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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."'"
Fixing stuff is nothing new. Until the 80s or so fixng everything was common. A lot of the problems are due to one of two things: people want an upgrade anyway, and something breaking is a good excuse; massive integration makes it harder, if not impossible, to service some devices.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think this may have more to do with the abilityto upgrade computers. Due to the original IBM PC architecture, it was easy to make your computer run better - some simple screws, plug-in cards, simple electrical connections. Lots of folks who would never dream of opening up their VCR - still flashing 12:00 - have upgraded memory or a hard drive.
Now those same folks who have cut their teeth on PC's look at broken electronic gadgetry and think:
1) How hard can it be?
2) If I screw it up, no big deal - it's a loss now as it is.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Ah, the perfect thread to brag about an accomplishment about which I am (perhaps even unduly so) proud. You see, I have a Netgear combination ADSL modem/router, and after about 3 years of use it started to sporadically malfunction. The connection would drop, sometimes not coming back until the next day, only to quickly drop again. After a painful call to SBC (now ATT) tech support, I was able to determine that it was not a line problem. Being that the router wasn't exactly cheap (150ish?), I hated to buy a new one, so I went searching online...
:P (I could be described, when it comes to electronics, as at BEST a very inexperienced hobbyist)
Interestingly, I eventually discovered that I had been the unwitting casualty of industrial espionage! Apparently, a capacitor company, wanting to do things on the cheap, had tried to steal the recipe that a rival company used to manufacture capacitors. Apparently, however, the rival company got wind of this and planted a FAKE recipe for the ne'erdowell to find. The eventual fallout was that a little while down the road, this company's faulty capacitors started malfunction en masse.
Long story short, my modem used one such capacitor, and apparently a great many users were reporting similar problems. So, out come my trusty soldering iron and jeweler's screwdrivers, and the modem is quickly disassembled. Lo and behold, there is indeed a bulging capacitor. A quick trip to radio shack and a little painstaking soldering work later, I had a DSL modem working good as new. That was about two years ago, and I'm still using the same modem.
I'm still pretty damn proud of myself
Yeah, they can be repaired... it's just not always practical.
My girlfriend's expensive iPod speaker system got its volume stuck at full, and it fell to me to repair it. Actually, her remedy was just to pile pillows on top of it, but we don't really have enough pillows to get a decent volume control range, and it took up a lot of space.
I didn't have too much trouble tracking down the faulty volume control IC, but it helped that I have a workshop with several thousand dollars of test and rework equipment. Honestly, it could have been done with a cheap voltmeter or logic probe and some patience.
I knew exactly what chip to replace, but there are NO distributors of that part in North America. Minimum order from Taiwan was something like 10,000. No equivalents available, either. I managed to talk the company into sending a couple of engineering samples - 'free' parts that only cost me $70 in FedEx charges. (Ah, the things us geeks do for love.) Installing the part was again not a big deal, but only because I have a hot air rework station designed for the task.
Component availability problems can be overcome, but the bigger problem is lack of information. Without at least a schematic it can be very tough to troubleshoot modern electronics, and good luck getting that sort of information out of a manufacturer.
Still, I suppose it's worth pointing out that 3 of the last 4 cellphones used in my house have had their lives extended significantly through repair. 90% of the time the problems there are related to mechanical and interconnect parts - charging connectors, flex cables in hinges, speaker contacts, and so on, and it doesn't take a genius to spot and fix those problems. The last phone I fixed turned out to have a failed connection where some foam had worn out. The fix was to jam a piece of paper in its place.
Forty years ago my dad had a TV and general electronics repair shop, and customers could bring in any random gadget and reasonably expect that there was a good chance he'd be able to fix it, or at least tell them what was wrong with it and why it wasn't worth fixing. Those days are long gone, at least in the realm of consumer electronics. Yeah, you can specialize in XBox repairs, or iPods, or some limited scope like that, and folks like me will make their best attempt at fixing devices for their friends and family, but doing general repairs commercially? Your success rate is going to be too low, and the chances of breaking things further is too great. And the situation is only going to get worse as integration increases. Just wait until all of our electronics are made in 3D fabricators, with each IC die and passive component buried in a solid block of material and no possibility of access to ANY discrete part.
TFA should be entitled, "Today's younger generations are discovering that some stuff can be fixed... if it's the right stuff and I don't have a six figure income." My father was more than happy to pull out a screwdriver and tinker with the record player, and would sometimes spend days tinkering with gadgets to get them to function correctly. Of course, most of the stuff that he used was electromechanical, with components large enough to replace by hand.
Dad often took the time to point out how things worked, because he honestly believed his understanding of "how things work" would be of immense value to me. Unfortunately, it wasn't. I was a child of the 8-bit microprocessor revolution; my childhood environment was filled with mysterious digital circuitry, and no manner of traditional tinkering could repair a blown Commodore 6581 SID chip. Things have gotten worse with time: The introduction of surface-mount components and multi-function chipsets means that there are genuinely few "user serviceable" parts inside consumer goods.
Millions of PDAs, handheld computers, digital cameras, phones and mp3 players flooded the marketplace in the 1990s. It didn't make sense to try to fix them if they broke, because something 10x better was always just around the corner. Fast forward a decade, and the rate of development has slowed. My 3-year-old iPod is like an old friend, and it's technically "good enough" for everyday use. If the battery or screen needs replacing, it's worth it (from an economic and time standpoint).
Unfortunately, lots of modern tech gear isn't designed to be fixed. It's designed to be cheap to produce. That translates to mp3 players with shoddy connectors that pop of the circuit board, or DVD playback mechanisms with poor quality plastic drive gears. Thist stuff can be fixed, but it's usually more trouble than its worth. As far as electronic repairs go, the easiest solution is often a board swap, because replacing SMD parts requires considerable skill and patience in addition to excellent troubleshooting skills. All is not lost, though -- things will change quickly if the economy continues to nosedive, for the simple reason that asian-made electronics will cost more to purchase and real incomes in the US will drop. Paradoxically, poverty breeds creativity and determination for geeks.
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.
The high rising price of gasoline is one of the biggest key factors. Next is the rising basic cost of living. All around me I know people who now can barely afford to buy food plus pay the rent/mortgage plus pay their utilities after filling up their cars every week so they can drive to work. Buying new clothes or new gadgets? Ha, they wish they could, but just can't anymore. Luxury stuff like cable TV, and a landline plus cellphone went away for them a few months ago. Their $14.95/month basic DSL internet line will have to go by January, and they'll just do without internet, or go to the public library.
Salaries / wages are not keeping up with inflation and increased cost of living either.
The higher-paid technogeeks like me aren't hurting nearly as much, but some of the people I know can no longer make ends meet and it's starting to get ugly among the blue collar working stiffs out there.
No wonder people are fixing stuff instead of buying new stuff lately.
Duh.
Go ahead and mod me down as flamebait. I'm angry as hell right now and need to vent.
One of my blue collar buddies, who's brother just got blown up in Iraq last week, is having to charge his trip to Arlington Cemetery to attend the funeral on his almost maxed-out credit card (maxed out due to unexpected medical expenses for his kids, not because of bad spending habits), since the military offered him a "discounted" military/bereavement airline ticket at nearly $600 when he was able to find his own on Expedia for only $350. I offered to buy his ticket and hotel but he is too proud and refused to accept. Me and the rest of his friends will gang up on him when he returns and we'll fill his kitchen full of groceries for a couple months or something that he won't be able to refuse to help him out.
I'll give you a great example of what's bleeding non-corp types dry: Health Insurance.
If you're keeping yourself insured and don't have a nice big company backing you, it's EXPENSIVE.
As an example, I've got about 220 dollars per month in combined gas/insurance costs.
Health insurance for that same period is 278 dollars/mo, and getting dropped end of this month.
Combine that with minimum wage, and well you can see why I wouldn't be living on my own.
Only other option is to sell out and pick a 'career' job, assuming you can find somewhere that'll hire you on full-time, and provide health care benefits (last job wouldn't either way, and given that it paid a buck and a half less than my prior job, it wasn't worth it!)
On Christmas day, my 3+ year old powerbook G4 met my mother-in-law's cat. Upon meeting, the cat evacuated on the keyboard. Flash forward 3 hours when I discovered that my powered laptop was dripping yellow. Powered electronics + ionic solution equal crusties everywhere. The backlight was out, but I could still see OS X on the LCD. I get back home and take the machine apart. With my trusty bottle of alcohol and cotton swabs, I start cleaning off the crusties. I could not save the inverter card but with a CFL placed behind the stripped LCD I found that the rest of the computer still functioned normally. While waiting for my card to arrive I had the wireless antenna drag across the main board while the laptop was powered. Flash, Pow, Smoke. Looked like a surface mount diode exploded. The diodes purpose? It was part of the battery charging circuitry. So I now had a laptop that could not charge, and requires a CFL placed behind the screen. For a week I toted this frankenstein machine to law school. Professors perplexed with a bare light bulb propped up in class. I figured out the part I blew by matching the writing that had survived the explosion with that of other diodes on the board. Then I searched google for those markers, and found the part for sale from Digikey. I ordered 5 parts for $0.50 + $8 shipping and handling. 5 because I knew I would probably lose one, burn one, and didn't want to be left with the perverbial 1 match in the matchbox scenario. Besides the main expense was shipping, not the $0.09 for the part. I did lose the first one. Once received, I soldered this tiny diode, received the backlight inverter board from Ebay, put it all together and finished the semester. I still can't believe that I fixed that thing. It was awesome.