[teuobk]

While well-intentioned, I wonder if this will lead to something like the "sesame" debacle[1], in which is becomes far cheaper and easier for companies to deliberately design digital devices so as to be absolutely unrepairable -- even by the manufacturers themselves -- rather than provide parts and instructions for 3rd parties to effect repairs.

[1] https://reason.com/2022/12/23/why-is-sesame-suddenly-in-ever...

[kmeisthax]

Apple already did this. They've been doing it for over a decade. They don't do component-level repair, they do assembly swaps, because it's cheaper to make the customer pay $500 to replace a board with 100 soldered-on components than to pay $50k/yr more for a skilled technician to replace just one. Then they handcuff their vendors to make sure as many chips as possible on the board can only be bought by them.

The reason why Louis Rossmann is - or, at least, was able to fix your MacBook is because Apple's vendors were breaching their supplier agreements. Apple worked around that by putting Apple logos on all their components and getting Customs to seize any parts shipments coming out of China.

[kalleboo]

Why are you singling out Apple here? I can't think of any consumer product where the manufacturer does board-level repair. My washing machine dies? They replace the whole board. TV dies? replace the TCON board. My aircon stops? They replace the whole board. ECU in my car starts throwing errors? They replace the whole unit. What company sends out a repairman with a soldering iron?

[throwaway48476]

None of those boards have expensive CPU's RAM, and NAND.

[kalleboo]

Samsung still charges $300 for a new board for their washing machines, half the cost of a new machine.

It's actually an even BETTER candidate for board-level repair as they have easier to hand-solder, off-the-shelf through-hole components, and yet they still don't do it.

[runlevel1]

There's always some risk of a cobra effect. However, I'd rather we try something reasonable and have to reverse it than to not try anything at all.

[enriquec]

laws don't tend to get reversed very often, while unintended consequences are compounding

[hi-v-rocknroll]

Design For Manufacturing + Design For Obsolescence

!=

Design For Durability + Design For Repair + Design For Low TCO

Recall how the GDR's unbreakable beer mugs failed to sell in the West and became lost to time because restaurant vendors insisted on selling "cheap", inferior, fragile products breaking regularly to ensure profits.

[JumpCrisscross]

> because restaurant vendors insisted on selling "cheap", inferior, fragile products breaking regularly to ensure profits

I prefer thinner, lighter glassware. Even if it breaks more often. The fact that these products didn’t do well in households should be Exhibit A for why restaurants’ profit concerns weren’t to blame.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

Incorrect and you're conflating thoughts.

Households weren't offered that choice because they never entered the supply-chain.

And it had nothing to do with restaurants' profits, and everything to do with distributors' and resellers' profits.

[jacobr1]

Design For Obsolescence isn't often the goal ... just a side benefit. Not that it doesn't happen.

The goal is usually something like: ensure we meet durability requirements X, while minimizing costs.

Now in practice that might very much amount to the same practical impact, such as the product will break after the designed lifetime, but maybe not if it happens to be cheaper to use a simpler, cheaper component that actually is more durable. But probably there is some component that is the weak link that only meets the minimum design specs. And this yet one more reason why Repair is important, because many of the components are perfectly fine!

[hi-v-rocknroll]

Goal or not, that's immaterial. It was alleged as a primary objection to purchase of Coca-Cola reps to Superfest at a trade show.

https://youtu.be/vEvBpjCOBu0?t=12m15s

Video reference links: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8mKisckj6gcJXX2f0P01BrB...

[IncreasePosts]

People already steal beer mugs...buying very expensive ones that don't break would just be a target for thieves requiring you to replace them even more frequently than glass ones.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

(East) German restaurants and beer halls didn't and don't have that problem. Some of them still have them.

[bluSCALE4]

This has been the status quo. Soldered SSDs, ram, keyboards that die from a speck of dust. It's the lack of oversight that's allowed companies to do as they please.

[jacobr1]

The market largely self-regulates this. If you want systems with replaceable components built to high quality standards, they exist, but there are costs. They might costs more, not be cutting edge, not have the nice integrated form factors. But plenty of third-party-reviewers, brand reputation from customers, and fierce competition reigns in much of the worst practices of industry. But things move fast enough that it requires either relying on a reputation for quality or detailed review to get what you want. And the mainstream buyers don't care about soldered components (at point of purchase). They might care about resale value, but really doesn't hinder the current market too much, given how fast things deprecate relative to repairability. All of this is basically self-regulated by a highly competitive global market.

[AnthonyMouse]

There are two reasons this often results in a market failure.

One is when the market is too concentrated. So e.g. when substantially all of the SoCs in smartphones are made by just three companies, none of them have to provide adequate drivers or documentation unless the others do, and then their devices become e-waste as soon as they themselves stop updating the binary blob drivers for newer kernel versions, because the kernels the old blobs are compatible with have published security vulnerabilities. A better solution to this would be to break them up / stop letting them buy each other, but state-level governments have little ability to break up multi-national corporations and national governments have failed to do it, so here we are.

The other is when the rule is to protect customers other than the original purchaser. In many of these markets one customer buys the product new, with a warranty, and then sells it to someone else when the warranty expires. The original customer doesn't care about repairability because all their repairs will be under warranty, and may not even care much about resale value because they're affluent, so the OEM can sell them a device that isn't repairable. But that screws the customers in the second-hand market who need to make out-of-warranty repairs, and it's those who the law is trying to protect.

[abdullahkhalids]

In an unregulated market, the presence of non-repairable products means that repairable products can't achieve economies of as scale as easily.

This is a systematic effect, whose size must be quantified, so we can deploy appropriate regulation to counteract it.

[Dylan16807]

I think you mean to say the market is "supposed to" self-regulate this.

People don't notice early enough that it will cause problems, and they don't have equivalent options available that are more repairable but only marginally different in price and capability.

Brand reputation reigns in "the worst", but pretty bad things still happen, and being unrepairable and non-upgradable isn't "the worst" so it keeps happening.

[jacobr1]

> being unrepairable and non-upgradable isn't "the worst" so it keeps happening.

Because it isn't collectively valued relative to other things, like have the most performant device. The bundle of things people value includes repairability ... but not that much. As I said, you can buy repairable and upgradable system, they just tend to be last-generation tech and cost more. Buyers just don't value it more. But clearly they value it some, which reaches that equilibrium of reigning in the "worst" as you say.

[Dylan16807]

The price premium for those niche options is orders of magnitude higher than it would be in a highly competitive market. People avoiding those options makes sense. The market is not competitive enough to consistently offer moderately important things like repairability in an accessible way, especially because it's hard to tell at a glance. The market is failing here.

If it was there at a fair price, lots of buyers would pick it.

But because the actual cost is quite low, we can have a good outcome by forcing it on companies, to also fight their perverse incentive to make disposable hardware.

[jacobr1]

> If it was there at a fair price, lots of buyers would pick it.

I don't think this is true. Lot's of folks on a forum like this would pick it. But the social norms around repair have degraded significantly (in large part no doubt, to it not being a cost-effective option). But my main point is that it will take more than just availability. And thus there is no market pressure, so it doesn't appear to me that this is indeed a market failure, instead it looks like the market responding to the demand.

Let me illustrate further, if a top provider of electronics and appliances, but not fully market dominate in many niches, say LG, pledged and followed through on their pledge to ensure the repairability of their products, and remained price-competitive, would they gain significant market share over their competitors? In phones? In appliances sold at a big box store? Or would people choosing an Apple device, or GE Fridge still choose those options because of features and market clout and ignore the repairability? I predict they'd gain some marginal sales, but really wouldn't incentivize change amongst their competition.

Now there are markets where the dynamic is different. Farming equipment, where there are some strong challengers to Deere and one of the things they sometimes use to different is repairability. There the market failure I'd be concerned with is the vertical alignment of dealers with service.

[graphe]

CAMM2 will replace DDR. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module) and it's not soldered. Did the keyboards cost Apple sales or costs in repair?

[throwaway48476]

CAMM2 replaces SODIMM not DDR.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

Megacorp feudalism + a lack of coordinated customer pushback through "customer unions"