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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

#141

Post by gruez »

InfinityByTen wrote: post #112
bubblethink wrote: post #111

This is largely a result of tariffs/duties that India imposes on everything. A typical $800 laptop is going to cost $1200-$1500 in India. Combined with the purchasing power parity, a good laptop is out of reach for most people. The repair culture works entirely due to artificial scarcity. Nostalgia for repairs notwithstanding, it is a failure for the country that people can't afford a decent laptop in 2025.

Food for thought: if a failure (of sorts) can make the successful rethink their ways of being, is that success missing the point, maybe? A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints…

>A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints births sustainability and how we all can learn from it (including India) and in fact foster it in a positive way :)

Isn't this the degrowth ideology expressed in a slightly obfuscated way? Being poor is more "sustainable", because you don't have as much resources to consume.

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

#142

Post by pjmlp »

jdietrich wrote: post #109
pjmlp wrote: post #33

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…

In the early 1990s, Portugal had a GDP per capita of less than $10,000 per year. Portuguese people today just have much better things to do with their time than fix old toasters. I repair my own stuff for fun, but there's absolutely no way I could make a living from fixing other people's stuff. The phone repair business in my area is dominated by illegal immigrants, because fixing iPhones is only marginally more lucr…

Go tell that to the folks earning minimum wage, splitting 800 euros for everything a family needs.

Yeah Portugal is a great experience when visiting with tier 1 country salary.

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

#143

Post by goku12 »

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.

Please don't define everything in India in terms of poverty. It gives the impression that anything good in India happens only because of economic concerns. But that isn't entirely true. Let's not undermine the recognition of those who do it as a social responsibility. I'm personally acquainted with a rather successful engineer and businessman who does it because he believes in sustainability. His reworked Thinkpads are very popular among the tech community here - not because they're cheap, but because of his workmanship and configurability (it even comes with coreboot). And none of those customers are incapable of affording high-end laptops either - many are FOSS contributors when they're not at their full-time jobs.

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

#144

Post by sadeshmukh »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #108
forgotoldacc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Said responsibility can remain the choice of the consumer: producer must accept repair/replacement if consumer brings it back to them, but consumer is not forced to bring it back to them if anything goes wrong. Consumer may also choose to self-repair, sell, etc. Perhaps consumer must bring it back to dispose of it though, as nobody benefits from hucking it directly into a landfill. The other difference between "renti…

So renting, but with only the negative parts for the company

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

#145

Post by InfinityByTen »

gruez wrote: post #141
InfinityByTen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food for thought: if a failure (of sorts) can make the successful rethink their ways of being, is that success missing the point, maybe? A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints…

>A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints births sustainability and how we all can learn from it (including India) and in fact foster it in a positive way :) Isn't this the degr…

I didn't know there was a term to it. I wouldn't think of my stance currently as advocating of purposeful scarcity in an anticipation of better distribution. Instead I do consider it critical to "take a step back" and "evaluate the problem statement at hand". Is the end goal more consumption or better living?

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

#147

Post by yason »

gloxkiqcza wrote: post #31
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.

Question is what domain/field is the next virgin frontier for hackers, unspoiled of commercial greed and integrated and locked down solutions, where you can still not only buy things but also own them, and rebuild from parts what you bought when it breaks down?

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

#149

Post by fn-mote »

lou1306 wrote: post #76

I literally just bought a 2nd hand laptop, made by $huge_tech_conglomerate_from_pacific_northwest, with an 11-th gen i7, for less than EUR 250. The reason it was so cheap? It has a defective charging port so it only charges via USB-C. So it's not even "dead" dead. This is mind-boggling, the CPU alone almost basically makes the full price. In what world is this an efficient allocation of resources?

> This is mind-boggling, the CPU alone almost basically makes the full price. In what world is this an efficient allocation of resources?

The world in which diagnosis (plus risk of incorrect diagnosis) is done at $200/hour. Obviously a corporate sale, where they cannot be bothered to check it out because that's not their core business.

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

#150

Post by Ray20 »

ponector wrote: post #83
eviks wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better It's not, you're just ignoring two obvious points: 1. a person with no laptop would prefer it 2. a repairable laptop can also have its parts upgraded, so a 20 year laptop could have 1-year old parts

Cheap laptop I've bought in 2011 went through several upgrades: replaced ram doubling amount of GB. Replaced HDD with SSD, added HDD instead of DVD reader. Even replaced CPU to get more cores! Nowadays I can only replace m.2 stick to get more storage. Everything is soldered.

Today there are also plenty of cheap models that support memory expansion and have an additional slot for an SSD. The only exception is the ability to replace the processor, which is extremely rare. So you should rather ask yourself why you, as a consumer, chose a non-upgradable model.
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