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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

#31

Post by gloxkiqcza »

saidinesh5 wrote: post #15

During my middle school days, we lived in a small town for a little while (read: A place where i was allowed to take my bicycle out onto the main road). After school, I used to spend a lot of time just hanging out around some TV and radio repair shops and just watched them work. They used to be friendly and gave me parts like spare motors, lights that were lying around from broken Walkmans they wouldn't repair. I too…

All tech is becoming more and more integrated and purposefully locked down. Everything from operating systems to cars. It’s truly a shame. I think many of us tinkerers/hackers have a similar story to yours - something grabs your attention when you’re a child and develops into an engineering knack later on.

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

#32

Post by daedrdev »

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…

There are plenty of products where recycling will never make sense, as it's literally worse for the environment to try and recycle it.

And for disposal modern landfills in rich countries are very good at avoiding environmental problems.

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

#33

Post by pjmlp »

I remember up to the early 1990's we had repair shops all over Portugal, we would buy devices for life, and any kind of malfunction would be rescued at one of those repair shops, unless it was really a death sentence for the device.

Now in a throw away society with planned obsolence devices, most of those shops are gone and the repair knowledge gone with them.

Unless goverments fix the planned obsolence culture it is almost impossible to have the repair culture back.

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

#34

Post by Sateeshm »

I used to do at-home computer troubleshooting as a part time job when was in college. Most of time it was just opening up the casing, dusting it and reattaching all the parts/reinstalling Windows that did the trick. 90% of time it was just RAM popping out a bit. But in rare cases, it was the components themselves. I used to rely of these shops in the city (Hyderabad, India) that fixed motherboards etc. really cheap and relatively quickly (less than a week most of the time). People that worked there weren't engineers or anything, more like tradesmen. It was amazing to see them work.

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

#35

Post by forgotoldacc »

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…

Making the company responsible for the entire lifetime of a product also makes them effectively own the product. Your idea sounds a lot like renting from the producer.

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

#36

Post by pjmlp »

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.

An Amiga or PC running Windows 3.x would be quite capable to handle the word processing and spreadsheet related activities I do at home, and from the Amiga side I dare say I would still enjoy more many of those games than the 80 € AAA graphics pumped games that come out nowadays with their 60 h gameplay and 120 GB disk space.

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

#37

Post by nottorp »

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…

> If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke

Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.

Incidentally you should also be able to modify the laptop as you want, or if you lack the skills, pay said 3rd party repair shops to do it for you.

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

#38

Post by vlz »

daedrdev wrote: post #32
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…

There are plenty of products where recycling will never make sense, as it's literally worse for the environment to try and recycle it. And for disposal modern landfills in rich countries are very good at avoiding environmental problems.

> literally worse for the environment to try and recycle it

For example? What products do you mean?

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

#39

Post by DeathArrow »

I remember a time when I bought an used laptop and was able to upgrade the CPU, RAM and hard drive.

While I might buy now a laptop such as a MacBook without being able to replace major components, I will never buy a desktop such as a Mac Studio and accept the same shortcomings. And it's not only that I want to tinker with hardware, but buying parts and assembling the desktop myself has a much better price/performance ratio than buying of the shelf parts. Being able to upgrade is a bonus and that allows me to have cheaper upgrades than selling it and buying another one.

How much more would Apple tax me for a Mac with the equivalent performance of i9 14900K, Nvidia 4090, 128 GB RAM and 8 GB SSD I assembled in a few hours.

If I were much richer so the few hours spent on assembling the thing were more valuable than the price difference, I might have thought differently.

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

#40

Post by throw828288 »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #29
throw844849 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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. H…

[flagged]
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