[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.

[makeitdouble]

I think the balance is just opposite in electronic devices.

As you mention, you can assemble a bike with all parts at roughly the same costs without that much of a trade-off. The example I was giving is more of the exception of putting a very performant/specific core part into a meh setup.

As I see it, in electronic devices it’s more common to have a very basic structure with super cheap commodity components, except that one corepiece that pushes the whole appliance’s capabilities far ahead. For my washing machine, the metal frame, belts and motors are cheap run of the mill parts that might not have changed for decades, and only the controller is custom designed to adapt to modern use. Or looking at rice cookers, a tremendous portion of the value would go into the pan and the controller, and the rest of the housing and heating structure is pure commodity. As a caveat, that might not be the case for high end appliances, where perhaps every component could be high quality, but I’m too cheap to confirm that.

[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.