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."'"

Comments

Welcome back!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Re:Welcome back!

[Gonarat]

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.

Re:Welcome back!

[MBCook]

Yep. I opened up an old transistor radio a year or two ago. It came from Radio Shack in the late 70s or early 80s. I was floored to see, stuck to the inside of the back case, a full schematic of how the radio worked. That kind of thing (even if it only showed the ICs and not their functions) is basically unthinkable today.

Re:Welcome back!

[GwaihirBW]

While planned obsolescence is more widespread than ever these days, it's nothing new - Companies have always realized the benefits of forcing buyers to come back on as frequent a schedule as the market will bear, and have pushed consumers down that road whenever possible.

My father has a few pairs of socks that he got 40-ish years ago that he wears regularly - they're comfortable and haven't stretched or worn out at all . . . for fairly obvious reasons, the company that made them no longer exists. Or, for a more entertaining example, look to the 1952 movie The Man in the White Suit - guy invents perfect, invincible fabric and attempts to sell idea to clothing companies. Clothing companies see the writing on the wall and turn to desperate measures . . . so even way back in 1952 the concept of planned obsolescence was thought about enough to generate a movie.

As technology moves forward, more and more items become commodities or at least lend themselves to planned obsolescence. Nowadays, modern manufacturing processes have brought the prices of most electronic gadgets down to the point where consumers will stand for being forced to replace regularly, and it's often more profitable to sell an upgrade cycle than it is to sell service/repair contracts (plus the sheeple really like being told how many wonderful new features they're getting when they replace broken version 12 with ever-so-(temporarily)-shiny version 13). Companies only have an incentive to serve their customers well enough to keep them coming back to spend - anything more is wasted and too much quality might shut off that revenue stream entirely!

Also, I have to make the obligatory and oft-harped-upon point that open source software is one of the very few examples of a product that is immune to this unfortunate market force - software companies are strongly incented to steer their customers toward application designs that will require regular upgrades/patches, because a stable and perfected application can only be sold once. Some compnaies have figured out that if they do enough interface changing with every major upgrade, they can even tack on a new "training" revenue stream, a side benefit to the quest for lock-in . . . [/rant]

There are a lot of greenies out there

[blueZ3]

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"

Re:There are a lot of greenies out there

[thynk]

I put effort into repairing a lot of items, regardless of the cost. What true geek ever throws something away?

I usually try to fix it... either fix it or get frustrated and buy the upgrade I really wanted anyway and put the broken one in a box for "parts". Never know when a scrap of wire or micro switch might come in handy down the road. Or I let the kids play with it, never hurts to expand their minds - and I'd rather have them taking apart the broken PS2 controller than the working Xbox 360 :-)

Extension of upgrading computers?

[R2.0]

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.

it's all i got

[User 956]

From the article: 'Most other gadgets come with batteries that are easy to replace without custom tools.

When i'm working on a piece of electronic equipment and I see "custom tools", my brain responds with "hammer". But then, that might be part of the problem in the first place.

My Experience

[immcintosh]

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...

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 :P (I could be described, when it comes to electronics, as at BEST a very inexperienced hobbyist)

Re:My Experience

[PlusFiveTroll]

badcaps.net I've repaired about 20 motherboards with blown capacitors since reading that site. I cannot tell you how much money and time that has saved me. It's a hell of a lot easier (for me at least) to spend 20 minutes replacing 5 to 15 bad caps, then to put a new board in and trying to get windows working and praying that you don't have to reactivate the product over the phone.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/ has a lot of information.

Mostly thanks to the Internet

[kalpol]

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.

Re:Go PS2!

[Mursk]

Yep, the PS2 is a good example of something that is not too hard to open up and troubleshoot a little. Also comes in handy when/if you want to modify it to use Swap Magic (which I've done both with an older fat PS2 and a newer slim one) or, I suppose, install a mod chip (haven't done this since Swap Magic seemed easier/cheaper/less risky).

One of the things keeping me from buying a PS3 is the fact that I feel like I'll be less comfortable taking a look under the hood. I'm a ME, not and EE, and I've learned that it's REALLY important to limit the dollar-amount of damage I can do when it comes to the more complex gadgets. I can never figure out how to get the magic smoke back in those little chips...

Basic philosophy there:

[Moryath]

I have seen so many otherwise workable items about to be thrown out because of a minor, easily fixed issue (sometimes even just needing some superglue!)

I have a collection of about 6 DVD players, a few audio tape players, VCR's, etc that people have handed me when I said "it's probably an easy fix"; their response was "if you can get it working it's yours." Invariably the repair was simple, in the case of the DVD players just needed a lens cleaning (not one of those crappy sale unit lens cleaners, a real opening up and swabbing with some rubbing alcohol).

Basic principles of home electronics:
NOTHING is all that complicated. If it were that complicated, it would cost $20,000 or more. Even a DVD recorder sold 5 years ago for $1000 is still frighteningly similar to the one you got for $30 last week, and probably even easier to trace loose connections and items since it's not been subjected to 5 years of component consolidation and micro-sizing.

VCR repair, DVD repair, most anything else is just a matter of having a few basic tools. Well, that and using the grey matter between your ears. You can tell if there's a broken belt, you can visually tell if a capacitor has blown, you can smell if something has shorted out and you can usually see the scorch. Sometimes it's repairable, sometimes you just learn more about the standard innards (and if you think Company #1's VCR or DVD player is that much different from Company #2's or Company #3's, you're delusional).

You wouldn't believe how many times a "dead" PS2 can be revived just by cleaning the firking lens.

And if you kill it... parent point #2 is dead-on correct. You have nothing to lose opening up something that's long out of warranty and broken; the worst that can happen is that it's still broken when you're done with it.

Of course, when I've mentioned this to some of the people out there, they're terrified of the "warning, voltage" and "warranty void if removed" stickers plastered all over their stuff. We really need to teach people that they can do this stuff safely and without a lot of worry; I'm starting to be convinced most of these "warnings" are just there to scare people into not getting perfectly serviceable products repaired.

Re:Basic philosophy there:

[ACDChook]

Reminds me of the time I got a free laser printer because a local business was closing. A friend of mine had worked there, and they gave it to him and said it didn't work. I found it sitting in the corner at his place a year or so later, and he hadn't touched it, so gave it to me to have a look at. When I plugged it in and turned it on, a red light came on.

I put some paper in it, the red light went off, and it's worked fine ever since. :D

Re:Ink Jet Cartridges

[veganboyjosh]

I work in print production. We have some inkjets and some laser machines. All the printers we use (and I'm guessing lots of others) have at least one part which has a chip that's designed to stop working before the life of the part is used up. It drives us nuts here. My boss has taken to pulling the old chips off old broken parts, for use in other parts with "used up" chips.

We've since been switching our inkjet machines to use ink resevoirs, which are these big tanks that sit outside the body of the printer, and can be refilled while the thing is printing. They're clear plastic (lexan, maybe?) so you can see how low they are.

Planned obsolescence should be punishable by some sort of recursive punishment.

Availability of parts

[Rorschach1]

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.

Things are slightly more complicated...

[Dzimas]

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.

Re:Ink Jet Cartridges

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Planned obsolescence should be punishable by some sort of recursive punishment."

rm -f -r?

It's the economy, folks.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's the economy, folks. -- Healthcare!

[vranash]

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!)

Cat Piss and Blown surface mount components

[JohnAllison]

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.

Children of the New Depression

[Jafafa Hots]

I was telling my sister and brother-in-law about how I was planning on doing a repair to my dad's fridge. They were almost outraged that I wasn't going to just replace it, kept cutting me off, wouldn't even let me speak "just buy a NEW one." Almost disgusted at me.

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.