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Professor: Young People Are "Lost Generation" Who Can No Longer Fix Gadgets

Posted by samzenpus on from the beyond-fixing dept.

antdude points out this story about one of the problems with our ever increasingly disposable world. "Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned. Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to 'just work' and have no idea what to do when things go wrong. Unlike previous generations who would ‘make do and mend’ now young people will just chuck out their faulty appliances and buy new ones. But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics. "

21 of 840 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This story is a dupe from my grandfather's generation, who cried about the same thing.

    1. Re:Dupe by rubycodez · · Score: 5, Informative

      wrong, we over 50 were taught to fix shit, starting at age 10 in my case. Guys [1] usually fell into two categories, the electrical or mechanical.

      [1] sorry wrong headed thinking about women meant females left out, though sewing and cooking are good skills everyone should have

    2. Re:Dupe by Rhywden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That was a time when you could actually easily fix something. Take cars, for example. Fixing a modern car aside from trivial cases is not easy.
      Hell, even exchanging a broken lightbulb can pose major problems.

    3. Re:Dupe by jedidiah · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Some things can be fixed but would you want to? My previous oven got replaced because it's failure mode was to go into it's cleaning cycle. I could have replaced the faulty control board but I didn't really want to. I didn't want another one of THOSE control boards nor did I want a same brand replacement.

      I didn't want to wait for this "fixed" item to eventually burn my house down.

      OTOH, many other things are so cheap that they are not worth the parts and labor it would take to fix them.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    4. Re:Dupe by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And the reason is ... because the stuff used to be BUILT by people. If a guy on the assembly line had to be able to get his hands onto a bolt to install it then someone replacing it would also be able to reach it.

      Once we switched to robots for manufacturing it became a lot more difficult. A robot can reach where a person cannot.

      Which means you save a lot of "wasted" space and materials ... but you have to take apart X, Y and Z to be able to read the headlight.

    5. Re: Dupe by Nirvelli · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Went to replace the fog light in my 2014 Ford Fusion; the instructions start with "Remove the front bumper" and the entire process took over an hour due to the bumper being attached in some places with somewhat of a "just wedge it in there and hope you're not breaking something" approach.

    6. Re:Dupe by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It all comes down to economic efficiency. Manufacturing costs have plummeted while labor costs have skyrocketed, so it's not a productive use of one's time to repair. Time is expensive, stuff is cheap.

      Repair isn't the only skill that's suffered; we've forgotten how to farm, forgotten how to weave our own clothing, forgotten how to do many things that were required of a household a century or two ago. It's also why we get connected halfway around the world for customer service and don't get our fuel pumped and windshield washed by a whistling attendant.

      Whether this is ultimately good or bad depends on your point of view, but unless we run short of raw materials, drive up costs via pollution taxes, or see an economic meltdown in the west it's not likely to change course. Rising wages in China and other industrial companies will only do so much before factories switch to robot labor.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    7. Re:Dupe by anagama · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think there is an aspect to this that is being missed to some degree. Yes, it is true that repairing a device with surface mount components the size of dust by hand is a lost cause. It is true that manufacturers build their products in ways that makes opening them impossible or nearly so, and it is true that it is often cheaper to replace something than repair. None of that is going to change.

      But off to the side, tons of people are making their own stuff with Arduino/Pi/etc.etc. People are learning about interfacing with the real world through sensors and adjusting it, or adjusting to it, with any number of methods. The barriers to these types of projects have dropped immensely recently and there are lots of people who take that broken toaster oven, and totally repurpose it as a soldering oven.

      So, perhaps people _are_ less likely to try to fix things than they were decades ago -- instead, a great number are learning how to _design_ their own rather sophisticated stuff. Grandpa may have been able to repair his tractor, but his grandkid can automate it to minimize overlap when out tilling the fields saving diesel, time, topsoil, and mechanical wear/tear. The former skill is valuable, but the current skill is valuable in its own way.

      --
      What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
    8. Re:Dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      To a certain extent that is true. I just replaced the tailight on my mustang and to disassemble most of the trunk.

      However, in another case I watched two people try to get a PT Cruiser running on my street. They worked on it for two days before I went over. I said "you know, the car is trying to tell you what's wrong!" The check engine light was on.

      You can flip the ignition switch ON, OFF three times and it will print the error code on the odometer. A quick Google search and I resolved the problem to be a bad oil pressure sensor. $20 for the sensor, $10 for a socket to fit it ad the car fired right up.

      Improved, more comprehensive diagnostics make a lot of things easier on new cars.

    9. Re:Dupe by Nemyst · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yep. That Professor needs to check back, it's not the "young people", it's their parents' generation. The ones who've decided that repairable appliances reduces income for companies, that cheap materials are the way to go, that throwaway electronics pave the future. I'll be the first to agree that many changes have been for the better: you wouldn't be able to get cars as efficient as they are now without a lot of complex machinery and ICs everywhere. Many of our most beloved gadgets can only exist because of miniaturization and automation of production, at the cost of being able to repair them. It's just that when your washing machine's motor fails after a year, or you need to replace your convection oven's fan seven times before it stops making a buzzing sound, you realize that it's about as much about cost-cutting as it is about efficiency and actual, material gains.

    10. Re:Dupe by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."

      Even better was the fact that a friend of ours had recently purchased the same car, something we mocked him incessantly about, and this was just extra fuel for the fire. :)

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    11. Re:Dupe by LordLucless · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, churning your own butter is easy. Just accidentally forget about the cream you were beating in your mixer. Done that before.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    12. Re:Dupe by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Nah, it's nothing new. Friend of mine when we were teens had a 70s compact car - a VW Scirocco, or maybe that replaced this one - where you had to pull the engine to change the oil filter. No joke. The guy on the assembly line could install the filter easily because the engine wasn't in the car yet. Ahh, 70s cars.

      Cars keep getting better - whens the last time you fiddled with points (or, heck, even had a mechanical distributer). What's changed is now there's no room in the engine compartment - everything's in there as tight as can be, to put maximum space in the cabin. There's a procedure and a tool for everything, and often service is easy if you've had the specialty training, but it's no longer designed for the average driver to just eyeball it and figure it out, beyond the most routine stuff.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    13. Re:Dupe by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh really? Broken-window fallacy much? Think of what our economy could do if these people spent that laptop cash on something better...

      --
      The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
    14. Re:Dupe by luisdom · · Score: 5, Informative

      Car factory worker here. Welding and paint shop is mostly automated nowadays, but assembly is 99% manual. It's just not designed with reparability in mind. Or it is, but in the sense that repair shops and sellers are here in Europe normally the same business , and with nowadays margins you better let them charge a whole hour to change a bulb.
      Thank them they still let you change a fuse...
      And for robot “reachability”, it's normally the other way around. Industrial robots in car making are bulky things not meant to access small or hidden spots. For that, it's better a human being.

  2. Its a cost decision by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have detailed technical knowledge. However my time is not worth fixing every small gadget that breaks. If I break a blender, its simply not worth me sourcing parts, waiting, and then spending an hour repairing it.

    1. Re: Its a cost decision by WarJolt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not about cost. It's about design. They used to build things to last. They'll build products with improper snubbing. They know that the back emf will eventually burn out the IC and they depend on it. It lowers cost and means you buy a new electric carving knife every couple of years.

  3. Integrated this, integrated that by by+(1706743) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Part of the problem could be that so many things are integrated now.

    Entry-level audio gear, for instance, tends to use integrated amplifiers -- no longer can you fix easily fix a blown power transistor, as you could with older gear. Same thing with cars -- adjusting the timing on a car was sort of a rite of passage for many, but it's hardly feasible on a new car with computer-controlled everything.

    1. Re:Integrated this, integrated that by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      These are not cost reduction measures but rather anti-tamper protections.

      Yes and no. In some cases you may be correct, but when I worked in consumer electronics, the devices were glued because it was cheaper and screws would have required us to use a thicker care just so there was space for the screws.

      And 99.9% of people would just throw it away if it failed, so why worry about it?

  4. Yeah, sure by russotto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is why there are no forums full of information of how to replace the screen on your phone or tablet. This is why ifixit.com doesn't exist. This is why you can't order OBD scanners for your car.

    It's only a minority of people who are skilled and interested enough to fix things. But that's always been so. It's just that now it's typically cheaper to replace broken things (well, not cars) than call in someone who can fix them, because labor costs for repair are so high compared to initial manufacturing costs.

  5. Also by jkonrath · · Score: 5, Funny

    This generation doesn't know how to shoe horses. And they're terrible with cave drawings.