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How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

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Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#151

Post by laserlight »

user_7832 wrote: post #77
divan wrote: post #60

MHBKD recently made a video on Apple testing lab [1], and one thing he talked about and that was kinda new to me is seeing repairability as a spectrum. I.e. on one side is "indestructible" product and on the other is "perfectly repairable". And that those properties (being hard to damage/destruct and being easy to repair) might be mutually exclusive. In a hindsight it seems obvious, still this video was the first tim…

Disclaimer: I haven't seen the video (I'm in a quiet place right now.) > And that those properties (being hard to damage/destruct and being easy to repair) might be mutually exclusive. I disagree on a fundamental level. You could say such a thing when talking about really small (micro/miniature) devices. But as size increases, the validity of such arguments rapidly goes down. A phone case/bumper for example - makes t…

> Apple does not care too much about making repairs easy.

They do. iPhone 14 internals was redesigned to be more repairable [0], which extended to pro models with iPhone 15 [1].

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/82867/iphone-15-teardown-reveals...

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#152

Post by baq »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #94
baq wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. If customers don't complain strongly enough, the manufacturer is incentivized to develop products prone to malfunction. If the cost of malfunction is raised, the incentives change. If they got invited to a hundred cases at the same time, they'd send a lawyer and perhaps even would tweak the design to include some extra $1 parts which actually work.

It's a trade-off. People don't want appliances that break down after a few years but they also want cheap appliances... In this case it seems to boil down to: " In the end he replaced the light bulb (which hadn't worked for years, we hadn't bothered replacing it) and the message had gone away anyway. "... i.e. the guy could have replaced the light bulb when it broke and perhaps nothing would have happened in the firs…

and the next day the error came back and ultimately something else had to be replaced.

a failed bulb could result in a 'please change the bulb before the rest of me breaks' on the display, too.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#153

Post by TeMPOraL »

0xEF wrote: post #84
gnicholas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading a quasi-debunking of this. I didn't go down the rabbit hole far enough to understand all the details, but it seems the situation was more complicated than just corporate greed. [1] The topic has been discussed here in the past a few times, including [2] and [3] 1: https://readmedium.com/en/the-phoebus-cartel-was-never-reall... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596792 3: https://news.ycombinat…

I would not call any of that a debunking, even quasi. Just a different dance around the same hard-to-swallow pill. Company X makes a great product that everyone only needs one of and lasts a long time. Over time, the market starts to dwindle and. Company X is going broke. Now, Company X must either invest in innovation or reduce the lifespan of its current offering. There's nothing inherently evil about this concept,…

> There's nothing inherently evil about this concept, but we tend to want to chalk it up to greed when Company X really just wants to survive and make a profit, which I suppose is the point.

No, that's exactly the problem. Company X surviving isn't a good enough justification for it to start making shittier products. Especially when they don't inform the customers of the degradation.

This is a business model problem, or perhaps a whole-market problem; papering over it with "oh just a little planned obsolescence is good, because it lets the vendor survive" is kind of a bailout, and prevents the problem from being corrected. By now, this has happened in so many places across so many industries that it's a rot that runs deep through entirety of the market.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#154

Post by Y_Y »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #133
greekanalyst wrote: post #121

The EU gets a lot of heat for many things (and rightfully so), but this is an area where it is actually doing wonders in favor of consumers. Here is the directive adopted by the EU Council to promote the repair of broken or defective goods, also known as the right-to-repair (or R2R) directive: " The directive adopted today enshrines a new right for consumers: the right to have defective products repaired in an easier…

The US, the UE and China have wildly different approaches to many important topics, and the fact they are all affecting the entire world has the tendency to break political stale matches and balance things out. It shows that diversity is a good thing, you end up having to compromise no matter how rightful you feel.

I'm often guilty of missing mistakes in my own posts, but as a PSA: please proofread your posts, especially if using prediction on a phone.

You can edit your post if you do so soon after posting, and sometimes the meaning isn't lost (stale matches -> stalemates) but other times it (subjectively) is. For example I don't know what "rightful" should be here.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#155

Post by hoseja »

notoverthere wrote: post #29
r4indeer wrote: post #21

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven? Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

There's also the Centennial Light [1], a light bulb made in the late 1890s. It was first lit in 1901 and it's still alight today. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light

It barely glows. The "lightbulb cartel" was basically a consumer protection because barring major inventions, any deviation from the thousand hour lightbulb would have severe drawbacks in terms of power efficiency or light output.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#156

Post by prmoustache »

> So you have a reasonable expectation that your appliance will last a reasonable amount of time. So how long is reasonable?

FOREVER. Just design them so parts are replaceable and buildable by any third party and provide the documentation.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#157

Post by Onavo »

afiori wrote: post #61
r4indeer wrote: post #21

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven? Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Planned obsolescence is very real, but the reality of incandescent light bulbs means that lifespan, efficiency, and luminosity are not independent. The 1000 hours limit is in practice a lower bound to a combination of luminosity and efficiency

LED diodes can theoretically last decades given the correct drivers (current and heat needs to be significantly limited), unfortunately they are the very definition of planned obsolescence.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...

A stable DC current and temperature limited LED can easily last decades.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#158

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

Y_Y wrote: post #154
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US, the UE and China have wildly different approaches to many important topics, and the fact they are all affecting the entire world has the tendency to break political stale matches and balance things out. It shows that diversity is a good thing, you end up having to compromise no matter how rightful you feel.

I'm often guilty of missing mistakes in my own posts, but as a PSA: please proofread your posts, especially if using prediction on a phone. You can edit your post if you do so soon after posting, and sometimes the meaning isn't lost (stale matches -> stalemates) but other times it (subjectively) is. For example I don't know what "rightful" should be here.

I always thought it would be a good idea to have a suggest spelling improvements on social media & forums. Gives a low-key way of improving things without wasting comment space and potentially saving embarrassment. But I’m sure it needs a good ux or otherwise will be abused

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#159

Post by AnthonyMouse »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #133
greekanalyst wrote: post #121

The EU gets a lot of heat for many things (and rightfully so), but this is an area where it is actually doing wonders in favor of consumers. Here is the directive adopted by the EU Council to promote the repair of broken or defective goods, also known as the right-to-repair (or R2R) directive: " The directive adopted today enshrines a new right for consumers: the right to have defective products repaired in an easier…

The US, the UE and China have wildly different approaches to many important topics, and the fact they are all affecting the entire world has the tendency to break political stale matches and balance things out. It shows that diversity is a good thing, you end up having to compromise no matter how rightful you feel.

The problem is people keep trying to stamp the diversity out.

The model in the US is nominally to have few regulations limited to things like enforcing contracts and antitrust laws and pricing major externalities, then leave the rest of it to free market competition. That isn't compatible with a model where regulators are trying to run the economy, because then the regulators get captured by industry and thwart rather than protect competition, and competition can't save you from needing complicated rules if it is not present. And those kinds of complex competition-destroying regulations are showing up everywhere, including in the US.

Conversely, the model in the EU is to not care a lot about small businesses and just regulate the large ones. But that model isn't really compatible with free trade. You can't impose expensive regulations on domestic companies and then put them into competition with countries that don't do that and expect them to succeed. But people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the expensive regulations but not the correspondingly higher prices, and then the stuff they buy gets made in China where the rules don't exist (or exist on paper but the government waives them in order to capture the market). If you want to have the rules without destroying domestic industry then you have to impose them on the manufacturers of imported products too. Which would actually help the US increase competition, because the regulations would then shackle global megacorps that want to sell into the EU but not smaller domestic US companies that don't. But then foreign-produced stuff sold in the EU would cost as much as domestically-produced stuff -- a boon to local industry but higher prices on local consumers, and apparently they're not willing to suffer the latter.

Re: How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court

#160

Post by macNchz »

Youden wrote: post #95
r4indeer wrote: post #21

> Now an old fashioned light bulb shouldn't be expected to last a decade, but an oven? Funnily enough, there actually was the Phoebus cartel [1] which sought to reduce the lifespan of incandescent light bulbs to around 1,000 hours and raise prices. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY Key points from an AI summary: - Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan. - Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply "better" products b…

Well, without the cartel there could have presumably been bright white, 1000 hour bulbs on the shelf next to dim yellow 2500 hour bulbs, and people could have chosen accordingly.

Additionally, the companies set up a whole compliance regime with bulb testing and fines, not for bulbs being too dim, but for bulbs that lasted too long, which I think clarifies the intent more than anything else.

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