I don’t see the relevance.
Fair. I wasn’t very clear; and my mind does go on weird tangents. It was also a knee jerk reaction to your assertion that phones could last 10 years. I felt the hand-held nature of a phone compared with a console invalidated the comparison.
Behind that, tho’, was another idea… that the shape of phones has become ingrained in culture now. I think more reparable phones will likely need to be a bit thicker and heavier. Making them tougher (“10 years…”) will definitely require this. I think that leads towards changing market perception, and perhaps even slight shifts in usage and culture.
These changes are probably valuable, from an ecological perspective. Definitely from an “owning your own stuff” standpoint. By and large I’m in favour of companies taking on the responsibility of sorting out climate problems instead of leaving it up to individuals like they have been doing… but individuals will likely have to make some adjustments too… and phone culture is probably one of them.
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How does how you hold a device invalidate the comparison? You have handheld consoles that last for 10 years easy, 20 years even 30 years probably.
Hmm, why would they have to be thicker and heavier? And why would a a phone that was a few millimeters thicker, with maybe a slightly smaller screen be automatically worse than the trend now? I think it’s the companies who are driving phones to be slimmer with bigger screens, because as I already said they cannot offer us the one real thing handheld devices should really get better at: battery life. Also because selling us the same product every 2-3 years makes them mountains of money, instead of making long lasting phones that are easily repairable and thus much more ecological.
I want all this too.
But it’s not JUST on the companies. If it were, Fairphone would be where LG or similar are in the market, and every phone would have to compete on that level. Consumers also have to want the “good” option.
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I don’t think the world quite works like that. Marketing, supply chains etc. have a huge role in how successful a product can be. The biggest 5 companies hold 70% of the market. Fairphone isn’t available from most if any service providers, which is how a lot if not most people buy their phones. And I’m not even expecting every phone to be like Fairphone, I just expect to be abled to walk into a local repair shop and have my phone repaired easily and for a fair price. And have supply parts available to buy from retail shops or online.
The kind of hoops I had to jump through to get ios 14.7.1 on my old iphone SE are probably what contributes to a lot of people changing their iphone so often.
But I’m a stubborn fucker, so it works now.
Anything modular that’s not going to be more fragile is going to require protective shells and reliable interconnects around each layer that will inflate the size.
Now, this is not quite “repairing”, consumers will still not be able to repair the still to be garbage modules when they fail. It will not solve all the ecological concerns we have with cellphones, only improve some aspects of them.
Whether larger is a “bad” thing is up to the consumer. Whether consumers care about size as much as Apple is up to them.
I’m happy to hear that persons are buying the modular phones, but I think persons may believe they are more of a complete solution than they are in practice. I support the existence of them but there are still limits to the benefit they provide.
Again, phones can already be “repaired” with replacement components. I do so with iDevices and only iFixit guides. Modularization will create wholly unserviceable blocks of components to similarly be thrown out when you swap them, versus replacing the legitimately failed parts at a time.
I think it’s good for persons to be able to keep their phones longer, it’s just important to keep a realistic perspective on what right to repair means and how it’s a different sets of problems to tackle than modular phones or that forcing phones to be glorified lego bricks would not lead to similar concerns of obsolescence.
If I know corporations they way I think I do, right to repair will backfire.
Initial cost of devices will go up due to them having to make more individual parts available (which most likely wont be sold/used)
This in turn will make companies reduce costs on these parts
Companies will say “well since I dont sell as many devices, i might as well sell as many parts as possible, lets not bother making the parts last longer, just replaceable more often”
Im all for the right to repair. You have it already. But it seems they are working towards the model of “everything should be repairable by anybody”. Like everything is gonna be opensource.
I do believe there needs to be limits on it. Like not while the device is under warranty or while there is a patent (FRAND excluded). If you make a product and its patented and you automatically have to supply parts to anyone, chances of this being “Behringered” are pretty high.
No you don’t? That the point of the legistelation.
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No one is stopping you from opening up your devices and fixing them.
Amazing how no matter how draconian these companies get, theres always someone defending them.
No one is physically restraining me from fixing a device no, I think there are laws against that in place already. Companies like Apple and Microsoft are doing their very best to make fixing their products so hard and time consuming that people would just buy new ones.
There are certainly issues in warranty, DMCA concerns with firmware locks, surely you’ve owned a printer at some point with ink or toner…
I do think it’s useful to separate the “right to repair” movement with separate complaints about ease of repair, modularity, and the need for more “green” device designs and less e-waste.
I don’t think it’s necessarily “planned obsolescence” in all these cases, but I also welcome regulation that would improve specific aspects of serviceability (at least stuff like requiring OEM parts made available direct to the consumer.)
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Not sure if me saying “go repair your own device” is defending a company when that company doesn’t want you to do it.
3 members of my family needed new phones recently. (All had cracked screens and screen replacement was $450.00 AUD each, while new phones were only twice that on sale)…so rather than fix 4 year old devices for a stupid amount of money, we kinda felt new phones were the way forward. (All part of Samsung’s plan I’m sure)
Within one month my daughters phone started to expand and get very hot…! To the point where the case cracked open… We took it back to the store under warranty and were told that it would have to be shipped off to Samsung for assessment and repair or replacement…that was 2 months ago and we are still waiting.
There is no way in hell that Samsung are going to spend time trying to bang the frame back into shape, replace the battery and any other components that were exposed and maybe damaged…they are going to obviously replace it and move on…
The whole process from a logistics point of view is a complete environmental nightmare…! A. The unaffordable replacement parts causing constant upgrades to new devices…
B. The crappy quality parts to start with…
C. The worst thing however in my mind is the amount of carbon footprint left from all the jet fuel, i started to imagine the actual cost of the phone to arrive in Australia, be distributed by road (more carbon) then boxed back up, couriered back to the airport, back on a plane to Samsung, for them to ship it back or ship a replacement device…then tried to scale that by how many, expanded batteries, bricked units, screen replacements, etc… and it got frightening. And even if the units lasted the expected life it would be scrap in 3 or 4 years and it all starts over…
So i started to think, if the average life is 80 years, and we have a phone for 70 of those, a new phone every 3 years is about 23 phones each…now if you simply open the population counter on the internet and multiply that number by 23 it should scare the crap out you the amount of resources, chips, jet plane trips etc needed to fill the void for just one consumer product at the current population number…just one product…
Actually the scary part is opening the world population counter and watching that sucker endlessly, exponentially spin out of control…
Maybe humans are the most unrepairable gear…
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This will give you some insight into the agricultural side of the RTR movement. The machinery being discussed runs about $100-500k USD…a far cry from a laptop, phone or home appliance. Imagine pulling firmware off a warez site for a tractor worth more than your house.
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Sustainable energy has got almost nothing to do with diesel or cars.
It’s things like these which are the main problem: consuming crap products endlessly.
It’s all about greed and money. It was never about the environment. Even the “sustainable energy industry” doesn’t care about the environment.
This is what’s great about Elektron:
Units are easy to open and repair. + they give a three year warranty on their products. Regardless of who owns it.
No shady terms and conditions about not being the original owner and crap like that.
But you almost don’t need the warranty as these are fine products. Except for the battery handle thing apparently 
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This.
This is todays problem of The West.
You can drive green cars all day long. As long as stuff like this doesn’t change, the environment will continue to get worse
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I had to remove some of the wood paneling on my studio ceiling to access the casing of the electric roller blind that was broken.
I had to fix it myself because no professional would do it, especially because the paneling prevented any access to the casing… I cursed the “professional” that did that, especially because he started the laying on the casing, with a lot of glue: removing the panelling without breaking it was an awful moment.
Anyway, yesterday I finished putting the panelling back, and tried to have my children to leave their books and watch me doing it. After all, I learned to understand how things work by watching my father conceiving, building and fixing things.
Still nowadays when I want to do something like installing a water tank or building a pergola, I try to save it for a day he’s here, so that we share this moment. Nothing like sharing a beer after a day’s work together.
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I just replaced the kiuas (stove) and chimney in my summer cabin sauna with my stepdad. Two long days of hard work with cold beer each night after, sitting on the porch listening to some oldies tunes. It is great!
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It gets worse and worse for small items or entire sections of a house.
Becoming autonomous as much as possible for repairs is the only way to reduce pollution since the first criterion of repairability is now economic, even if it borders on the absurd …
And laws preventing making reparations hard or impossible must emerge.
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