[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.