[teh_klev]

I disagree, five to ten years is far too short.

I have a couple of audio devices that are ~14 years old and working perfectly fine. If either of them broke then I'd want to repair them (unless of course the fault was fabulously catastrophic). Once upon a time even affordably priced equipment lasted way more than 5-10 years. Maybe it's a generational thing, due to my being on the wrong side of 50 :), but stuff used to be built to last for affordable money. Hell I'm still wearing the Seiko mechanical auto-wind watch I was given for my birthday in 1983, and it still (mostly) tells the right time and day.

Twenty years should be a minimum.

[hughrr]

I worked in the defence industry for a few years where they did this. I also have equipment that is nearly 50 years old in service now (electronic test gear).

BUT the cost was astronomical as were the storage requirements for parts and the cost of the replacement parts. The oscilloscope I have (tek 7904) was released in 1972 and would cost about $100k now with the plugins I have in it. And that's because it was designed for repair. Versus a modern unit which costs around $5k, lasts 5 years and is disposable. Yeah that's not gonna wash. Also it actually requires some quite extreme skills looking after 40+ year old kit.

What you end up with is a $7000 iPhone and a repair industry where min charge is $500 for some obscure part because the universe has moved on.

Recycling and reuse is better and that's where we're heading. Even cars are going in that direction.

[birdyrooster]

So if I buy a keysight scope that thing will die quickly?

[hughrr]

Depends on which phase of the moon it is. Best to look at the total cost of ownership over the warranty period and see if you’re happy with the monthly total. Anything outside that is a bonus! Same applies to Apple.

Keysight’s semi legendary reputation for reliability comes from the second hand market which has had all the lemons removed from the table. Their production reputation is “average” and their in warranty fees “surprising” (I’m still getting over having to pay for a new OLED display for a DMM that was 2 years old)

Better buy Chinese these days and plan to throw it away.

[noizejoy]

And that disconnect between economics and what’s environmentally manageable is at the very heart of a lot of modern problems.

I often wonder, if there will ever be a way to make that widening chasm disappear, other than going back to living in caves …

[mikepurvis]

The manufacture, storage, and ultimate disposal of all those spare parts also has an environmental cost, unless you assume that the measures end up driving some industry wide shifts, such as toward many more common parts, on-demand manufacture of certain elements, etc. It's a lot easier to warehouse a bunch of STL files than the actual bits, and maybe if your dishwasher's controller unit is just a 3v3 Linux computer with a standard GPIO connector, then a "spare part" in ten years is a totally different unit that happens to plug in and run the same interpreted software, and everything on the other end of that connector is just standard discrete parts like drivers, signal conditioning, etc, that can be replaced a la carte.

In any case, there certainly have been some proposals for how to bring some of these costs into the economic picture, most obviously pricing carbon and charging upfront disposal taxes for things like automobile tires. More aggressive measures might specifically punish the extraction of anything non-renewable— John Michael Greer talks a bunch about this [1] in a framework where the "primary economy" is in fact the natural processes like rain, pollination by insects, fertilization by animal waste, etc. Anything humans do on top of that which disrupts it is "secondary economy" and should have to pay the appropriate compensations for stewardship.

It sounds reasonable, but obviously it's a political nonstarter in any place in the world (like Canada) whose economy is mostly still built on conventional primary industries like oil, logging, fishing, mining.

[1]: https://newsociety.com/books/w/the-wealth-of-nature

[mikepurvis]

I think past a certain point it's reasonable to expect that your repair operation may also involve some scrounging for the parts— for example, the classic frankenstein procedure where a laptop with a dead motherboard is married to another of the same model where the screen is cracked. I think for most electronics, past 5-10 years is pretty reasonable for this kind of thing. I mean, the GameCube came out in 2001-2002, and many circles now consider that to be a vintage/retro machine at this point. Would we really expect Nintendo to still be supplying repair shops with the full BOM of whatever's in there?

Anyway, the real trick with this of course is forbidding the serial number based lockouts.

[teh_klev]

> the real trick with this of course is forbidding the serial number based lockouts.

Yeah, that is just downright spiteful scumbaggery.

[mikepurvis]

I mean, they position it the same way— "we're protecting customers from those unscrupulous overseas ebay vendors who will sell them a half-capacity battery that they install and then forget about, later blaming the device and OEM for poor performance."

But obviously that's super suspect when the end result is still granting themselves a razors-and-blades monopoly over key replacement parts.