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

bbc.com

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

#481

Post by fsflover »

zepto wrote: post #450
michaelmrose wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence. 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.

> nobody has presented any evidence that Apple is doing this

Simply compare the cost of official Apple service and corrsponding third-party service.

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

#482

Post by GordonS »

FearlessNebula wrote: post #272
GordonS wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hunting for a new laptop just now, and just about everything has at least one DIMM soldered, with many having both soldered. Driving me nuts! Is there a convincing technical reason why everybody is doing this nowadays?

Force you to choose more RAM from the factory where they charge high margins.

Well, that's not a very convincing technical argument :)

Even this wouldn't be so bad if they actually sold configurations with more than 16GB RAM...

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

#483

Post by tomjen3 »

alexvoda wrote: post #165
css wrote: post #2

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…

That would amount to saying that we in Europe can't use any technology that is less than what 20 years old?

You can't even replace an Intel CPU with an AMD one unless your motherboard supports both. Good luck finding a modern laptop with a socketed CPU.

I get where you are coming from, and it would be nice not to be locked down to one vendor, but the cost to enable that is so high as to be not worth it.

I would rather the manufactures have to state their support up front and then you know what you buy when you buy it.

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

#484

Post by tomjen3 »

nousermane wrote: post #218
35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You can choose to forgo owning stuff personally, sure. But that is not everybody's preference. And please don't pretend that "devices aren't built around discrete components anymore". There are plenty of discrete components in a modern phone/laptop/roomba/whatever, that could be replaceable/upgradable by advanced user or entry-level technician, but are not: - battery - screen - storage - RAM - list goes on and on...

RAM and storage is usually integrated on phones. The battery is usually not something you can pull out anymore because people like me prefer phones that I can use to find my way in the rain without risk damaging the phone, but even so they are pretty easy to replace, the same with the screen.

On laptops you have a choice: buy a Thinkpad that is not an ultrabook, but even then you see people prefer thinner and lighter models than ones that are servicable.

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

#485

Post by swiley »

operator-name wrote: post #370
swiley wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find me a low power discrete CPU and we can draw the board for another open source phone together.

RISC-V is not only looking interesting but promising.

Arm looks promising too but it's about parts not ISAs.

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

#486

Post by tomjen3 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #337
6510 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials.

I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you needed a computer, maybe a calculator, a form of MP3 player, a camera, maybe some DVDs to watch in the back of the car along with a DVD player to watch them on.

Today you have all of that in a phone.

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

#487

Post by neop1x »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #341
leoedin wrote: post #53

PCs and even most laptops have been very repairable for decades. You can still run Windows or Linux on a 10+ (20+?) year old laptop without an issue. The idea that a 5 year old laptop would be unusable or not get the latest version of Windows is unacceptable. Yet phones cost similar amounts and have nowhere near the repairability. A decade ago you could argue that it wasn't that important - specs were changing so qui…

Repairable is not limited to just OS support, but fair and equal access to replacement components. For example, apple can ask Texas Instruments to not sell a particular chip that is used on their logic boards to anyone else but them, rendering odds of third party repair slimmer [1]. Apple went as far as to prevent genuine, that is, salvaged parts, from legitimately bought phones, from being used to replace camera uni…

Yes, it is often impossible to source things like Intel CPUs or chipsets. They sell them to device manufacturers only in millions. Even if you have IR rework station and can solder BGA chips you have no reliable source of these chips. It is even worse with Apple devices where they often use parts not publicly available at all (custom-made for them) and sometimes if they use a common STM32 micro, there is no firmware available to program it and it won't work without the firmware.

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

#488

Post by spixy »

scientismer wrote: post #276
antattack wrote: post #50

Given opposition to 'right to repair' from corporations, some of it on valid grounds IMO, I would be fine with the following compromise: If company does not want to provide resources needed for consumer to repair a device- it ought to provide extended warranty to the consumer for free or a small fee.

How do you know how much it costs to provide an extended warranty? If it actually costs money, that kind of rule would make devices more expensive for everybody.

I am OK with everybody paying +3% more than few unlucky ones paying another 100% because they received faulty pieces. In EU there is mandatory 2 year warranty for everything (with exceptions like food etc) and maybe extending to at least 3 years could be fine compromise.

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

#489

Post by TeMPOraL »

tomjen3 wrote: post #486
TeMPOraL wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials. I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you nee…

> Today you have all of that in a phone.

But you replace them every two years. And the market for them is still growing. And there's now a resurgence of a market for single-purpose appliances that happens on top of the smartphone market - not replacing it.

(It's also possible more matter goes into making a modern smartphone than a bunch of devices it replaced, because of the demand for more exotic and more pure materials in the processes along the way. But maybe it doesn't, maybe an individual smartphone is a net matter and energy saver. I can totally buy that, we've made a lot of efficiency improvements in manufacturing in the past decades. But there are limits to such improvements, and in the meantime, manufacturing as a whole keeps growing.)

Perhaps I've simplified my diagram too much - I should've drawn an additional "bypass" into "WASTE MATTER" from every other node, because every step in the pipeline loses some of its input as waste.

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

#490

Post by fsflover »

zepto wrote: post #409
Der_Einzige wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know for a fact that Apple was artificially lowering their battery capacity, and that's most likely just the beginning. The PR speak about it being done to protect batteries is BS and we all know it. It incentivizes more purchasing. Much like how the GTA5 loading bug was never solved because it led to more advertisements for digital currency being forced upon one's eyes... Every update I get on my mac, or Iphone s…

> We know for a fact that Apple was artificially lowering their battery capacity. This is completely false.

Apple artificially decreased the performance (not lowered the battery), which is why they were fined.
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