Comment by alexvoda
4 years ago
Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation.
As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc.
We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction.
To move the overton window even a little bit towards where it was before, the demands have to be disproportionate. I say those demands are still reasonable. We should demand that any device and any component in any device be second source-able (just like AMD was a second source for early x86 chips). And for that matter since I am from Europe, any component should be second source-able from Europe. If IP transfers worked for China, they should work elsewhere.
(1) https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1012672/Pioneer-C-5600dfv....
> We should demand that any device and any component in any device be second source-able
Devices aren't built around discrete components anymore. That ship has sailed, we waved goodbye, partied on the dock, and took an Uber home. Now we're nursing the hangover. But hey, our phones are now marginally thinner than last year's phones, so that might be worth something.
I don't see how we get back, considering the market just isn't there: it'd rather treat devices as things that we lease for a low cost from a vertically-integrated company.
"Devices aren't built around discrete components anymore."
Your right about most electrical products. That is not the point though. (I know you were just commenting on this article, but I feel strongly over right to repair laws.)
I just want access to parts if they are available. I want access to repair information. I don't care how complicated a devise is--I want to see the factory repair diagrams. There is someone out there who can fab together a computer board if there's a demand for it.
If the company doesn't want to sell parts to consumers so be it, but release the information. Yes--trade secrets make it more difficult, but not impossible.
I would be content (now) with a huge sticker on every product that didn't want to give out information, or sell parts.
Something like, "If you buy this product, the minute the warrany ends, you are on your own. We don't provide any repair information (because you're too stupid to repair, or we are greedy), and never supply parts to anyone. We will never release repair information. So the minute the warranty ends, you will 99.99% of the time gave to buy a New product from us!".
I have a feeling after a few years, companies might put screws back in, and use a bit less epoxy? And poof--repair parts will be shipped overnight, and free?
O.K. right to repair movement is covering more than just electronics.
Like your watch you have on your wrist?
Rolex, and The Swatch Company (own mist watch brands)have pulled all third party parts accounts. Watch companies realized they could use Vertical integration, and "Quality assurance" to bring that watches back to the factory for repair, at factory prices.
I don't want to be in a perpetual lease when I buy a product.
This article is a great example of how the market niche exists and there are plenty of other markets (motor vehicles, industrial equipment, the maker scene) where right to repair is the norm. I'd argue the maker scene is bigger than it's even been and still growing, hence the increased increase in right to repair.
Exact discrete components aren't important becuase your usb IC isn't any more special than another usb IC that follows the specification. Your laptop display isn't special versus the others that use the same internal displayport ribbon cable.
Market aside this is effectively corporations attempting to take a right/freedom away from the people. The market can treat devices however it likes but if it crosses a threshold then applying rules and regulations that restrict it's freedom isn't a new magical concept.
You can choose to forgo owning stuff personally, sure. But that is not everybody's preference. And please don't pretend that "devices aren't built around discrete components anymore".
There are plenty of discrete components in a modern phone/laptop/roomba/whatever, that could be replaceable/upgradable by advanced user or entry-level technician, but are not:
- battery
- screen
- storage
- RAM
- list goes on and on...
A big reason that stuff isn't replaceable anymore is because consumers wants some of the benefits that come w/ non-replaceable parts.
For example, it's nice that I can drop my iPhone in water w/o worrying (too much) about destroying it. I spent ~$1500 on an iPhone 12 Pro in November & dropped it in a lake in December. Part of the reason it's (more) waterproof if because it's not covered w/ ports/hatches/openings that would allow me swap out the battery/RAM/SSD/something. If I had to choose between having a fully customizable phone & one that doesn't die when it gets wet, I think I'd rather have one that resists water.
Just one person's opinion.
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I believe the GP was talking about discrete circuitry vs integrated circuits, not so much supporting peripherals.
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RAM and storage is usually integrated on phones. The battery is usually not something you can pull out anymore because people like me prefer phones that I can use to find my way in the rain without risk damaging the phone, but even so they are pretty easy to replace, the same with the screen.
On laptops you have a choice: buy a Thinkpad that is not an ultrabook, but even then you see people prefer thinner and lighter models than ones that are servicable.
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Ram isn’t separate, storage is soldered on, screens have security sensitive components built in (the Touch ID in modern android devices), etc
Your approach will always be a valid choice, for those who want it, and companies will be happy to provide that device-as-a-service model.
R2R is just seeking to preserve the practical access to repairability for those who want to service their own devices.
> Your approach will always be a valid choice, for those who want it
This isn't "my approach" – it's the approach that the vast majority of purchasers prefer. And pining for the good ol' days of technical datasheets doesn't help everybody who can't start their cars without the successful interaction of nearly a hundred proprietary microcontrollers running proprietary code speaking over a high-speed data bus.
And here's the annoying thing: I want a car that doesn't have a hundred microcontrollers speaking over a high-speed data bus. I want a car like my old '88 Camry, that I could take apart with my dad and fix almost all of the problems I ran into with the help of a Haynes manual and a trip (or two!) to the junkyard. But the market clearly does not agree with my desires.
So how do you get there from here?
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No it's not, it's looking to enshrine that standard by law for everyone. Nothing is stopping consumers from demanding phones that are self-serviceable, they just simply aren't willing to accept the tradeoffs involved (larger size, worse thermals, higher price, etc). If you disagree, there's an unserved market segment wide open for you!
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> it'd rather treat devices as things that we lease for a low cost from a vertically-integrated company.
This is a nightmare.
I built my PC, I repair my phone and laptops. I replace joysticks and mod old gaming consoles. I fix my own car.
I don't want the industry following Apple into the depths of hell.
We used to be allowed to record tv shows on VHS legally. Look how far we've slid down the path of non-ownership.
We've given up our privacy, we license media on subscription, and even our employers rent premium and expensive time sharing on "cloud".
Open source has been captured and turned into hidden away SaaS/PaaS.
We're all being gaslighted.
>We used to be allowed to record tv shows on VHS legally. Look how far we've slid down the path of non-ownership.
What's changed that prevents you from doing that today? I'm guessing the answer is: "But that's a crappy alternative to what people watching Netflix or even renting DVDs are doing." And I would agree with that. (Though in the case of music, owning versus renting is still very much a legitimate choice at least for me.)
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> Devices aren't built around discrete components anymore.
Huh. Thats news to me. A 0603 resistor is pretty much a discrete component to me. And if it is some other part of the assembly that breaks, the assembly it self is a discrete part (e.g. the microphone of your smartphone might be on a seperate flexboard that costs like 15 euros, which is a lot cheaper than buying a new one).
Yeah things got small. But that doesn't make things unfixable. Missing documentation, proprietary parts you cannot get, gluing in things in without reason, etc. are problems. The size is for the most part managable — and if it isn't, right to repair is also about you being able to go to some repair guy and having your stuff fixed instead of having some Apple employee tell you how you can only buy a new device, and loose all data because they won't even look at it properly. So in short this is about repairability in general.
And if you like to do it yourself, this is totally possible. Even my father managed to swap out that home button for his completely glued Samsung Galaxy S7 edge.
I teach (among other things) soldering at University. Most people can actually SMD solder if you show them how. A student who never soldered before swapped a usb port for an E-reader within an hour of me showing her.
So, devices are built less around discrete components than they used to be, but there are still tons of discrete components in any given product, and these discrete components fail more often than you might realize. One common failure is failure of jacks/connectors--sometimes the solder joints get ripped out due to stress.
However, I think that you're basically right anyway... because when you pay Apple for a laptop repair, I think there's a good chance that they do a logic board replacement or something similar. The logic board itself is made of components and can be repaired, but it often isn't repaired, just replaced.
Doesn't have to. It's not that much to ask to release documentation or code.
Hardware is one thing. My sister has an iPhone 6 which will soon lose support from Apple and apps running on it. Why can't we install Linux on it and save us the e-waste as a bonus?
They make a worthwhile distinction for ICT devices, which definitely have all those characteristics for miniaturisation. But that’s not the end of the right-to-repair story - glib example, but plenty of toasters end up in landfill, and there’s nothing complex or miniaturised about them. The market that delivers a new replacement for these things for a cost that is the same order of magnitude as a repair would be basically ensures that this will happen.
> it'd rather treat devices as things that we lease for a low cost from a vertically-integrated company.
It's weird how you defend Corporations' private property while apparently disliking the idea of personal property.
It's weird how you read me describing the decisions of the market and attribute them to my opinion/preferences.
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Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation
For a short time in college I worked fixing stereos at a big-name electronics company's east coast repair facility. You could always tell the gear that people had tried to fix themselves before sending it back to us as a last resort. We didn't begrudge them trying on their own. In fact, it was encouraged because home repairs kept the cost of maintaining the repair facility down.
These days, since everything gets chucked in the garbage when it breaks, I guess that logic doesn't work anymore.
As an aside, the Commodore 64 didn't come with the schematics, but they were part of the Programmer's Reference Guide, which many people had, and could be bought in most bookstores.
Shameless plug: We're doing this with the MNT Reform laptop: https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/schematics.html
There's also a print version of this book that is included with the assembled version of the device: https://shop.mntmn.com/products/mnt-reform-operator-handbook
This was in a very different era, when manufacturing was difficult and expensive. Having the schematic didn't necessarily get you anywhere. That's no longer the case - now the design is expensive but the manufacturing is cheap.
Component level schematics should be freely available for all products. It's not like there are no schematics available for e.g. Macbooks. Third party repair shops use them all the time. It's just that they are not legally available.
I might entertain the argument that you don't want to show all internal details of your 6 layer PCB but those are also not necessary for repair. Just hand out the component level schematics.
a lot of consumer electronics are a bunch of strung together reference implementations. the schematic isn't really the secret sauce, especially since with a soldering iron, a multimeter (and maybe an lcr meter) and time, you could completely recreate it without difficulty. not practical for a repair shop's level of income/device, but if you wanted to steal a design, you could easily do this
Can you articulate what that has to do with repairability?
For one thing, I think it's an important point to make when someone else makes the, "look how repairability has regressed since the golden era of getting the Apple II schematics in the box with the computer!". At the time, design was cheap. Why not give it to your customers? It's not like they're going to go out and make one themselves.
The fact that manufacturing is cheap now and schematics are not only the key to repairability but also counterfeit Chinese knock-offs is a problem worth understanding.
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While going through my father’s things after he passed away, I found there instructions for an old television that included the full schematic for the device. If something was malfunctioning, and you were willing, you could fix it.
For a 15 year old e-reader I found the repair manual online, which contained a full schematic. For a more recently released e-reader from the same company, the repair manual simply has a disassembly step-by-step. I can only imagine the company found it not worth the effort for technicians to actually repair anything.
That would amount to saying that we in Europe can't use any technology that is less than what 20 years old?
You can't even replace an Intel CPU with an AMD one unless your motherboard supports both. Good luck finding a modern laptop with a socketed CPU.
I get where you are coming from, and it would be nice not to be locked down to one vendor, but the cost to enable that is so high as to be not worth it.
I would rather the manufactures have to state their support up front and then you know what you buy when you buy it.
I see a good intention behind it, but it only works only if only honest people and companies exist. It’s not the case in real world.
What would prevent a competitor simply copying the whole product and offering a cheaper price because they didn’t have to invest in R&D, and those engineers who spent many years working on a finished schematics will be out of job because the company won’t be able to make a living selling more expensive products?
there is a big big difference between a schematic that will aid people in repairs and ones that are used to manufacture the boards...and no one fighting for right to repair is asking for that anyways
system76 talks about this in this interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ
Nor is anybody asking for mask files for ICs, just that they be available for purchase at a reasonable price. Stuff like Apple getting proprietary charging ICs from Intersil that nobody else can buy to replace a defective one is unethical at best.
Patents and reputation aka trade marks. Speakers for example are extremely well understood technology yet premium speakers are still a thing.
Speakers and computer components are great examples of where companies provide less tangible benifits in quality control and customer support.
You're basically arguing for IP protection via obscurity/complexity, but I assure you that anyone who wants to clone tech products at industrial scale can already do so today. This just gives repair documentation and parts availability to independent repair shops and DIYers...
What would prevent a competitor simply copying the whole product and offering a cheaper price
Whatever it was that kept this from happening from the advent of electronics up to the invention of the smartphone.
This isn't a totally unreasonable position to take, but in some cases "whatever it was that kept this from happening before" really is nothing more than "nobody had thought of it yet".
I wonder how big the manual would have to be for a smartphone with the equivalent of those old stereo diagrams.
Look up board view files. Those are the kinds of schematics people are talking about. Louis Rossman uses them on his Youtube channel to do board level repairs of Macs and iOS devices.
They are not all you need copy a device outright, contrary to what some people in the comments think. But they are sufficient for you to track down faulty components and de-solder them.
Maybe not that big, unfortunately a lot of the connections will end up going to that SoC that does most of the work and is probably obsolete by the time you want to repair it.
Can't you do that without imposing it on everyone else?
I care about consumption (I'm on my 2nd laptop since ~2003), but I don't particularly want to pay $15,000 to replace this one with one that is worse.
The average computer is around 700 including ones that are relatively repairable and ones that are not. Pretending that repairable laptops cost 20 times as much is disingenuous.
> disingenuous
That implies intent to deceive, which crosses into personal attack. Can you please not do that on HN? If you feel that someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information in a neutral way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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(In the comment) They want to be able to source a drop in cpu from 2 different supply chains.
And they want that for every piece and part on the thing.
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One electronic device from the 70s doesn’t support the statement “Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation.”
Be careful.
My dad replaced a defective memory chip on his IBM PC XT.. but the computer cost the equivalent of $12k.
I’d rather throw away a dozen modern laptops than fix one that costs 10x.
You can replace the memory and storage on just about every desktop computer today that isn't made by Apple, and a decent fraction of laptops.
They do not cost 10x as much as devices with soldered RAM and SSDs.
Your comparison does not work. Replaceable parts didn't make that IBM cost what it did.
I'm not talking about replacing a memory module. I'm talking about replacing a defective 4Kb memory chip on a $1000+, 384Kb ISA card.
When I built PCs in the late 90s, the BOM included motherboard, cpu, graphics card, sound card, nic, sometimes a parallel port board, memory, hard disk, etc. At this point, it was only really feasible to repair modules that failed, few humans with the skill to replace a component would do so due to the economies of scale and cheap price.
Now, it's motherboard, cpu, memory, disk. The cost is much less, but most repairs are replacements of the mainboard or disk.
For most laptops, there's a tiny motherboard with most of the functionality integrated into a few modules. The only things that get repaired are memory and battery.
For the M1 Macbook, you have one of the highest performance devices on the market selling for $899 at 40-50% margin. I just bought similar Dell and HP units in quantities over 50,000 last fall for $100-150 less (probably 6-8% margin to the OEM), with inferior battery life, disk and cpu.
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Yes it did. Computers became cheaper because more and more functionality can simply be combined on single chips. You can not replace parts of broken chips at home.
Look into Apple's M1.
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I'd rather repair it myself, or be able to take it to someone local with particular expertise. What's important is that we have a choice!
>Electronics used to come with full schematics as part of the documentation.
Nearly every electronic device I bought in the 1970s did not have included schematics. TI-55, Pong console, digital watches, Speak'n'Spell, transistor radios, Mattell football and baseball handhelds, Simon... and on and on.
Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer.
> Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone's saying that "an average consumer" in the terms of "I can't tell the difference between a hammer and a soldering iron" should be able to repair their devices.
But I think that if the consumer can demonstrate some minimum level of interest (education, certification, or at least competence) then they absolutely should be able to repair devices they own.
And, further, that owning devices and software should be the default and normal thing. The trend today of renting/leasing things is clearly anti-consumer.
> Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer.
Sure, but repair shops could exist that would specialize in doing all sorts of repairs.
As they do now. I know a few people that repair most all modern phones and iPads and other gadgets for a living.
Open up that old transistor radio and you will usually find a tiny printed schematic diagram affixed to the inside of the removable cover.
Nope :) As a kid taking everything apart, and as an adult collecting some old gadgets I had as kid, there is generally no such thing. I just listed quite a few gadgets that definitely do not have schematics glued inside.