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Is Repair As Important As Innovation? (economist.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: Events about making new things are ten a penny. Less common are events about keeping things as good as new. Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation. It is mostly noticed in its absence -- the tear in a shirt, the mould on a ceiling, the spluttering of an engine. Not long ago David Edgerton of Imperial College London, who also spoke at the festival, drove across the bridge in Genoa that collapsed in August, killing 43 people (pictured). 'We're encouraged to pride ourselves on all being innovators and entrepreneurs,' he said. Maintenance is often dismissed as mere drudgery. But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."
It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."
I'll bet there are in fact many prestigious and well funded events about repairing people
Nullius in verba
In Asimov's Empire books, when a society no longer recalls how to repair something, it is a sign of societal collapse.
I say no. Business analysts want clean revenue cycles. They like planned obsolescence. Or they build only a few spares, moving on, because the design said that only a fraction of people would complain that there are no spares/replacement parts/people trained to fix them.
This behavior, however, is praised by the corporate hegemony. They like clean numbers, campaigns, so they can shift quickly in a highly competitive world. The consumers get the shaft, and not very much justice from bad equipment. Quality counts, but so does the supply chain for post-sale equipment support. The general public isn't taught to look for post-sale support, only to buy the shiny new object with easy third party financing.
Most every laptop I buy these days croaks early. Looking at you, Apple, Lenovo, Asus. Disposable electronics is a bad concept. And that's what happens when you can't fix it or get it fixed (or for a reasonable cost).
To my fellow engineers that design short lifecycle drek: you're evil.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation
Maybe, but there's something pretty fantastic about something like this: Commodore 64 left outside for over a decade! Could it still work??
Looks to me like a false choice.
I'm a step further, I eliminated the need of throwing the junk away by not buying it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That was easy one.
If anything, it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable. If politicians put their money where their mouth is, making things repairable IS where "taking jobs home to the US" is.
That would take care of all the thinks currently done. First, repairing locally is cheaper than sending stuff halfway around the globe. Repair shops would pop up quickly where people with the skill to repair sell that skill to those that need it. It's also one of the best kinds of industries you can possibly have, because you're selling raw work force with a minimum of investment. This would be American as all hell, something where someone who has little money but lots of skill and talent can start a business. And it would instantly also take care of the postal bickering with China, because that is only a problem because sending stuff from China to the US is cheap and nothing moves the other way. China would either have to accept that fewer things get shipped over here, because the stuff isn't thrown away but repaired, or they have to accept that they, too, have to uphold their part of the deal and deliver the returns for free, too. Which they won't.
So if our politicians really were about getting jobs back, they wouldn't try to bribe large corporations into building plants here. All they really had to do is to force them to make their shit repairable. But, of course, where's the kickback in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a lot of assumptions, too. If it's cheaper to make something that lasts 10 years and then gets replaced, then do that.
Think of it this way: humans build machines, produce electricity and energy storage, mine and recycle materials, refine things, build components, assemble products, and ship and retail them. That's a lot of human labor, and it's reflected in the price of products--yeah, it's not that the mining equipment is expensive, but that the labor to create it, maintain it, and fuel it is expensive.
Your $20 toaster comes down to a grand total of $20 of human labor. At Chinese $3/hr rates, that's around 7 hours. Troubleshooting the electrical circuit when it fails can be costly: maybe it's some internal module which is 80% of the toaster anyway, and your repair tech spends an hour swapping it out, and it costs you $30 to repair. For that matter, maybe it's just a blown MOSFET, and your repair tech spends an hour disassembling the device, and another 3 hours troubleshooting it, and then 10 minutes replacing the MOSFET itself. You might be ahead on labor, but the labor-hours are priced high.
Assembling a computer motherboard doesn't take much in terms of labor-hours. Once you've set up the assembly line, it's fairly rapid. The motherboard is extremely-complex and takes potentially days to troubleshoot, meaning there's more human labor in repairing it than in replacing it.
At a point, you've reached the break-over: it's a waste of time to repair this. Maybe you're poor and you can spend 4 hours repairing your $20 iron, at $10/hr, when you could work 4 hours for $15/hr--if only you had work. It's still a waste of time; you're just poor.
At that point, the economics of reuse have passed. You've got electronics waste, and you should send it for recycling. We readily smelt chips for silicon and gold. Copper, plastic, and aluminum are valuable.
You're going to spend $2,400 on high-quality oil changes for your engine, and another $100 on spark plugs, every 100,000 miles. You might spend $800 for an engine rebuild around 200k-300k. If you don't maintain that engine, you're spending $6,000 for a remanufactured engine swap somewhere around the 80,000-100,000 mark, if not closer to the 50,000 mark. Which is cheaper?
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On a lot of things. One of those things is a side-effect of the rate of change of computer systems.
Sure, my Tandy 2000 from 30 (or so) years back should be repairable. But that would require that the maker continue making parts for 30 or so years. Which would make sense if nothing much had changed in 30 or so years.
Alas, a smartphone today has more computing power than my Tandy 2000 did. Making parts for the Tandy 2000 today makes about as much sense as making parts for a stagecoach does.
As is, for the most part, spare parts are made as long as it's profitable to do so. And no, the fact that seventeen people in Maryland want to be able to repair their Tandy 2000's doesn't mean that it's worth the bother of maintaining archaic machine tools, training operators for same, and distributing parts to stores for display on strictly limited shelf-space....
Of course, there are other considerations sometimes. For instance, pollution control laws exist. Allowing the owner of a vehicle to bypass the pollution controls on his vehicle (or just to muck them up by accident) is generally considered a bad thing.
And on and on.
Short form: yes, you should be able to repair your stuff. Except when you shouldn't....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
That's usually a result of shitty design. Designing something so that it can be repaired easily costs money and is (usually) more difficult so unsurprisingly people/companies prefer not to bother if they don't have to. If something is difficult to repair it is usually because they didn't adequately consider repair during the design of the product. Once in a while you run into a product that is made intentionally hard to repair (Apple I'm looking at you) but most of the time it's just benign neglect and/or economics.
I was wondering the same, what do they have to do with each other at all?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Innovation" is not making new things--that would be "invention". Innovation is bringing things to market that weren't available before.
Innovation can be as simple as offering the same car, but with financing that wasn't available before. Simple change, "innovation". (Peter Drucker, the late management writer, gives this exact example involving cars. Make of that what you will.)
Repair hasn't been a credible option in a long time for a lot of things. Make repair affordably available, and you're innovating.
As repair encompasses the ability to update out of stock and/or out of date units. Innovation isn't contained to wholly new things but also in repurposing and updating the still functional.
Silly business paper.
with all these philosophical dissertations.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Maybe we could tear all the dollars we donate in half then see if their interest in repairing them goes up?
Would you rather repair a politician or throw one out?
Unfortunately, the comparison is between repairing a politician and getting a new one.
I'm not sure there's an upside.
- The Sigless Wonder
But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them
Most people don't have a clue how to repair anything lets take your average mechanic. How many times have you had your car fixed only to have the problem return soon afterwards. Of course when the school dropout goes to mechanics class he is taught a few things however most lack investigative thinking. you walk in say you hear a rattle. after several hours (they said it took them that long) they found a bolt that was loose and tightened it. Very few of them question how or what caused the bolt to get loose. Of course the cause makes the bolt go loose or something else to fail, lather, rinse, repeat, and now your car is designated a lemon.
I find this too common across any kind of repair they fix the symptom not the cause
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
You're going to spend $2,400 on high-quality oil changes for your engine, and another $100 on spark plugs, every 100,000 miles. You might spend $800 for an engine rebuild around 200k-300k. If you don't maintain that engine, you're spending $6,000 for a remanufactured engine swap somewhere around the 80,000-100,000 mark, if not closer to the 50,000 mark. Which is cheaper?
You must buy dome awesome spark plugs.
And you raise one interesting aspect that is true.
There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
When do we become technological Amish?
The right to repair concept includes a decision process enforced by law that will force interesting things like a return to discrete components, highly accessible design, and the death of a lot of the innovation we take for granted today. I could envision a future of olde school tube based technology. That stuff was easy to repair.
Imagine, a hollow state smartphone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This was discussed on the Freakonomics podcast several years ago - In Praise of Maintenance. He had been doing a series on innovation and then did a counterpoint on how maybe maintenance was as much if not more important than innovation. It's a good podcast and goes into more detail than the short Economist piece.
There really needs to be both. We tend to get caught up in Consumer Technology and how hard it it is to repair. This is akin to the ancient pottery shards, archeologist dig up. Our ancient ancestors rich or poor. Probably had acquired some pottery, then it broke, from a fall, or just from a lot of use. In theory they could repair them, but after it became unusable they got themselves a new one. Because the cost of getting/making a new one is less then trying to repair it.
However for these same people clothing may be mended and stitched back together, while it is also a consumer product it was easy to fix and and historically textiles were expensive to produce until the industrial revolution.
Now to consumer technology the problem we have is often the cheaper stuff is easier to repair then the more expensive stuff. This is mostly due to size. Cheaper electronics are bigger, thus allowing room for us to get our hands in it and replace faulty parts. More expensive stuff currently is small and thing, and mostly all embedded with a very low margin of error to get it to fix.
But I think the real point, is we should make sure we are wise on what to fix and what to replace. When do you just fill a pothole vs repaving a road, What is the environmental cost or refurbishing an old building vs. knocking it down and building a green one.
Part of the reason why colleges are so expensive is that they are always building new buildings, while their current classrooms are only 20% utilized. Why not just refurbish the rooms? Because it is tough to get funding to fix up rooms as that is just boring. However to get a new building with some rich doners name on it, is much easier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm a step behind, I still need to buy a trashcan.
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of the not so ancient past could be repaired. It was not always easy - a set for repairing a diesel engine or its fuel pump could cost quite nice sum of money and require some feeling in the fingers as well as knowledge. The company that produced the machine could have ceased to exist and yet the repair was still possible by getting the spare parts from the junkyard. The modern car of today electric or ICE have computers on board which if secured from malware may be impossible to fix if company producing them did not leave the code open and even then the cost of fixing the bug in a sw of an ancient car make repairs probably not feasible. This is a problem because almost each part has now some sort of SW identity with which it communicates with other parts or with central unit. That leaves car repair where exactly? Add to this that SW running diagnostic may not be able to identify the fault properly - the result is very expensive exchange of parts by try and error. How do you maintain SW in all the gadgets in your house that have IP address? How do you know nothing possessing a camera (light bulb in the ceiling or vibrator) has not been hijacked and and sending photos of yourself eating tv dinner half naked in front of a TV sent to youtube for perverts to enjoy.
Company I work for produces industrial SW - maintenance group has been outsourced to India with fixed yearly cost. What do you think happens then after the cap has been reached in May or even April due to lousy design practice? I talked with customer representative lately and they were not annoyed just mildly disgusted.
Me: Canada, woo-hoo!
You: Don't you want to know what numbers they're talking abo -
Me: Nope! Canada is number one! Woo-hoo!
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Know and learn from history, shape and innovate the future standing on the shoulders of giants ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But think of the fun when you have one on the operating table! âoeNow, Senator, next week, we will ask your constituents to choose between Marvin The Heart Surgeon and Bobo The Deranged Clown for your triple bypass. Would you care to change your vote on the net neutrality bill being voted on this afternoon?â
Yeah but one is more important than the other.
"Enjoy your food is this vacuum chamber, moron!
I'm outside with plenty of air so I'm going to starve to death in a few weeks instead of seconds!"
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All this is nice and correct, except it only take labor costs into account. Mining raw materials and throwing waste are not zero-cost. They cause a big impact, but economists, specially those promoting free market, prefer to ignore it.
Products(and other things) evolve fastest if you can just replace the old ones. That's not just the case for living beings. It's a high-metabolic process, very wasteful but it allows to adapt quickly. Once you start to recycle and repair it slows down product evolution. Not just of the things you use longer but of all things connected to it somehow in higher orders.
We live in the anthropocene. We have large impact on many aspects of the planet and that includes the climate. You can disagree about how damaging and how large the impact is but it's possible to agree on the fact that the rough scale of the impact is now such that you have to take it in account. It can no longer be neglected. So we have to start paying attention to our ecological and economical footprint. Reusing, repairing and recycling is part of that.
A century ago, technology was sustained by repair. This kept economies diversified and distributed. But predatory financial interests realized that centrally controlling production and distribution was more profitable to their schemes of empire. They saw they could reduce payrolls while ensuring the costly material and economic thrash they use to manipulate the economy, and economic bubbles, to their gain. So, here we are.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong.
Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one.
If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
preserve the environment
I wonder how much environment I've saved by keeping a couple of 40 year old cars on the road.
Have gnu, will travel.
Where are you seeing exclusivity? I see "is A as important as B? Because right now B gets all the attention"
That's the diametric opposite of a mutually exclusive statement.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think we're already headed that way. Most people change their computers a lot less than in the early days of home computing. Even tablets sales have been slowing down and people don't feel the need to buy a new one. The closer we get to "peak computing capacity per watt", the more the need to upgrade goes down.
My main computer is a Mac mini released in 2010. I "repaired" it three times by upgrading the RAM, swapping the HDD by a low-end SSD and replacing the fan.
Two decades ago, the top new games required a PC no more than one or two years old to run properly.
Today, people are playing the latest games on PCs they built five years ago or more. If you lower the quality settings, you can run games with PCs built a decade ago.
Most PCs can be upgraded which is a similar to being able to repair it. Need more RAM? Add RAM. No room for more RAM? Remove old RAM and add new higher capacity RAM. New game requires a better GPU? Remove the old one and install a new one. That's a kind of repair, removing old "non-working" parts to install a brand new ones.
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(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?! The primary reason these days that things are becoming increasingly difficult to repair, is further integration and minimization. While in some very specific cases (I'm thinking about batteries or exposed/vulnerable parts like cameras and screens), it may make sense to be able to repair things, in general it does not make sense; repairability makes things more expensive to make, it makes parts larger and therefore it requires more materials and thus is bad for the environment.
If we're going to enforce anything, let's do it specifically for things that make sense. But enforcing that "things" have to be "repairable" would not be in anybody's advantage.
0x or or snor perron?!
That's because the phone is not designed to be repairable. There's usually 3-4 major chips in a cell phone, and there's absolutely no reason those chips couldn't be socketed rather than soldered. The device is already inherently modular, it's only the *choice* of interconnections that makes it monolithic and difficult to repair.
Yeah, at some point it stops making sense to make things more modular - your phone probably has RAM,CPU, and video all integrated into the same $5 chip, and it would drastically increase the cost to manufacture them separately. But the camera, circuit board, flash storage, screen, case, etc. are all manufactured as separate modules, and it would only increase the overall cost slightly to *keep* them as separate modules that could be easily replaced individually.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
Hey look, I'm rich; I can spend $50,000 on a brand new car, and in 5 years I'll buy another one.
You lot don't get that luxury. You can buy my nice, shiny Audi S5 for $12,000 when it's 10 years old and have a nice car with 70,000 miles on it. That's efficient. Your econoshitbox of today isn't on-par with a nice Audi luxury car from last decade.
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Repair's importance relative to innovation's importance is irrelevant unless they're mutually exclusive concepts-- which they're not. One can enhance/improve/maintain device repairability while furthering technological development. Repairability is simply be a constraint like weight, power consumption, dimensions, water resistance, etc. All of those factors are important and part of design. In certain applications, you may need to focus more on power consumption than maintaining water tightness, but for mass-market electronics, you need a healthy dose of each factor.
I don't think a repair economy would work. How much of a $50 item would you pay to repair it? How much would you charge to repair stuff? Would that be enough to live off of and also provide value back to the repaired item? Even if you were to assume the part acquisition cost was close to the original raw part cost and ignored all the inventory holding costs in the supply chain, just labor wise, it would still be expensive.
Each part would have its own supply chain linkup (of course most would be shared with the whole product). So there would be multiple supply chain links for the same product; which lowers predictability. The labor units in all those links also have a cost. The defect rate within those links would actually increase the cumulative defect rate & cost of the repaired product. Then there is a forecasting of the demands of various parts. In today's tech, you would actually end up with more waste. But lets assume we have the Walmart logistics system of 2050 and those are all automated and highly reliable and forecasting of parts requirements is better or equal to just the product.
An economy that has high labor cost like US, doesn't mean people just cost more. It also means that people must produce more too. Either through automation, or specialized skills (ie: a forklift driver costs more than 50 people in around country, but produces more results). Repair positions need to bring in enough revenue to sustain the "average lifestyle" of that community. Unless we have double digit unemployment where that average is low enough; a repair position just won't be worth it.
Example: for a $25000 car, you don't need to do your own oil change. There is a sustainable industry for that, and it wouldn't exist if that is all they did. It is actually subsidized by all the other services that shop provides. But for your $250 lawn mower, there is no industry to replace the oil. Even for the expensive car, there is no workforce to pump fuel. Because the revenue for those services will be less than the societal necessitated labor cost.
I am not saying a repair system won't work or we shouldn't encourage it. We all change our own vacuum bags, residential air filters, usb cables, AA batteries, etc. So if the product was built to be easily repaired many would use their own "free labor" to do so. I just don't think it would sustain a segment of commerce and solve the labor problems in our society. Or the labor problem will go away, but societal advancement would take a hit.
BTW, there are LARGE parts of our economy that are repair based. Big equipment like AC Units, farm/mining/construction/industrial machines, hospital systems, airplanes, ships, cars, etc. But these are all big ticket items and we are talking about more commodity level stuff here... like your laptop, cell phone, water bottles, microwaves, furniture, toaster, milk/juice/egg cartons, etc. And these are actually repaired and/or reused in more developing economies.
My main computer is a Mac mini released in 2010. I "repaired" it three times by upgrading the RAM, swapping the HDD by a low-end SSD and replacing the fan.
You lucky bastard! I can't do that on my new Mac :*(
How many years do you design it to be repairable for?
That's a decision that has to be made and there will be trade offs as a result both in economics and performance. I did not argue that everything should be made as easy to repair as possible so you are putting up something of a strawman here. I merely pointed out that repairability is almost always a function of product design and that many companies these days are electing to design products that are hard to repair because it is in their (usually short term) financial interest to do so even when it negatively impacts society and their customers and sometimes themselves in the long run.
It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma problem. Companies want the cheapest product and so do customers even though a company might get a better reputation and customers might get a better product if both were willing to sacrifice a little money in the short run for a better long term outcome.
There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
Hey look, I'm rich; I can spend $50,000 on a brand new car, and in 5 years I'll buy another one.
You lot don't get that luxury. You can buy my nice, shiny Audi S5 for $12,000 when it's 10 years old and have a nice car with 70,000 miles on it. That's efficient. Your econoshitbox of today isn't on-par with a nice Audi luxury car from last decade.
Audi S5? That is so cute.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is an old joke about software. "Do you know why God was able to create the world in seven days? He didn't have an installed user base."
For software, maintenance is usually harder than writing new code. I assume that is also true for most products. I also agree that we need to spend more money on maintenance, especially on infrastructure. The infrastructure in the U.S. is in a deplorable state.
How is glueing in the battery so you can't replace it "Innovation"?
That is like making a car with epoxy tire attachment.
Tires are bald time to throw away the whole damn car!
And I'm scared to the bones about what Apple is going to unveil on the 30th.
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The lack of the ability to repair is a tragedy of the commons. People are willing to pay more for a sealed phone at the expense of the environment when they throw it away. The commons is the environment that nobody owns but everyone benefits from. This is exactly the sort of thing that regulation is for.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
then who is Darth bobo?
There would obviously be "things" that are simply not repairable, such as smaller components, like ICs, of some larger "thing". The point is making the larger "thing" repairable by being able to replace its non-repairable components, like ICs, rather than having to discard the entire larger "thing" when it breaks.
But where do draw the line between "repairable" and "non-repairable"?
An iPad has some repairable components and some non-repairable components. The glass, chassis, and battery are replaceable, and if you break one of those components you may currently have them replaced by Apple or a local vendor of your choice.
All the other major components are embedded into a small PCB with a few chips doing everything. If one of chips cracks or burns out, the most expensive part of the iPad is toast. The PCB cannot be unsoldered and repaired for a reasonable cost, you may as well buy a new iPad.
As the GP pointed out in a general sense, redesigning an iPad to be more repairable than it already is would quickly balloon the chassis into a small form-factor PC -- you've lost your ergonomic tablet to the repairability cause -- as well as making it radically more expensive.
Taken to the illogical extreme, if we declare that SoC's and IC's are not allowed because they're not "repairable" we'll have to go back to room-sized computers that require dedicated power plants to operate.
More importantly, how do you draw such a line? A blanket rule via legislation isn't feasible because it cannot take varying technologies into account over time; an agency to determine the RP (repairability quotient) of every new product would be a slow process that radically hampers innovation while driving up costs due to product redesigns required to fit the RP; a promise by companies is worth the paper it's printed on.
So how do we determine and enforce the repairability quotient of our consumer products?
In a Perfect World, that'd be the way to go, and it'd happen. However notice that most politicians benefit from those companies making as much profit as possible, and one way to do that is to keep people buying your products, and one way to do that is through planned obsolescence -- and making products impossible to repair, or creating practical and legal barriers to repairing them.
Electronics are freakishly reliable. They basically never fail.
Wrong.
Even ignoring sloppy manufacturing and using them outside of their rated environments, electronics DO wear out with lots of use or lots of heating/cooling cycles or which is exposed to too much heat too quickly. Anything with a motor in it will wear out, including hard drives and fans.
Many a consumer-grade PC has died an early death due to mains electricity that, while clean enough for most consumers to not notice, is not as clean as the manufacturer expected. What would have lasted 10 or 20 years may last only 3/4 or half that time. Bad mains electricity can wear out a power supply and after several years, the power supply is delivering "not quite on spec" power to the motherboard and other equipment, and after a few years of that, those components become unreliable or just plain die.
I will credit you for asking the important questions about a hot or dusty environment or about not using a UPS. However, these days most consumers and many businesses don't use UPSes on non-server/non-infrastructure equipment and they may run them routinely in a home or office that, over time, is exposed to dust. Manufacturers know this, or at least they should, and they should be building things accordingly. When they don't, it's fair to complain.
I don't expect consumer/small-business-grade equipment to be the same spec or same price as enterprise or mil-spec equipment, but I do expect it to run for many, many years in a typical home or office. In some cases, home/small office equipment has to have BETTER specs than enteprise-grade equipment because you can expect or even demand (as a condition of your support contract or warranty) that enterprise-grade equipment to be on a UPS in a climate-controlled environment, but you can't expect the same for consumer- and home-office equipment.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I wonder how much environment I've saved by keeping a couple of 40 year old cars on the road.
Depends on the car and how much you drive it. The 1973 Honda Civic got 27 MPG. Today's gets in the mid-30s.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First, repairing locally is cheaper than sending stuff halfway around the globe. Repair shops would pop up quickly where people with the skill to repair sell that skill to those that need it.
Depends entirely on what's being repaired. Let's imagine I want to open a repair shop in San Francisco. To pay the shop's rent, taxes, utilities, a salary for myself and everything else I discover I need to charge $150 / hour + parts.
So someone brings in a TV for repair with a power supply problem, and you tell them the cost for the repair (labor and parts) will be $200. Most people will just say "never mind, I'll just go buy a new TV.:"
Why were there TV repair men in 1968? Because a 23" color TV cost $2500 in today's dollars. Back then it was cheaper to repair it.
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1968-A...
I remember that, and I thought it was darth. but that was based on hearing it.
An individual IC might not be "repairable" in any meaningful way, but there are also very few modes of failure where a literal single IC fails independently of nearly everything around it. Unlike, say, the screen on a phone, tablet, or laptop (which can break, suffer cable or interconnect failure, etc), batteries (which can, do, and are 100% EXPECTED to degrade over time), mechanical switches & fans, anything directly exposed to 100-240v AC or involving electrolytic capacitors, etc.
If a vendor wants to use a proprietary, purpose-built part... fine. As long as they publicly document enough of it to enable a comparably-sophisticated manufacturer to make compatible second-source replacement parts, with straightforward FRAND licensing terms. Maybe even require vendors to disclose itemized BOM costs per production run (registered with the department of Commerce, or its equivalent in China or wherever) & give statutory immunity from infringement lawsuits if a company manufactures & sells replacement parts when the original vendor either can't, won't, or charges more that 400% of its own BOM cost and/or unreasonably restricts availability.
A good start would be to look at laws passed in the 1960s & 70s to fight the auto industry's abuses... and the ways the auto industry initially tried to skirt them before largely settling down into the new regulatory regime. The electronics industry isn't identical to the auto industry... but it's not all that DIFFERENT from it, either. 98% of the issues consumers have now were issues faced by US car buyers in the past -- complex supply chains, proprietary parts, vendors seeking lock-in, restrictions on repair, and all. Regulations didn't solve 100% of the problems... but they DID fix the most egregious 90% pretty quickly, and the next 9% within a decade or so. And today, even automakers like Tesla (probably the most proprietary car in existence today) have made peace (or at least ambivalent detente) with third-party repair shops.
In point of fact, while pin-counts for, e.g. standalone CPUs are often quite high, most of those pins are usually for the memory bus, something that is internalized in the same SoC package in most consumer modern electronics. The remaining pins are generally used to interface with electronics orders of magnitude slower - high-def video feeds being the primary exception. Modem? Audio? That stuff's positively glacial in comparison. Even video isn't actually much trouble - it gets transmitted through pressure-pad HDMI sockets all the time. And of course it's usually a tradeoff - lots of pins for parallel interfaces, OR a few, high-speed pins for serial interfaces.
There's not even any reason solder would be a major problem - a soldering iron is a standard part of every appliance repair guy's arsenal - a reflow oven would be just another minor business expense. The circuit board just has to be laid out so that it's easy to replace the components in question. And perhaps more importantly, easy to determine what needs to be replaced.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"I think we're already headed that way. Most people change their computers a lot less than in the early days of home computing."
I dunno. Other than this year or next year's games, I can't think of much that can't be done on a 5 year old machine. Sure, add some RAM, maybe swap in a bigger or faster hard drive or go SSD, but I think what has driven consumer average non-geek computer purchases have iether been hardware failure, a new OS is released, or a new CPU is released.
In the past 5 years though the capabilities of CPUs have been stagnant from a "email and facebook" users point of view. The new Windows was helpfully installed overnight for you, so you didn't need to go buy a computer with it installed. So aside from breakage, why spend the few hundred dollars?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
How could you make the next thing without knowing the current thing?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Does the term "spare parts" mean anything to you? By your logic, I can't repair my car because I cannot repair my oil filter but have to replace it when it fails.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We certainly won't get a repair economy for dollar-shop items. But it is by far not dollar-store items anymore that are the only thing that cannot be repaired. We carry around electronic gadgets costing hundreds to thousands of USD constantly, with the constant danger of breaking due to accidents and neglect. And facing the choice between having it repaired for 100 or buying a new one for 1000, you're looking at an industry waiting to start.
All that's needed is that this phone can be repaired. And not just by some "genius" (I use that term loosely here), who knows jack shit about the phone anyway, and certainly less than the Pakistani at the corner who could probably repair it better, faster and with less chance of an error because he fucking knows what he's doing, but can't because only the "genius" gets the tools to actually perform the shoddy repair he will then do, staying in business for the only reason that he holds a monopoly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, we're getting back to this level with our cell phones, so...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Taken to the illogical extreme, if we declare that SoC's and IC's are not allowed because they're not "repairable" we'll have to go back to room-sized computers that require dedicated power plants to operate.
How about this:
Manufacturer has to publish the service manual for the device, available to anyone who has bought said device.
Manufacturer has to sell custom parts for the device (parts that cannot be bought from another store, including programmed microcontrollers if you do not want to publish the firmware) for at least 10 years after release of the device.
If one of chips cracks or burns out, the most expensive part of the iPad is toast. The PCB cannot be unsoldered and repaired for a reasonable cost, you may as well buy a new iPad.
It depends, even BGA chips can be replaced by someone who knows what he's doing and has the right equipment.
Is the IC something I can go and buy at an electronics store, like a capacitor? No problem then.
If the IC is something that cannot be bought in a store, for example, a microcontroller with firmware, then the manufacturer should be forced to sell them to anyone who has bought the complete product. The manufacturer should also be forced to make service manuals available to anyone who has bought that product.
But if the product then lasts much longer, then it is better for the environment. If a cell phone can be made to last 10 years, it would affect the environment less than a cheaper cellphone that lasts 2 years.
How much of a $50 item would you pay to repair it?
Depends on what's broken, probably $25.
I have actually repaired a couple of broken PC power supplies where I paid about the same for the new parts as I did for the PSU itself. The reason is that now the PSU has a fan with ball bearings and proper capacitors.A PSU like that would cost more compared to the original or the cost of the new parts.
I have noticed a consumer mindset in some people though. "My $x is broken, it would cost $40 to repair it, I might as well add $300 more and buy a new one for $340".
I'd say $49.95 to repair would work for many. The point of fixing is the convenience because you don't have to learn the newer model and get to keep what you're familiar with, plus the huge benefit of not dumping stuff into landfill (not directly seen by consumers trained to not noticethis).
But practically, 10% of the price is quite reasonable. It was not that long ago that the television repair shop was common. Similar for major appliances. The costs of a new model might not be terribly high but was also balanced with the cost of repair being even cheaper. If you just wanted to throw an appliance item away, you could NOT just place it in trash but would often have to pay a fee at the dump. There was also a common attitude that quality products should last and that being thrifty was a virtue; whereas today too many people assume that you things break often and being thrift is something only old people do. Remember, we used to "repair" clothing too.
Also, not everywhere was San Francisco, and that place is an anomaly. In the past a town might have a rich section, a middle class section, and a poor section, and setting up a repair shop in the poor section would get you customers from the entire town. Also the television or appliance repair person would have a van and would be able to drive all over the place to fix things.
People were also much less wasteful in the past. Possibly because we had generations that remembered the depression or the rationing from wars, or possibly we just have a new generation of people who don't care about anything older than a few months.
Even today a coworker was thinking about the new iPhone, and with high paying job and a highly paid lawyer spouse, the cost of the new iPhone still felt like too much money to spend...
If we throw out the politicians, will they stick around stinking up the dump and seeping into the water table?
The real issue is that for most people, health care is paid for either by employers or by medicare if you're retired. Everyone else in comparison is an outlier, and yet that's where all the political angst is.
If your employer paid for DMV services in the same way that they pay for health care, it wouldn't necessarily get better. We might be on the phone on hold for 8 hours instead of standing in line for 8 hours, and when we got a person on the other end of the phone it would be someone outsourced in a differen country. Private services have not yet proven themselves better than public services.
Component size has nothing to do with this; it's about component integration. Repairability requires components that can be replaced independently from each other. ICs are the primary example of grouping components. A reasonable level of repairability requires limiting integration of components and often even requires the introduction of mechanical connectors over plain old soldering or glue. I think considering ICs different is super arbitrary; they're just components effectively glued together for economic reasons, just like most solutions that negatively affect repairability. Why would ICs be ok but would we complain about other integrated components just because they happen to be large enough to be visible to the naked eye? Component size is a super arbitrary criterium AFAIC.
0x or or snor perron?!
The automobile industry has elevated non-repairability to an art form, and for most parts, in a good way.
We don't want our cars to break, and we don't want to perform unnecessary maintenance. It is downtime, and downtime is bad. We also want to pay a reasonable price and have good performance.
Cars are full of moving parts, making them last forever is impossible, at least not without ridiculously heavy and expensive over-engineering. So the solution is to set an expected lifetime (250000km is typical for personal cars) and make sure that everything fails at the same time. It it fails earlier, make it stronger, if it fails later, make it lighter/cheaper. The result is car that are not repairable, because there is nothing left to repair.
I worked in aeronautics and while aircraft are much more maintainable than cars, there is still this idea of: that part will last forever, it is bad, let's make it weaker and save weight.
Deliberately making things hard to repair is bad, but good engineering should make it so that there is no need for repair.
They'd just reduce the amount of information in the service manual, and obstrucate it through tricks like referring to common components by internal part numbers. The real service information wouldn't be in the manual, it'd be in a collection of internal memos.
(...) it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable (...)
With rules like that, it would have been quite difficult to introduce the IC. How do you repair an IC?!
The old standard in service documentation was to use "A" for repairable assemblies which included printed circuit boards. These days I would not consider printed circuit boards with the higher density surface mount parts to be repairable so they would just need to be replaced. Wire bonded hybrids are easier to repair with the proper equipment.
However many failures, especially in consumer devices, involve power supplies (and batteries) which tend to be very repairable or at least replaceable if suitable service documentation is provided.
the most innovating products were always easy to repair.
look at cars that made a difference, for example the citroen 2cv & vw beetle/golf; they were easy to take apart and repair.
the first (apple) computers basically were build your own and thus easy to repair.
if innovation makes your product hard to repair, it will be a pain to build upon for the future as well as the complexity makes it difficult or at least very expensive to advance the technology used within.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
People were also much less wasteful in the past.
In most cases it's not about being "wasteful." It's purely an economic consideration. People aren't going to pay $250 to fix a vacuum cleaner worth $300. If the cleaner's worth $1000, then yes, the $250 is worth spending.
What about $15 to replace the battery on a $1000 phone that doesn't have a removable battery? That's a bigger issue for me. A vacuum cleaner will easily last a couple of decades, but people are throwing away phones that should be repairable.
per wikipedia:
The car could achieve 40 mpgUS (5.9 L/100 km; 48 mpgimp) on the highway, and with a small 86.6-inch (2,200 mm) wheelbase and 139.8-inch (3,550 mm) overall length, the vehicle weighed 1,500 pounds (680 kg).