[hypersoar]

I attended Google I/O in 2013 and was given a Chromebook Pixel, their $1300 laptop. The hardware was very, very nice, and I quite enjoyed using it for a while. One day, I dropped it and damaged the screen well outside of its warranty period. "Oh no," I thought. "This is probably going to be pretty expensive to fix." So, bracing for the damage, I called up Google and told them what had happened. They replied that there was no fixing it. They would replace the laptops under the warranty, but there was no repairing to be done. I was welcome to call around and ask local repair shops if they could do it. That went nowhere, of course.

I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.

[efskap]

Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.

This pattern extends to so many goods in modern life. Washing machines, microwaves, etc aren't worth the time of a local repairman. Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.

Clothes are replaced, not stitched. And after a few washes at that. Cars, phones, etc, consist of proprietary parts all sealed up.

[computerex]

That’s a western perspective because we are spoiled and have no thought for sustainability.

Please take a look at poor countries of the world like Pakistan. They have a repair culture. They have vehicles from the 80’s out on the road doing daily driving work instead of being used as vintage show pieces. It’s a poor country, this is a necessity. But nevertheless seeing the repair culture there in contrast to the disposable culture in the western world makes me pause.

[xtracto]

This... I wonder why isn't there a market in Tijuana, Juarez and other border towns for fixing broken electronics and similar appliances.

Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.

[carlosjobim]

In Western countries, the time of skilled repairmen is better spent repairing things which are much more important and expensive than consumer goods.

And a consumer usually has a much higher return from working in his specialized field to earn money and buy a new product, than spending time with difficult repairs of a broken product.

[JumpCrisscross]

Yeah, this is entirely a function of labor costs. If you want your stuff repaired, ship it to a low-labor cost economy or hire someone to whom it’s worth the time.

[carlosjobim]

To add to that; labour should be expensive. And lower repairability of consumer goods is a side effect that is worth dealing with for that benefit.

[hx8]

Just to take one step further, labor costs are largely a function of local real estate costs.

[JumpCrisscross]

> labor costs are largely a function of local real estate costs

Difficult to determine causality in that system. All we can say is places with expensive labour tend to have expensive real estate. (The confounding variable, I imagine, is immigration.)

[keybored]

The practice of planned obsolescence means that there is more to it than just that.

[xp84]

> Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.

I'd add that experiences like GP help expose that the main difference in most products between 'premium' and 'disposable' is in the branding and the price tag. With few exceptions, most companies that used to make the respected brand of the thing (e.g. Sony, G.E., Craftsman) now churn out the same garbage as you used to find 30 years ago in a fleamarket with a brand you'd never heard of - and that's if they don't actually outsource the design and/or production to that low-bidder company and simply license their logo directly to them.

And that's because these are all public or PE-owned companies, and it's a shortcut to easy short-term quarterly growth if you can cut your costs while keeping your price high or almost as high (after all, you're a "Premium Brand" so you can leverage your past reputation to trick customers into continuing to pay that premium).

[nextos]

Good clothes can be definitely stitched. Some brands even offer free or reasonably priced repairs. Patagonia or Citizen Wolf are two examples that spring to mind, and it's even more common once you cross a certain price point. Same applies to good hardware, but you need to do some research before buying.

I am afraid Google's business model is incompatible with this approach as they have almost no customer service because it doesn't "scale". Actually, what they are doing is turning customer service costs into externalities, i.e. environmental waste.

[tgma]

Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance.

In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.

[xandrius]

Absolutely not when replacing costs 100% and repairing usually costs 0.1%.

And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating.

The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.

[wat10000]

If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it.

The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.

Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.

[xandrius]

You're confounding variables here, the cost of repairing a microwave is actually very often 0.1%: the part they broke and the work required to fix it is often nil.

Unless, you have businesses fighting for it to be repaired by making the microwave schematics impossible to find, the casing stupidly hard to open, etc. If you then have that a repair part is impossible to be found then of course only the truly motivated will attempt (and sometimes succeed).

Example: a friend bought an ebike with a bosch motor. Something happened and it stopped working. Now the only thing that is possible to be done with it, due to how the system has been constructed, it's to have it replaced by warranty and/or insurance. This is because there are locks on the battery that prevents it from being removed to safely analyse the system, the engine is covered by one piece that makes its opening borderline impossible, etc.

On the other hand, I have a top of the line ebike motor (Tosheng) that can be fully opened, its firmware modified and schematics and parts can be easily found online. That meant that when another friend had his motor break down, he could open it, see that it was only a gear that failed and replaced it for less than $10, he only needed to unscrew a coupleof screws to see what happened. With the world we are moving towards, the company would make you throw away the WHOLE bike instead of changing a broken gear.

[wat10000]

You're ignoring costs. If your microwave costs $100, then you're saying it's often ten cents to fix it. It is entirely possible that the bad component costs ten cents. But the cost of the repair is only ten cents if your time and travel is completely free. Let's say you have a well designed microwave that's easy to repair and a ten-cent component goes bad. How much do you think a repair shop in a wealthy country would have to charge for such a repair to keep the lights on? A 100% margin on that 10 cents won't even pay for the time the worker takes to say "hello" as you enter the shop. What's your optimistic estimate of how long it would take to replace such a component on a well designed unit? 10 minutes? Plus administrative overhead like collecting payment, probably storing the unit for a while until the customer picks it up, and dealing with "it was working fine until you touched it" idiots. And 10 minutes is extremely optimistic for something that's likely soldered (even highly repairable units are going to solder small stuff). How much does the repair person earn? Auto mechanics make maybe $25-30/hour in the US. Pad that significantly for their fully loaded cost to the business. If we assume it takes 20 minutes total, accounting for everything, you're looking at maybe $20 in actual costs for the business, not counting rent and equipment and such. You've already hit an appreciable portion of the cost of a new unit and that's with a lot of very generous assumptions.

Appliance repair might be a dying art but car repair is common. You can look there to see what simple tasks might actually cost. Something like installing new tires is probably comparable. It's not outrageously expensive but it's also not anything like ten cents.

[xp84]

This is actually a thought-provoking perspective! I have to admit you're right in your conclusions, though the issues are:

1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created.

2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.

[joe5150]

You can value not pumping out disposable garbage even if the (current) economic regime appears to encourage and reward it.

[1shooner]

In this interpretation, repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product, and 'parts' somehow doesn't represent any labor.

[JumpCrisscross]

> repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product

It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.

[petra]

Often it's not even labor.

Given the right guidance and difficulty level, I would enjoy fixing things in my washing machine.

[culi]

Temu boots don't feel like "abundance" to me compared to some nice tailored $400 boots that you take to the cobbler when there's an issue.

I think in abundant society people would be able to have nice things and the time to take care of them.

[igorbark]

this logic does not hold up if the reason that labor is more expensive than parts is that the labor involved in creating those parts has been outsourced to a "shithole country"

[tgma]

If anything the causality is exactly the opposite. The labor cost will go up (empirically provable) in such "shithole countries" once work is outsourced to them, improving their livelihood.

[drysine]

That means that the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized

[gruez]

>the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized

No, it's the exact opposite, because the consumer is on the hook for the purchase price as well as any repair costs.

[culi]

Handling trash costs money. A lot of money. Right now, most Americans find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of paying to deal with their waste.

[fragmede]

Where Americans are renters and garbage service is hidden in their monthly rent payment, sure, but for Americans who own a home, they have to pay their local jurisdiction a fee for taking away trash and recycling and compost (and batteries and light bulbs). Also sewage and water.

[wat10000]

Wat. Almost all Americans either pay someone to deal with their waste or are dependents of someone who pays on their behalf. Do you think we're all burning our trash in barrels or dumping it in the local river or something?

[loeg]

What are you talking about. Trash is inexpensive, but Americans absolutely pay for it (solid waste utility bill). I think people conceptualize that they have utility bills?

[kelnos]

But the consumer isn't on the hook for dealing with the garbage.

[boppo1]

Horseshit. It means we're doing less with more and anyone with a brain should be able to figure out that's bad for Quality of Life on a long term. Wasting your resources is not how an economy grows strong.

[gruez]

>It means we're doing less with more

Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.

[hyperbovine]

I'll bet it does once you properly price in externalities.

[gruez]

There are various localities that add recycling fees to electronics. They're on the order of 1% of the purchase price, so it's unlikely to make a difference in the repair vs replace calculation.

[losvedir]

It's the result of manufacturing at scale being so tremendously more efficient. It really does use less human effort, resources, energy, whatever metric you want to measure, to just produce a brand new one than to produce a more resource-intensive one and then try to fix in a one-off fashion.

[phainopepla2]

My washing machine started making weird loud noises recently. Had a repair guy come by and he told me it's the plastic gears in the gearcase wearing down. I asked him what it would cost to repair and he said with parts and labor it would be cheaper to buy a new one. He told me to just keep using it and deal with the noise until it stops working, so that's what I'm doing. When the time comes I'm considering paying $150 for the new gearcase and trying to fix it myself, but it's so stupid to that it's come to this

[ssl-3]

Parts wear out. Things break. That's normal.

The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.

It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.

Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.

It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.

So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.

Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)

[76SlashDolphin]

Slightly off-topic but this is why 3D printing becoming popular is a boon to the repair industry. Yeah, the part might be bad, but instead of paying a ridiculous sum for a piece of plastic, you can take the old one, model it, and make yourself a compatible one within a day. Of course, this requires modelling skills and the ability to be able to disassemble the machine but so does any other kind of repair work and at least you are no longer reliant on the manufacturer.

[ssl-3]

3D printing is pretty neat. I've printed some functional widgets that work well. I can just download the things and then print them, and that's awesome.

I don't know if I'd to be printing a replacement gear for a washing machine, though. The original was probably injection-molded nylon, which is a quite good combination of accurate repeatability and robustness, and presumably had good material compatibility with the other gears.

But despite those advantages, this original part already failed.

Whatever I can print is going to be sloppier and weaker, with a less-compatible material and in a less-compatible shape. If the first part failed because it was underspecified, then this printed part is going to be even less reliable.

Someone with appropriate skills could use that as a set of constraints to design an entirely new (probably physically larger) gearbox that is superior to the original, but that's sounding like Real Design Work. And iterating on design and in-situ testing means taking apart and reassembling a washing machine -- again.

I hate taking apart washing machines. It's awful work.

It seems like it'd more fun to spend $150 on a new gearbox that will probably fail every few years than to iterate on 3D printed washing machine parts at home, but perhaps my proclivities are poorly aligned. :)

[phainopepla2]

Plastic gears in a washing machine just seems stupid, though. That's probably on me for buying a cheap one, but the repair guy said it's extremely common now, even in nicer models

[ssl-3]

Metal gears also break and wear out. All materials have finite strength and endurance.

It's up to the folks doing the engineering to make sure that the gears last long enough.

After all, it doesn't do anyone any good at all if the gearbox (whatever it consists of) still works after while the rest of the machine has failed.

And plenty of plastic gearboxes exist in the world. We just don't usually hear much about the ones that end up working Just Fine.

I have a 20+ year old cordless drill that I've beaten the snot out of. As cordless drills go, it offers a mountain of torque. I used it to roll new threads into long, extruded holes that were stamped into radiator supports of new Chevy Impala cop cars. Where my co-workers' drills would just flatly give up and they'd use ratchets instead, this drill would finish the job without a complaint. It did take two hands to hang onto the thing when doing this job and it was not kind to the operator even then, but it accomplished the work.

The plastic gears inside are still fine. The plastic drill body is also holding up very well. Again, we don't usually hear much about the plastic parts that outlive the rest of the machine, but those parts have been great.

In this particular case the nicad batteries for it became NLA, and the ones that came with it (and their replacements) are dead AF, so it has no value to me at this point. I really should take it apart, keep whatever bits are interesting to me and recycle the rest of it.

Due to the lack of new batteries, my world of power tools has moved on. This drill is not doing anyone any good how it is -- despite the astoundingly-good plastic gearset still being (as far as I can tell; ran when parked) just fine.

If it had metal gears instead and those also lasted longer than the machine's lifecycle, then that added expense wouldn't have been an advantage at all.

---

Anyway, I aim to be helpful instead of deconstructive here.

If gearboxes are a weak link in washing machines, then it is possible to eliminate them. There are washing machines that don't have gearboxes at all; these are usually front-loaders that only spin-a-ma-thing and that don't really do much in the way of reciprocating motion, but they exist.

Some of them are very stout indeed, though they may appear to be fairly featureless.

Dexter may be at the high end, here, with a belt-driven drum and a VFD-supplied motor; they're made in Iowa. Many places like laundromats and fire stations love these machines for their durability and repairability. Dexter is certainly proud of them; they are not cheap. I once read about their in-house factory testing: IIRC, they take a machine off the line, weld a weight onto the side of the drum that is 40% of the mass that the machine is supposed to handle, and let it run at its highest speed for for 1000 continuous hours. If it fails, they consider it to be a problem that needs to be corrected upstream. It's a pretty good test, I think.

Whirlpool has similarly-shaped mechanisms at a fraction of the cost; many of those are made in Ohio. That's not necessarily an unsafe bet. (I did have a long chat with one of their process guys about things like air-conditioned final assembly areas and conformal coatings once. I've also cleaned up some corrosion on the VFD board's contacts and installed some dielectric grease on a machine that was built in that same plant, but it was built years before this conversation happened.)

Speed Queen is a common consumer favorite. They're still independent, AFAIK. (I've never been inside of a Speed Queen machine or hung out in their factories, so my commentary here is limited. The one I once had in my laundry room was completely trouble-free.)

[bcrosby95]

I'm going to offer a counter narrative here based upon my experience. I have LG appliances and they have fairly reasonable "fix everything wrong" prices. It's not literally everything, your bells and whistles might not work, but if you want just a washing machine, just a dishwasher, or just a fridge/freezer, it will be less expensive than the cheapest new option out there.

When our fridge stopped fridging, we got it fixed for $300: this included replacing the compressor and the coils. When our dishwasher stopped washing, we paid $250 to have 3 or so things fixed at once. And so on.

I don't know if any appliance makers offer this, but if LG still offers it when we eventually replace, they're going to be on the top of my list.

[Forgeties79]

>Clothes are replaced, not stitched

Unlike a lot of hardware and such in our homes, this mostly just boils down to people refusing to learn and is incredibly easy to remedy. Basic stitching is not super difficult. My partner has very light knowledge of stitching, learned it mostly as a kid and never used it much, but has repaired plenty of my clothes. I'm wearing stitched jeans as we speak (pocket got caught on a hook and tore nearly off). Typically gives my regularly worn clothes an extra year or two of life.

[tick_tock_tick]

> Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.

No, it's because repair involves labor and unless we ship it across the world to take advantage of people making a dollar a day it's just not worth it.

The cost of making and importing stuff from the third world is just so cheap now that it's simpler to get a new one then to have someone making a living wage in the west fix it.

[loeg]

"Disposable" is fine! Things have a useful lifetime and uneconomic repairs are just that. Nothing needs to last forever.

[bigyabai]

"Disposable" is a tradeoff, and can absolutely be a net-negative if you take it too far.

[kingleopold]

"Planned obsolescence" is the engineering reason for this so it's well planned.

[Henchman21]

Welcome to modern life. It looks amazing — but its all a lie.

[abirch]

I used to have everything Google.

Strata Pixels, Nest Cameras Google Smart Speakers Nest Home Security system

but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.

[tadfisher]

They completely changed their watch design for the Pixel Watch 4 so that it is actually repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/News/113620/the-pixel-watch-4-is-the-...

[sbrother]

I went all in on the Nest ecosystem when I bought my house eight years ago, and Google absolutely ruined it with the botched acquisition. Half the stuff is Google branded, half is Nest branded, a different half has Google branded software and a different half has Nest branded software. None of it really works reliably anymore. The lock to my front door is completely incompatible with modern "Google Home" and I'm unable to change its passcode.

It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.

Love their SaaS offerings though!

[kelnos]

How is Apple any different? IIRC Apple watches have an abysmal repairability score too.

If anything, Apple is in general the worst on this particular metric. Switching to Apple because you had a repairability problem with another brand is kinda funny.

[abirch]

I haven't had an issue with Apple, but it's only been 3.5 years.

Are there stories where Apple straight up said they wouldn't repair a watch? I thought they'd repair it even if the repairs were more the the replacement value.

[fragmede]

Apple gets a 3/10 for repairability to Google's 9/10 on their latest Pixel Watch 4.

[abrowne]

Google isn't making these (or having them – the devices themselves – made under a Google brand). Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo are making them.

[cj]

I really miss the Chromebook Pixel / Pixelbook / whatever it was called.

It was my travel laptop for at least 5 years.

It was expensive, but the quality, performance, and durability was top tier. And it lasted 5+ years.

The Pixelbook also had a "Google Assistant" button built in the keyboard. Should be easy enough to relaunch the hardware and swap in a gemini button...

[simonh]

I still think it’s amazing they manage to fit all that AI technology into something as small as a button.

[kylec]

Different iterations of the product were called both those things

[stackghost]

Those original Chromebook Pixels were awesome machines.

I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.

[tgma]

You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.

[bsammon]

When I was actively hacking my chromebook, there was tons of advice like this, and 90% of it didn't work on both arm and intel-based chromebooks, and the advice-givers never mentioned which category it worked on. Sometimes it was buried 5 paragraphs into the webpage you were sent to for downloads, sometimes not.

Has any of this changed?

Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.

[tgma]

I was talking about a specific device on a specific dimension brought up by the GP, i.e., "freedom to tinker for the owner while preserving security for the masses." Whether that became a standardized process is a different story. By and large it has changed across models, but nevertheless it was a good balance of ownership/hackability without compromising security that can be emulated by other devices if they choose to.

[fragmede]

There's no specific device under discussion. Where do you want the link to go? Google?

[stackghost]

Oh awesome, I never knew that. I sadly do not own one these days.

[tgma]

Process documented here: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/refer...

[bsimpson]

Tying the browser version to the system version was a mistake too. Once it stopped getting system updates, it stopped being compatible with big corners of the web that expect Chrome to always be the newest version.

[StilesCrisis]

They had a fix for that in development! Sadly but not surprisingly, it was cancelled:

https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/

[abrowne]

Cancelled presumably because instead they will move new Chromebooks to this Android OS.

[StilesCrisis]

Doubtful!

[kushalpandya]

That's still the default state of Google Hardware. Just look at their out-of-warranty Pixel Watch repairs.

And if you're not in North America (or EU), chances are very high that any repair to Pixels is going to be either not possible or will cost you dearly. I personally had a terrible experience of this with Pixel 7 Pro that was in warranty and had a water-related damage, since then, I've stayed away from any device made by Google.

[slashdave]

Because they (Google) are so removed from manufacturing