[_ph_]

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 hundreds of years. A time traveller could buy a current Rolex and have it serviced in 1950, possibly even in 1850. The watchmakers of those times wouldn't have access to the right spare parts - those are surprisingly high-tech, but basic service would be possible.

And that is why I cannot stand the current state of repairs in the electronic world. I am especially looking at Apple in this respect, because they have demonstrated a surprising skill at making things repairable, which they want to be serviceable. Just look at the brilliant mount for the USB ports in the new Air.

While end-user serviceability might not be desirable for something highly-integrated, the benchmark really should be whether someone trained like a watch-maker has the ability to service a device. Which would be great for the local economy wherever in the world a customer is, because traditionally most towns would have at least one watchmaker, a well paid professional who would keep the money local vs. creating more electronic waste and shipping a new device around the world.

[ThePhysicist]

Apple seems to be one of the worst offenders in terms of repairability of their devices. You can watch e.g. Louis Rossmann's videos on Youtube, he goes into great detail on how Apple tries to make it impossible for anyone except themselves to service their laptops, even going as far as to restrict market suppliers from selling specific microchips (that were not invented by Apple) to anyone but Apple.

I imagine this will only become worse as they switch to their own CPUs in the near future. I expect that Macs will become more like iPhones in that Apple will restrict more and more which software you can easily run on them and how you can extend the devices.

Other manufacturers like Dell or Lenovo do a much better job in terms of repairability IMHO: They build their machines with mostly standard components that can be easily replaced and make them easy to open and service. Compare that to recent Apple devices: If you want more RAM or storage in your device they charge you 5-10 times the market price. They also make sure you will never be able to upgrade those things yourself by soldering them to the mainboard.

[theandrewbailey]

I watched one of Louis' videos[0] yesterday where he doesn't think Apple's ARM transition won't make things harder. He mentions that CPU failure is rare, and replacement CPUs aren't easy to get today, because they are salvaged from other machines, and can't be ordered from places like Newegg or Amazon. Almost all of his repairs involve components that aren't the CPU.

[0] https://youtu.be/T_2LnFAGypM?t=175

[barrkel]

Switching away from a PC architecture is the issue more than moving to using an ARM CPU in particular.

[rasz]

Not to someone already repairing ipads/iphones.

[Scoundreller]

On the other side, Apple’s approach means I’ve been able to re-capture about 50%+ of my 3-4 year old MacBook Airs by parting them out, instead of nearly 0 for commodity laptops.

It really reduced my TCO instead of letting that get captured by 3rd party manufactures.

[_ph_]

I don't think it will get especially worse with the switch to their own silicon. It is not as if you could exchange the CPU in your current Mac either, with the possible exception of the Mac Pro. Same with the software. The pure fact that they demonstrated a Linux VM in the keynote shows, that they understand at least the requirements of the Mac users.

[m0xte]

I'm really not bothered by this.

While I appreciate the right to repair, I don't think a lot of stuff is repairable with any reasonably easy to obtain equipment these days. It's limiting all repairs to FRU replacement. I can rework everything down to 0402's and MSOP packages but BGAs and things like that, forget it.

We really should be fighting for better consumer rights legislation in our respective countries where we don't have to resort to repairing our own devices because they had designed in lifespans. You should be able to walk into the store you bought your device from in 5 years and say "it failed" and get an unconditional repair or replacement without a single argument.

We have that here in the UK under CRA 2015 and Apple have honoured repairs I've taken in there up to 5 years old without question. In fact I got given a brand new 6s after 3 years when the display developed a cosmetic backlight fault. The old one was recycled I assume and turned into other iPhones. That's where we should be.

Fear of things breaking is really a big problem with expensive technology items. Removing that fear and cost though legislation changes is the best outcome. Not the right to repair which is honestly beyond most people I have encountered, including so-called professional repairers. Involving third parties and self-repairs is walking around the problem which is why the manufacturers are surprisingly silent on this. It's a better outcome for the manufacturers than actually forcing the manufacturers to support their devices for a reasonable lifespan.

[rvense]

"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 others) are indeed in the wrong when they don't design their products for repairability and long life.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

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 insane statement to make when you're taking about multicore processors that can execute multiple instructions per cycle and run at 3 billion cycles per second. Modern software is the computing equivalent of burning rainforests to roast marshmallows.

[nitrogen]

Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic.

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

[tomatotomato37]

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

[rvense]

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.

[encom]

>but BGAs and things like that, forget it.

Sure. But things like batteries should be replacable in all devices. It's a consumable item, and it shouldn't even be counted as a repair at all.

The fact that modern electronics, and especially phones, is designed to be disposable is infuriating. And Apple says they care so ooh much about the environment, but wants you to throw your headphones in a landfill when the battey dies. Disgusting.

[m0xte]

Completely agree there. With respect to the earphones I think Apple etc should buy them back at a percentage of the original cost and have recycling targets that that are independently audited.

[_ph_]

The right to repair should at least cover trivial things like replacing the battery, keyboard, ssd, fans. Things which are going to wear down and can be cheaply replaced, if they can be replaced at all. But charging $600 for a keyboard exchange and even more for a new LCD (which is worth $100-200), that is entirely wrong.

[m0xte]

Yes I agree.

[C1sc0cat]

I think its an attempt to keep developers who want to develop directly on their laptop.

Personally I am not taken with the idea of running a vm on a different hardware arm to the to the one I will deploy in production.

I much prefer developing and testing on identical hardware

[Shivetya]

Right to repair never covered upgrading an item. We cannot upgrade memory or storage in many devices so limiting the rule to say "this item type must allow for use upgrading" limits the flexibility of the seller. If you don't like their limits then buy the other brand.

One could make a good argument that circuit board repair is outside the realm of right to repair as in many applications you simply buy a new module or board; see automotive repairs, appliance repair, and similar.

It is the difference between swapping out the a water pump and repair one yourself. Right to Repair makes it possible to get new water pumps from any vendor as that is the extent by which the common consumer would need. So in the case of Apple products Right to Repair would include replacement circuit boards which could include a mainboard, battery modules, and any individual component which simply plugs in. Also covered would be the ability to open an close an item without having to damage it to do so to get at the internals.

[ThePhysicist]

I don't think so. Letting the manufacturer decide which parts of a system "belong together" will not enable an effective repair, as companies like Apple will just say that their whole logic board is a single unit and to "repair" it you need to throw it out and get a new one (actually that's exactly what they are doing already by restricting repair shops from buying specific chips they use on their boards; many board problems would be easy to repair with the right 30 cent IC, Apple just won't let repair technicians have those). That's a bit too convenient maybe. A better approach would be to see what is practically possible in terms of repairability without significantly compromising other aspects of a design, and mandate this to everyone. Another way would be to create fore-runner programs, where the most innovative and efficient solution becomes the standard for everyone to follow. This worked well for products like cars so I don't see why this wouldn't work for computers.

Also, saying "if you don't like their limits then buy the other brand" is not a strong argument against standardization and regulation of technology, that stance would basically give a free pass to manufacturers to do anything as long as there is customer demand for it. Any industry that can produce significant external negative effects like waste or pollution, which are not primarily experienced by the consumers (think of pollution produced by cars; not very inconvenient to each individual consumer, but harmful to people in cities due to the large number of cars), needs to be regulated based on environmental and sustainability factors as well.

[_ph_]

The ability to upgrade would be a bonus and usually comes automatically, if you have the ability to repair a device. OWC is well-known for offerings of upgrades for Apple computers, which were not officially upgradeable, as well as of course, repair kits, like for the battery in some models.

A right to repair should be one of the fundamental customer rights. In this case, not only protecting the customer, but also the environment. Customer rights exists for multiple reasons. First of all, to protect against undue forcing of customers into something. Even if a company doesn't have a monopoly in the strict sense, they might try to force you into situations, where you cannot just choose a different brand. Especially if all brands go on a similar course.

[bzzzt]

About the soldering part: memory prices don't plummet as hard as in 2005 anymore, so when you need more RAM, just buy it. By soldering it you also make it more robust. Most DIMM troubleshooting begins with 'reseat the modules'. And users won't place cheap modules which will cause issues and give your products a bad name.

[ThePhysicist]

Of course, you can select a 16 GB memory upgrade from Apple for 400 $ when you buy your laptop. On the other hand, a user-serviceable laptop would just enable you to buy that RAM yourself for around 100 $ and put it in the laptop. Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. With an Apple laptop you're just out of luck in those cases, the only thing you can do is sell it and buy a new one. Same story with the hard drives or almost any other component. I don't think that the reason they do this is to make the laptops 1-2 mm thinner, I think it's just economically way more interesting to be in a position where your company controls the entire value chain from software to hardware. That's where Apple is headed and it's great for them as a company, for end users it's not so great though. I would really like if the EU restricts this kind of behavior as I think it would be good for Apple users as well.

[cesarb]

> Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years.

An example of that: when I started working at my current company, the 4GB of RAM I had on my several years old laptop was no longer enough (I could work fine, but it got annoyingly slow when I used the IDE). Since said laptop is a Dell, I just bought a matched pair of 8GB RAM sticks (dual channel, total 16GB), followed the instructions on the repair manual (available as a PDF on the manufacturer website, no login required) to open the back cover, and exchanged the memory. Took me only around an hour, and would have taken only a few minutes if I hadn't insisted on running the full memory test to make sure the new sticks were good (built-in hardware test program, launched from the BIOS, no installation or operating system required).

I some time later used that 4GB stick I had removed from the laptop to upgrade another computer from 4GB to 8GB. That is: even the part I had to remove for the upgrade wasn't wasted.

[_ph_]

Yes and no. I am all for buying the maximum memory you can order for a laptop, but Apple makes this an issue by asking a huge premium for upgrades. And of course, with ssd-storage, there is the question of wear, eventually you would have might have to replace it.

[StavrosK]

> 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 component visually (it'll usually be black), desolder it and solder a new one. It's just that they're so small that it's really hard.

Many manufacturers (looking at you, Apple) are designing things so they're hard to repair, but it won't be easy to repair electronics, no matter how much you plan for it. The best compromise is to design them so the user has to replace small modules rather than the entire thing.

[_ph_]

Your comparison misses the point. A modern smartphone or laptop consists of dozens of parts. Of course, no one can fix an error on a CPU. I don't even ask to fix proplems on a PCB. But a laptop should not consist of a single PCB, but be split into CPU/GPU, memory, storage, battery. At least these components should be replaceable for a skilled worker, especially those which age with time, as the battery and ssd-storage. And of course any fan built into the device, as the clog and wear out.

[xxs]

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)

[_ph_]

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.

[xxs]

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.

[sagarm]

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.

[rini17]

Maybe the watch analogy isn't the best one. But you are probably aware that the display, battery and storage break down more often than CPU? And that noone is proposing to replace individual bad transistors or pixels, but these parts which are manufactured separately and don't have to be glued together.

[StavrosK]

I was arguing specifically that comparing tech products to mechanical wristwatches is a bit ridiculous. Obviously tech products could be much more repairable than they are.

[rini17]

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

[smichel17]

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.

[jameshart]

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.

[_ph_]

I hope the clarification I posted shows in what sense it clearly is not ridiculous. Of course you would need spare parts, but the access to be able to exchange parts in the first place ist the essential part.

[dx034]

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.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

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.

[MikusR]

Apple is intentionally making things harder to repair. They already have added drm checks to batteries and screens.

[dx034]

Fake batteries can cause explosions and exploding iPhones are bad for Apples reputation. Furthermore, iPhones are by now stolen pretty much only for parts as the iPhone itself is already protected. Sure, it'd be better if they offered replacement parts. But DRM is actually good for product safety and theft protection.

[stunt]

But replacing parts is still great.

Manufacturers are slowly pushing toward making those replacements impossible.

Just people in my family have replaced camera lenses, body, LCD, and battery. Just imagine how much waste it was if they couldn't repair those issue and had to buy a new device.

Same goes with other devices. Just a simple upgrade on old Macbook Pros gave them at least 5 extra years of life. That's now nearly impossible with new Macbook Pros.

[adrianN]

Watchmakers don't repair broken cogs either, they replace them with spare parts.

[bonoboTP]

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.

Opening it up, gutting it out and seeing wires and mechanical parts destroys the illusion. Just as it's not fitting/elegant to think of a celebrity diva or queen farting on the toilet or examining their smelly tooth cavities or whatever, it's not fitting to lay an Apple product barren with all the broken parts sticking out.

Because then it looks like just any other contraption, not this futuristic sleek intelligent product.

I claim that tinkering (and even just imagining the possibility of someone else tinkering) is in direct opposition to Apple branding strategy. It should just work. If it doesn't work, it should be disposed of, replaced, forgotten.

[_ph_]

Replacing a worn-out component doesn't really qualify as "tinkering". And throwing away products, that could be trivially repaired/refurbished should be banned for environmental reasons. At minimum, a company that prevents the repair of their products should be called out for their environmental unfriendliness

[nitrogen]

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

[sireat]

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 and it was a breeze, took a few minutes at most.

Sadly HP stopped offering this kind of notebook case around Haswell in 2014.

[shuntress]

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.

[sireat]

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.

[shuntress]

Late reply, sorry.

Personally, I prefer the current common design of trading tool-less battery service for size and weather resistance. I want a smaller more durable phone and I am willing to trade away tool less battery hot-swapping to get it.

With that said, let me re-iterate that I think battery replacements in particular should be REASONABLY accessible. I should be able to perform a battery replacement myself with easily available tools/consumables provided by either(/both) the original manufacturer or third parties.

[6510]

They could no doubt (at a price) make the inside as spectaculrly looking as the outside.

[zepto]

Rolex’s cost upwards of $6000.

Mechanical watch functionality evolves extremely slowly - over generations, not years.

Competent Watch repair of actual high end watches is an extremely difficult skill to master taking years.

Read watch forums - repair is often botched.

Computers are almost always redundant before they need repairing, whereas a mechanical watch can last generations, therefore a far higher percentage will need repair.

Watches are not recyclable.

Rolex is an exception. Watches in the price range of computers are mostly electronic and are in fact less repairable than computers in general or any Apple device.

There is literally nothing about this analogy with watch repair that applies to computers.

Also, there is simply nothing to support the hypothesis that Apple makes devices intentionally hard to repair.

They offer good warranties, and a lot of people buy AppleCare.

It is therefore in Apple’s interest to make devices economic to both repair and/or recycle when replaced.

Furthermore Apple has stated that it is their strategy to maximize the useful life of their devices (presumably so they can continue to sell services to users who don’t need new devices).

Increasing the device life is not the same as making it repairable.

Many things that make a device easier to repair, also make it more likely to fail.

People who demand repairability without taking this into account may well be harming the environment, and economically disadvantaged users without realizing it.

[stiray]

Let me tell you a story. 4 Samsung smart TV models bought as a "pack" to bring down the price. Me and 3 friends bought them. 3 of them died in 5-6 years. One was just replaced with larger one but still works.

Difference? First 3 were connected to internet, last one, mine, was on stock firmware, never connected anywhere (I have computer near it and lately raspberry pi 4).

Coincidence?

[MikusR]

Were they connected with ethernet cables? A lightning could do it.

[stiray]

Naah, no one was thinking of ethernet cables in old houses. Wireless all the way.

[cheesecracker]

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 a smartphone https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-there-in-the-... )

What is the hourly rate of a watchmaker?

[_ph_]

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 a multiple of that for having my dealer upgrade the disk in my iMac. Which still has an internal SATA port, but unfortunately is glued together. This is something which should cost less than a watch service, even at the same rate.

[cheesecracker]

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

[xxs]

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 able to assemble it back - glue/epoxy used as cheap fastening/engineering tools is the bane of. Ability to find spare parts and service manuals, schematics and the like. The count of transistors is irrelevant as even a simple and single MOSFET driver is enough to prevent a device being operational.

The comment comes off extremely misguided and ill-informed.

[cheesecracker]

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?

[xxs]

If was time to assemble they would have not been inventions like pentalobe and 'secure' torx screws. If you have seen a pcb with just an IC (chip) potted in epoxy, you'd know the sole reason for.

Glue has its own issues including degrading with temperature - which doesn't really happen to bolts/nuts/screws.

The specific standard would hopefully begin to address the issue with throwaway culture and planned obsolesce (there is min 2y warranty in the EU for all electronic goods, though). I dont care if a company save less than 1euro, making something that costs hundreds/thousands virtually useless for any minor ceramic capacitor that fails.

[gen3]

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.

[cheesecracker]

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

[Spivak]

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.

[cheesecracker]

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.

[viraptor]

That's not a great comparison. Nobody repairs separate in-chip transistors and they're not the usual source of issues. PCB mounted components however do fail and get replaced regularly. There is space for reasonable pricing too given that Apple's response is normally either: swap the inside, swap the outside, or swap the display. (all of them expensive)

[hrhrhrd]

The components in modern electronics are interchangeable and have interfaces about as complex as a gear at worst but usually solderable components. The number of transistors is completely irrelevant because no one is servicing the individual transistors. If a CPU breaks, you replace it.

[conradfr]

Maybe we should start with at least a way to change the batteries of otherwise perfectly fine devices or at least a reliable way to have the information about that possibility before purchasing.

[knolax]

The amount of infrastructure and equipment needed to create a watch from raw materials is an order of magnitude less than any piece of modern electronics. A single chip fab probably needs as much physical capital as an entire 1850s Swiss town needed to make a watch from scratch.

[ginko]

>A time traveller could buy a current Rolex and have it serviced in 1950, possibly even in 1850.

That's because mechanical watches are an outdated design. Good luck to them trying to service a quartz watch.

[Frost1x]

It depends on the component you need to service. For a battery it's usually quite easy, but that really depends.

OPs point is that in many cases, products are being intentionally designed to be difficult to service. It's one thing to introduce a complex component that's not reasonably serviceable and make it modular to replace, it's an entirely different story when you make that modular piece difficult to replace when it doesn't need to be.

This is what a lot of product vendors are doing, intentionally designing products to force vendor servicing. It's not a new trick, some auto manufacturers used to and still do it for certain cases.

Due to the complexity of the situation, there's usually ambiguity that the product needed to be designed that way to meet some specification/constraint. What usually happens is that a specification/feature/constraint that forces such designs is often sought after or identified, then the design follows suit.

These are the types of shenanigans you have accountants and financing involved in the design process of anything. They want to maximize ROI and know engineers are good at optimization problems, so ultimately, we end up with products designed to be more business friendly and less consumer friendly. I know for a fact it happens because I've been in this scenario countless times during product or service development, then someone chimes in, "is there a way we can... so we can get more money."

[_ph_]

And even with a quartz watch a watchmaker can do a lot of things. If you provide the battery, they can exchange it, they can even service the dial and hands. Of course, servicing the quartz movement itself is not possible, but the point I tried to make was, that at least important components should be exchangeable on their own, like for example the battery in a laptop.

[Fnoord]

> A time traveller [sic] could buy a current Rolex [...]

Well, no. A wealthy time traveler could buy a current Rolex. Rolex is a terrible example. I'd love to learn about high quality, affordable brands. Also, only being able to know the time is very little information nowadays; smartwatches can do so much more (I have a Fossil Hybrid HR).

[_ph_]

A non-gold Rolex can be bought for less than a top of the line Macbook Pro :p. I just wanted to give the example of a very fancy and expensive brand, which doesn't have to hide behind glueing their product together. The same applies to any quality brand mechanical wristwatch, be it Seiko, Tissot, Omega, IWC just to name some.

[Fnoord]

> The same applies to any quality brand mechanical wristwatch, be it Seiko, Tissot, Omega, IWC just to name some.

Thanks for mentioning these. Seiko is a brand I know, and if that fits the requirement then that's telling to me. My parents both had Seiko watches (different ones; mom had a smaller one, dad a bigger one), for a long time. At one point though, my mother replaced hers as it would've been too expensive to repair. For me, that watch was part of her identity, as I grew up with it.

My father was (virtually) blind, and he also wore an other watch which he could push to hear the time. That was also an expensive watch back in the days (end 80s / begin 90s), and did require a battery. It also said the time only in English, including PM/AM (we use 24 hours here, so I learned pretty quickly what PM/AM meant). Sadly, he missed the smart device era, though he did receive spoken books from the library for the blind, as well as the Dutch equiv of Consumer Reports (Consumentenbond). I grew up listening to these. And these watches I mentioned.

[ascorbic]

"traveller" is a valid spelling. No need for the passive-aggressive sic