441–450 of 566 posts
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They don’t prevent users from replacing the battery. I’ve done it myself.
For many devices the devices themselves are glued making the process of just opening the case interesting and then require near complete disassembly to remove the battery.
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Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation. As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc. We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction. To move the over…
> We should demand that any device and any component in any device be second source-able Devices aren't built around discrete components anymore. That ship has sailed, we waved goodbye, partied on the dock, and took an Uber home. Now we're nursing the hangover. But hey, our phones are now marginally thinner than last year's phones, so that might be worth something. I don't see how we get back, considering the market…
However, I think that you're basically right anyway... because when you pay Apple for a laptop repair, I think there's a good chance that they do a logic board replacement or something similar. The logic board itself is made of components and can be repaired, but it often isn't repaired, just replaced.
This article moves the goalposts on what "right to repair" is several times. It generally means that manufacturers should not hide schematics from device users or disallow third party manufacturing of first party parts. However, the author states: > The law doesn't yet cover smartphones and tablets that she says are getting harder to fix. One problem is keeping older devices updated with new software. Now "right to r…
Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation. As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc. We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction. To move the over…
For a 15 year old e-reader I found the repair manual online, which contained a full schematic. For a more recently released e-reader from the same company, the repair manual simply has a disassembly step-by-step. I can only imagine the company found it not worth the effort for technicians to actually repair anything.
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Manufacturers want planned obsolesce more than anyone. The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant. Recycling should be the first goal then repair ability. I think we can do this without the manufacturers drawing the proverbial short straw. Maybe we should get a partial refund when returning expired de…
> The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant. That's an important insight. I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline: RAW > PRODUCT > FINISHED > A BIT > WASTE MATERIALS > COMPONENTS > GOODS > OF USE > MATTER Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means th…
>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!
The relationship between economic growth and environmental damage is more complicated than this. Something like transitioning from fossil fuels to cheap renewables is both a case of economic growth, and a reduction waste matter. Similar principles might apply to everyone having an iPod instead of buying new CDs, miniaturization in computing, productive uses of what used to be considered waste, building mass transit infrastructure over cars, etc.
If you want to slow damage to the natural environment, I'm all for it, but if you aim to do that by slowing economic growth, rather than accepting slowed economic growth as a potential side-effect, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Economic growth often means more people can have better lives using fewer resources.
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Assuming you've already researched the time and material costs - Why does it matter if more effort is required? We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies. We don't allow industries to pollute the planet, we require expensive filters and waste-treatment for chemical plant effluents and catalytic converters for cars, and what no…
> We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies. It's not necessarily about overall profit. Apple profits on iPhones because they sell them for many times their cost. A marginal cost increase in manufacturing wouldn't impact them much. The problem for Apple (and other large manufacturers) is production volume. It is a massive (and…
Car assembly lines were changed to include adding the seat-belt and the catalytic converter, etc, etc due to regulatory mandates. Heck they had to redesign their entire car to include crumple zones for safety! I don't think a screw is all that much.
And so, electronics companies will figure out how to optimize their assembly lines to comply with the regulations and they will figure out how to manage the supply chain and everything else. Apple employs tons of smart people, and there are many smart people in the world who can help as well.
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For many devices the devices themselves are glued making the process of just opening the case interesting and then require near complete disassembly to remove the battery.
So what? That doesn’t prevent changing the batteries. I have done it myself, and Apple will do it too, as in fact do many third parties .
Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence.
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The lawsuit they lost suggests that the court found it was intentional.
The lawsuit might have suggested that but the court did not find any such thing .
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Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation. As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc. We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction. To move the over…
> We should demand that any device and any component in any device be second source-able Devices aren't built around discrete components anymore. That ship has sailed, we waved goodbye, partied on the dock, and took an Uber home. Now we're nursing the hangover. But hey, our phones are now marginally thinner than last year's phones, so that might be worth something. I don't see how we get back, considering the market…
Huh. Thats news to me. A 0603 resistor is pretty much a discrete component to me. And if it is some other part of the assembly that breaks, the assembly it self is a discrete part (e.g. the microphone of your smartphone might be on a seperate flexboard that costs like 15 euros, which is a lot cheaper than buying a new one).
Yeah things got small. But that doesn't make things unfixable. Missing documentation, proprietary parts you cannot get, gluing in things in without reason, etc. are problems. The size is for the most part managable — and if it isn't, right to repair is also about you being able to go to some repair guy and having your stuff fixed instead of having some Apple employee tell you how you can only buy a new device, and loose all data because they won't even look at it properly. So in short this is about repairability in general.
And if you like to do it yourself, this is totally possible. Even my father managed to swap out that home button for his completely glued Samsung Galaxy S7 edge.
I teach (among other things) soldering at University. Most people can actually SMD solder if you show them how. A student who never soldered before swapped a usb port for an E-reader within an hour of me showing her.
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The lawsuit might have suggested that but the court did not find any such thing .
Sorry they actually settled for 113 million to terminate the lawsuit. I normally read settled for 9 figures as admitting wrongdoing.
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So what? That doesn’t prevent changing the batteries. I have done it myself, and Apple will do it too, as in fact do many third parties .
At minimum when a device opens up and swapping the battery takes 10 seconds near everyone does it themselves. As difficulty increases the propensity of users able to afford to do so trends towards zero. Imagine if a battery costs $200 and requires $100 in labor. If the cost at purchase is 400 and the value at end of warranty is $200 zero people will ever make use of this service and every device becomes trash after t…
It could, but nobody has presented any evidence that Apple is doing this, and their business strategy is openly stated to involve increasing the lifetime of their devices, so that they can deliver services to more users, so this is just innuendo.