[gcoguiec]

It's sad, but not only because it means people are forced to buy new too often or because of the atrocious increasing e-waste associated with it.

It's sad because folks will be less and less interested in fixing their things or simply opening their devices to understand how they work. It'll be general knowledge that it's "dangerous" to attempt a repair, and they're impossible to fix anyway.

Attempting a repair is one of those sparks that nurture curiosity. It's the same spark that ultimately gave us Apple and many other great businesses. Why are we indirectly undermining ingenuity and inventiveness? Is it a false perception? Or maybe Hanlon's razor?

On the other side, China has relatively affordable access to parts (low-level components included), schematics, extensive tooling and a growing hacker/maker culture.

Sometimes, I feel we (occidentals) are going into reverse.

[lasc4r]

I don't think it's a stretch to assume malice, billionaires are running the show and they aren't nice people that want to build a better world. If they want a population of poor, ignorant and unengaged worker drones they're doing great though.

[ospzfmbbzr]

Its the trillionaires that are the problem -- why don't you know their names? Because they don't want a better world for you just for them and their 'better' world keeps their insanely high living standard at the expense of us the little people getting to exist at all. The only people that believe the very rich want a better world are still watching television.

[porknubbins]

Youtube has made it easier than ever to do diy repair. Its massively different than even 5-10 years ago. If the billionaires don’t want people fixing things they are going to lose in the long run.

[bb88]

A lot of what Apple has done is to try to discourage DIY and third party repair services with device locked components, screens, and batteries (yes, even batteries)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-locking-down-iphone-batt...

[robertlagrant]

It is a stretch to assume it. Billionaires generally do well in countries of hard-working, educated people. And they aren't running the show, although they might run a little bit of it.

[scottLobster]

Benign malice is still malice. Billionaires do well in countries of hard-working, educated people the same way parasites do well in a healthier host. They often aren't contributing to said health, merely profiting from it by chance.

Don't get me wrong some Billionaires are legitimately moving the ball forward, or at least trying to, but for every Elon Musk (despite the man's many flaws he's at least snapped the space launch and EV markets out of decades of stagnation) there's a few Sacklers who seemingly exist solely to abuse the populace for their own benefit, and are only shaped by how much effective resistance they are met with, resistance they will obsessively attempt to overcome/circumvent until they die.

People at that level tend to care about themselves and only about themselves, or at least that's what many of their actions would suggest. They're predators, and even if the wolf can't control what it is you generally want to keep it away from the flock.

That said I have nothing actionable to offer. Short of mass collective action it's hard to see how we deal with them, and mass collective action requires lots of mass collective pain for enough people to be motivated in a single direction. I'd imagine most of the billionaires are well aware of this and are betting that the breaking point will occur after their death, or they arrogantly think that they can be insulated from it somehow. Seems they get away with blatant malfeasance time and again.

Frankly I'm surprised the Sacklers haven't been shot at yet. If I was a broke West Virginian who's family had been torn apart by opioids and I had nothing to lose, I'd be saving my pennies for a bus ticket and take my hunting rifle to their next public appearance.

[anothernewdude]

Elon Musk does not come out positive.

[scottLobster]

Depends on your priorities I guess. I'd say making reusable rockets a reality, creating a serious market for EVs where none existed previously, and from all appearances about to provide the first real competition to terrestrial internet/cable providers has made the world an objectively better place on a scale most individuals can only dream of.

Does that excuse sexual harassment, union-busting, defamation, stock manipulation, and other crimes? Of course not, and he should be punished for all of the above. But the scale of his positive works far outsizes the scale of his negative works IMO, at least so far.

Capitalism and Democracy are fundamentally based on (imperfectly) burning assholes for fuel. They're fundamentally cynical systems, that's part of why they're so stable. We give the assholes a relatively safe outlet for their mental conditions while in exchange demanding they provide some good or service for the rest of us. So don't be surprised when the people who do the most good also have some skeletons in their closets, that's how the system works. The people without skeletons tend to be naturally filtered out of the power hierarchy by refusing to compromise their principles past a certain point.

Put more bluntly: The obsessive, selfish, narcissistic careerist who puts 80 hours a week into his career, has no real friends and neglects his family and sexually harasses potential partners will generally rise higher in terms of power/wealth than the honest, stable, principled family man who intentionally clocks out after 40 hours so he has time to spend with his kids when he gets home. There are lucky exceptions of course, heirs to fortunes and so on (where likely their mother/father/grandparent was the maladjusted careerist). But the percentages speak for themselves IMO.

[helloworld11]

Before jumping on the sexual harassment bandwagon. Is there actually any concrete evidence of this? And what was the exact context? These accusations and actual cases exist in degrees, not absolutes of evil male pig or perfect feminist male. Believe it or not, it's very, very easy to accuse a famous man of sexual harassment for all sorts of frivolous reasons and have it stick to their reputation like shit.

[latexr]

> Billionaires generally do well in countries of hard-working, educated people.

What does that mean? Are you able to provide examples of “countries of lazy[1] people” and how one reaches that conclusion? Which metrics do you use to define who is hard-working, and how do you confidently apply the categorisation to a whole country?

[1]: Or however you want to define the antithesis of “hard-working”.

[robertlagrant]

I'm not implying the inverse. See the comment I replied to for the context.

[mdavis6890]

If Billionaires are running the show, why to they have to keep showing up to congressional subpoenas and kowtowing to government bureaucrats of various types and stripes?

Power and money are frequent bedfellows, but power trumps money every single time.

[typon]

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Conclusion:

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

[wolverine876]

Is this just cherrypicking results?

> strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy

What do those other studies say? Why not quote them?

[femiagbabiaka]

Congressional subpoenas are pure kayfabe. To win their districts, congress members need money. And the more of it they get the happier they are. So money is power.

[deltaonefour]

It's more complex then them running the show. But for sure, billionaires run more of the show then non-billionaires.

>Power and money are frequent bedfellows, but power trumps money every single time.

Power and money are bedfellows? They are synonyms. Power trumps money only because money was involved with the power.

Are you a billionaire?

[JKCalhoun]

Money is power.

[nonrandomstring]

Don't worry. Defeated this time, but it will keep coming back again, and again, and again until it's made law, no doubt about it. We're in a different era now, and e-waste is very topical [1]. A vote against "right to repair" is a clear vote against ecological common sense. California is unfortunately in a vulnerable position with respect to climate impact. Another season of wildfires and droughts will help the naysayers see some sense.

[1] Here's an interview I did recently:

https://www.thisishcd.com/episode/andy-farnell-perils-of-e-w...

[twblalock]

The average person has spent about zero seconds in their life thinking about e-waste.

If you want to sell this bill, show voters how it will impact their wallets.

[nonrandomstring]

> If you want to sell this bill, show voters how it will impact their wallets.

I hear you, but the sad thing is the financial impact isn't really that compelling. That's because waste is effectively subsidised. Carriers will be happy to push a new handset on customers every 18 months and just absorb that in the contract fees. Repair is expensive (time consuming) in comparison. And of course they have stacked the services and tariffs to make owning older gear less attractive.

> The average person has spent about zero seconds in their life thinking about e-waste.

I'm about to find our a lot more about that as some research students are looking at e-waste solutions and their first stage is interviewing people on their gadget recycling habits. I reckon the average person does think about it, but has no information or guidance at present. Hopefully we can change that.

[otagekki]

From what I can see, the right to repair suffers when "buying brand new" becomes significantly less expensive than "buying only the parts you need and spend some time fixing it". The former is always cheaper in developed economies, and the latter is often cheaper in third-world countries. Economic tradition like planned obsolescence is the single biggest culprit

[II2II]

> The former is always cheaper in developed economies

Is it?

It seems cheaper in developed countries because the cost of labour is high, the cost of goods is low, and serviceability is rarely a consideration. Yet those factors have more to do with this point in time than the distinction of being a developed economy. If you went back in time 20 years: a cell phone with a dead battery would be user serviceable, regardless of that user's skill level; a computer with a dead hard drive would be user serviceable, to anyone who could handle a screwdriver. Fixing the socket on most devices would require a learned skill, soldering, but would be accessible to most people. The reason why I selected those examples is because they are easily diagnosed by the end user and don't require much technical sophistication to fix, so the cost of labour is cut out.

These days, something as trivial as replacing a battery or hard drive requires a great deal more skill. Heck, in many cases it takes a great deal more skill to non-destructively open the enclosure simply to peek inside. None of that has anything to do with developed or developing economies. It has to do with how products are designed.

(And if you were to go back yet another 20 years, the contrast is even more stark.)

[makeitdouble]

I completely agree with your point on skill level, and also think parent’s point is true at the same time.

We had a washing machine die on us after 5 yers. After searching for repair manuals, we got the probable cause, and the part number of the controller board to replace (or test the chips and replace and resolder the parts that died, which goes to your point on skills). Except the price of the controller board was 90% of a new washing machine. And we’d still be taking the risk to either botch the repair, or have something else fail after we fix the controller.

Same way, looking at the pixel 4a replacement screens, they retail around 170$, shipment not included, and you can buy a decent second hand pixel 4a at a bit less than 200$. The price difference doesn’t make it worth it to try to repair the screen, except to spare reinstall time perhaps.

I expect most of our appliances to have that core part that just costs almost as much as the whole device to repair, though from a material mass/role perspective it doesn’t make any sense.

[II2II]

But that raises the question: is the 90% the cost of a new washing machine or 50% the cost of a mobile phone in any way reflective of the cost of getting replacement modules to the consumer, or are they using the price of replacement modules as an attack on independent repair?

I am looking at the relative cost of those modules and comparing them to the relative cost of components on my bike. Cycling is different since there is a culture of repair, may it be DIY work or through independent repair shops, and I would be hard pressed to name any component that would amount to 20% of the market value of my bike (which is about 30 years old at this point). Even then it may not be necessary to replace an entire component since it is often possible to rebuild what is already there. That component that costs 20% the market value of my bike may actually cost a few dollars to rebuild, assuming that I had the cost and skill.

In cycling, the approach you take often comes down to how much skill you have, how much time you have, and whether you are willing to pay for someone else to do the work for you. While electronics may be different due to integration and miniaturization, it is really difficult to see how a washing machine is all that different from a bike. Yes, there is going to be some degree of integration to reduce costs. Yes, there are some electronic and electromechanical parts in there. Yet what a washing machine does today is not all that different from what one did 50 years ago. The big difference is how everything is controlled, and that should be cheaper than it was 50 years ago.

[makeitdouble]

Going for the cycling analogy, if your otherwise bog standard road bike came with a wireless SRAM drivetrain, when you kill your derailleur you might be looking at 400~500$ of replacement parts when the whole bike was 700$ new, and probably 550$ second hand.

I had the same experience the other way round, where upgrading the derailleur and the shifting gear costed more that the initial price of my bike.

I would compare that to current gaming laptops where the CPU and really the GPU make for the bulk of the price. It seems to be common across enough industries that I don’t think it’s just makers fighting consumers. Making repairs technically more difficult feels more inline with maker’s malice.

[II2II]

I'm an all-season rider who lives in a city that loves salt. Most of the drive train on my older road bike (plus cables, cable housings, and the rear wheel) has been replaced piece by piece for considerably less than your modern SRAM derailleur. Parts are readily available and most modern bikes use the same components. Sure there are modern bikes where replacement parts are considerably more expensive, but they're easy to ignore unless you are in the market for something specific. Then again, the same thing could have been said about bikes 10, 20, or 30 years ago. This strikes me as being in sharp contrast to most electronic devices and many electric appliances, where finding something repairable is the exception and it may not even be possible if the given component is specific to a given model or manufacturer.

[mjevans]

If the software were supported closer to decades rather than years, I suspect it'd be worthwhile to have a refurbishment center that carefully scraps the major bits apart, re-tests them, and re-assembles a working device out of the non-failed parts. (Ideally with a fresh battery and replaced storage chip.)

[JKCalhoun]

I just don't see "planned obsolescence" as a top-down directive.

Has any engineer come forward to say management told them to make specific changes to cause a thing to become obsolete in some period of time? I am not aware of any.

Rather what looks like planned obsolescence can generally be explained by other factors — not the least of which might just be the fickleness of consumers.

[otagekki]

Looks like a top-down directive to me. Just look at the lightbulb cartel.

From an engineering perspective, some designs simply don't make any sense if not for planned obsolescence: on a quite famous printer brand, the printer stops working after X pages printed [1]. You can fix that with soldering and chip reprogramming, but it may or may not be trivial. In the end, warranty is really short and is void the minute you open the product to see its guts, so it's not exactly for safety reasons.

Some people blame planned obsolescence on the consumer, but in fact that's just blame shifting. The truth is rent-seeking, at the expense of the environment.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/4a965dc0-f27c-11db-a454-000b5df10...

[JKCalhoun]

Lightbulb cartel, I agree. But that's ancient history now.

Any current "cartel" would no doubt also have a Wikipedia page write-up. Maybe I should have said I am unaware of any current planned-obsolescence directive.

I was, to be sure, putting some of the blame on the consumer, there are other reasons though — like the always moving technology wavefront that makes composite-video "obsolete", SCSI "obsolete", etc.

Your printer example is the first I had heard about a printer designed to stop after 'n' prints. That sounds ripe for a class-action lawsuit.

[otagekki]

> Your printer example is the first I had heard about a printer designed to stop after 'n' prints. That sounds ripe for a class-action lawsuit.

AFAIK the printer manufacturer hasn't been affected by any class-action lawsuit (yet) regarding its design.

[eurleif]

>void the minute you open the product

That's not legal (in the US). https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/11/601582169...

[otagekki]

Legality indeed varies, but even if it's illegal hardware vendors easily away with it, and will still bill you the repairs if they want to repair it at all.

[convolvatron]

as someone who repairs things for myself and others its really hard to explain some of these failures as anything other than planned obsolescence. board-mounted fuses. sacrificial plastic gears in the drivetrain. chillers with the filler tube folded over and brazed.

the most charitable explanation is cost reduction. but $0.05 savings on a $500 retail item isn't helping anyone if it means my mixer lasts 1 year instead of 20 like the ones they used to make.

[jotm]

That explanation, as dumb as it seems, can be the actual and only reason for many designs. Barely functional heatsinks in laptops, using 0.1mm metal backsides in keyboards instead of 0.25 or something (the fucking thing bends and keys stop working!), plastic clips instead of screws, etc.

Yeah, we say "it's just $0.05, I'll gladly pay that for higher quality!". But somewhere, a new CxO is saying "we have saved $10,000,000 on production this year". And it's a big number, indeed.

But what about the users? Well, fuck the users. They will buy overpriced parts from the company or a new device from the company or the few competitors who do the same thing. They could be in cahoots, but it's more than likely they all decided saving tens/hundreds of millions a year is worth far more than a small number of disappointed buyers.

[nonrandomstring]

I think you're right. Planned obsolescence has perfectly sensible bottom-up explanations that revolve around the linear algebra and optimisation of MTBF in mixed source components. Indeed, planned obsolescence is no problem whatsoever if you have a "Right To Repair". Even better if you Design for Repair

[squarefoot]

Your point is valid, however we shouldn't forget that right to repair doesn't mean being forbidden from buying new products. That is, people wanting to buy their new device wouldn't see any difference, until the day they're forced to buy a new product because either repairing it from only authorized shops is too costly, or because there are no documentation and spares available at all. A right to repair law would be a win-win scenario for everyone, except greedy beancounters of course.

[jotm]

That would be the case if for some reason, the third world countries would be getting repairable stuff. But no, they get the same shit that's popular in developed countries, even worse - because the main reason for soldering and gluing everything shut is cost reduction. And there are no parts.

[tremon]

The former is always cheaper in developed economies

Is it really cheaper to buy a new house than to replace a fuse? Really cheaper to buy a new car than to replace a tyre? Really cheaper to buy a new OS than to install some updates?

[otagekki]

I am not sure about the house, but on used cars replacing a broken engine/transmission/hybrid battery is more expensive than the car itself (or even better: a car value if sold whole is sometimes less than the sum of its parts).

For the rest, I was mostly talking about electronic hardware: replacing broken screens, wanting more Processor/RAM but buying a new motherboard is needed, etc.

[jvanderbot]

It's not the American Way (tm) to have congress force this. Let The Markets Decide (c)

Yet, now, we have Farmework laptop and OEM parts for Apple products. We're better in those ways, but worse in others, for sure.

I only hope soon these concepts catch on. The image of small car repair shops working on teslas both scares and inspires me. Or the future of a handyman with a laptop to debug a washing machine both infurates me and gives me hope.

[gruez]

>It's sad because folks will be less and less interested in fixing their things or simply opening their devices to understand how they work

those days are long gone. you might be able to disassemble a turntable to figure out how it works, but disassembling a phone isn't going to tell you much when all the magic is in the silicon. all you get from disassembling it is a circuit board with random bumps.

[okr]

Hm, these markets in Shenzhen seem to offer different stories. Youtube is full of those, you can replace/upgrade displays, memory, storage of your phone or even assemble your own.

And in my country you have these little shops as well, where you pay a premium, but you dont have to buy a new phone.

So, unless you really want to fix something very integrated, i am rather positive about the situation.

And from my own history, mainboard was never really a problem, it was always something attached or plugged or solded onto it.

[JKCalhoun]

It's possible, however sad, that there are societal stages where China is in a stage we saw in early Americana when farmers were often the "techies" that kept engines and equipment functioning. They had tools and learned from doing, repairing, making.

But as we went from farm to factory and our wages got us a higher standard of living, we preferred to buy new things rather than keep old things working.

If China follows the path of the U.S., Japan, Korea, they too will grow a middle class that no longer want to work for low wages in factories and will look for cheaper labor elsewhere in the world to meet the needs of their growing consumption.

Just my armchair observations.

[seanmcdirmid]

> On the other side, China has relatively affordable access to parts (low-level components included), schematics, extensive tooling and a growing hacker/maker culture.

Having had repairs made in Beijing in hole in the wall E shops, no thank you. You have to watch the repairs being done like a hawk, or they will “fix” what wasn’t broken with some flaky parts they want to get rid of in addition to making your repair. The Apple Store is much more reliable in comparison, while being price competitive.

[lttlrck]

RTR doesn't seem like the optimal solution to e-waste.

If manufacturers were required by law to take care of e-waste they generate, to recycle everything they produce, rather to shifting that onto the consumer, perhaps they'd start building things to last in the first place.

Also increase minimum warranty, 5 years for solid state devices?

[drdeadringer]

A large part of my tinkering hobbies include fixing, not just making -- often a mix of both.

A lack of "right to repair" seems to kill some aspect of both if not one of these.

[thewileyone]

Collect all the e-waste and dump them at the doorstep of the State Senate in Sacremento.

[dehrmann]

> Attempting a repair is one of those sparks that nurture curiosity

I appreciate the sentiment, but repairing an iPhone only gives you a very superficial understanding of how it works. It's about as technical as setting up a computer with a discrete monitor, webcam, UPS, case, speakers, etc.

[FastMonkey]

I don't think he's saying that the repair will teach you the first principles of phone design. It's that by taking the step of actually opening the device, you significantly lower the hurdle to any next steps.

[actually_a_dog]

Indeed, it requires more physical dexterity than technical skill to repair an iPhone. The technical skill is really limited to being able to follow instructions, and basic things like ESD control.