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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

#161

Post by saidinesh5 »

9rx wrote: post #155
dghlsakjg wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are all sorts of things like this, but one that springs to mind is drones, specifically FPV drones. You can build a very good drone from basically parts that runs on open firmware. The videos that you see coming out of Ukraine is clearly using flight control software that is basically the standard for non commercial drones. Nothing more cyberpunk than fighting fascists using open source software and commodity h…

What seems to be lacking is the path to accidental discovery that underlies these stories from the past. Is there a reasonable way people will find themselves building drones without being intentional about it?

Not accidental, but government restrictions are the main reason people built their own drones here. Government banned import of drones here back then. Only way to fly and have fun was build your own. build them part by part.

I have built them for dozens of non technical friends too. And then they themselves got into fixing them once they broke. Solder the wires. Get parts 3d printed etc..

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

#162

Post by vel0city »

Gigachad wrote: post #118
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…

Stuff still is repairable these days, it’s just most of us live in countries where labor is so expensive locally it makes more sense to just buy a new one than to pay someone to replace components on a circuit board.

Right? If the replacement is $500, and the repair guy is going to charge $100/hr in labor to diagnose the issue and repair it plus an unknown cost of replacement components, the risk of spending more on the repair is quite high.

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

#163

Post by pjmlp »

carlosjobim wrote: post #156
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…

Your lord and savior the government cannot do anything about the fact that it's cheaper to manufacture new than to repair. Unless you want to de-industrialize, which of course is a popular ideology among Europeans.

We only need to throw into the arena the mighty power of executive orders, and great wall of Europe.

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

#164

Post by penguin_booze »

The repair culture exists because there's a market for it. People's disposable income--or lack thereof--forces them to make do with less shiny, older, products. As society gets richer, this repair culture, too, will fade and go extinct. "When I can easily afford, why should I settle?", the thinking will go.

What I'd like to see is for society to embrace repair culture because that feels the right thing to do. A culture where it should feel immoral to chuck something out when there's still life left on the product. A culture where repairing makes economic sense--i.e., the cost of repair doesn't surpass that of a new, comparable, product by a wide margin.

When deprecation is the norm and fashion, when companies are incentivized to "innovate" (read: planned obsolescence) and flood the market with cheap products, there won't be a repair culture.

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

#165

Post by saidinesh5 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #57
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…

My dad has set up a repair cafe near where he lives, and they're popping up in loads of places now. While some electronics are hard / impossible to repair, sure, there's still a lot that can be done with the rest. Household appliances, for example. The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run, but to make a living out of anything you need to charge an X amount per hour, and if the repair is more e…

> The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run

There is cost, and there's also the companies/devices themselves. We are losing modularity. With almost no benefit to the user.

I mean companies have the audacity to solder an SSD to the motherboards of laptops. And make the batteries - one of the biggest points of failure - non user replaceable. We had all that. It was cheap. It was user friendly. When one failed, you were able to replace it yourself.

Once there is enough momentum on letting users fix these failing parts themselves, the ecosystems would automatically fix themselves imo. That's one of the things that companies like Framework, Valve etc.. seem to do really well with their hardware endeavors.

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

#166

Post by srameshc »

I bought a 2016 for someone for about $150 and it was probably refurbished at such shop few months back. It had 16GB RAM and i7 processor enough to get going with design work with a nice external laptop. I wasn't sure if it will last but took a bet and it works perfectly.

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

#167

Post by vjk800 »

Gigachad wrote: post #118
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…

Stuff still is repairable these days, it’s just most of us live in countries where labor is so expensive locally it makes more sense to just buy a new one than to pay someone to replace components on a circuit board.

This is the reason.

I've fixed old electronics myself sometimes and quite often it's doable and the spare parts usually cost approximately nothing. However, paying someone 50 euros for half an hour worth of work to fix a thirty euro Christmas decoration doesn't feel like a good deal. Maybe for 10 or even 15 euros it would be.

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

#168

Post by octopoc »

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…

Yeah I'm in the same boat. I have a MacBook Pro 2009 that still works fine. That is 16 years old! I use it for web browsing occasionally, although I do have to update the certs manually.

Only downsides are it has only 2GB of RAM and about 0.1 seconds of battery life.

When I bought a new one, I made sure to get 32GB of RAM. That way I'll still be able to browse the web in twenty years, although I'm sure it'll be very slow because of the CPU.

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

#170

Post by thenthenthen »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #20
userbinator wrote: post #19

Happens a lot in China too. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/recycling-in-china-laptop-cpus-...

Less so now than a decade ago. You need to watch them while they repair it, I learned that the hard way.

EVERYTHING gets recycled in China period.
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