121–130 of 151 posts
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Yeah but it was half a centimeter thicker, and therefore useless to today's Apple.
You make it sound like Apple is doing this despite their customers. But nobody other than a handful of people would rather have a much heavier device in exchange for being able to replace their WiFi card or keyboard.
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Did the free markets ended slavery in US or under-age working? I remember many good things had to be forced with laws and not let to be decided by the big companies.
> Did the free markets ended slavery in US In a very oblique manner it did. Industrialization (which was very much a product of free markets) of the Northern States made the economics of slavery untenable in the North. Once people were not as blinded by profits, they could actually see that slavery was a moral evil. In the South, the economics were very different and therefore a lot of rationalizations were formed as…
It was actually quite the opposite. Pre-industrialization, serfdom and slavery were basically equivalent. You hand a local lord and if you worked for him you got food and shelter. Your alternative was to run off into the wilderness and fend for yourself, which frequently meant starving or freezing to death or being mauled by a bear. Unsurprisingly not many people chose that.
Then factories show up and suddenly your alternative is to run off and go work in the factory. Naturally many people started preferring to do that, which turned the plantations upside down because their economic system was based on the workers not having anywhere else to go.
Their response was brutal. Chains to keep slaves from running away, hunting runaway slaves with dogs, savage beatings, etc. None of that stuff was really commonplace before industrialization. The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
But that response was as futile as it was brutish. The factories made slavery uneconomical. You can't defeat supply and demand with chains and whips. All they do is cause the slaves to want to run away more.
The factories destroyed slavery directly, by out-competing it. It's questionable whether the war was even net positive -- that was a whole lot of blood spilled over an economic system that couldn't have sustained itself much longer in any event.
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How do you feel about mandatory warranty periods? I see the requirement of repair manuals for a mass-produced product as a very similar thing, and both are justified as part of ensuring a fair bargain where you get what you paid for, not a device that randomly fails and wastes all the money you put into it.
> How do you feel about mandatory warranty periods? You know what you're getting when you buy the product. It's critically important to be able to say "no warranty whatsoever"; Open Source wouldn't exist without that, and neither would the (still quite small) open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers. (I do feel that you should always be legally allowed to try repairing somethi…
For example, most consumer ice makers on the market in the UK has the same design flaw. I know because I learned in frustration to spot the signs. The design is clearly copied by multiple manufacturers. The problem is someone cut a few cents of their BOM by leaving out a sensor for when the water tray has rotated far enough, and instead just runs the motor 'long enough'.
Except most models on the market uses a plastic tray where doing that repeatedly eventually causes the tray to crack from the stress.
Most consumers buying those products won't know. It took my second one breaking and me taking apart both that one and my third one before I realised how the design is broken. Turns out even wildly different looking models still use the same basic mechanism.
In this case it's a trivially fixable machine once you know what the problem is if you have access to a spare tray. The exact same part would fit in many mods. Except they're not available for sale. So you junk 5-10kg of serviceable metal and plastic parts because of lack of a 100g part.
That may be fine for the manufacturers, but it's hugely detrimental to society that these products are being sold when most people have no way of telling upfront that they'll fail - it takes just long enough heavy use that most reviews don't reflect the problems.
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But who decides? There is going to be a ministry of "did it need to be so compact?" staffed by disinterested experts? I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
That's the opposite of what the comment meant. The suggestion is that where it doesn't change the size/quality you mandate easier disassembly. Next to zero subjectivity.
You propose some new design which is more compact / easier to manufacture / more reliable because it has fewer connectors, and then you take it to the ministry for approval. How do they know whether your changes are justified? Maybe they sketch an easier-to-disassemble variant which is no bigger than yours, and reject your design, but they don't understand the why it will cost you twice as much to assemble that design (in your factory, with your workforce) or why you rejected that kind of connector (your experience with the supplier, or your vibration tests). Can you prove why you made these decisions? Call expert witnesses? This just seems like an impossible minefield to me.
I think better to tilt the balance in other ways, like pushing longer guarantees (regardless of whether the best solution is an unbreakable one-piece object, or a repairable one) and forcing recycling (so that the sticker price includes more of the total lifecycle cost).
I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.
I guess I believe in this "right to repair" movement, but only so far as to ensure that if you're capable of taking your device apart and putting it back together without breaking anything that you don't automatically void some warranty. I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines. I'd rather see legislation t…
Who defines "useful lifetime" though? The manufacturer would then be even more compelled to make engineer planned obsolescence since no one wants to be on the hook for having to take back products 10, 20, or even 40 years from now. But keeping electronics operational for multiple decades is one of the goals of right-to-repair. With your proposal we'd have nothing but short lifetime disposable electronics. We should be focusing on solutions that create less waste, not more.
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But who decides? There is going to be a ministry of "did it need to be so compact?" staffed by disinterested experts? I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
> But who decides? Well, I dunno, but that's a question with every law, and thus not exactly an argument by itself? > I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying. But why would there need to be micro-management?
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> Did the free markets ended slavery in US In a very oblique manner it did. Industrialization (which was very much a product of free markets) of the Northern States made the economics of slavery untenable in the North. Once people were not as blinded by profits, they could actually see that slavery was a moral evil. In the South, the economics were very different and therefore a lot of rationalizations were formed as…
How were the markets less free in the south? From what I know from history the difference was that south was more agriculture focused and this meant they had different interest then the north , I am not from US so I did not studied all the details of US history. Even if say free market solved the issue, is it reasonable to wait centuries for the free markets to solve things then dare to vote some laws ?
It's worth knowing that the south was once considerably richer than the north, but industrialisation changed things in the 19th C, by the end of which the north was vastly richer (per capita), richer than anywhere had ever been before. In this sense free capitalism did vastly outcompete an unfree economy.
I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.
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pentalobe screws?
Batteries which are soldered to the board instead of using a connector, motherboard is all one assembly including the keyboard, fewer ports, nothing user serviceable. That all seems like measures to make manufacturing easier from my perspective.
It's not a law of nature that making things better for yourself will make them better for your customers. In fact, the opposite is usually true.