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Consumers Starting To Realize Gadgets Can Be Fixed
An anonymous reader writes "Consumers seem to be paying more attention to the possibility of fixing gadgets instead of sending them to the landfill. It may be because 10gb in your iPod is more than enough for any normal person, it may be a deep, abiding love for the environment or it may just be the price. A New York Times article explores how new sites like FixYa and old standbys like Macintouch can aid the average user in restoring their 'slightly used' gear. Practically every gadget has their own website devoted to helping owners help each other deal with problems that arise. I personally like AVS Forum for my living room needs. From the article: 'Most other gadgets come with batteries that are easy to replace without custom tools. Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices' manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less. Companies offering replacement batteries for iPods often offer better batteries with higher capacities and longer lifetimes. Ipodjuice.com, for instance, sells a 1,200-milliamp-hour battery that will replace the 600-milliamp-hour battery that shipped with a fourth-generation iPod -- an improvement that lets the Web site claim that the repaired iPod will "last 100 percent longer."'"
but let's face it, this is almost certainly the result of economics, rather than some magical new sensitivity for the environment.
Call me when people start putting effort into recycling or repairing their $25 gizmo, instead of when they decide to shell out $100 for the repair of a $300 item.
The title of this article should probably be something like "expensive gadgets not such a commodity item for middle class Americans, after all"
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Printer manufacturers should also encourage inkjet cartridge refilling as opposed to making people throw these away. Some manufacturers even resort to embedding chips in their cartridges to prevent these from being refilled by 3rd party companies or the by the user.
...everything looks like a nail.
LA LA LA *fingers in the ears*
Oh no this just isn't happening! Hardware is so cheap and replaceable now that we're all going to be paying for software that comes with its own FREE hardware in just a few years! Welcome to our brave new electronic commodity frontier!
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The Internet caused a real breakthrough in fixing stuff for me - before, I'd have to find someone who knew more than I did, or hit the library, or just figure it out myself. Now I can find parts for my old Mercedes and my Fiat, repair the lawn mower, put a new power supply in my old LaserJet, recap my Marantz amplifier, refoam my Bose woofers - repair all nice old stuff that probably would have been tossed out without the ability to easily search for repair hints and sources of parts.
12:50 - press return.
Until the late '70s / early '80s, things were designed to be fixable. I remember going to the store with my Dad to get a cord for my Mom's clothes iron. The iron was designed so it could be opened up so that the old cord could be replaced. The power cord would fray from use over time and need to be replaced, but the iron itself was designed to last for years.
Now the iron is designed to be disposable. There is no way to replace the cord even if the iron would last longer than the cord. Forget the waste -- it is more profitable to make you buy a whole new (cheap) iron instead of a cord. The extra waste in the landfill is not the corporation's problem.
Rinse and repeat for most consumer products today -- most products are designed with to be replaces after x amount of time instead of lasting for years so that people with be forced to throw away the old and buy the new. I hope this will change, but I am not holding my breath.
Beware of Sleestak
..seriously, I've been fixing my stuff and others' since I was 9. Cash registers, toasters, guns, cameras, sheesh, I dunno, it's probably the Yankee in me. I used to save stuff. never know when a power cord would come in handy. Or the strain relief from one. I bought a finished Heathkit color TV and solved the various adjustment and bad solder problems. Cheap TV. And my first three CD players, last two stereo systems, and my Minidisc recorder.
My first 'real' job outside the Air Force was fixing office calculators, dictating machines, typewriters, mimeographs/duplicators, sorters, folders, you name it. I moved up the food chain a bit to IBM stuff like Selectrics, Mag Cards, Electronics, OS/6, and DisplayWriters. And those damned 6:5 things. I finally bought a turbo XT and learned to fix computers.
Now I amaze my wife with little and big things I fix. All except for the digital camera she sat on. But I know which of the 3 little plastic fingers she broke, and if I had them, I could indeed fix it. lately, I've been on a jag fixing anything but iPods, especially those Toshiba Gigabeats. Damn, those are easy to fix.
Yeah, I hate throwing something out just cause it's got a weak battery, or laptops with broken screen hinges, stuff that fails intermittantly just cause of a connection. With a decent selection of soldering irons, good epoxy, small screwdrivers, and patience, you can fix a lot. Sometimes, the hammer works best...
We do need to be less of a throwaway society. But the way consumer electronics are made today, the economics of repair parts is terrible. I dread buying an HDTV, knowing that I probably won't be able to fix much in it. And it won't last 20+years, like that old Heathkit. But hey, the picture makes it all worthwhile, right?
*sniff*
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
While I'm not positive this is the case, I'd bet it's more profitable to sell you a replacement cord that costs 10 cents to produce and sells for a couple of bucks than it is to sell you a $10 iron.
But then you open yourself up to a barrage of lawsuits when people try to replace the cord on their iron without unplugging it first, replace it incorrectly, etc. Not to mention that it's not fashionable to be competent enough to be able to fix things, and a new iron is so cheap that it's hardly worth anyone's time to do so to save the six bucks, so people able to fix these are less inclined to do so, so that replacement cord taking up space on the shelves costs stores money.
The good news is that you can find discarded stuff that you can easily fix without too much trouble if you're so inclined, and that landfill space is not in short supply. In the event that landfill space should become in short supply, you'd see disposal costs rise through the roof, and everyone would fix everything again.
How cool is that?
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Generally speaking, it takes more labor to build a device than it does to fix it. Therefore, one would think, it would be cheaper to fix than to replace a broken device. But when device-construction labor is done halfway across the globe by slave laborers, and device-repair work is done by locals who have to pay the same cost of living that the device's owner does, then that assumption breaks down.
It's a distortion of the market brought on by capital being far more mobile than labor, that's all.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How much do you make an hour?
Knowing what you're doing, how long would it take for you to diagnose a bad smt chip, dismount it without killing the board, then remount it? How much will the chip likely cost?
Is it worth it in a appliance that cost $200 new, and is now three years old?
Now, for that $2k bigscreen HDTV, it'd make more sense - but what if replacing the whole board is only $200?
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, but devices also did not last long. TV sets failed after 6 months to 2 years. Even cars were rusted out after only 3 years. A VW Beetle exhaust pipe lasted 9 months - not even a whole year! So if you wanted anything to last more than a year or two, then you had to repair it regularly. Since manufacturers figured out how to make consumer devices that last 10 years or more, repair became optional.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The reason why people are suddenly more interested in the possibility of fixing their gadgets instead of throwing away old/broken items and buying new stuff is because the economy is tanking big-time right now.
I don't agree with this. I think it's the internet--which has allowed people with little or no experience to find easy fix it solutions to a variety of problems--or find secondary vendors who can fix things cheaper than the manufacturer/replacement.
As much as it's an iffy economy, consumer spending is still strong.
Firethorn, Genarat, Bluesman, MBCook, and you all raise valid points here.
I think the big change has been the whole 'guarded proprietary/closed source gaurd so called 'Intellectual Property' mentality that started becoming prevalent in the so called Computer Age in the late 1980's.
IMHO, IP is a vacuous and shady concept, but that's just me. As far as I'm concerned it is just another GenX marketdroid concept trying to be passed off as real goods. (yeah, I know...flame wars have been started for less, but that's how I feel)
Your examples of washers and dryers are good ones- other than some proprietary boards and chipsets for the newer controllers, a washer is still a washer.
Hell's Fire! Prior to the mid to later 1980's, quite a few automobiles came with a fairly detailed owner's manual and a basic toolkit.
Up until the 1990's, I could readily get the parts (and references/schematics) for a product and repair it myself.
Ranging from replacing drive belts on cheaper turntables and CD players to changing the ignition points in my distributor and setting the correct point-gap/dwell angle was trivial. (okay...the point-gap reference gives my age away somewhat, and is only good until the early 1970's, but HEY YOU KIDS! GET OFF OF MY LAWN!)
With the Artificial Property (IP for you suckers out there) concept of 'virtual (as done on a computer) reality' being considered as a real, physical thing...the sky's the limit. No ground rules, no reality, nothing physical, nothing but ideas...and this is what we seem to be trying to establish as the new reality.
It all reminds me of my Grandfather's definition of a mess: 'Trying to put ten gallons of shit in a five gallon bucket'....and we're bragging about trying it!....WTF?
Yeah, call me a luddite, but in some ways (IP, current copyright laws[I'm looking at you Mickey Mouse and Sony Bono!], the current patent system, what society has been accustomed to, etc.) I'm glad to be 50, and will probably not live to see all of the CRAP that my children and especially my grandchildren will have to deal with.
Yes, I'm sure that by kicking the bucket I will miss out on some cool stuff in the tech field, I don't regret missing out on the social aspects I see coming. It almost makes me think that the whole cyberpunk world of a corporate-run world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Society_and_government
And yes, I was amazed by the IBM Selectric (sp?) that only had one arm and a BALL! With all of the typable characters...on the BALL!...not separate mechanical levers attached to the individual keys on the machine!
(Yes, I was that excited by this at that time! We were also playing blackjack and baseball(don't know if the baseball game was written in house, or was common at the time?!?!?!) on the NASA mainframes at Goddard Space Flight Center (NTTF Facilty) in Greenbelt, MD in the 1970's)
I'm not a complete luddite however, I currently have a box here with a (okay-laugh dammit!) P4 Prescott/ Socket 478, 1GB PC2700 RAM, Audigy SC (PCI), ATI Radeon 9550-256MB AGP vid card[YAY ATI's newest fglrx drivers for Fiesty!!!], LiteOn 8x Dual Layer DVD R/RW, LiteOn 32x 12x 48x CD R/RW, 200GB Pri IDE drive (yes-it's a long story..I'm running this as my realworld primary drive!), 80GB and 100GB SATA1 drives as storage/backup drives.
I am running Kubuntu 7.04(have been soley Kubuntu on this box since 6.04 Dapper LTS) with Compiz (could not do this until latest ATI/AMD fglrx drivers), 1280x1024@74 Hz and all 'eye candy' on, and (laugh again- but dammit, I REALLY liked TuxRacer when I was running Mandrake 7.? with a P3 800MGHz/ nVidia TNT2 64 vid card back in 1999-2001!)
I sometimes miss my old WinXP era games like Battlefield 1942 and BF Vietnam, but I still have a box set up where we LAN, but at home....it's all Kubuntu for me- I can still play my Win95 and Win98 games with VirtualBox or DosBox(Xcom anyone?), so it's hard for me to personally get with the program of 'disposable goods' as mainstream.
I do however have a few non-functionabl motherboards here I'd like to put back into sevice.....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I personally see it as almost immoral, given the current state of things, to throw out a huge appliance that barely gets used anyway and buy a new one because it needs a simple fix.
The idea of repairing something almost offends them. I was staying at their house and their dishwasher quit, it was 2 years old but out of warranty. They were going to buy a new one and were bitching about it, I hired a guy to replace a faulty switch for $100 and my sister acted like it was a strange novelty. She had to hide the fact it had been repaired from her husband, he'd be pissed.
I have the same attitude as my dad, the sort of environmentalism of the depression era - waste not, want not. Simple as that. I don't keep garbage, but unlike my sister and brother-in-law I don't buy a new PC every six months rather than just keeping it clean of malware, putting in a new HD, memory, etc.
Part of that is because I have to live off of disability... but still, these people who are consumer droids buying a new cell phone for every kid in the household every six months... that's just fucked up.
This space available.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Disposal costs don't work like that. You cannot make it undesirable to send things to landfills by increasing the cost. We've got this problem already in the UK - landfill is becoming increasingly non viable as political pressure over locations rises. UK gov. have recently made it possible for local authorities to pilot so called 'pay as you throw' systems to penalize heavy users of landfill waste. Since the removal of domestic waste is a public good, you would be penalising their neighbours too. This makes me think about how householders will react to this.
1. Recycle more - a bit maybe, but a big change seems unlikely. Recycling rates are already very high for the recyclable portion of the waste.
2. Buy less - again, unlikely. Biggest outputters of waste are those with low incomes anyway, especially larger families. Discarded non-essentials aren't a big % of waste anyhow, most waste is food and non-recyclable packaging, or things like disposable nappies (which already slightly more expensive than reusable ones).
3. Pay the extra tax - see 2.
4. Dump the waste somewhere else - flytipping, contaminating recyclable waste, into neighbours bins (with or without their knowledge) or delivering it to local authority tip sites - all of which are more damaging than kerbside collection, and don't reduce landfill waste.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)