Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by keenerd 3654 days ago
We already know how that is going to play out. Go ask your local radio and TV repairman.

(Although they weren't helped by the fact that transistorized designs simply didn't have parts that were expected to burn out on a regular basis.)
1 comments
rasz_pl 3653 days ago
oh, they do. Capacitors in modern switching circuits should be treated as perishable.
link
seanp2k2 3653 days ago
And paying someone who knows how to fix them their rate to replace a $.10 part can cost more than getting a new thing. I dug a 19" UltraSharp display out of the trash, tested it, and found the problem to be some bulging caps in the power supply for the backlight. The parts cost less than a dollar, and it took about 4-6 hours of my time total. I was billing $90/hr 10 years ago to do PC repair, and we didn't touch electronics, so given the value of my time, it was definitely not worth it for me to repair this monitor, which is maybe worth $100 now ($60 if you can find a good deal).

Since a car is so large and complex, I highly doubt that repair costs will exceed replacement costs in the foreseeable future. Disc brake pads are under $100 for a set of 4 for most vehicles. It's hard to find a car for $100 in any sort of road-going condition to make it more cost-effective to swap cars instead of doing the repair.

A head gasket is different. On many older cars, the cost to replace it exceeds the value of the vehicle. Related: http://jalopnik.com/the-time-smoke-came-pouring-out-of-my-br...

This is of course aside from things like insurance, registration, bills of sale, etc which make swapping vehicles a big hassle right now.

I honestly don't see this situation changing in the next 20 years, and the future I see is more in shared vehicle ownership, where instead of owning a car directly, one might join an organization for a few hundred dollars a month which provides access to a network of vehicles, possibly self-driving ones. Uber is, as far as I can tell, trying to be the first to do this, and they might even charge for actual usage instead of some flat monthly fee. BMW is also looking into this, but given they're a car company and not a tech company, I expect them to be badly beaten to market: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/access-over-... (I'm sure there are other companies working on similar ideas as we speak).

link