Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's your device, you should be able to repair it

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 566 posts

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#421

Post by OrwellianChild »

notJim wrote: post #371
simion314 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple would publish schematic, diagnostic software and allow refurbishing and selling of parts to third party - it will keep your iPhone water proof still. The reality is this, when your device gets old or your screen cracks , Apple will offer to fix it for 70% of a new device price, so you are pushed to buy a new device. I hope this is not controversial and has nothing to do with the water proof preference you ha…

You can already buy some replacement parts, like screens and backs. It doesn't seem like you can replace the motherboard, so that would be a fair point. I wouldn't objecting to coding this into law, but I'm not sure why your comment is implying this is not currently possible.

Apple has explicitly made replacement parts non-user-servicable at this point. It's called "serialization" and prevents even OEM parts (like a screen from a different iPhone) from being recognized by the phone. [1] This is the type of consumer un-friendly behavior that R2R seeks to defend against.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#422

Post by ChrisLomont »

kaibee wrote: post #286
ChrisLomont wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation. Nearly every electronic device I bought in the 1970s did not have included schematics. TI-55, Pong console, digital watches, Speak'n'Spell, transistor radios, Mattell football and baseball handhelds, Simon... and on and on. Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer.

> Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer. Sure, but repair shops could exist that would specialize in doing all sorts of repairs.

As they do now. I know a few people that repair most all modern phones and iPads and other gadgets for a living.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#423

Post by michaelmrose »

segmondy wrote: post #98
II2II wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the author kept moving the goalpost since we have lost so much over the years. Take that legacy software. For many technologies the software is not distinguishable from the hardware to the end user, yet faulty software could present a security risk or even pose physical danger. At the same time, vendors are dropping support for software at an accelerated rate while making it impossible to use third party fixe…

Are they also going to force "the right to sell" instead of rent? Nothing is stopping companies from renting instead of selling their products. We already see that with software, no one is trying to sell software these days, it's all subscriptions. It could happen with hardware, in which case you don't have the right to repair since it never belonged to you.

The populace is under no particular obligation to allow the company to continue to go about doing business in the US. The populace of the EU and Canada and so forth likewise.

An act of such naked greed could trivially backfire.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#424

Post by ChrisLomont »

anonymousiam wrote: post #238
ChrisLomont wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation. Nearly every electronic device I bought in the 1970s did not have included schematics. TI-55, Pong console, digital watches, Speak'n'Spell, transistor radios, Mattell football and baseball handhelds, Simon... and on and on. Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer.

Open up that old transistor radio and you will usually find a tiny printed schematic diagram affixed to the inside of the removable cover.

Nope :) As a kid taking everything apart, and as an adult collecting some old gadgets I had as kid, there is generally no such thing. I just listed quite a few gadgets that definitely do not have schematics glued inside.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#425

Post by zepto »

shard wrote: post #277
ska wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only planned obsolescence if the lifetime of a product is artificially shortened by design choices. It's not clear this applies here.

I'm going a little bit on a tangent here, and this may not apply so much to recent Apple phones, but Apple phones had planned obsolescence in terms of the design of their physical appearance such that you can tell almost instantly which generation it is. This allows broadcasting of status, that this person can afford the latest while that person can only afford to use a 2-year-old phone, thus artificially driving the…

That isn’t planned obsolescence, because the people who upgrade for status reasons don’t destroy their phones - they either pass them on or trade them in.

Arguably it’s the opposite of planned obsolescence - even used phones are not obsolete and are still in circulation.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is Apple’s stated policy - they want phones to last longer so that more people have them and they can continue to sell services to them.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#426

Post by michaelmrose »

beefalo wrote: post #121
segmondy wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they also going to force "the right to sell" instead of rent? Nothing is stopping companies from renting instead of selling their products. We already see that with software, no one is trying to sell software these days, it's all subscriptions. It could happen with hardware, in which case you don't have the right to repair since it never belonged to you.

Most cell phones are leased already today

That is only untrue because owning the phone would be disadvantageous to them. It's vastly more advantageous for them if you own it and are obliged to pay them for it because you own both pieces if it breaks.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#427

Post by michaelmrose »

google234123 wrote: post #380
hilbert42 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything from the design process to the assembly and repair is completely different today than it was 50 years ago." 1. Yes, and that needs to change—and very soon at that. A short while ago I counted over one hundred x86 motherboards that were current and readily available from just one single manufacturer. I spent many hours trying to differentiate the minor—almost insignificant—differences between many of these…

> A short while ago I counted over one hundred x86 motherboards that were current and readily available from just one single manufacturer.... This nonsense is a deliberate marketing ploy and there ought to be definite penalties against it... This is authoritarian nonsense.

There is no reason they can't have 100 slightly different motherboards they just need to maintain and provide proper docs on the lot and follow other reasonable standards.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#428

Post by dang »

michaelmrose wrote: post #415
maxerickson wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you do that without imposing it on everyone else? I care about consumption (I'm on my 2nd laptop since ~2003), but I don't particularly want to pay $15,000 to replace this one with one that is worse.

The average computer is around 700 including ones that are relatively repairable and ones that are not. Pretending that repairable laptops cost 20 times as much is disingenuous.

> disingenuous

That implies intent to deceive, which crosses into personal attack. Can you please not do that on HN? If you feel that someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information in a neutral way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#429

Post by michaelmrose »

zepto wrote: post #405
joshspankit wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s another angle: An iPhone 4 with the “last supported OS” is significantly slower than when it had the OS it launched with. This is true across the board, which leads to this very convenient “they can buy used iPhones, but we don’t want them to use them, so we’ll gently guide them to new devices by making it inconvenient and annoying” And before someone argues: Yes, much of the slowdown is because of new feature…

> An iPhone 4 with the “last supported OS” is significantly slower than when it had the OS it launched with. This ignores the fact that later iPhones with the newest OS are significantly faster than what they launched with, which contradicts the conclusion that this is intentional.

The lawsuit they lost suggests that the court found it was intentional.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#430

Post by jpttsn »

hilbert42 wrote: post #158
omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is goalpost moving, but I also agree with the author. If a device is no longer supported by a company, or that company goes under, there should be some mechanism to make any software needed to modify software on the device available. Take the essential ph-1 as an example. Now that the company is gone, if a device bricks during an update, that's it. Having the firehose file would make it possible to unblock it, but…

"a bricked phone is just spare parts (less the main board)." The main board should be just as repairable as any other device. If that requires changes to copyright law, the DMCA and or even WIPO treaties then that will eventually happen. It's not that many years ago—certainly well within my lifetime—that 'deep' repairs of this kind were not only commonplace but actually encouraged by manufacturers. (If you want examp…

I like the better performance of computers now. If lower repairability is a way to pay for that, that’s great.
Post reply on HN