EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products • Hacker News Board

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#231

Post by undersuit » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 8:41 PM UTC

pizzetta wrote: post #22

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?

Advertising, including Google, will feel the effect of a slower purchasing cycle. Fewer designers (in all industries) to design a lower volume of products. Less money to promote fewer items being sold. On the flipside, larger per-item transaction values. To add, It doesn't seem like we could go on indefinitely with ephemeral product cycles consuming increasing amounts of natural resources considering the increasing p…

>Fewer designers (in all industries) to design a lower volume of products.

The shrinking of the number of models and manufactures relative to the size of the market is already to blame for this. Maybe there would be more designers because now when you put out a product it needs to work for a long time, not until you can just tweak next years model?

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#232

Post by undersuit » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 8:50 PM UTC

lindner wrote: post #87

roel_v wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a Miele appliance anf get the extended guarantee which is ~10% of the purchase price, you get 7 years guarantee. As in, something breaks, tomorrow a repairman will be at your house and fix it, no extra cost. Quality is available, people just don't want to pay for it. Those washing machines that lasted for 15 years? Back then, they cost one or two months' wages. Try to get anyone to pay $2500 for a washing…

Speed Queen is making a go of it. Slogan is "Built Better to Last Longer." https://speedqueen.com/ When my Frigidaire washer finally dies that's what I'm getting. I already injured myself replacing the pump once. And now that I've seen the cheap plastic parts used I don't have confidence it's going to last.

I like it. It's like buying a commercial TV because they aren't full of smart features[1] and are made to run under harsher conditions(i.e. 24/7). Better yet, the MultiSync V404 model can have a Raspberry Pi plugged in for your own custom smart features.

[1]https://www.nec-display-solutions.com/p/uk/en/products/choic...

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#233

Post by undersuit » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 9:02 PM UTC

oever wrote: post #129

TylerE wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't really reasonable. No product is expected to work _forever_. Things fail. ICs go out of production.

At some point an equivalent product could be offered as a replacement. Or parts could be replaced. The cost of this will be reflected in the price of the warranty which also serves as a down payment for a replacement product. But still, the producer will have an incentive to do an honest assessment of the longevity of the product via the cost of the warranty. Too low will cost the company and too high will shy away t…

>At some point an equivalent product could be offered as a replacement. Or parts could be replaced.

Some computer graphic card manufactures have a system like this. If the card fails in it's lifetime warranty they will replace the card with an equivalent or better model. One of my friends had their RMAed EVGA card upgraded even though it was 5 years old, and it wasn't to just the current performance equivalent, their $300 5 year old card was replaced with a $300 new card.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#234

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 12:33 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #229

anigbrowl wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're assuming the regulation is an end in itself and coming to a tautological. Regulation is essentially saying 'wait, let's factor in these unaccounted-for-but-predictable costs (like repairability)' and you're saying 'but what about the costs of assessing the costs?!'. Yeah, incorporating some product standards is going to raise the cost of all units sold, which represents a loss to the buyer who hoped to get…

> and there's a >50% chance that it will suffer some damage to some major functional component What if the chance is actually 1%? What if the cost of repairing it is bigger than a new car? What if, as you said, cars got cheaper, but not so cheap to be disposable? What if making if repairable has the side effect of making it less durable? Just nobody upthread is asking any of those questions. It's not circular, it's a…

Why don't you make a positive claim of your own in competition with the existing regulatory one? Obviously I'm using simple numbers to sketch a simple conceptual example. If you consider the burden if regulation to be so onerous, quantify that.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#235

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 12:36 AM UTC

bashinator wrote: post #209

anigbrowl wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're assuming the regulation is an end in itself and coming to a tautological. Regulation is essentially saying 'wait, let's factor in these unaccounted-for-but-predictable costs (like repairability)' and you're saying 'but what about the costs of assessing the costs?!'. Yeah, incorporating some product standards is going to raise the cost of all units sold, which represents a loss to the buyer who hoped to get…

A lot of people use their computer keyboard more than any other single object they don't sleep on. There's finally (thank you Cherry MX) a supply meeting the presumably pent-up demand for decent keyboards. I hated those membrane things, and you could get them for under $10 as far back as 2003. These days you can get a perfectly good _repairable_ mechanical switch keyboard for about $35.

Still though, if you pour orange juice into your keyboard and don't have the time/ability to repair it yourself, who's going to do it for under $35? I seem to remember that fixing a messed up one took 1-2 hours, but that was like >25 years ago when I was an eager whizkid and a new keyboard ran for $120 or something.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#236

Post by boznz » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 3:25 AM UTC

ksk wrote: post #147

cwyers wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch this video of a crash test between a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2] Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient an…

The argument is more like 'soldered RAM' versus 'user replaceable RAM'.

Re-soldering a chip is pretty easy. Being able to buy that chip in one-off quantities is sometimes next to impossible.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#237

Post by gmac » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 9:57 AM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #127

gmac wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hunch: part of the problem here is that people got fleeced by retailers, who sold hugely overpriced extended warranties, banking on loss aversion and risk aversion and general lack of technological understanding. When people realised how much they had been fleeced (assisted by consumer programmes like Watchdog in the UK), many of them went off extended warranties as a mug's game — and never came back. (I once had…

Yes, you can argue that warranties are overpriced, but if everyone factored the price of the extended warranty into every purchase they made, then manufacturers would naturally be forced to reduce the cost of the warranty, by making their product either more reparable or increasing initial quality. > Finally, people are hyperbolic discounters, they are myopic in a way that hurts their happiness, so a regulation that…

On the last point, yes this is paternalism, but I'm not convinced it's the worst sort.

On your big TV example, you probably shouldn't be prevented from buying it, but other measures to discourage you from buying it could in theory be welfare-improving on a societal level, and if they were then that would constitute part of a case for imposing them.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#238

Post by SeanDav » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 11:03 AM UTC

Fej wrote: post #193

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…

I did a quick search for your touch screen problem. It seems you might have been able to, instead of replacing the whole unit, replace the digitizer only, if possible. The whole assembly (including screen) appears to be $200-300 before labor. How much did you end up paying?

The first thing I investigated was trying to repair just the screen, but no local company was willing to do that. I ended up paying about $500 including labour, using console from scrapped car.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#239

Post by mbrock » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 2:01 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #227

mbrock wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's effectively the same goal. If you engineer it to work for 2 years as cheaply as possible, you're probably engineering it to break after 2 years. Would we get better results from "it must cost max X, how can we make it last as long as possible and be repairable?" Probably, but the incentives don't reward it.

Yes but the intent is vastly different. It's like the difference between accidentally and deliberately killing someone. Same result but they're not the same are they?

Depends on the systematicity and avoidability of the accidents, I would say. Negligence is different from manslaughter, but it seems like a spectrum.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#240

Post by petra » Fri, Jul 07, 2017, 3:25 PM UTC

photojosh wrote: post #217

CalRobert wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly possible. Same goes for water - I note that Bosch dishwasher have some sort of system that analyzes the water to see if it's still clean enough to use before using more. Clever, and a savings for water, but one more complicated thing to break. Of course, I fail to see why most modern consumer products can't just be driven with a Raspberry pi or arduino. Using off-the-shelf parts like that would do wo…

I design embedded products for industry and usually prototype with Arduino and Pi-alikes before designing the final board. A custom board assembly is much cheaper to manufacture. For instance, for a recent design, the only chip used off a full Arduino board was the microcontroller itself (and then in a different, smaller package). Physical and electrical constraints are often significant. And that's before getting in…

I think people will happy to spend a bit more on a standard. easily replaceable board(and electronic components are relatively cheap), for an expensive appliance, since it gives them some piece of mind.

Further more, standard high volume stuff usually sees much more competition and investment by chip companies, who are really the ones doing the deep r&d in this industry.