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Ask Slashdot: Why Does Almost Nothing Come With a Proper Printed Manual Anymore?
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: As someone who grew up with 1980s and 1990s computers and electronics and still has whole boxes of lovingly prepared printed computer, peripheral, game and software manuals from that era, I am continually surprised by how just many products ship without a proper printed manual these days. Case in point would be things like Android phones. Android has quite a few not-entirely-obvious functions built into it. And a lot of people aren't even aware they exist. No Android phone I've bought has ever had a printed manual included in its little product box. Not even a small one. Even expensive laptops ranging in price from 2,000 to 5,000 Dollars often come only with a few sheets of printed paper in the box -- warranty card, where to register the device, URL for downloading drivers and so on. Why is this? It can't be environmental concern -- the electronics devices themselves, when thrown away, are a hundred times (if not worse) more harmful to the environment than a little 50 to 100 page recycled paper booklet would be. So where are the manuals? Is it the cost of preparing the manuals? The cost of printing them? Is it a few grams of extra weight added to the product box? Is everyone supposed to look up everything online now, even in places where there is no internet connection? And why can't there be a print manual option -- e.g. pay 3 to 5 Dollars extra, and get a full, printed manual you can study on a couch?
Seriously, that's a fucking retarded question to ask and you don't deserve an answer.
It means they or someone else can sell it separately.
And the nerds who does want to read the manual, like me, can and find it on the Internet.
Anyway the quality of the information are declining.
Manufacturers are not interested in creating users who know what they are doing.
Designers tend to be of the persuasion that if it needs a manual, it isnt user friendly enough, and writing one anyway makes them look like quitters.
Users themselves just want a black box with a go button that takes them to pleasureville.
Why is this even a question. When a company does not include something it's because they are trying to save money. Even offering a servi e to print the manual for you means they will have to spend money on things to do that.
Just get a tablet and load all your manual/pdfs on that.
Seriously Slashdot, do you let these posts through because you have nothing better to do?
^^
They add bulk, cost and can't be updated. You may think each one is cheap individually but the costs add up when you have to print millions or billions of them.
Why print it when nobody reads it anyway?
Nintendo stopped shipping printed manuals with most their games. They cited reducing unnecessary waste as the primary cause. They don't omit the manual though. Every product comes with a built-in e-manual now, and this allows them to specifically design and format the manual content for built-in software readers. In an era of mobile gaming, nobody wants the manuals to take up physical space.
They've made their product packaging much smaller too, but so have most the other game publishers in recent years.
The internet is free. I find it easier to google the manual online than find the one that came in the box with the product. Next question...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You're not a jerk, are you? Because I can't imagine a world where you'd want to read about the new shiny object rather than touch it, fondle it, attempt to understand it through osmosis, and maybe, if you're really lost, post online about how you just bought this new shiny object that has no manual so you can humble-brag about having the newest shiny object.
In truth, it's because most places don't want to bother writing documentation at all, instead relying on users to disperse information through the net. It's a sad truth, but truth none-the-less.
The cost to print/include the manual likely isn't the hold back here. It probably isn't even the extra weight for shipping (although I imagine that is a factor, eating into profit margins).
No, they don't include manuals frequently because they aren't written. Some electronics might have basic ones, but in the modern world of support websites, even when I can download a manual, it is often superseded by an FAQ website or company-hosted forums. If they know that's the longterm support outcome, why bother paying for all the development time and copy editing to create a high quality document few people will actually read?
The OP here assumes the increase in cost is entirely to do with the paper/printing/inclusion, but I suspect it is costly long before that, in the writing phase.
You have to realize even the most basic manual of instructions comes in a multitude of languages. Making a simple instructive manual into a total mess. But it mostly comes down to bean counters deciding that a printed manual is permanent, its difficult to make changes, and these days most have some sort of internet access to a manual online at anytime. For many people they end up reading it once and throwing it out in the garbage as well. I actually look for car makers to dump the paper manuals as well soon and incorporate them into the head unit displays. Or provide a application to download them on a mobile device of which many have already done.
"The reason to move on: courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us."
When you get manuals with everything you buy you have to put them somewhere, no?
And then when you need it, chances are it isn't right next to you so you have to go and find it. I put them in the cloud and its easy to look at my collection from whatever device is near me at the time.
;
Tmen shì zhèyàng; n bù dú zhngwén ma?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I mean, do you really read your phone manual? Or your graphics card manual? Maybe your PS4 console manual?
I guess things nowadays are literally idiot proofed enough that anyone can turn on the stuff and use it away without reading anything at all. If any doubt arises, people just use web search and call it a day.
Back in my days we had PRINTED manuals!!
Yes, devices came with thick, detailed manuals back then. People also typically didn't read those manuals. The vast majority of people either just stumbled their way through "figuring it out" or avoided the product entirely as being overly complicated.
These days, more work has gone into product design to make things intuitive so that people can just "figure it out" easier rather than providing the manual that will go unused anyways. At most things will typically come with a "Quick Start Guide" to give you the most basic of instructions to get the device up and going - and for the most part that's what the market wants.
Those manuals cost money - both to print and to pay someone to write in the first place. Offer the same product on the shelves - one without a manual and one that costs $5 extra that includes it. I'd wager quite a few dollars that the one without the manual will outsell the one that includes it 20 to 1.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Science confirms it.
The last few laptops I have gotten game with electronic manuals. They were nicely formatted, complete, on the usb stick that came with the laptop so I could view it offline along with a complete set of drivers and other recovery information.
I much prefer electronic manuals to paper ones.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I was part of the decision to remove printed manuals from the shipped product. The first trigger was that the manuals were often outdated (software, hardware and instructions evolve), and we didn't want to ship an "incorrect" manual. Waiting for the new manuals to come back from the printer delayed shipment of the product. The cost was second, but everyone was happy to save $25k a year of printing costs (everything counts). Finally, our technical support staff was certain that most customers didn't read the manual before calling us for support.
I'm usually irritated if I ever have to crack open a manual, which is almost never. What is this guy studying on the couch? Does he read manuals like it's a novel?
Holy moley what a pinhead.
To find out why your smartphone won't connect to the internet, just connect to the internet to download the manual telling you why you can't connect.
What could be simpler?
Just not computers. Considering the typical computing device product cycle, it's unlikely that a printed manual would be both reliable and useful by the time the customer opens the product and loads the first update over the net. Plus contextual help on anything with a reasonably sophisticated UI is probably more helpful, anyway.
Yes. That is what you are supposed to do. What is the point of a printed manual for a whiz-bang piece of tech like an Android phone or $2000-$5000 laptop when there is no internet connection? Maybe such tech is still useful without the connection, but that is a tiny minority of use cases. That tiny minority does not justify the expense of preparing, printing, and distributing manuals.
A more common use case would be this: a manufacturer goes through the expense of preparing, printing, and distributing manuals with their product. Then, after all that effort, 75% of end users never even open it. Of those that do open it, most will never reference it later on. A tiny fraction of users will reference several times during the life of the device. Some users will look at the printed manual, puzzle over the table of contents, and wonder where all the hyperlinks are. What, no search tool? Another thing to consider is currency: hardware and software changes often, and probably as soon as the manual was prepared and published, some of the information in it would be dated, misleading, incorrect, or otherwise out-of-sync with reality. Keeping a soft copy up-to-date (like an online support page) is much easier.
I doubt anyone under the age of 20 has ever read a printed book let alone a manual. Distributing information on physical media vs electronically is an order of magnitude more expensive. What you imagine is a trivial expense to manufacture, store and ship printed material may not be so in large quantities. Andr electronic manuals can be corrected and updated far more readily than printed material.
The optimist in me says that digital manuals are more convenient anyways. Don't take up any physical space, harder to lose, you can Ctrl + F whatever you're looking for. The pessimist in me says they just want to get the less tech-savvy to sign up for their customer support tech expert services. The gamer in me misses when reading the manual and looking at its illustrations was the foreplay before the game.
The printed manuals would be out of date as soon as the device connects to the internet and updates.
Duh?
The people that got home computers in the 80ies and 90ies are the geeks/nerds. When the common man began buying computers/electronics they never read any manuals, and the manufacturers understood this. So they stopped printing it.
But I agree, it would be nice to be able to pay $3 extra for a manual.
I wonder what the manual would say for a brand new computer though. Would it contain information about all the chips and the BIOS and UEFI and stuff, or is that something the manufacturers don't really want anyone to know about? Maybe it would just simply be way too much information to fit it into a manual.
If nothing else, it would be lovely to have a *comprehensive* documentation of the thing one bought. I guess the only way to get that is by buying a RISC-V desktop computer -- which there only is one of atm, and its a dev-board.. In theory system76 could maybe provide it as well.
Whatever
And the good ones get paid a premium. Generally they gavitate to big contractors, as in the defense and aerospace industry.
It's just another way the world was better in the 1980s.
Just buy an iPhone, it needs no manuals, even 80year olds can use them.
Cost and lack of a general need. Who reads manuals? Really, who reads manuals that cannot download one?
They buy their stuff and then just use it. Its supposed to Just Work. They don't give a ****.
Do you know how many so-called booklets or instruction manuals you'd have to print for the Xbox? Eight million. This won't be 4 pages; more like 34. Now think about all them trees you'd have to chop down -- do I need to go on?
All this, not to answer your question, but instead to prove to one and all the one single purpose that the Xbox is good for: a really bad example, even for this type of Ask Slashdot question
My First PC, with 256Kb, thats Kb, of ram had 3 sets of manuals.
1 for MS-DOS, which taught me everything I needed to know, complete with examples.
1 for the Deskmate "GUI" which taught me how to use all the aplications [ spreadsheet, database, modem, etc ]
1 for GWBASIC complete with code examples.
these were each 100 pages or so, but they were VERY well written, had detailed specs about the computer/application.
Now, people are nothing but "pointers and clickers", which is what companies want.
Look! a FREE toolbar! tools are good! can never have enough of those!
of course I'll click install!
A FREE system check-up, of course! How can I lose!
Consumer products today should be produced with the aid of UX experts and UX studies, so that they are intuitive enough that manuals are not required. Features that are too advanced to be understood without the assistance of a manual should never be compulsory to use, and regarded as customizations for expert users who will research themselves.
No product these days should ever require a manual - we have the tools available to make it possible to produce products intuitive enough that manuals are unnecessary. If you'd like some help learning about it yourself, I suggest you read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" and Don Norman's books for more extensive advice. If your everyday consumer product requires a manual, you're a failure as a designer. The only exceptions to this are really, crazy advanced products, and even then a lot more could usually be done to make them easier to use.
If you want a book on Android, you can buy several, there's no shortage.
Check out the winner of this years Ignobel prize in Literature: Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products
There aren't enough discerning customers out there.
Everybody complains about lack of quality, but as long as they keep choosing "bargains" over quality, the latter will be increasingly hard to find.
To me, a good manual is often a knockout criterium when I select what to buy;
If they cared enough to put together a structured, readable manual, they probably did the rest of the homework.
Software updates that add and/or remove features quickly make the printed manual you got with the item obsolete.
can read more than 140 characters on a single subject any longer.
Manuals are printed at a cost to the manufacturer, placed in the box by a worker paid by the manufacturer, adds weight to the package shipped by the manufacturer, and potentially ends up going missing at a replacement cost to the manufacturer. The more of those boxes they can pack into a shipping container from China the lower their costs will be.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
First, most people have seen or used something similar to what they have purchased. This was not true when computers/software... was first available.
Second, the printed material was probably already outdated when it was originally printed, much more so when updates to the software/microcode have been made.
Third, the lack of enough (good) translators that can actually take the original language and make enough sense of it and carry that over to other languages.
Fourth, If something is simple enough to use without a manual, why bother printing one?
Fifth, Search engines with access to Online manuals and support group sites, combined with phone/email support can answer most questions. If you need detailed information, the answers a click away.
To those who have said "who cares" or "stupid question" etc. you just don't get it. I do.
I remember the day I cracked open the box for Ultima VI (in particular) - and in all it's glory were a cloth map of Britannia, two (count 'em) manuals (spellbook and general adventuring guide), and an "authentic replic Orb of the Moons moonstone" (a key item in game).
Lots of games of that era were like that, it was Good Times, it made it an *experience* - as opposed to "Activate Steam Key and Download".
They were also able to do some clever copy protection with manuals on some games, fro example, in an adventure game you might get asked a question "The King asks you 'What is word X in line Y of page Z?' " and if you get it wrong, well sucks to pirate that game because you shall not pass.
I do miss that stuff, it was cool.
In answer to the question though, $$$, cost of developing materials, and it's then got to be boxed, and freighted/distributed. Internet distribution saves money to make a better value product, I mean, increases profit margins. I don't see prices going down on electronic only software.
Someone has to write it, edit it, translate it, print it, pack it, ship it, unpack it, put it in the box that has to be enlarged to allow it to fit, ship it again, and for what? 90% of consumers won't even read it. It will go straight into a bin (a recycling bin if lucky, most likely just into landfill trash). So not including it is a cost savings and environmental savings. Think about it this way, in Q1 2018 there were 383,503,900 smartphones sold worldwide. If each one came with a 200 page manual, that's 38,350,390,000 pages (100 double side printed pages per manual) of paper essentially wasted. Now let's assume it's about A6 size paper. That's around 1.41g per sheet, so 54,074,050 kg of paper, not including covers. All for just 3 months worth of phones. Now extrapolate that out for a decade. And that's just for phones.
A better solution would be to include a manual on the device (for phones and laptops). You would at least save the cost of producing and shipping the physical manuals. Even so if you really need it, you can usually find setup and service manuals for laptops on the vendor website. Phones, well... There's always the For Dummies books.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Just one spelling mistake or errata suggesting a person swipe left instead of right and you âMuricans club together and sue....
The internet is free. I find it easier to google the manual online than find the one that came in the box with the product. Next question...
I call BULLSHIT on that one .. everything I've bought in the last 5 years came without any type of manual and there wasn't one online .. only community forums.
If that bothers you then perhaps you should avoid the lowest priced product available from an unknown vendor on Alibaba.
Sure, printing them is really cheap. However you also need people to write them, do the layout, committees to argue over the graphics, artists creating the diagrams, supply management of getting the manuals from the printer and into the shipping box, etc... Crappy Q&A websites were the users answer other user's questions is far easier to maintain and you can censor things when you remotely remove a feature.
Or at least, it should be. http://www.atarimania.com/docu...
@Uncle Rico - The first rule of development is that no one RTFM -- especially end-users. Even graybeards from the 60's know this. How far back are the "good old days" you're trying to relive?
Printing is costly and if I want to search for a specific term, give a copy to a friend, keep an archival copy, or load one on to a mobile device: I want the electronic version
It's all digital because it's cheaper and easier. I keep manuals in a binder. Even if I have a manual, know that I have the manual and know where it is, I often just look at the digital version, even if I have to download it first. The digital version is searchable. What pisses me off though is when manufacturers think they don't need to provide a manual anymore or when they don't make their old manuals available online in a way that lets search engines find them.
One of my (now-defunct) startups sold shrink wrapped software, very consumer level. We always included printed manuals, because they were amazingly cheap and our CEO thought having one helped to distinguish us.
I wrote most of them back in the day, and I was never encouraged to be brief or limit screen shots and illustrations. They wanted 60 pages or so (and it was all in English.)
Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products
https://academic.oup.com/iwc/a...
Manufacturers are not interested in creating users who know what they are doing.
Designers tend to be of the persuasion that if it needs a manual, it isnt user friendly enough, and writing one anyway makes them look like quitters.
Users themselves just want a black box with a go button that takes them to pleasureville.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Many years ago - way before the internet - there was a computer scientist (a real one with a PhD) who said that computers should work according to the user's preference. Meaning a user starts typing at a command line (this was a long time ago) and the computer figures out what to do.
As someone who's worked in IT for almost 30 years I'm glad to see the back of manuals. I remember every new release of Oracle used to come with a few CDs and about 50 lbs of "dead tree" manuals and at the time ( back in the 1990s ) there was nowhere to recycle anything so we simply dumped the lot out on the pavement for the garbage trucks to take away and dump in a landfill somewhere. We once went 3 years without throwing out the old manuals and it when we did we have about 5 stacks, 6 ft high to get rid of. Then we had one CD with every manual we needed and we all had a copy on our PCs and the world was a better place.
Anyway come on guys, since when have guys ever admitting to needing the manual? You buy X product and your wife/gf says "Honey, perhaps you should read the..." and the standard reply is, "No, no it's alright dear I'll work it out, can't be that hard can it?". Of course we all know we'll still be trying to fathom out how to turn the damn thing on at 2am but we will not have admitted defeat and allow a device to get the better of us! We're men, now behave like men and throw away any manuals! ( Alright, put them in a drawer and go back in about 3 years time when you finally get so bored you want to read it! )
Adding a printed component makes it harder to get everything right. It increases the difficulty of shipping your product. Sometimes it can even force you to delay shipment.
There's just no upside in most cases, and only a few people read the manual anyway. So it makes sense to do only with a certain set of devices, mostly expensive devices that can be destroyed easily or devices that can harm people if they're used wrong. Also when the manual can yield more revenue for the product creator by helping with sales.
So Chainsaws may get manuals, for example, with warnings about how to cut down a tree and warnings that, for example, most accidents happen while limbing. Devices with refrigerants may get manuals warning about how to transport them so you don't break them. Cars will get manuals that tell you roughly what maintenance the manufacturers recommend, but none of the manufacturers actually give you the service manuals by default.
Printed manuals for electronic gear always did suck to varying degrees. It's true that back in the nineteen hundreds when machines like the Altair and Commodore were aimed at the hobbyist market, the writing was nerd-to-nerd rather than by the illiterate Chinese peasants who wrote the manuals for other electronics.
Computer manuals have never been the worst. Try deciphering a camera manual sometime. After you invest in a new Kosmo-Kazac 5000 and are immediately lost in a maze of twisty little menus, all alike, you may be tempted to reach for the manual, which quaintly still comes in printed form. But you're better off with the PDF, which you can (1) display at a readable font size and (2) represents the current revision, rather than the one that was in print that day in Sichuang when the box was sealed.
But experienced photographers know that they'll be still better off when a third-party guidebook called something like "Mastering The Kosmo-Kazac 5000" comes out. It will explain not only what each menu item means and how they interrelate, but but will tell you what settings are important for different kinds of photography. The guidebook, not the manufacturer manual, is what you will keep, well-thumbed, in your camera bag for the life of the device. And in a field with hardware so complex today that lenses have their own firmware updates, only a good third-party guide will tell you whether bringing the Exorbitar 24mm prime is a good choice for today's shooting with this particular camera.
I can return things in my country if the manual is wrong or missing. Its only legislation.
Having created numerous products during my career, I can tell you that I always got tech support questions about something that's clearly explained in the documentation. Doesn't matter how those docs are distributed either. People will STILL not get it even if you came to their house and set it up for them.
A printed manual costs money to produce and then you're stuck with it if you make a change to the product. Video is better than text and photos because you can show people how to do things but they still have to be able to grok it. There will always be people who are really painfully stupid and shouldn't be using your products. That can't be fixed because that would involve those people realizing that they are stupid which is an infinite loop.
Most of them don't even provide pdf manuals online any more, either. At best, there is some totally disorganized FAQ that tells you you should try rebooting, or else power cycling.
When there is a manual, it contains no useful information. When there is a manual, it is written by Chinese or Japanese people who incorrectly believe they are fluent in English. When there is a manual, it is totally disorganized and unusable. This problem began when engineers stopped writing manuals and handed it over to "technical writers," people who write about, but do not understand, technical stuff. It was soon discovered that the manuals written by these morons were of no value to anyone besides other morons, so it turned out to be cheaper to fire the "technical writers" and create peer-to-peer forums, where people could offer wrong information to each other and feel righteous about it.
when you would get the model number off something check and see if the manufacturer was still in business and then call or write a letter requesting a manual.
;) lol
;)
It does not bother me at all, the first thing I do is download a pdf now. Actually better because I get instantaneous gratification most of the time.
The other thing I have noticed is I buy very few books now, don't go to the library much anymore. But more interesting is I don't print save an archive information, I usually recall the search terms to display what I need at the time. Often don't try and save the information itself, just try and commit the search used to memory.
But that brings up one thing, what happens if the internet goes down, it's back to the stone ages I guess
Just my 2 cents
Every year, this one customer answers in our customer survey that he's still waiting for us to offer printed manuals for our product. We're a SaaS company (CMS product), our product changes over time and has online help articles for almost everything. For some reason the fact that he pluralized "manual" is the biggest howler to me; only one person ever requests this; we wouldn't have to print more than one!
I NEVER want a printed manual for something that won't work if I'm not connected to the internet...I'll just Google it and a 3rd party has probably written a blog article better than the official documentation!
The problem with a paper manual is that someone, like you, might keep it for 30 years. Nothing made with modern technology will work the same way in the same context 30 years from now. The idea is to get the product to consumers as fast as possible, and fix any problems as fast as you can. Once you've published a manual, you have a "contract" with the users and you can't change any of those things without making the manual out-of-date. That means you can't change anything, but bug fixes, and you're out of business. Far better to have a manual wiki, where you can change things as you change the product. Even hardware products change all the time when you install the mandatory monthly software updates. Only a steampunk gear driven product would have a paper manual.
No one has the attention span to RTFM anymore.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this. Printed manuals are out of date before they are off the printer. It's much easier to update a PDF online and just provide links to the always up to date PDF.
Where unnecessary they were dropped. Where necessary they were replaced with the one-page quickstart guide. The Internet (forums, Google, etc.) is superior for most purposes because it can cover far more ground, in far more detail, with up-to-the-minute data (my OTA update failed, now what?) and without any distribution costs or hiccups. Hiccups like forgetting where you stuck the manual for your printer eight years ago when you unpacked it.
As a kid in the 80's, I knew games came in cool boxes with beautiful manuals. But all of mine came from BBSs and I would have to figure out the controls by trying each key and writing down what it did.... :)
Those were the days
The websites and PDF are more easily changed when one of the users realize that our product has major problems when held upside down in a closet during a full moon.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
when they don't make their old manuals available online in a way that lets search engines find them.
That's where the physical manual comes in...
A lot of manufacturers think their engineers can also write product manuals. That's how you end up with some of the shittiest documentation ever. Very few engineers can actually write documentation worth a damn, and pretty much all of them would rather be doing something else ("real work").
Many vendors are content to let documentation die in place, with senior management pocketing money that could otherwise be spent on someone with UX experience who can advocate for the end user.
Include a PDF pre-installed on the device - if your device's screen isn't good enough to view PDFs, then you've bought the wrong device -)
The PDF should include a URL for downloading the latest version of the PDF. I get annoyed when manufacturers release a new firmware or software update that changes or add features and don't revise the manual to match.
Hi, I think it is probably because so few people ever read the manual, coupled with economics... maybe a little HCI dreaming as well. Back in the 80's and 90's, even then when applications were mostly user unfriendly, many people didn't read the manual, it seemed that only a rare few ever did, then in the 90's people started worrying about user interfaces, so business types figured they could save some money by not printing the manuals, and claim they were 'green' in some sense too. Just what I recall from those days when there were manuals.
"Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy" true in
I have many fond memories of installing WordPerfect 5.1 on my office computer and taking the manual home to study on my own time. The manual explained almost everything you could do at that time in WordPerfect, in plain English, step by step, and with short examples. Thanks to the manual I learned how to do many things that I never actually had to myself and was often called upon by others in the office to help them. Several of us were of the same mind and studied the manual. Oh, the amazing things that got done there because several of us knew how to do extra things. I believe that manual helped to make WordPerfect the word processor of choice at that time. What a cynical, stoopid, useless time we live in now.
2) Updating: an online manual (usually in .pdf format) is enormously easier and faster than having to send out updated copies of the printed manual.
3) Less waste: updated manuals or EOL products both mean obsolete printed material taking up warehouse space.
4) For many consumer products, use is obvious enough that manuals really aren't needed as much as they used to be. And where manual type information and instruction is still needed, they have been largely supplanted by user forums.
5) Even when manuals were common and very useful, a LOT of people didn't bother to read them anyway. (hence RTFM-Read The Fucking Manual)
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
a) You can download the manual from a website to read on a Kindle or iPad - most even come with a barcode on the outside to do just that.
b) Most people are tech-advanced enough NOT to need a manual
c) Most of the time, the manual is outdate by the time you receive the package
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I'm less bothered by the lack of a default paper manual, but I am bothered by things that don't really appear to have any kind of documentation at all, paper or electronic. Or if they have documentation, it's like paper thin (that's a pun) and doesn't cover most of the product or only a subset of features.
You're expected to just grok the design and figure it out, or google it somehow and find someone else who did figure it out and felt like sharing.
I feel like the world gets more and more technical but the actual documentation for it gets less and less. More complexity and less information.
Which explains why pretty much all computers are so scarily easy to set up... incorrectly.
What is this thing called manual of which you speak?
Most kids just starting college need remedial reading/writing courses.
Asking them to understand a technical instruction manual?
It is to lol
I remember marking pages in my Visual Studio, Novel Netware, CorelDRAW and Wordperfect manuals. Netware in particular was a huge set of books. I also remember going through these manuals cover-to-cover to learn about these programs. Good times.
A pdf, wiki page or other HTML help is just not the same. I want something I can stick a post-it note in.
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
Our products are not for consumers. Our products are super expensive, pretty much 10 times COT's. The required manufacturing Flow Control Documents, Quality Control Documents, Identification Documents, recording of all of the above on paper, and proper filings makes up 90% of the cost of the parts.
Documentation of API requires changes from both our company and customer, so you even need a little wag of that cost to add into the part. Or in some cases, where our customer likes to change all of the above, its about 5K every time they want to change anything before the next build.
Otherwise for COTS having available online PDF of your language flavor I think is preferred.
Do you know what's worse than not having a manual? Having a manual that tells you something outdated that no longer applies.
Tech companies now make a profit for novelty. "Windows (10) as a service" is the perfect example - try looking up online ways to do something particularly complex on W10, and chances are you will land on a non-official blog post from, say, 2016, which has instructions to access a setting that no longer exists, or simply changed names. Bummer. Now here's the tricky part - companies change so fast, they even neglect their own documentation being up to date. And yes, Microsoft does this too.
Microsoft is a good example because it's a company that once was known for great documentation and professional-level software QA. Now it stillbrags about that, yet more and more it hypocritically tries to follow Google's software. LOL Google - a company known for having no support at all on their software, and about as loop-hole'y as an ISP's or Utility's company support page. And no, Google Product Forums isn't support, and Google hardware support lines don't count - it's not their core business, google hardware is a branding stunt for their core market.
Meanwhile, what these and every company right now is making sure of is they provide documentation FOR DEVELOPERS - because that's the only empathy these tech companies still find - engineers ask tough questions, so they need accessible answers. Clients? Hell no. Instead of providing documentation for the end-user, they'd rather "formulate UX" that is understandable enough that usage itself becomes the documentation.
That is so cool, right? It is a load of bullcrap.
Let me tell you about the perfect UX for silicon valley these days: it doesn't last long. UX right now is a tragedy because, even though my 1990's Yamaha keyboard brought a bigg-ass manual that I didn't even have to read because I learned from pressing them buttons and listening to sound, the best thing about that experience is that it didn't fucking change. It was rock-solid usability - I pressed power and it always worked like expected. No hangs, no update nags, no new search bars, no unexpected arbitrary text pasword prompt, no deleted instrument because a royalty was no longer in place, no confusion because my PEANO instrument got a typo fixed, so now I longer know if it's the right piano when switching to it mid-performance.
You don't get manuals in today's stuff because they are a liability. You're a tech company. You push a change, and forget to update the manual, and you're gonna get users calling CS. Do this on paid, licensed, professional, critical stuff, you're gonna get sued. Another example: do you like Tesla cars and are saving up to buy that Model 3 ASAP? Imagine Elon 420 decides to push an OTA that makes you go armageddon on your 1st child's birthday. Unlikely you say? So was the weather channel getting a windows update live.
Manuals aren't necessary because the webapp and the stores and the always-connected commandment made it all transient. If I could put a logo on Silicon Valley as a whole, it would be Hermes (the greek god) wearing a pair of Nikes with wings, and with his back turned to the viewer. Because they expect you to keep up, but don't give a fuck.
First of all, once we became networked, it was possible for 90% of everything to be propagated by word of mouth. This wasn't the case back in the 1980s. (I was there.)
Second, if you never make a formal claim, you can't ever be wrong.
Right around the time that most developers realized that their application could only ever be as stable as the APIs you develop on top of (the dark days began with Windows 95 and progeny) it became wise to keep a low profile on your software ever working precisely as advertised. What's your other choice? Become a lifetime expert on the care and feeding of Windows 95, 98, and next of sin? A true coding artist could write a stable program on top of Windows 95, but how long does that last in the marketplace?
Right. Three years. Absolute maximum.
Then, you kind of want to write in your manual: well, this function would work properly, except for that bug-ass piece of shit library underneath. But finger pointing is a dangerous game, because maybe what you're suffering from is conceptual impedance mismatch, and you might both be at fault (it takes two to tango).
[*] But of course, a true coding artist could design an API that wouldn't elicit conceptual impedance mismatch in the first place ...
Another thing about the 1980s: half of all software design was cramming a large thing into a tiny place. Seriously. If it wasn't a RAM problem, it was a pixel problem, or a disk sector problem. So a lot of your manual explained a host of unnatural design decisions. These are no longer primary. These days, bad design is mainly self-inflicted.
Finally, the primary factor in application choice in the 2010s is UI style. People tend to choose a UI style they're comfortable with (there's generally a lot of choice, too, in the variables least important to long-term function and stability). Consequently, most manuals would be preaching to a self-selected choir.
I still read the manual a lot (online). PostgreSQL isn't going away any time soon, even if there's now twenty other cloud-compatible databases. I'll read the manual for something with staying power at the drop of a pin.
On the other hand, life is too short to read any manual with the title "xxxScript for Dummies". Don't even try. It's like machine learning, where the fastest way to fall behind is to keep up (you can either read the results of others, or pursue your own; pick any one).
Since updates are delivered automatically and electronically, any printed manual that would ship with a product is pretty much out of date as soon as it is turned on.
The android example is a good one. First it is not a pure android, so a manual from Google might not even apply (the manufacturer and cell provider can tweak it). Second, it is not a pure product, so a manual from name your hardware vendor here may not even apply (because the cell provider can change it). Your cell provider often has the last say on what is on the device initially, which apps are there, configuration etc., but as configuration they won't have a manual for all of the stuff they don't touch.
And as soon as it is turned on and updated, any manual it might have had may not even resemble what you are looking at in the slightest.
Besides, isn't this more about a relationship anyway? I mean, you'll bond more with a device that is more like a puzzle that you have to figure out than one that comes with a manual. Along the way, you'll want to know more about it, will do research and eventually you'll find and try all of those features you want to find in a manual, but this time you'll have a relationship with it which is more important to the vendors than an actual manual.
Everyone loves to hate on Apple, but their products have no manuals and yet they have a huge list of fans. The missing manual isn't what garners such love from the fans, it is the building of the relationship with apple and the devices that leads to this kind of fanaticism.
Shipping a paper book costs much more than printing it.
If you print less than 1,000 copies, it is easier to use an on-demand printing solution, but if you drastically change features every quarter, then you get to do that every quarter.
Plus, many companies were overflowing with paper manuals for every software product they bought - 200 copies of the same manual using shelf storage because each user "might" need to read it.
In the 1990s, I lead a programming/QA team for a commercial product. One of our QA people doubled as a technical writer. The docs she made looked just like every program/computer document you've ever seen. They were big on what to press/click/type/drag, but didn't include **anything** about "why." Every quarter, we'd have a new release that would add 1-2 huge new functions and modify 50 of the minor other capabilities. All the documentation needed to be reworked for that. We had clients all over the world, so those updates would need to be translated into other languages - Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin where the major ones.
All of that costs money and time.
And don't forget the taxes. If you ship paper, that is a product that demands taxes. For a software/services company in a state that doesn't tax services, that was a huge difference in accounting. Putting a directory onto a we server with {product}/{version}/docs/{lang} is much easier and more efficient for the product team and customers.
Search: (Device You Own) manual. Bingo! Downloadable PDF that you can print and have a hard copy! I usually just store the PDF manuals on my computer.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
because shit changes and fuck paper?
In a Tesla you can turn its A/C on, while it is in the garage and peacefully read the manual without any fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. Actually the sound system and acoustics are very good, there is no engine noise, so it is not a bad place to listen to music or to banish your kids to so that their "music" does not disturb you....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Old man yells at cloud. Don't waste my time with a shitty little book, link me to the pdf with a searchable TOC
In some cases, I'd like a paper manual. But for the most part, I'd just like a decent manual. One that you don't have figure out which parts of the doc are in your language. One that's actually written by someone who speaks your language. One that gives complete information. I know. I'm asking for a lot.
when I got stuck on a programing task in the 80s I often stayed stuck. I didn't have any good teachers and only a limited # of books. And forget about a C compiler or assembler. I didn't even know they existed let alone where to get one.
With the Internet when I hit a wall I can go on stack overflow, ask a question and 9 times out of 10 some kind soul will point out my mistake. Heck, I rarely have to do that. Odds are somebody beat me to it. Better yet, there's often 10 explanations for the same thing. That sounds redundant, but if the first 5 don't make sense #6 often does.
The Internet's a whole new world of capabilities. There's a generation who's going to grow up with all the answers at their fingertips. And rather than make them lazy I think we'll see them spend less time learning and more doing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Printed material is just tattoos on dead trees. Creepy..
Organization? You must be joking..
If the software is worth anything it will have the full manual in the help menu as a fully searchable and well organized document. Devices seem to be lacking. The companies selling the device want you to pay for their experts to fix it for you, or for you to pay for a class to be taught how to use their device.
I have been working though documentation for scientific instruments/software and feel your frustration. They last printed a book 15 years ago and it is not relevant to the current version.
Nobody reads them anyway, and even if they did most people don't understand Chinglish.
Suits got sick of /.ers answering al their questions with "RTFM," so they said to themselves, "What if there were npo manuals." Nowadays young protogeeks don't even know what even RTFM means.
I can totally understand why we don't get nice printed manuals that ship in the box. They are expensive to print and quickly become outdated. It is often easier to read and online version. The real question is why there is rarely an up-to-date online manual to go with the product you buy. I have often bought something that has a few links on a postcard sized manual, but the online manual is the wrong model, has decades old information in it, or is so general that you can't find the answer to nearly any question. Nearly no one provides a current, useful manual online anymore either!!!
Therefore they don't HAVE to give you printed manuals.
I've had a number of small cameras with 30x lenses. Much better than a cell phone. Both Sony and Canon cameras used to come with a manual the size of the camera and thin. It fit in the camera casse. First, there was no 10 pages of "Do not drop the camera in toilet" junk. Second, they just showed a pic of the camera and then gave you the tree of features for each setting. Short and sweet. Usually about 40 pages. If ANY manufacturer had a small camera with a manual like that it would be my next buy. They don't exist (and I've really looked).
Why the manual and not the internet? I can circle things in the index. I can underline and mark the features I keep forgetting. I don't have to stand in a square in Montenegro, turn on my cell phone and search the internet to find the so-called manual (meaning a brochure of all the add-ons they are trying to sell you plus a long list of half-blank pages with WARNING! in size 4 type inserted by the legal team). I need the equivalent of a Linux cheat sheet.
A note for the Japanese companies making these wonderful but barely usable $300 cameras. There is a real business opportunity here....
Whats worse is the things that don't even have a link to PDF documentation, just a link to some shitty youtube video.
Couldn't agree more. We are lucky if there are even digital instructions at this point. Referring people to online resources, or expecting social media or the blogosphere to fill in gaps - this is unacceptable.
Why should a game developer pay for making a manual that many will ignore, when they can license the manual creation to Prima, who can charge them an inflated price for it? And include the walkthrough and database dump at the same time.
What - you don't want/need the collectors edition manual for your stove?
People keep saying the printed manuals are gone because "few people wanted to read them", or "that's what people want".
But IMO, we started running into a real problem where the people making a lot of the devices and software didn't have good enough writing skills to produce good manuals for them.
I remember really starting to see this in the late 90's and early 2000's, when the small computer reseller I worked for would receive products like new modems or I/O cards with instruction books that were really difficult to read, since they were very poor translations from Chinese. The fact we were building PCs from a bunch of components like this meant we really didn't HAVE a good set of instructions to bundle with the computers when we sold them. So we'd give customers a folder stuffed with all the little instruction sheets and the motherboard manual (which was usually the best manual of the bunch, though also questionable at times). Only the big name computer brands like Lenovo, Toshiba or HP could afford to hire people to write up decent instruction books to include. And most of those really weren't that helpful either. They wasted a lot of time with diagrams showing you where the lights, connection ports and switches or buttons were, plus any mandatory legal statements about things like FCC certifications and some really high-level overview of how to navigate a few things in Windows and any proprietary crapware they bundled on top of it. A far cry from the manuals the 1980's 8-bit era computers included, that taught you how to PROGRAM the thing.
Every corporate I.T. job I've had has included some technical writing as part of the user support I've had to do, and I see a lot of instructional stuff put together by various colleges and universities along the same lines, for students and staff. So really, manufacturers have been able to successfully "offload" expectations in that manner too. (Why write and bundle instructions to teach you the ins and outs of setting up email on your Android phone? Your school or employer has already spent money asking someone to make you one.)
Even as an advanced computer user now, with over 30 years of experience with the things? I still learn a lot of hidden tricks and tips for using whatever the latest operating system is on my machine when I watch the YouTube videos or read the enthusiast web sites that post about them. This stuff really SHOULD have been documented by the creators of the code. But these days, I think they just assume the knowledge gets disseminated by the Internet-using crowd, and some of the users enjoy the "Easter egg" element of surprise of discovering the stuff, even long after using the product.
Paper manual are environment-friendly, since they are a carbon sink. All the books in your library are made of carbon that is not in the atmosphere.
There are services that will print your pdf on book quality paper, bind it in any fashion you select, and ship it to you.
Intentionally left blank
Older software and equipment was feature rich and contained a certain bit of complexity. Now we have dumbed everything down to "push button, get prize". Everyone that speaks about how smart phones can replace computers don't realize what they are saying. Please write a 3D Figure Generator, an Office Suite, and a Photo Editor on your smartphone right now. I am thinking you can't do that, because your smart phone isn't that smart.
The machines we sell, use to come with printed manuals. After 5-6 years on lease, they would come back to us. 70% of the time, the plastic wrap was still on the manual. With the PDF version of the manuals, which come on a DVD, or downloaded online, they are searchable. Our repair manuals use to be printed, until the late 90's, then they switched to PDF, which I prefer over the printed one. I can edit, highlight, and most important, key word search them.
From what I understand, it's a major issue to update documentation. It's so much easier online where you can fix techical and speeling mistakes quicker.
As a member of the Society for Technical Communication ( https://www.stc.org/ ), I created very technical documentation. My company made software for people who create circuit boards (up to 16 layers thick). Software written by engineers for engineers.
Our users had to convert circuit diagrams into printed circuits that actually worked. Even with our software and our manuals there was an element of magic (this was 20 years ago). For instance 'noise' from one circuit interfering with another. We were in a perpetual update mode and the documentation was always a bit behind, but without it the software would have been useless.
OTOH, I'm a Mac user and since 1984 I've never needed a manual cuz 'it just works'. Even third party software is usually designed with Mac principles and it just works. Exceptions are Adobe, math and CAD programs which still require study to use effectively. Even MS Office can get beginners to a good start without a manual. And Windows itself is almost understandable having copied Mac OS rather closely.
Smartphones can be confusing in this early part of their evolution, but very soon standards will arrive and users will be able to move from one to another without having to relearn from scratch. Some old timers may recall the Model T and other early autos which came with many different configurations, levers, switches, gauges, doodads, etc; all now standardized. You don't need a manual to drive a Chevy or a Suzuki car.
...omphaloskepsis often...
When a manual is printed and shipped, you can never change it. If it's a file sitting on a web server, I can rev it ten times per day for virtually no cost. And you save a few bucks plus not kill a few trees.
Thanks to near ubiquitous internet access, both hardware and software have rapidly increased update cycles compared to "back in the day", many of which can affect the user interface.
In many cases, the manual will literally be outdated before it's finished printing.
On top of that the average user is much more at ease with various hardware and software, meaning many/most people don't bother with a manual anyway. Why waste the money? The cost for including a PDF, online knowledge base or how-to is next to nothing, especially compared to printing manuals.
Plus, online manuals have one major advantage over a paper copy: it takes literally seconds to find all mentions of a specific keyword across a 1,000 page PDF file -- good luck locating even a fraction of that info in a paper manual.
Not so many trees left, so paper prices rise and give rise to interest in alternative media. Online cloud offers much promise, but much complication as well.
Scientifically proven and awarded an Ig-Nobel prize - no-one reads the f***ing manual anyway:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-14/nobody-reads-the-instructions-ig-nobel-prize-study-shows/10242560
I like that you bring this up, as I found a great example with Osmand. Osmand is an Android application to view maps and maybe do other things, that doesn't
require the Internet or Google Play. Map data can be downloaded from the application, copyleft or such. Recommended!
Fine, I have a huge area of offline maps and this will serve me if I need to find a street (I don't know if my GPS works yet, I don't know how to use navigation and think I'd end up with a depleted battery and a bike accident but the map is so precise it shows parks and building outlines).
So, I want to add a location as a bookmark.
My map is roughly centered above it.
I open the menu, and then "bookmarks" [It is the general menu because it has the sandwich/burger/pancakes icon as seen in Google Chrome and Firefox!]
There's a screen that begs me to import data and shows an "import" button in the middle! Crap, I don't have any data to import! If I had any I'd want to export not import.
I fail to create my bookmark, so I give up. On second attempt I notice an icon bar on the bottom of this screen.
"Flag" icon : great, this means a bookmark! Oh crap, it doesn't do anything or anything good. I don't have any bookmarks yet afterall.
"Plus" icon : oh, this must mean it adds a bookmark. Nope! It doesn't add a bookmark and I don't remember what it does.
I gave up, but then I found out how to add a bookmark. I will not tell you, because I want you to find by yourself.
The software takes dozens megabytes by itself, and then you'll want some hundred megabytes for maps, contour lines, etc. Surely there would be room for a help file. Help file or manual may need to be updated? Both the application itself can download files, and it's hosted on at least two app stores/package managers which manage updates. Probably the help should be optional, and you would click a button to download it, done.
Also, drawing the maps seems slow, but the OS doesn't include a task manager to look at how the CPUs are loaded (or not loaded).
Dead-tree manuals are expensive to print, heavy to ship, often contain errors, and cannot be quickly updated when you change the device. Also, not searchable. AND most people don't read them. I used to WRITE them and I never read them.
A CD with a PDF of the manual is light and cheap, and is searchable. A line in the "Help" documentation that links to an online manual is lighter and cheaper, and the online manual is not only searchable but also updateable for errors or changes in the device.
Having always conected games killed the need for a manual. Once the DRM server is switched off, the game is unplayable and not ever worth collecting.
Having played around with an Atari and Commodore 64, I first got my hands on an IBM PC compatible in 1993 when I started at secondary school. Back then I was able to read the entire manuals for the 3 pieces of software installed on them over the course of a week or so: MSDOS, Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Works. Now I work in IT support. If I had a printed manual for Microsoft Windows 10, I would need to obtain a new one every time an update was released as the layout of Settings and other screens changes as features are removed and added. When repairing or servicing a clients computer, I often get asked how I keep up with all the changes. I explain to my clients that for me the industry is no longer about knowing the software inside and out (as I was able to achieve back in 1993). Instead, it has evolved into a research role - I have had to hone my research skills to locate the details for the specific piece of software I have been lumbered with fixing on that particular hour of the day. In the few hours I have been at a clients property, countless new pieces of software have been released online which I may be expected to now support.
I get that paper manuals are heavy and expensive to ship, while a download is cheap. I don't mind the e-manual.
However, the manuals for purchases seem to have become increasingly shallow. It's just a place to stick the ubiquitous CYA warnings and legalese ("Keep sharp tools out of children!" "Don't operate electrical appliance in the bathtub!"). Usage instructions are likewise so vague that it is more helpful to figure out the working of the device by trial and error.
Document writing is an art. It is hard to be concise, clear and at the same time comprehensive. Same goes for software development documentation, by the way - good thing Agile these days puts "face-to-face communication above documentation" (good? not).
I guess its the way things go...
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Equating the environmental concerns of the manual, which few people read, is not necessary at all for the function of the device, and can be obtained in alternative formats, with the actual device itself is just utterly stupid.
Instead look at the environmental cost benefit analysis of the printed manual vs the device itself. You'll find there's no good reason to send paper at all with any product.
Also technical writing. No manual, paper or PDF these days even remotely comes close to the resources at hand on the internet or a dedicated book on the topic. Why settle for second best? Before the days of the internet paper manuals made sense. These days most people don't even read the manual online but rather look for other ways to solve their problems.
For something that will barely change over a decade (like your VCR that you bought in the 80s), yes manuals would make sense, and some nerds (like us /.) were actually RTFM.
For a modern pieces of equipment, like s smartphone :
well, over the time the manual is written, translated, printed, and packaged into the box (should take the last couple of months of a product development cycle before shipping), the OS would have been going through several revisions, most of them changing its aspect (including changing drastically the menu structure).
And anyway, when you take the device out of the box, you would need to install ASAP some extra security patches, which might yet again change how the software looks like.
In other word, the device will look completely differently between back when the manual was first written and how it looks now.
In fact if you pay close attention, this *already* did start in the late 80s and during the 90s for products that did change a lot.
e.g.: motherboard BIOS.
Ever noticed that back then, each mobo manual fell compelled to also give a detailled explanation of all the BIOS Setup menus ? And how these never actually matched the one you see when you turned on the mobo ? and further upgrade flashes (to support more CPU and RAM variants, etc. fix last minute bugs in some controller, etc.) introduce yet more different options ?
10 years down the line, the mobo's manual is still relevant regarding hardware elements, like position of jumpers and connectors on the mobo.
at the moment of unboxing, the mobo's manual is already out of date regarding the BIOS.
Modern manufacturer have simply come to this realisation regarding devices that are mostly software driven.
That, and yes, most people don't indeed RTFM to begin with, so nowadays even a blender won't package a manual in.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Who on this great blue marble in the wide universe could possibly withstand 50 pages of Chinglish, Google translations of Chinese to English?
{O.O}
As a Sr. Tech Writer for over 35 years, I can tell you the answer is simple. Good documentation is very expensive in both writer time and engineering time. Its extremely difficult to sync new product delivery with finished documentation. To find out what to write, a tech writer spends a LOT of time with the engineers that designed and created the software and/or hardware. This ties up the engineers from being productive which has a high cost in delaying new product development. Then, often early prototypes or first run items must be diverted to the tech writer to work with, grab screen shots, photos, develop procedures, etc. Reviews and validation cycles are often skipped due to time constraints. A really good tech writer can only produce 10-15 pages of content per day. A major manual can easily exceed 300-400 pages, taking 5-8 weeks to produce. Given the rapid design, build, and release cycles today, there is little time for a decent manual to be produced. So, typically today, to be competitive, equipment is shipped with minimal "quick start" documentation and a reference to a web location for the real manual. Generally, the manual isn't posted until a few weeks after the initial equipment deployment, hopefully catching up just as the major sales start to hit.
If you create a product that has to be sold in many countries, you have to provide a manual in all those languages.
Your options:
1. You provide the manual for each language in every box. This gets expensive (lots of manuals to print, large/heavy box = higher shipping cost). Customers don't like getting a 900-page manual, of which only 50 pages are relevant to them.
2. You divide and conquer. Each language or group of languages gets its own box and manual. Now you have dozens of box designs and manuals to keep track of, each with their own part number etc.
3. Avoid the problem: stick a quick-reference guide with some pictures and a URL of the manual in the box. You get a small, light box and only one part number. And you get the ability to update the manual.
For consumer stuff a manual should rarely be necessary. But... I work in failure analysis of semiconductors. We have a lot of very expensive machines and not a single one has a proper manual. Neither online nor printed. I use a scanning transmission electron microscope, three years old, no manual. There are functions in the software even the service engineers have no clue about and no one can explain what they are there for. Correct adjustment? Troubleshooting in case of hardware failures? Some basic info, mostly written for an older and different microscope. We are talking about 3 mega euros for this tool We have gone through a few software upgrades for OBIRCH and PEM machines, used to find shorts or misbehaving transistors in ASICs. And there are several functions where we get differing infos from every one we ask at Hamamatsu. No manuals. 1.5 mega euros per tool. We run a few FIBs, focused ion beam tools, for circuit modification and nano milling of semiconductor chips. No manuals. There are options where we dont know at all how to use them. 1 to 3 mega euros per tool. I bought an AFM, atomic forrce microscope. No manual. Online manual is for a completely different software release. We are currently trying to give it back to the manufacturer as it is useless without detailed info about all the settings. Of course we get trainings for these tools. But this is no replacement for a proper manual. But the worst is, that no tool is bug free. Software that costs a several €10000 a year and it crashes again and again. There is no software for any of these tools which I cannot crash intentionally. And with each new machine it gets worse. All this crap is nowadays sold and bought by sales and purchasing people. Not engineers. Specs have to be met on paper, no one cares if it can't be used efficiently for the intended purpose by the people working with it. The days of Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard are gone, it is not surprising that Agilent and now Keysight are struggling.
Snidery aside, let's try to look at this somewhat seriously.
For example, fifty grams of paper times, say, two million boxes, is one hundred tons of paper. If virtually nobody reads them, that's close to one hundred tons of manufactured and delivered waste.
Multiply by a thousand products that, on average, used to come with that amount of extra paper, and we get a hundred kilotons of printed waste. Would that add just one percent of environmental wear, it's still a big pile of avoidable damage.
It is a fallacy to think that, because doing A causes much more harm, also doing B won't matter. It does. If someone got injured a hundred times, one more injury would still matter. Same here.
In this particular case, it is typically possible to download a PDF manual, likely more up to date, easier to search and easier to keep, as it is next to free to keep any number of backups, as opposed to carefully storing lots of paper.
As for the less than obvious features on an Android phone, the weight of just one comprehensive printed manual would be quite substantial. I'm looking at the (PDF) manual for just one (fairly complex) program right now. It's 1300+ pages. Even on thin paper in a small format, that manual alone would weigh well over a kilogram.
Put the PDFs on a smartphone or tablet and they will work just as fine even with no internet. Typically these devices works fine on couches too. One could also print the PDFs, should electronics not be an option. While print-on-demand might be hard to come by, beacuse print as such isn't in much demand any more, it's still likely someone has a good enough printer available for this pupose. Such printouts can typycally be kept neatly in binders, as opposed to the randomly sized booklets we used to get.
While printers, like, say, horse shoes or vinyl records, may get less common, there will likely be enough of them for those who wants them, for as long a future we can imagine.
We've thrown the baby out with the bathwater with respect to books. Sure we can ship badly formatted PDFs to customers and forget that as far as being able to visualize very complex information, a big book can be marked up, have coloured chapter markers down the side, and lets you 'map the content in your mind' as you flip pages.
For consumer products the Mac-ification of product design has been great. (Does anyone remember how crappy phone interfaces were before the iPhone was launched?) For enterprise-grade, technical products that may often require courses to operate, complex documentation sets are the rule and yes, paper books and posters are very helpful.
They are also bespoke. Getting nicely printed documentation actually makes you look like you are being serviced by a grown up company that is not afraid of organizing information and making things coherent rather than throwing 'good enough' where-do-I-click articles on-line and hoping that's good enough. Alternatively it can mean you're part of a regulated industry where things have to get written down or else...
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It you can't find how to use a device on youtube. Your screwed.
Everything is a platform for how ever you want to use it. If you need a manual, you donâ(TM)t get it and I donâ(TM)t care. Give me your money and leave already. NEXT!
I see a lot of partial answers in this thread, but I wanted to list some of the steps in preparing printed documentation of the quality we had in the 80s just to give an idea of the scope of the project. This is long, but not even comprehensive.
These things would all ideally be done for online documentation, whether HTML- or PDF-based. They're all expensive, which is a big reason we don't have 80s quality of documentation, even on the web. But there are other problems with printing:
Finally, there are cynical reasons for not providing high-quality documentation. An obvious one is support contracts. Whether by phone/email or on-site visit, the company can charge a lot of money to help you use their poorly documented product.
Or, just leave the users to their own devices. If your product is popular, the users will all jump on somewhere like Reddit and build their own documentation, some of them obsessively. Voila, free docs at zero cost.
Russia's fault.
As an avid reader of manuals, I have to concur with many of the comments already posted. Most people don't care about & never read a manual, regardless of which format it might be in. And companies don't print them because of cost. The only people who seem to care about this parlous state of affairs are you & me. And I suspect that neither of us cares enough to start a movement.
the 'fake' nobel prizes were handed out a few weeks ago, i think there was an mention of it on ./
one of the winners was that most people don't read manuals.
and that is the reason why you don't get one anymore.
i'm OK with downloadable pdf's anyway.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.