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India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

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Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#21

Post by ryandrake »

blackoil wrote: post #13

It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.

Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've somehow normalized the idea that companies can just externalize these real disposal costs onto the public and environment.

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#22

Post by chrismorgan »

aamederen wrote: post #3

Even though the aim here is different, sustainability through repair and reuse is uplifting. It's also a reminder that 10-year-old computers can do a lot and most of us may not need the latest shiny laptops.

It’s also good to upgrade certain components.

Firstly, upgrade from HDD to SSD. For random access, these are commonly 100–500× as fast, and even for block I/O 10–30×, and that will concretely speed up startup by a large fraction of that ratio, quite apart from speeding up other things later.

Once you get used to modern SSDs, as almost everyone on this site will be, I think you lose track of just how bad HDDs are, to run the OS from. My wife’s ten-year-old work laptop takes well over five minutes to boot up, log in, start a browser, load something like Gmail, and settle down so the disk is idle and it’s running as smoothly as it ever will; and sure, the aging i5-4300M CPU doesn’t help¹; but I suspect spending less than a thousand rupees replacing its HDD with even the cheapest and smallest SSD (acceptable capacity, in this case) might cut that to a minute, and spending a few thousand for a faster one would speed it up to below a minute.

(One fun thing about SSDs is that, overall, bigger is faster. At some points in history, for some makes, it’s been almost as simple as “twice as large, twice as fast”. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think not too far off.)

Secondly, if you have less than 8GB of RAM, get more. Beyond that it varies depending on what you’re using it for, but up to at least that point, it’s just an unconditional improvement.

—⁂—

¹ PassMark lists single/multi scores for the Intel Core i5-4300M of around 1,700/3,000. Some units in recent generations from approximately the same segment: the Intel Core i5-1334U scoring 3,350/13,400, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H scoring 3,450/21,500. This basically means an absolute minimum of 2× speedup on any workload, and for most it’s more like 3–4×. There’s a lot of difference in ten years of CPU.

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#23

Post by meta_ai_x »

ryandrake wrote: post #21
blackoil wrote: post #13

It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.

Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've s…

what about people who don't care for the products they own. Why should it be Toyota's responsibility for lazy people who don't even do basic maintenance?

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#24

Post by throw844849 »

blackoil wrote: post #13

It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.

[flagged]

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#25

Post by nyanpasu64 »

tommica wrote: post #4

Honestly cool, though it really sucks that they don't have any safety from all those harmful chemicals.

What's the chemical exposure from laptop repair? The biggest thing that comes to mind is flux smoke, which needs a fan or ideally a fume extractor to keep out of your face. Modern devices use lead-free solder, though I understand solder is mostly a concern for scrapping electronics for gold rather than repairing it (unless you don't wash your hands after soldering). I've gotten nasty effects from isopropyl/acetone vapors and super glue/epoxy too.

EDIT: Are they salvaging components from e-waste, or diving in dumpsters with non-computer waste as well?

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#26

Post by walterbell »

nxobject wrote: post #9

I’d love to learn some of the advanced rework skills they need to work on modern motherboards - especially BGA part replacement. And how to build a workshop on the cheap! I’m always in awe at the skills they need to learn that are nonexistent in the western world.

Some repair shops have videos on YouTube. Search for a specific device or IC replacement. Some videos are oriented towards teaching vs. demo.

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#27

Post by sidkshatriya »

ryandrake wrote: post #21
blackoil wrote: post #13

It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.

Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've s…

This is a fair and valid view of looking at things. Though the trick is to not get too heavy handed. At what point does regulation become too stifling ?

The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation.

One way to approach this would be to put more responsibilities on large established companies and less on smaller companies. But then the problem is that larger companies will want to arbitrage this somehow by indirectly "owning" these smaller companies with less environmental responsibilities.

This area is far more complex than we think it is.

Also what do we do about totally new materials that are thought to be benign when introduced but then are proved to have harmful effects many years later. Does the company that introduced them now have huge open ended costs and now go bankrupt ?

The solution is as always in the middle ground. Society as a whole bears some cost of cleanup (a kind of insurance policy for all companies) and companies bear some of costs.

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#28

Post by lompad »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #23
ryandrake wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've s…

what about people who don't care for the products they own. Why should it be Toyota's responsibility for lazy people who don't even do basic maintenance?

Pretty much every product becomes trash at some point, maintenance only changes the timescale.

Something somewhat similar is already law in germany and works rather well. There is no reason society should have to pay for expected costs for disposing a company's products - as this would only incentivize companies to care even less about the difficulty of recycling/disposal.

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#29

Post by midnightclubbed »

throw844849 wrote: post #24
blackoil wrote: post #13

It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.

[flagged]

I know you are making a flippant and pointless comment, but I’m compelled to respond.

Of all the laptops I’ve owned my 2020 MacBook Air is still my personal daily driver, my 2010 Mac mini still works fine for running my 3d printer, my 2014 Mac mini works great for crafting and my 2020 iPhone SE2 is still getting OS updates and is sending this message. Are they repairable? Not easily. Do they still work, absolutely. Having used a bunch of non apple laptops and devices at home and work I would say the Apple products last at least 2x as long before breaking or hitting enforced obsolescence.

Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops

#30

Post by magicalhippo »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #27
ryandrake wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've s…

This is a fair and valid view of looking at things. Though the trick is to not get too heavy handed. At what point does regulation become too stifling ? The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation. One way to approach this would be to put more responsibilities on large e…

Here in Norway, electrical and electronic (EE) goods are taxed extra and that money goes to recycling and cleanup[1].

Importers and producers are required to be a member of a approved company handling returns, like RENAS[2].

Shops selling EE goods are required to accept returned EE goods from individuals of the type they sell. So if you sell fridges you have to take my old fridge and handle it in accordance with the rules.

Seems to work better than nothing, though how well I don't know. As with all such regulations there's money to be made by skipping steps, and some do[3].

[1]: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/ansvarsomrader/avfall/Retur...

[2]: https://renas.no/

[3]: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/2022/februar/...

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