I agree with you that things should be repairable (hell, it’s a large part of why I own vintage synths!). I just think the market for devices like cell phones is tricky… you have people who always want the latest and greatest, and will pay whatever is necessary to have it. and you have people who will take whatever comes free with their plan, and couldn’t afford to repair it even if it’s possible to. the former people will buy phone insurance or just buy a new device if theirs breaks. the latter won’t buy insurance, and will live with a cracked screen for two years until their plan updates with a new device. and there’s a lot of people in the spectrum between those two extremes, of course.
now what that market would look like if all of those devices were easily repairable, I don’t know. but I do think it depends on device price/repairs as well as device function/features.
the farm equipment thing is based upon explicit vendor lock-in on firmware & diagnostic tools - ie. harvesters, sprayers & irrigators that are fundamentally networked or self-steering via positioning etc.
Its all about the ‘authorised service agent’ game.
In AU - the ‘right to repair’ push contains lots of small-business activism. ie that I can get a 3rd rate replacement screen in my iphone at some nation-wide repair chain at a low cost. That’s aside from any of the many desirable aspects to the R2R movement.
if this is the particular iPhone ‘scandal’ … there’s been so many, which is telling us something about ubiquity. Yet another situation of the corporate publicity overruling the engineering explanation:
In music gear, most/many devices are made with SMD parts, now. This is ok for me, as they are pretty reliable.
But: as most issues are caused by a bad power supply, it would be awesome, if all of these devices had fuses (or at least thru hole diodes instead of SMD protection diodes). This would make it way easier to repair.
I think mobile phones, tablets and laptops should be like gaming computers: modular and easy to fix and replace parts, even if you could not do it yourself without tools and knowledge you should be abled to go to a local repair shop to get them repaired for cheap, or even buy bulk parts online and have a professional replace them. It’s amazingly stupid how much goes to waste on the basis of being “more efficient”, which ultimately just means cutting manufacturing costs and increasing profits for the technology companies. Who actually don’t mind customers throwing their phones away every two years or when they break and buying new ones.
I imagine it’s like the Amazon metrics… milkiseconds shaved off a network request or a web page render makes the difference between 1-2% “conversions”. The difference is $10,000,000s at their scale.
Planned obsolescence is definitely one of the ways in which the world went wrong. Let’s hope low-carbon/green initiatives gathering steam (especially in Europe and parts of Asia) also help to end the idea that everything should be replaced every few years.
I’m skeptical, but would love to be wrong about it.
It’s meaningless in the sense that end users have broken tat lying around they can’t fix, and our collective environmental burden mounts. I agree; these are significant problems and are what the legislation hopes to tackle.
I think it’s worth understanding and discussing the drivers behind these “meaningless” decision. Firstly, to get people riled up against overbearing global behemoths, and secondly so as to inspect the problem points in the chain even before the manufacturing occurs. It goes back all the way to greed and mingles with power, status, ownership etc. We can use these observation to lobby, to shape our own purchases and even our own business plans.
I remember the days when one was buying eg. tv and it came with schematics and repair manual.
Another problem today is designed in failure point/time into every single product, be it a bulb or a car.
Their “expansion cards” idea is stupid. From what I can see, they’re all USB-C on the back. That’s “dongles” that fit inside the laptop body, making it bigger than it needs to be and creating a new “standard” where none was required.
Yeah, I’m not suggesting that PCMCIA is still fit for purpose in modern laptops. Just that expansions in the form of “dongles that fit inside the laptop body” is not a new idea.
It was the only brake it had!
