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Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

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Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#321

Post by 8bitsrule »

Good, altho RTR was always obvious until some foolish clowns got some laws passed to try to stop it. Good luck with that.

When I pay for some physical product it is MINE. If you put something fancy in there, you sold it to me, IT is MINE. I can't copy it and sell the copies, that's fine.

If it's a truly great product, I won't have to fix it. If it wasn't as good as you could make it, you've cheated me. If I can't fix it then you've cheated me in an attempt to keep not just the product but me tethered to your stockholders. Sad.

Sad for you. If it's worth fixing, and you expect to bleed me to fix it, I can fix it myself, or find someone who can. That's a LOT easier than before. And you've lost another customer for a lifetime, one who will spread the word at every chance.

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#322

Post by bartvk »

tjoff wrote: post #226
konha wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ordering 2 items from Amazon will almost certainly result in two separate packages being shipped to you. (At least that’s my experience here in Germany - YMMV.)

Then don't order from amazon.

I had the same experience with a local webshop here (bol.com). I needed two types of batteries but these webshops are more like marketplaces. They don't have a feature to search for items from a particular vendor. But I was able to simply browse and order the two types of batteries from a single vendor.

Next day: two packages. From the same vendor.

(Now that I think about it, the original sin was buying a product that is not rechargeable.)

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#323

Post by jamil7 »

sudobash1 wrote: post #267
toper-centage wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not something we can control effectively as consumers. My supermarket sells fruits and vegetables mostly pre-packaged. Fees are not enough, we need to make this kind of barely useful plastic containers illegal. Potatoes don't need to come in plastic containers.

Whereas I agree, it is never so easy. For example, Oregon banned many single use plastic shopping bags. They went away briefly; however, a workaround has been found by stores. They are now using much heavier plastic bags and calling them "reusable". But most people seem to just treat them like the old disposable ones. So a well intentioned, but heavy handed law has put us a step back. We are now using more plastic pe…

In Germany you just pay for individual bags if you want them, sometimes they’re plastic and sometimes paper, depends on the shop. As far as I can tell this is way more effective than an outright ban, I hardly ever see people buying the bags unless they’ve really forgotten or are tourists.

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#324

Post by souprock »

throwanem wrote: post #76
RankingMember wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. A lot of modern fridges use LEDs and have control boards driving them that cost hundreds of dollars. If the LEDs are out, the likelihood is not that the LEDs are dead, but that something much more expensive failed.

The prices on those controllers are totally absurd, too. You end up paying four hundred bucks for something with a sub-$20 BOM cost.

They do the slow fade-in effect when you open the door. That's got to cost something.

I, mistakenly, bought the refrigerator with LED lighting because I hated how old-style bulbs would turn on slowly in the cold. LED lighting should be instant I thought. Oh no, totally on purpose it was made slow.

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#325

Post by varjag »

stretchcat wrote: post #318
varjag wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About any fridge you buy now would last a decade easily. Several decades even, if you bother to invest into its maintenance and repair like people did 40 years ago.

Getting appliances repaired is harder than it once was. Disposability culture drove many repair shops out of business. Many repair shops I and my family used to are now gone or dying. The guy who used to do sewing machine repairs for my mother is gone. The cobbler that used to repair my boots is gone. Furthermore, appliances that used to come with repair manuals no longer do, and finding the manual online is often a…

It's a good point, but it's not really a failure of product design. Appliances themselves now are not any less reliable than they were in mid-century. There is no grand conspiracy of manufacturers filing down screw threads to make them fail.

I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#326

Post by wizzwizz4 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #271
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried asking pe — sorry, “market research”? If you can make something that people want to pay for, that goes down a lot better than trying to make them buy what you're selling via an elaborate multi-agent optimisation algorithm.

My job is writing software, so I never have reason to do market research. My strong impression is it's hard to do. People may say the want kale, but end up buying donuts. They weren't lying about wanting to be the kind of person who buys kale. But at the moment of truth, they got donuts "just this once".

This suggests that they'd pay for the opportunity to be the kind of person who buys kale.

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#327

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

ogre_codes wrote: post #199
hippich wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. If cost of throwing something away increases - may be that will make consumers choose something more reliable and serviceable. As if right now residential trash pickup service probably covers just the labor and machinery to get trash to the landfill

They tried that with televisions in California. The result? Televisions are one of the most common forms of road trash now. Often on the way to/ from the dump. As soon as you charge someone to get rid of something, the temptation to just dump it on the side of the road increases.

More full spectrum surveillance and INSTANT FINE!1!!

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#328

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

oauea wrote: post #106
globile wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone unlocking doesn't get much attention, but it is an integral part that no one wants to address or get their hands dirty with. There are many more locked phones in drawers or acting as mere paperweights than people actually care to disclose. Several years back we ran a poll to understand lifetime recycling habits. People aren't proud of dropping a phone and shattering the screen, but they are less proud of having…

I live in the EU and have never encountered a carrier locked phone. It's quite an amusing concept, and the first carrier to come up with it must truly have been evil.

Funny. As I remember from the times of early GSM, that carrier lock was the default, because subsidized by them in exchange for long term contracts like 2 years. Otherwise you had to pay much more intitially, but it could make sense to calculate this, instead of blindly trusting the advertisements.

/me mumbles something about "Kids these days..."

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#329

Post by tpxl »

jeswin wrote: post #315
ogre_codes wrote: post #164

I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it would be better to tag items at manufacture and charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream. Manufacturers could solve this by either: - Making their things easy to repair - Creating in house recycling programs - Makin…

> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. This is a mistruth (add: unintentional I'm sure) - and I hope people stop repeating this. I'll explain in detail. 1. Older versions of Android aren't crippled in the way an older iOS version is. On iOS for instance, Safari is tied to the iOS, while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version. Any phone run…

> while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version

Apps are compiled for target SDKs and if your phone is too old the apps wont work.

Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

#330

Post by jeswin »

tpxl wrote: post #329
jeswin wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few people care to repair Android phones because you can't upgrade the OS after 2 years regardless. This is a mistruth (add: unintentional I'm sure) - and I hope people stop repeating this. I'll explain in detail. 1. Older versions of Android aren't crippled in the way an older iOS version is. On iOS for instance, Safari is tied to the iOS, while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version. Any phone run…

> while on Android none of the apps are tied to the OS version Apps are compiled for target SDKs and if your phone is too old the apps wont work.

You're right, I should have been clearer. I meant the Google Apps bundle of essential apps (especially the Web Browser).
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