing and transport could be avoided.
But I notice no "Green" group ever mentions this.
You could get the same net effect by the green groups offering repair services that were cheaper than a new purchase, or by the green groups offering to haul the old stuff away, and refurbish it, and sell it to other people so that they *don't* buy new stuff.
Of course, the problem with that is that the equipment is till going to take energy to operate, and the green groups would generally prefer we live in caves or trees, after at least 90% of the human population is "unfortunately" killed off by something.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know the WSJ, but if it is for "true" capitalism rather than what we have now pose as such, the position makes sense: True competition can only exist if you cannot force your customer to buy from you instead of hiring anyone else (i.e. competition) to fix his problem.
A free market in repair services (Score:3)
As I understand it, this article is about reducing Imaginary Property barriers that interfere with a free market in repair services.
Re: (Score:2)
be ready to pay dearer prices for oil changes, tiers, etc.
If I only need to get my electric car (no oil!) serviced once every 100,000 miles then I am happy to pay more than I am paying now for 25,000 mile services.