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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

#171

Post by cheesecracker »

xxs wrote: post #130
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…

I am not sure what kind of point you are attempting to make: the amount of transistors in an IC hardly matters. No one repairs individual transistors. The chips/IC can be replaced and many ICs are not much more expensive than the cogs in the watch. Ofc, there are billions of transistors in a phone - that doesn't mean anything at all. Repeatability depends on being able to open a device/tool non-destructively, being a…

Pretty sure they save materials, time to assemble and "space" by gluing instead of using replacable parts.

I guess your theory is that it is all malice by the manufacturers?

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

#172

Post by cheesecracker »

gen3 wrote: post #126
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…

Almost all those transistors are in a nice little package. Using transistor count isn’t really a good way to define a devices serviceable complexity. People repair phones all the time, it just requires the knowledge to do so.

Then the comparison to watches doesn't really make sense, either, because both can be repaired?

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

#173

Post by cheesecracker »

Spivak wrote: post #146
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…

But a watchmaker is also unlikely equally unlikely to have the skills and equipment to fabricate the individual pieces of a watch. We are asking what the repairability is like when all the pieces of the phone (that would be available in the factory at final assembly) are available to the servicer.

I think that's what they did traditionally. If you want pieces of the phone to be replaceable, you'll get a thicker, heavier phone that uses more materials to build.

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

#174

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

fluffything wrote: post #38
moksly wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is anecdotal, but everyone in my circle of friends who bought a fairphone2 (2015) has replaced it. Meanwhile my mom is still using my old iPhone 5s (2013). And my wife uses her iPhone SE(2016). Hell the fact that they have released one in 2013, 2015 and 2019, kind of goes against their message doesn’t it?

I'm still using my iPhone SE (2016). I've changed the battery once, and the screen twice (I should probably stop dropping it). Changing the screen takes ~20 minutes, and a new screen costs ~16$. I will probably upgrade to the iPhone SE2 at some point, but given that my phone works perfectly for what I use it for, paying 550$ for an upgrade just does not make sense.

Well, I'm using an HTC phone from 2014. I haven't had to change or repair any parts and it costs about half an iPhone, I think. To clarify, everything seems to be working just fine.

Unfortunately, Google. But that's the only problem with it. I was actually going to stick with a flip-top but then I started working as a dev and figured that getting a smartphone would give me some extra cred.

Nowadays it's probably the other way around, I should probably dig out my old fliptop and use that, to show how 1337 I am.

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

#175

Post by sagarm »

_ph_ wrote: post #153
xxs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many (incl. myself) people have no issues with the pcb and soldering on them, provided the entire thing is not potted in epoxy. Soldering SSD and RAM is another issue, which makes standard components useless (mostly on purpose)

And at least with SSD there is the risk of the drive wearing out. One should not have to throw away the CPU and GPU just to fix a broken drive.

Worse, it means you can't pull the drive out of a dead or to-be-resold laptop to salvage or secure the data on it.

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

#176

Post by xxs »

_ph_ wrote: post #153
xxs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

many (incl. myself) people have no issues with the pcb and soldering on them, provided the entire thing is not potted in epoxy. Soldering SSD and RAM is another issue, which makes standard components useless (mostly on purpose)

And at least with SSD there is the risk of the drive wearing out. One should not have to throw away the CPU and GPU just to fix a broken drive.

I'd bet the some capacitors would go into fail mode way earlier than a moderate quality SSD would wear off.

Saying that: home, we've got 3 laptops - all of them have removable drives and 2 drive bays (3 if counting SATA2 optical drive). All of them have replaceable and upgradable ram. All of them have replaceable cpu (one has been upgraded as well). Replaceable keyboards, trackpads... and batteries too.

It's kind of new trend to make anorexic laptops with everything soldered straight to the PCB, and if you're Apple apply no conformal coating either.

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

#177

Post by rvense »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #119
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…

Isn't that just for the boards and more awkward components though? It seems like it would be trivial to strip most of the surface mounted components off via just heating and shaking

For manual repairs it's certainly viable for some components, but it takes some care to not end up with tiny passives stuck to everything - if you literally just shake (or more, likely, scrape) everything off the board you'll get an absolute mess. And then you don't know if things end up damaged (or were damaged before, if you're talking about e-waste). It's not really something that works at scale. Even in the simplest case it's labour-intensive, so it's not economical in the vast majority of cases. Not for SoCs, certainly not for smaller things that cost singular cents, or less.

To reuse components in new products you'd have to harvest, clean off the old solder paste (reball in the case of BGAs), and sort everything, and then repackage them for pick-n-placing again. And if you're talking about more than just Apple reusing Apple products, there's also quite a lot of varieties of components.

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

#179

Post by sireat »

shuntress wrote: post #160
sireat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consumer notebook repairability the golden standard should be something similar to HP Elitebook 2560p from 2012. No screwdriver required!(with option to have a security screw) While removing battery you can press a latch to remove the back cover. Then you have easy access to everything that a consumer could possible want replacing(HDD/SDD,DVD->HDD, RAM, WIFI). I recently upgraded a cousins 2560p to 16GB and SSD a…

I think there are definitely some reasonable limits manufacturers shouldn't be expected to reach in terms of easy, intuitive, tool-less end-user serviceability. For example, I think it is unreasonable to expect that a smartphone's battery be replaceable with 0 tools and 0 consumables (gaskets, glues, etc). However, those tools and consumables _should_ be expected to to be reasonably standard and reasonably available.

Why shouldn't smartphone battery be replacable with 0 tools? Why should there be glue involved?

It was a standard that mobile phone batteries were easily replacable.

In fact https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?idBatRemovable=1 returns ~6400 results while not removable returns ~2400 results.

In fact that's how most smartphones were until some market leaders decided to move to glue on hard to replace models.

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

#180

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

fsflover wrote: post #22
princekolt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every android phone in that page has a score lower or equal to all the iPhones. This has to be a joke, right? Example: Galaxy S20 Ultra [3/10]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S20+Ultra+Tea... iPhone 11 Pro Max [6/10]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+11+Pro+Max+Teardown/1... But sure, lets keep bashing Apple because that gives us all the internet kudos, am I right?

Although you are right and this is a problem, android does not in general claim to be climate-friendly, while Apple does.

Well according to the list you posted, they seem to be the most climate friendly mass smart phone producer on the planet. Perhaps they deserve the title.
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