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EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

eubusiness.com

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Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#91

Post by Shivetya »

Some of their proposals are just the product of people who have no concept of how technology works. Hell some of it reads like an anti-Apple manifesto being that they integrate battery and LED and such. What would a tablet with a user replaceable battery look like? How many years must they last before they are long lasting? If a battery in a laptop last four years for a nominal charge is that sufficient?

With regards to products like cars where the makeup can come from hundreds of manufactures who decides what needs to adhere to the rules and what doesn't? Someone posted about a cracked screen on a radio, how far down the component tree do we go before we stop?

I do like one section, no software should enable the fixing of a user owned product. The exception would be software that locks out repairs that might allow for unauthorized access; what I mean is that this could be an end run to making touch id easily hacked by government by forcing it to be serviced by third parties.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#92

Post by gmac »

FTA wrote: post #60
lumberjack wrote: post #8

Wages have gone up and consumer goods have gone down in price and build quality. It's not feasible to have a repair business any more. Growing up, there were still loads of repair businesses around. You could fix anything. If build quality and price go up, you can revert to an economy where you would fix your broken appliance once or twice before you replacing it. But what's the incentive for the manufacturers?

> But what's the incentive for the manufacturers? Possibly reducing the companies' environmental footprint on the world. Instead of cheap devices being scrapped every two years and sent to the landfill, consumers could instead hold on to the companies' products for much much longer. If products have comparatively more time and quality parts, the cost will indeed go up--both for manufacturing and retail price. My gran…

See: The Market for Lemons [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#93

Post by foobarbazetc »

andrewla wrote: post #82

Not to play the free market card too aggressively, but isn't there already a solution to this, called "extended warranties"? Whether provided by the manufacturer or from the retail seller, they provide a way for customers to pay an extra fee in order to extend the product's lifetime. In theory, they even give a way to price out the effective longevity of comparable devices by looking at the prices of the warranties.…

Most countries with strong pro-consumer groups already have minimum 2 year warranties.

US-centric pro-corporatist thinking doesn't always apply to the rest of the world.

This is my favorite bit of legalease:

https://www.apple.com/au/legal/statutory-warranty/

That page has become more friendly over time, but when they first put it up it was amazingly passive aggressive.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#94

Post by ptaipale »

colanderman wrote: post #89
runeks wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.

What? Car radios are (or at least, were 10 years ago) easy for even a DIYer to replace with about an hour's labor. Even in modern cars with nonstandard radios they're still modular . You can take it out and replace it with a functioning one. The GP's issue isn't that he needed a technician to take apart the radio and install a new screen, he just needed a new radio. Which was his eventual solution.

Add to automation in car manufacturing the logistics. The chain of supply of cars is efficient due to high volumes, predictability and competition. The chain of supply for spare parts (like radio modules) is low volume, unpredictable and does not attract competition. Thus, fixing a car radio may seem prohibitively expensive when compared to the price of the car.

If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#95

Post by ptaipale »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
EGreg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Wages have gone up? Where and source?

Purchasing power has gone up for those who can take advantage of cheap goods, but as your question insinuates, wages have not gone up; they've been stagnant for decades.

What you get with your wages has changed. Real estate is more expensive; you get less of that with your wages.

Mass-produced electronics and other consumer goods is much, much cheaper; you get more of that with your wages.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#96

Post by scottLobster »

SeanDav wrote: post #51

I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car. In this case, I managed to get a repl…

My family encountered a similar issue with something even simpler, console LEDs. Some of the LEDs that lit up the control console in our old Toyota Sienna blew out, so we asked a dealer how much it would be to fix. Turns out they'd have to take off the entire dashboard just to access the LEDs, several hours of labor and several hundred dollars. We could literally get a new set of tires for cheaper.

As it was we committed the control locations to muscle memory and just had dark controls at night until it died several years later. The fact that replacing a simple LED is so horrendously complicated is laughable.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#97

Post by chipperyman573 »

andrewla wrote: post #82

Not to play the free market card too aggressively, but isn't there already a solution to this, called "extended warranties"? Whether provided by the manufacturer or from the retail seller, they provide a way for customers to pay an extra fee in order to extend the product's lifetime. In theory, they even give a way to price out the effective longevity of comparable devices by looking at the prices of the warranties.…

>Provided by... A retail seller

I used to work at best buy and our "extended warranty" was basically us floating you a new unit while we RMA'd the broken one.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#98

Post by ptaipale »

Animats wrote: post #81

The EU also has a 3-year minimum warranty requirement on consumer products. Much of what the EU does is to make buying from another EU country within the EU a seamless experience. They just prohibited phone roaming charges within the EU, for example. This is the "single European market" concept.

Not 3 years, it's 2 years, and it's not exactly same as "warranty".

Directive 1999/44/EC says all EU countries have to ensure a retailer could be held liable for all "non-conformities" which manifest within two years from delivery.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2011/feb/05/how-long-elect...

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#99

Post by logingone »

taway_1212 wrote: post #19
etix wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like devices are not even planned to be repaired. They are designed to be sold and then abandoned. That's the real issue. Not cost of repair. Absolutely. Smartphones are the best example, the software makes the hardware unusable or insecure because of the lack of updates pretty quickly.

> the software makes the hardware unusable or insecure because of the lack of updates pretty quickly. Or, alternatively, the (practically) mandatory updates make the previously perfectly fine phone slow to the point of being unusable. I'm saying that the updates are practically mandatory because if you don't apply them, your apps gradually stop working (as they cannot talk to their respective server backends, which a…

Or, alternatively, last night my (untampered) phone got bricked by an ota update.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#100

Post by Someone »

lumberjack wrote: post #8

Wages have gone up and consumer goods have gone down in price and build quality. It's not feasible to have a repair business any more. Growing up, there were still loads of repair businesses around. You could fix anything. If build quality and price go up, you can revert to an economy where you would fix your broken appliance once or twice before you replacing it. But what's the incentive for the manufacturers?

If there was a clear incentive, the EU parliament probably wouldn't ask for one to be created ("Europe's Parliament called on the Commission, Member States and producers Tuesday to take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded.")

If followed up, this could end up the same as with lead-free soldering. There weren't good incentives for manufacturers to remove lead from soldering until the EU passed the RoHS directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...) and, subsequently, laws were introduced to implement it throughout the EU.

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