Comment by devoutsalsa
4 years ago
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.
I'm not sure consumers per se want it, but that companies think it's what consumers want, and only make things like that.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy that customers will buy it. I dont have another choice
Manufacturers want planned obsolesce more than anyone. The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant. Recycling should be the first goal then repair ability. I think we can do this without the manufacturers drawing the proverbial short straw. Maybe we should get a partial refund when returning expired devices. Maybe we should rent them rather than buy them.
> The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant.
That's an important insight.
I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline:
Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too! The economy, as it is today, is essentially a rapidly growing system for turning usable resources into useless waste.
Here's the bad part though: adding recycling to any stage of this pipeline doesn't alter the overall behavior. It only recirculates some of the matter - recycling is never perfect. But as we know, if you recycle less than 100%, and then re-recycle that, and then re-recycle again, it still converges to zero. With an exponentially growing pipeline, recycling is only delaying the crisis a little bit.
Ultimately, we need to remove the exponent (or at least couple it to population growth, in the scenario where humanity expands into space). For now, we need to reduce it. And one of the best ways of doing that is... reducing use. Buying less. The less matter flows through the pipeline, the longer we have before it runs out.
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Apple maintains devices for more than five years, the devices themselves keep on working for far longer than that.
It’s got nothing to do with planned obsolescence, new devices get new features because technology makes those features possible.
You get non-serviceable devices because users want smaller, faster, better hardware. Any latches, connectors, or sockets are purely subtracting from battery life as that’s the only part of a phone that can be resized, and even that is subject to constraints.
Repairable/serviceable means by definition more expensive and worse feature set.
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> A big reason that stuff isn't replaceable anymore is because consumers wants some of the benefits that come w/ non-replaceable parts.
This may be true, but we shouldn't confuse 'a decision made by a product manager' with 'the customers want this'.
Some design decisions succeed because of the other strengths of a product (and the competition cargo-cult copies them), not because they are good design decisions. Some design decisions are made because they are more convenient for the vendor, not better for the customer. Some design decisions are made because of inertia. Pointing to any particular design trade-off in a successful product, and saying that 'Well, this is obviously what the market wants' is not always a correct conclusion to draw.
USB is unarguably the most successful mechanism for two hardware devices to communicate with each-other in history, and yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in. Should we conclude that customers want to play the cable fandango every time they plug one device into another?
>yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in
I used to know one of the folks involved with the USB standard pretty well professionally. At one point, he told me that this aspect of USB is one thing he wished they could have dealt with differently.
(That said, the fact that the mini and micro versions are more explicitly keyed doesn't make that much of a different and I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs.)
> I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs
Interestingly, reversible USB-A cables are readily available (at least here in Japan). They just have a too-thin "lip" in the middle which is prone to breaking. https://www.sanwa.co.jp/product/syohin.asp?code=KU-RMCB2W
I think it's just that nobody thought of it when the plug was designed, because this wasn't a problem that serial cables etc before USB-A had (and even USB-B is keyed!)
If Apple would publish schematic, diagnostic software and allow refurbishing and selling of parts to third party - it will keep your iPhone water proof still.
The reality is this, when your device gets old or your screen cracks , Apple will offer to fix it for 70% of a new device price, so you are pushed to buy a new device. I hope this is not controversial and has nothing to do with the water proof preference you have.
You can already buy some replacement parts, like screens and backs. It doesn't seem like you can replace the motherboard, so that would be a fair point. I wouldn't objecting to coding this into law, but I'm not sure why your comment is implying this is not currently possible.
Apple has explicitly made replacement parts non-user-servicable at this point. It's called "serialization" and prevents even OEM parts (like a screen from a different iPhone) from being recognized by the phone. [1] This is the type of consumer un-friendly behavior that R2R seeks to defend against.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...
>some parts
Maybe things changed a bit but you could not buy screens or use refurbished ones. But all parts should be available for phones and laptops, including screens,batteries, chips, ports. Also there should be a way where parts from broken phones could be reused (I know the argument about stolen phones but competent Apple people can find a way to make it possible so we can reuse components from borken devices and not send them some far away to be "recycled" instead of reuse.
Except for the battery I don’t think those things have ever really been user swappable though. The issue with water protection on phones I have worked on is that its hard to maintain when removing the screen because it tends to stick. I guess you could always buy a new gasket which is probably what the Apple store does.
You can have a replacable battery and be waterproof.