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There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

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Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#161

Post by jameshart »

smichel17 wrote: post #94
rini17 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, comparing exchangeable mechanical gears to a transistors on silicon die or pixels is a bit ridiculous.

I'd look at the comparison more like: a gear is a component (eg, cpu). If it breaks, it breaks and is not expected to be repairable, but that component should be replaceable; you shouldn't have to throw away the whole watch just because one gear broke.

But a replacement gear can be manufactured out of commodity materials using standard tools and a bunch of esoteric skills. A replacement LCD display is never going to be something a skilled worker can recreate from scratch. Your best case is that you are able to salvage matching parts from another instance of the same device - so if you have one laptop with a broken screen and another with a busted CPU you can cannibalize parts to make a single working machine.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#162

Post by nitrogen »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #118
rvense wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Recycling" in the context of electronics means that a few rare minerals (gold) get extracted, and the rest (ie. almost everything) ends up in landfills or as filler for roads at best. It's a very energy intensive process with often murky environmental effects, and defintely not just "used to make nee iPhones". Unfortunately! That's why the phrase is "reduce, reuse, and if all else fails, recycle" and why Apple (and…

Unfortunately modern computing trends make "reuse" pretty difficult too, what with software bloat and increasing layers of abstraction ensuring that everything becomes slower and slower over time, possibly just so that you will buy new hardware. Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic. Not that long ago users here were talking about 3 seconds to launch a word processor being "pretty good", which is an in…

Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic.

Comedians were making songs about endless upgrades back in the 90s.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#163

Post by nitrogen »

bonoboTP wrote: post #105
_ph_ wrote: post #24

Whenever repairability of modern electronic devices is discussed, I have to look at my mechanical wristwatch. Yes, there is an enormeous amount of technology integrated into a smartphone or compact laptop, but my wristwatch contains over 100 moving parts in a tiny volume. And still, every trained watchmaker can open and service it. It requires specialized tools, but those have been avialable to watchmakers for hundre…

I think it is a specific branding strategy. And I don't mean that in the direct sense, like planned obsolescence (it's NOT just about lost revenue due to repaired products staying longer in circulaton). The Apple product brand image is that these are sleek smart unified objects. All from hardware to software should be looked at as a singular entity, a well designed black box for my satisfaction as the customer. Openi…

But queens still fart. Denying reality doesn't make it go away. Elegance must adapt.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#164

Post by [deleted] »

michaelt wrote: post #63
nolok wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I kind liked washing machines that properly heated to 90C I will be honest with you this one I just don't understand. My washing machine is A+ in EU norms and it heats properly. Maybe you bought a not so good model ? If anything those norms should be re-evaluated with new tougher levels now, you have to go out of your way to buy something that's not at least A (which is good and it means it worked, but also that it…

> Maybe you bought a not so good model? Rinse quality is lower in modern washing machines in order to meet water economy standards - even if you buy an £800 Miele and turn on all the 'extra rinse' options. I know this because I have a relative with sensitive skin, who resorts to rinsing things by hand after taking them out of the washing machine - and doing such a rinse visibly dirties the water. Feel free to test th…

[deleted]

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#165

Post by auggierose »

nolok wrote: post #23
switch007 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After the EU forced manufacturers to improve energy use in their devices it soon improved situations for everyone on this planet. I don't know (talking as fairly pro-EU kind of person). I kind liked washing machines that properly heated to 90C and vacuum cleaners that actually picked up dirt. But the EU are only partly to blame. Companies are relentless in their pursuit of cutting production costs. Going "green" ju…

> I kind liked washing machines that properly heated to 90C I will be honest with you this one I just don't understand. My washing machine is A+ in EU norms and it heats properly. Maybe you bought a not so good model ? If anything those norms should be re-evaluated with new tougher levels now, you have to go out of your way to buy something that's not at least A (which is good and it means it worked, but also that it…

Same for vacuum cleaners, I am keeping my old one because I cannot get a new one that cleans comparably. On the other hand, you think a Dyson cleans properly, so ...

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#166

Post by nitrogen »

rsynnott wrote: post #93
silvestrov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would better if the EU had required listing the "sucking power" of vacuum cleaner in addition to the power usage, and require this number to be in bigger font size than power usage. And require "suckage per watt" also. People went by power usage because that was the only measure they got.

There's no metric for that that's well understood by the public, though. People have been trained that more watts == more better over the last century by lightbulbs and things (and more dubiously by hifi makers; they tend to use very dubious marketing watts). Air watts (ie power of air movement) might have been a good compromise; most super-high wattage machines don't have substantially better air watts metrics. It s…

Inches of water column were directly demonstrated by the last door to door vacuum sales pitch I saw, as a measure of suction. CFM are a perfectly comparable measure of airflow. And an abstract "cleaning power" could be defined for various surfaces by putting a standardized dirt load on the surface and weighing what percentage remains after a standardized sweep.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#167

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

dx034 wrote: post #98
StavrosK wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, there is an enormeous amount of technology integrated into a smartphone or compact laptop, but my wristwatch contains over 100 moving parts in a tiny volume I'm not sure what the point here is, a CPU contains 50 billion parts in a tiny volume, it's impossible to fix things this small if they break. If a capacitor or resistor burns, you can probably open up your PC, look at the motherboard, find the faulty comp…

But pretty much all smartphone manufacturers glue parts together. Watchmakers show that it is possible to use screws even with tiny cases that must be waterproof. I believe Apple would be able to create an iPhone with identical specs with no glue used. But it's likely much more expensive to manufacture.

This is the bit that people keep skirting around. No one is intentionally making items hard to repair (at least I have never seen any evidence to suggest it); they're making them easy and cheap to manufacture. And cheap to manufacture often means hard to repair as a side effect.

To anyone working with complex industrial devices this isn't a surprise. A good manufacturer will involve their Service people in Manufacturability reviews because what makes things easy for the Manufacturing guys and what makes the device cheap and so makes Sales & Marketing's jobs easier, often makes the Service people's job harder. For a product that costs $5,000 and that is expected to have a few repair cycles, getting input from Service is important. In that case, adding $1,000 to the selling price can be worth it to the customer if it means it can be repaired easily.

But when the product costs $500 and and has a predicted lifetime of less than 5 years and it isn't expected to be repaired by any but a tiny fraction of customers, it makes sense to ignore the repairability issues in favor of lower cost. Making that $500 device more repairable might add $100 to the selling cost, and that can be the difference between a hit that flies off the shelves and a total dud.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#168

Post by moksly »

Avamander wrote: post #112
moksly wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one I’d call a techie bought it, it was the artsy environmental types. The reasons for replacing it ranges from the OS not being updated to run modern Apps to the phone breaking. We’re pretty digitised in Denmark, so if you can’t download apps from the iOS or play stores you’ll have a harder time transferring payments to friends, using public transportation, ordering food online, interacting with the public sector…

Android is fine. It's the sub-par hardware that isn't, poor flash memory gets unbearably slow at some point and that bogs down pretty much everything. Second and related problem is developers that abuse storage, no, you don't need to fsync your logs or DB to the storage after each row. It really fucks with devices that have lost a bit of IOPS.

I’m not really into it, but the problem they seemed to have with the fairphone was that it wasn’t getting new android versions for some reason. I guess you could argue wether or not developers should support old android versions but the reality is that they don’t.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#169

Post by silvestrov »

rsynnott wrote: post #93
silvestrov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would better if the EU had required listing the "sucking power" of vacuum cleaner in addition to the power usage, and require this number to be in bigger font size than power usage. And require "suckage per watt" also. People went by power usage because that was the only measure they got.

There's no metric for that that's well understood by the public, though. People have been trained that more watts == more better over the last century by lightbulbs and things (and more dubiously by hifi makers; they tend to use very dubious marketing watts). Air watts (ie power of air movement) might have been a good compromise; most super-high wattage machines don't have substantially better air watts metrics. It s…

People can be taught.

Example of typical packaging of LED bulb in Denmark: https://imgur.com/a/J5PiGLb

It has: actual watt usage, "old watt equivalent" and lumen. It won't take that many years before people know the lumen value they want.

Re: There is now a European standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff

#170

Post by cheesecracker »

_ph_ wrote: post #154
cheesecracker wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but isn't a wristwatch like a bazillionth of complexity of a modern smartphone? How many transistors do you need for a wristwatch? The whole idea of servicing modern electronics is romantic nonsense. The hourly rate of an expert will make it too expensive quickly, because industrialized mass production is too effective. (Edit: according to this link on Quora, several billion transistors are not unrealistic in…

When I was talking about servicing a laptop, I was thinking about the usualy components, like battery, keyboard, SSD, fans. Things which can break or are going to wear out over time. By that count, a laptop has perhaps 10-20 "parts". Compare that to the complexity of a mechanical watch. I don't know the going rate for a watch maker, it is probably not cheap. But I know what I paid for servicing my watches before and…

Components are glued or soldered together because that makes the device smaller and probably also more efficient to build, wasting less resources, too.
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