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WSJ: We Need the Right To Repair Our Gadgets
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."
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!!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
This is why I buy cars made before 1993.
Sola Scriptura Sola Fide Sola Gratia Sola Christus
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.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
This is a newspaper -- bought and wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch and beholden to so much baggage of the gloomy old party-- advocating for at best copyright reform and at worst, a long winded cry for help to their sons and daughters to figure out how to get the DVR to record matlock tonight. DRM is preventing them from figuring out how to get steely dans greatest hits from iTunes to their Zune and its high time something be done.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If the product injures someone, the manufacturer gets sued. Doesn't matter if the owner or a repair person opened it up and modified it, even if the manufacturer is only 1% at fault, they have the deep pockets so they pay.
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."
Would you be able to repair your new OLED TV ? I sincerely doubt it. In some cases, yes, the limitations are frustrating (for instance you WOULD be able to repair your vacuum cleaner, were the case not glued), but in most cases you would just look in amazement to the inner workings of modern appliances.
Awhile back there was an entire university department that was unable to print documents because the line printer went down and they didn't have the source code for the printer driver.
People need to get organized for their rights.
Anyone might think something as low-tech as a washing machine would be easily self-repairable. When my mid-2000's front loader started sounding like a cement mixer, I went to the Intertubes and found relevant and well-documented repair videos. When I got to the end of the first video covering the complete teardown of said washer, ending with a requirement to find "a strong friend for the next steps" I called my local retailer and purchased a new washing machine. The point here is that while it would be nice to be able to fix some of the devices we own, sometimes the investment in time, money, health and frustration are not worth it versus replacing the broken device outright.
I think, therefore I am - Rene Descartes; I yam what I yam, an' that's what I yam - Popeye
Fair enough
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.
Must have been a guest editorial to provide balance.
Usually WSJ is all about "get rules out of the way and let the free market determine what is appropriate"
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.
Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.
Now for my mid-morning soma break.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
My friend has a rather common model of refrigerator. It went out four years ago. The repair man was going to charge about $200 to tear it apart, and knowing the model, guessed that the control board was out, which he priced at $200. He didn't have that cash on hand, and I was across the street, so he asked me to look at it before he committed to a $400 purchase.
The control board was in the back, under a couple of plates (obviously meant for removal). It had a bunch of standard wire connectors to it, but you didn't even need to take it out to see the issue. There was a fuse in it, and the fuse was burnt.
Now here's the deal, normally a fuse is in a fuse holder, but this was a fuse soldered to the board. I estimated that the repair man just swapped boards, as it seemed very unlikely he desoldered and soldered in a new fuse.
We took it down to the local electronic parts outlet, and bought a fuse and a fuse holder. We desoldered the fuse and soldered in a fuse holder, then put a new fuse in it. It took a bit more "work" than a simple board replacement, but we justified that it would pay off if (or when) the fuse went out again. The fuse went out again last year.
It isn't just planned obsolescence. It's a plain F U to the customer. The manufacturer saved an entire ten to twenty cents making that board by avoiding the installation of a fuse holder, at the expense of driving up repair costs; but, in that manufacturer's mind they are probably patting themselves on the back that they are keeping refrigerator prices low.
The only way I can see this being fixed is legislation. Consumers are just too stupid to buy self-serviceable items these days, and if you want to buy something self-serviceable, nothing is branded as such.
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 enough to burn the house down (i.e. putting a penny in or some such....)
Karnal
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, taking up several classrooms and one page in the schedule catalog. They taught general electronics for laser techs..
Bring Radio Shack back so we can buy the parts we need.
I think in general there is hostility towards consumers, and not just with things like consumer electronics.
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.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
For various values of the word 'skilled'. I've been working in electronics for over 30 years. To 'repair' something used to mean 'replace components', but after a certain point it became 'replace an entire circuit board', which will always be a weak substitute so far as I'm concerned. But the real problem is that with the advent of surface-mount components, the door to repairing a circuit board largely became shut and locked to the vast majority of people. When you need (high) magnification and some specialized soldering equipment and supplies just to replace common passive components (YOU try to remove and replace 0402 SMCs with the naked eye!) it puts the job just out of reach of many. Of course most times passive components aren't the problem, and when the integrated circuits are in BGA (ball grid array) packages, and you need a $3000 setup just to remove one, and help from a diety to install a replacement, for 99% of anyone thinking of trying it, it just went entirely out of reach. This is not even touching on the subject of schematics for the device you're trying to repair, which for many/most things you're not getting your hands on for any amount of money, and in some cases you might get threatened with legal action just for trying to get it. Then there's the subject of proprietary software tools that might be necessary, and you're not getting those for any reason from a manufacturer. Even the manufacturers themselves often don't bother repairing anything, they'll just 'recycle' it and send you a new one because the cost in labor alone to repair exceeds what the thing costs.
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.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
it's a well-known issue
https://www.ifixit.com/Answers...
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...
looked through some videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
and tried it out
in the first 15 minutes, i succesfully broke a tiny plasticzif connector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Human nature may dictate that workers want to work less, make more money, and buy the stuff they need for low prices.
These three things are contradictory unless the economy is very efficient in how and what it makes.
Companies want workers to work more, make less money, buy the stuff they need for high prices, and apparently buy the stuff over and over.
The companies' strategy may make the GDP go up, but it seems to be doing it in a way that is counter productive.
It seems like some minor adjustments to the ground rules might be a good idea.
The Company should provide the information necessary for these simple repairs.
Remember when all consumer electronics came with schematics and parts lists?
The repair shop that needs to charge $100+ just to look at something has opportunities for efficiency improvements as well.
This is partly due to human nature above, but also highlights that skill matters.
One thing the company provides is to permit low-skill workers to make complex things.
This doesn't work at a repair shop.
The market rate is $50-$100/hour to get a skilled tech.
Somehow to make the above information useful, we need more skilled workers.
In this example, the Internet substituted for the skill.
This needs to be nurtured. Take down notices preventing this are an issue here.
Could we start with requiring documentation? We just got a new FTTH Hub from our ISP. No manual. No instructions. Vendor has nothing online and refers to ISP insists who there is no known documentation for the Hub. Sagemcom f@st 5250 for those wondering. So not only is it non repairable it's non-troubleshootable and no way to tell anything about the device.
There is both a valid point to the article and a flaw.
"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.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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.
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.
..don't panic
you just don't have the tools or the parts. Notwithstanding the game-changning, history-making post-scarcity digital miracle that is 3D printing (uh huh), the skills and tools needed to repair things these days are beyond the reach of most people. I'm not trying to be elitist here, in the 1960s a television set was made of human-scale parts that anyone could see and handle. Corner drugstores sold parts.
These days if your phone stops working, it is mostly a single piece of plastic with no obvious parts the average person can discern.
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...
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 getting into the device.
also... what happened to the "bloom laptop"? i know it was 5 years ago now, but the whole reason why they started the project was because the entire class of students and two professors were absolutely astounded that it took *three hours* to disassemble a standard laptop... into over 140 constituent parts.
just wait for auto drive cars be ready to buy a new car each 3-5 years when the software updates stop and be ready to pay dearer prices for oil changes, tiers, etc.
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.
I don't think that's really a good example at all, because you're just talking about products' quality, and you actually admitted that you could still find a few manufacturers who are still willing to take your money in excahnge for a decent-quality product. And whatever the cause for this battery trend, I guarantee you it doesn't involve someone in the government threatening to use force against someone who is trying to design a computer with a removable battery. It's not a rights issue. You're just pissed that there's a lot of garbage on the market. (Nothing wrong with being pissed, BTW. I'm not saying you don't have good reason.)
Our RIGHT to repair things is truly being violated, in the cases where DMCA or patents makes it illegal for you do fix things, or illegal for people to help you fix it or document how or make/sell tools that make the work easier. This is where the government has broken from "let the market sort it out" impartiality and taken sides against The People. That is the thing that started to spring up in the 1990s, and totally unlike the simple planned obsolescence problems (like your battery) that even your great grandfather would have known how to deal with ("don't buy shit," he would say). When the law is fucked, though, all your great grandfather would know to say about that, would be "get a rope," and that's the kind of incivility that I hope we're trying to avoid.
By all means, keep buying decent hardware which lets you change the battery! But we have far bigger, newer and more threatening fish to fry. 1) DMCA's anti-circumvention prohibitions needs to go, ASAP, in its entirety. That thing has no redeeming virtues, and has done absolutely nothing but harm. 2) Something needs to be done about patents being used to prevent interoperability or maintenance (but I still don't know WTF that would be, or how to do it).
I don't know how in good conscious the Federal Trade Commission can accept our money.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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 license for you to transmit.
The FCC does not give a flying crap about the *router* firmware... "(think Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.)", what they care about is the radio, in the same way they care about the baseband firmware in mobile phones.
So the only thing the FCC wants is to control the air waves (which is what they, as an organization, were created to do).
Several router vendors would prefer you not replace their firmware, and cable companies which are now deploying WiFi hot spots in their service areas using your house and the router they sold you in order to do it, are objecting to you loading your own firmware, since it means they can't offer paid hot spot service out of your house because you happen to have a router that does WiFi from them.
But that's not the FCC, that's the people who want to use *your* equipment in *your* house in order to further *their* business model at the expense of *your* total available bandwidth (particularly, upstream bandwidth).
Ditto on that story but my was my oven, The landlord got a quote for a repair that was, no lie, $20 less then the cost of replacement. I was able to order the new control board for about $60 and install it in 10 minutes. Needless to say my landlord loves me.
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 manufacturer isn't going to use a screw to secure a component if glue will work, and the consumer has no expectation of replacing the component.
That said, for things that can be fixed, manufacturers do need to make service manuals available at a reasonable cost. I don't expect free, but I also don't want to hunt everywhere for it and be forced to pay an arm and a leg. Perfect example from my life -- our washer's drain pump died. I was able to find a replacement online pretty easily. However, without a YouTube video explaining how to get everything apart, it would have been extremely difficult to just figure it out. It wasn't exactly intuitive that the entire front of the washer had to come off in order to access a pump that looked like it was inside its own little cabinet. I'm sure the procedure is well documented in the service manual. In today's throwaway society, I'll bet there are a lot of people that would toss the washer and spend another $1000 for a new one simply because they're used to non-repairable gadgets. Why do that when the thing is going on 7 years' trouble free operation in a household that has to do laundry basically every day?
nobody cares about fixing cheap electronic gear
you can argue about whether or not this is right, but statistically speaking, nobody cares
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?
Noisy power, old motor getting too hot, etc. Lots of transients can blow a fuse, especially as components get older and start drifting out of spec. And there's probably no cost-effective way you're going to isolate that capacitor or resistor that's now at +20% from labeled value rather than the just-within-spec +9% it shipped at. At least not unless it dies completely and lets the magic smoke out.
And personally I'd stick with the same rating of fuse unless it was *really* hard to get to. The fact that the fuse is blowing means there's at least a minor problem somewhere in the device, possibly just waiting for a large enough surge of current to become a major problem. Now if you're talking about replacing , say, a 50A fuse with a 52A fuse I'd agree with you - just stretch the headroom a bit. But fuses tend to come in larger increments than that, and going to a 60A or 70A fuse offers enough headroom to allow some serious component failures, including lots components that still have nothing to do with the real problem. And then your problem starts becoming a lot more expensive to fix than replacing a fuse every year or two.
Now, what I *would* consider doing is cleaning and oiling the motors, or at least checking if they can spin freely. They're probably the culprits after all - they suck a lot of power, and as the factory lubrication gums up over time they start having to work a lot harder. Just remember that 3-in-1 oil is NOT your friend for machine maintenance - it's not designed for long-term operation and gums up rapidly. You want machine oil - sewing machine oil is great for smaller appliances, and a light automotive oil should do okay for most larger ones.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This is a newspaper -- bought and wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch and beholden to so much baggage of the gloomy old party-- advocating for at best copyright reform
Fox spun off Dow Jones and the rest of News Corp back in 2013. Or are Fox and News Corp still as joined at the hip as CBS and Viacom?
Perhaps we could start a new trend to counteract the decline, something like a "Certified Repair Friendly" logo that could be put on appliances
Would it be analogous to the FSF's Respects Your Freedom certification?
As I understand it, this article is about reducing Imaginary Property barriers that interfere with a free market in repair services.
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.
Does this $100 include the cost of e-waste disposal?
the most energy efficient strategy for an old appliance is to scrap it and replace it with a new model that is much more efficient
especially if you take your own time into account, is it worth blowing off a weekend with the family so you can save a few bucks on an old crappy washing machine?
How can be you be tracked if the phone is powered off? There's hardly any power consumption so what electronics and code is running in power-off state.
Putting a higher rated fuse into a device is usually not a good idea. Not to mention that finding a 5.5 amp fuse for that 5 amp one is not going to happen.
For devices that regularly blow their fuse, I've occasionally bypassed the fuse under test conditions to find out what's failing by looking for the smoke, but I'd caution you that one needs to first evaluate the circuits and do some diagnostic work to eliminate as many catastrophic failure modes as you can before you take the chance of burning something up (and your house down). Never, NEVER just put in a fuse that is above what is called for, unless you KNOW what you are doing and don't intend to leave it that way.
But I also work on old tube type Ham Radio gear.... Where an improper fuse can be a one way ticket to a blown power transformer and the destruction of circuit cards and parts which are not readily available for purchase or easily replaced. I can tell you that rewinding a power transformer, while possible, is tedious and time consuming and sometimes finding a suitable coupling capacitor with a high enough voltage rating is every expensive.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Um, that "FU fuse" is there for safety. Have fun when your buddy who can't fork out 400$ for a fridge comes home to a smoking crater where his house once stood.
Yes, but you're making a *lot* of assumptions there.
Efficiency isn't always terribly relevant - you probably don't care much about the efficiency of a sewing machine for example, probably not even a vacuum cleaner. Not unless they're *really* inefficient. Moreover even for refrigerators you pretty much need to go back 10-15 years to pre-energy-star models find one that's not worth repairing, unless it was junk to begin with. Once people started actually caring about efficiency they cut away the waste pretty quickly. Even if you're a hard-core energy-efficiency fan, you still need to consider the lifetime amortzed energy cost of building the new refrigerator in the first place.
Old != crappy. An old, quality appliance will very likely outperform most newer models. This can become even more dramatic as the age of the appliance increases, as the only appliances to survive this long are the ones that are unusually dependable.
Time is most definitely valuable - but money costs you time. (or as my brother likes to say: Money is liquid time) For a very large portion of the US population $400 represents a week or two of their paycheck. If you're spending money equivalent to a week or two of your life to avoid spending a weekend, you might want to take a look at your financial decision-making process.
Finally, and most importantly, there's absolutely no reason that most repairs should take anything like a weekend. IF appliances were designed for easy maintenance, then all but the most complicated repairs would take less than an hour or two.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I had a monitor crap out. The advice I got online and much searching - it was most likely the power supply.
Some of the capacitors looked gummy and black so I replaced them.
See, those capacitors were soldered in tight with a bunch of SMT components and their minuscule connections. I don't even know if the caps were even the problem....
With my $25 Weller, I totally screwed up everything near the caps.
A new power supply was 60% of the cost of a new monitor with a higher resolution.
Bought a new monitor that is still going strong.
But electronics are so cheaply made, they are not worth fixing; let alone spending several hundred dollars on tools and rework stations.
I am just buying less - or trying to - I mad at myself for letting my wife talk me into wasting money on this iPad. It is NOT worth the money!
So last week, probably due to a software update on my phone, my smartwatch (suck it, haters!) didn't automatically reconnect with my phone after coming back into range. I had to manually re-connect every time.
Note that I've had the damn thing for close to a year and this has not been a problem at all.
I looked all over the internet to see if this was a common problem, nada. I'm experienced enough to think that this is the sort of thing that can be fixed with a reboot or an update that I didn't quite get yet. So I write the manufacturer to ask for advice.
They tell me to send it in for service.
I'll repeat myself.
They were telling me so send my gadgets in for service for a bad Bluetooth connection.
I basically wrote them back telling them that the could go fuck themselves. I didn't use those words, I was polite, though not nearly as Tolkien was when he told the Nazis to fuck off.
And what do you know? One update later and boom, fixed.
So, fuck you, tech companies. I'm making it my life's mission to make sure everyone I know doesn't get fucked over the way you tried to do me. Point being: companies are out to make things harder to repair, or obfuscating the need for repair to make you dependent on them to make your stuff work right.
And by the way, you take away my right to replacing parts of my own gear of my own volition, and you'll see me gritting my teeth over cheap phones until the day I die, which at the rate at which my blood pressure rises every time I have to deal with your tech support probably won't be long anyhow.
(FWIW, this is not the first time I've ever told a company that I shouldn't have to send something in for service when an update should do the trick.)
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I had an old 1966 Dodge Dart that ran regularly through voltage regulators. Replacing them was fairly cheap, however.
Then I got an old 1972 Chrysler Newport. The voltage regulator went out. It turned out the thing was permanently attached to the alternator. You had to replace both (at a much higher price) if either one of them crapped out.
Not exactly programmed death by software, but the same mindset. Any earlier examples?
You're slow, aren't you?
The fuse isn't the FU, it's the lack of a fuse holder, and the fuse being soldered in.
This is weird.
Look, speaking on behalf of any corporation. Sometimes, YES, there's absolutely planned obsolescence in products. But truth be told, with so many consumer choices out there, this doesn't happen to the frequency it used to.
In the case of this man's $12 fix.
What I crack up at nowadays is how lazy people are at research lately.
"Why didn't Samsung tell me about the $12 fix" that's their job and responsibility
Is it possible that they didn't know?
Like Kim Davis not granting marriage certificates in Kentucky, some assert that if she wasn't going to hand out certificates - then it was "her responsibility to tell those seeking marriage certificates where to go to get them if she wasn't going to do it herself"
Samsung not having immediate information on how to resolve a problem they created by their presence. Kim Davis not being able to resolve other's problems problem she created by her choice.
I'm proud of this man for learning how to research his own answer.
Even if he's angry he had to do it.
My $300 "Family Actifry" was not working anymore, I had to disassemble it, about easy for a tinkerer, but damn to change the 15A fuse you have to disassemble everything because it is on the LCD control panel! :) Problem looked like a cold solder that heated too much...
I routed a fuse holder on the side so if it happens again it will take a few seconds to change
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Repairing stuff isn't as complicated as they want you to think.
I wonder how far off we are, though.
Common causes of fuses blowing regularly but infrequently are:
- Under rated. Sometimes a 1.2A fuse will protect a circuit just fine, while the original 1.0A fuse has a measurably short life. This is caused by various issues, such as current running too close to the rating or surges. Voltage rating is unlikely to be the fault here, most mini or glass fuses are 250V.
- Heat. Fuses will sag and fail under high heat. In a refrigerator, everything but the interior will want to be hot. Bad air circulation will cause this.
- Poor quality OEM fuses. Highly unlikely, but possible.
Putting in any sort of a holder is a good move, simplifies replacement, and if the problem is elsewhere, troubleshooting is greatly simplified.
When I worked on various office machines, I had a huge selection of fuses on hand, with some oddball values such as 0.8A, 1.13A, weird stuff. Some were very specific to prevent cascading failures and total destruction, but some I think were just engineers splitting hairs. Especially Sony.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is all nice in theory, but note that the original manufacturer gains nothing by enabling you to repair their wares. They WANT their crap to fail about 30 seconds after the warrantee expires, and they want you helpless to fix it at that point. The want you to buy their newest shiny as a replacement.
I am probably plagarizing but to anybody thinks that they have rights to repair their shiny:
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU COWS!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Dude, that's part of the safety feature. *I*'m slow? You're slower than a chunk of neutronium in a black hole's time-dilated event horizon...
Oh, "grishnakh", the resident Space drooler. Why am I not surprised you have a hard time grasping a fuse?
Holy shit, you're a fucking moron. Soldering a fuse in is NOT a safety feature, it's a cost-savings tactic. If you want safety, you put a fucking fuse holder in, and an easily-replaceable standard fuse in the holder.
Holy shit, this site is full of fucking morons these days.
And I used to do the same.
It's just a device.
In the old days, you used to be able to get the manuals for free at the public library, or browse through them at most dealers.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://www.acc.com/chapters/ncr/upload/Antitrust-Compliance-Training-Program-5-18-and-6-2-2015-Materials.pdf.
This the the paperwork. National Cash Register tried to withhold technical documents and repair parts to independent repair companies and lost. Now think about today and let us think about say Apple.
Well, another thing to consider is that around here, if you turn in a older, working fridge, the power company will give you $50 and haul it away for you. They define "working" as good enough to make ice, by the way. Might be enough to consider trying to rig it up to run again even if you decide to replace it.
My fridge would qualify (it's 20 years old) for the rebate, so I put a Kill-a-watt on my fridge to see how much power it draws compared to a new fridge, to see if it might be worth it. I found comparing its actual power usage to the claimed power usage on a new fridge, I would save about $40 a year. Now, $40 a year is still $40, but even with the $50 rebate I would be talking about something like a 10 year payback should I replace it with something equivalent. Considering that the prevailing opinion is that appliances all went to crap sometime in the late 90's/early 2000's, and the fridge I have is a GE model that's considered pretty robust, I figure I'm better off just keeping the fridge I have.
Reminds me of what a friend of mine said about why it's so much easier to fix the older car he owns than something newer; "It's just a bunch of car parts put together".
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.