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by jchw
1399 days ago
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No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time. It would also be great if they were more robust in general. Even with the correct tools, and decent skills, repairing a lot of common issues on modern phones is really expensive and complex. After a couple years of value depreciation, it is often questionable whether it's even worth it. The problem is that today, the incentives are all fucked up. Everyone's just trying to make phones with increasingly greater sex appeal every year so that they can convince consumers to throw out their perfectly working phones. Granted, there was obviously rapid progress for quite a while, but it has slowed down a considerable amount; it's hard to argue that this year's phone line ups offers something significantly game changing versus last year's. People have been saying this for a while, but it just gets truer every year. At best, real meaningful differences occur around every three years or so now. I really don't think corporations will magically decide to all agree to stop this completely unsustainable and pointless madness. It seems like the perfect place for regulation, because it puts everyone on a level playing field. I also think people are imagining that the result will be phones that all look and feel like the PinePhone (which, BTW, feels pretty nice in my opinion) but honestly, I seriously doubt that's the case. The degree of corner cutting going on today to get the smallest possible footprint is insane (and yes, I've opened up a reasonably modern phone; the latest being an iPhone XS.) We were perfectly happy with significantly more repairable phones that were not much bulkier... In my opinion, the concerns are much ado about nothing. |
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I'm strongly biased in favor of fixing stuff versus replacing stuff--I don't like our consumerist, disposability culture. But "making phones repairable" has virtually nothing to do with this, because "my phone broke" is not a major driver behind replacing phones. Rather, people replace phones because new models offer compelling features, because new software runs slowly on their older phone, or because their old phone is no longer supported by the software they want/need.
Making phones repairable isn't going to fix this problem.