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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."
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 precisely why I got the S5 even though if I had waited a month I could've gotten the S6. I knew the S6 wouldn't have a removable battery, and with that being a critical feature I made sure I voted with my wallet.
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.
true, the fact that apple started making it increasingly difficult/impossible to service notebooks(along with their shit specs for the price) and the inability to strip down mac pros(when they were still using totally generic commodity parts which I could upgrade at a minute cost vs. apple tax) drove me away from them. Obviously they continued this shit with their phones, but I was long since done drinking the koolaid by the time that they coughed up a phone.
Just for kicks I've built a couple hackintoshes and hackbook recently and I see that OSX is stagnant steaming pile, and pokey as hell(comparatively speaking to say any similar vintage linux distro win7/8/8.1/10) so the OS isn't much of a draw any longer. It was my ONLY point of hesitation when I decided to swear off apple products although my wallet and their aleady trending to totally locking down the hardware obviously were stronger voices.... Back to OSX I see VERY LITTLE improvements since say around the time of Tiger. I get the feeling that it's not even a third class citizen at Apple unless the "new" stuff can also be applied to ios. The iterations since seem to be more like the skinning of the year than any real improvements, and in some cases(Yosemite) backsliding on already subpar performance.
I should mention that I also purchased a recent macbook pro(Jesus people are stupid to pay retail for those anemic specs but at least it still had a mostly replaceable battery and RAM which is why I chose that model plus I got it for c. $200 or c. 1/10th the "new" price x86 dual core *snicker* for it's new cost I bought a Sager NP7330 quad core(i7-4800MQ/16GB/765m) it's clevo based to it's pretty much ALL serviceable easily(not as easily as hp probooks though, single screw optional) user serviceable although this one the dGPU is soldered rather than an MXM card although you do have to jump through an extra hoop for BIOS updates OTOH custom BIOSes are quite common for clevo based notebooks).
Lenovo and HP still supply quite a bit of info about their products, but at least in Lenovo's case it's partially because unless you use a custom BIOS of some form the stock BIOS WHITELISTS components which comprises a great deal of their service manuals, i.e. lists of stock BIOS acceptable components. I suppose that this is moderately more acceptable in primarily business oriented products. HP probooks are just so easily cracked open by pulling a few levers if the usually optional additional screw is not installed. Prices for specs on these isn't too ht although easily better than Apple's OTOH they are primarily aimed at businesses.
Phones: yes the race to make the chassis next to impossible to open to even replace the battery is HIGHLY ANNOYING, along with elimination of other useful feature such as uSD slots. I find this incredibly hilarious as IIRC Google's excuse is that it's "confusing" to users YET they still have to acquire the correct SIM card AND INSTALL it?!
But yeah at the end of the day making it nigh impossible to even crack open the chassis is incredibly annoying along with egregiously overpriced products that make use of extensively soldered parts where the main excuse is thickness(not a problem as most of theses ultra thin jobs do more thermal throttling than anything else) leaving mfg cost the determining factor but with their already high peofit margings, I think that they afford to lose .5% of profit margin. IOW IMO I'll take a bit thicker with the likelihood of having better thermal capability AND user replaceable parts as much as possible.
I can't believe that they were still getting shit caps that recently. Samsung must've been being super cheap and still buying china shit(ultra low quality) components.
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
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.
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.