Comment by bloppe
7 days ago
Car safety is a bad counterexample because the risk is otherwise often externalized i.e. your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal. And as GP stated, regulating this sort of thing would definitely force a particular trade-off on everyone. A lot of people would be pissed to have MacBooks with worse "build quality" even if they were more reparable. Having a choice is better.
I disagree. The lack of repairability has external costs not born by the purchaser or the manufacturer -- more toxic trash unnecessarily added to the environment.
Forcing a particular trade-off on everyone is entirely the point. It's the point of car safety, it's also the point of minimum warranties, electrical emission regulations, safety standards, etc.
Does this also mean only using "standard" parts? Or does the manufacturer have to over-produce the parts for, lets say 7 years, and then warehouse and ship those parts, probably multiple times. Or keep a low rate production line running for 7 years? What happens to the parts that don't get used? Are they scrapped?
That "what if" cost is going to be built into the cost of the laptop. Repairability doesn't always keep the cost low. The purchaser will definitely have to foot the cost otherwise it isn't sustainable.
> Does this also mean only using "standard" parts? Or does the manufacturer have to over-produce the parts for, lets say 7 years, and then warehouse and ship those parts, probably multiple times. Or keep a low rate production line running for 7 years? What happens to the parts that don't get used? Are they scrapped?
None of that is relevant in this context: The parts are available, but the laptop is designed and built such that the alone keyboard cannot be replaced.[1]
[1] Not sure if this is possible on that specific laptop, but with a steady hand, a tiny drill, maybe a magnifiying glass too, you can maybe drill out the rivets, then replace the keyboard, then either re-rivet it back again or tap very tiny thread into the laptop and use screws.
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Repairability definitely doesn't keep the costs low. If it was cheaper and easier, it wouldn't have to be regulated. As for supply chain management, companies that get that equation correct are going to benefit. Which is exactly how it should be.
We define the rules of the game and companies that can best implement those rules will succeed. That is capitalism.
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> Does this also mean only using "standard" parts? Or does the manufacturer have to over-produce the parts for, lets say 7 years
Why not? I don't understand how it's legal for manufacturers to produce absolute trash that can't be replaced and will just end up in a landfill. I think 7 years is far from enough, but because computers evolve quickly maybe 15 years is ok. For the rest of electro-mechanical goods, 50 years should be the baseline.
If a car or fridge from 50 years ago is still working with proper maintenance, that should be the minimum to be expected from products released today.
It's much more effective and economically efficient to deal with externalized pollution costs with deposits to incentivize proper disposal.
A ton of normal users will simply never bother to repair their own laptops no matter how easy it is, but you don't even have to recycle your own bottles and cans to see the effectiveness of bottle deposits work. Someone will usually come and recycle them for you in any big city.
> It's much more effective and economically efficient to deal with externalized pollution costs with deposits to incentivize proper disposal.
Or to just mandate devices that doesn't need to be dispose so often.
> A ton of normal users will simply never bother to repair their own laptops no matter how easy it is
Doesn't matter, because simplicity contributes directly to prize and when you can get your existing device fixed for cheaper than getting a new one, you likely will do it.
I already pay a deposit and "recycle" all my electronics. And some recycled electronics are already repaired and repurposed. If that was easier, more electronics would get a second chance at life.
Right now if you have two broken MacBook Neos, one with a broken motherboard and the other with a broken screen, you can make one working MacBook Neo without even needing to solder anything in just the time to takes disassemble both and reassemble one (which has been demonstrated in minutes).
> A lot of people would be pissed to have MacBooks with worse "build quality" even if they were more reparable.
It is not a given that being repairable results in worse build quality.
It is a given if someone could have made a superior product in the last 15 years, i.e. more repairable laptop with higher build quality, they would have.
> It is a given if someone could have made a superior product in the last 15 years, i.e. more repairable laptop with higher build quality, they would have.
Most of the PC competitors of the last 15 years have struggled to even come close to achieving similar build quality.
I'm not sure who this mythical competitor could be, who is supposed to not only match unibody aluminium MacBook build quality, but also solve repairability, and come in with a final product that is cheaper?
It kind of sounds like you are saying it is impossible to improve on the current state of the world.
That if it was possible to improve things, someone would have already done it. And they haven’t, so it must not be possible.
That feels a bit extreme… Maybe I’m misunderstanding?
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A lot of the recent car safety features are cameras and ADAS which make it safer for pedestrians. The problem is it makes the car so expensive no one can afford to buy it or to repair it. There needs to be some standards to drive down the cost.
Do you have a source for the cameras and ADAS driving up the cost of the cars dramatically?
The €14k Dacia Sandero ships with camera-assisted emergency braking and lane assist. By the time you get up to a €24k MG 4, you get full level 2 driving. These don't seem like very high price thresholds
https://www.kbb.com/car-news/whats-making-car-repair-so-expe...
Cars have much longer lifecycles that the repurposed consumer technology in the ADAS. A camera module is cheap, but a camera model for this particular make/model/year is outrageously expensive if not unobtanium 10 years later. Theres the famous f150 story where the tail light housing with blind spot monitoring cost $5k.
>> your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal.
You know that safety for pedestrians is also a very tightly regulated car safety category, right? Obviously, there's not much that can be done if you get hit by a car going 70mph, but the fact that most people should survive a 30mph impact with a modern car is mostly thanks to regulations requiring crumple zones specifically designed to protect pedestrians in a collision. And yeah, there are huge trade offs - I imagine people would generally prefer a car that doesn't need incredibly expensive repairs after a minor collision because everything at the front just crumpled, but then they would be guaranteed to cut off legs of any person hit - it's a trade off.
Not in the US. Specific pedestrian safety features are not included in cars sold there due to lack of regulation. FMVSS was planning a regulation modelled after ECE R127, then the administration changed and no progress since...
Lack of regulation resulting in worse outcomes is also a data point for regulation being able to solve problems.
Well yes, which is why most American cars are not approved for sale over here.
It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.
Or mandate in car cameras that record the driver to a blackbox to determine if the driver’s negligence caused others to be damaged. Also a cheap implementation that would immediately make drivers be more attentive.
>>It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.
Only partialy agree. As in - yes I agree in principle, but I don't agree it would be trivial.
My sister had insurance with a black box policy, where everything she did in the car was recorded. And on her drive to work, she would always get a threatening email saying "we've recorded you going 70mph in a 20mph zone, if this continues we will cancel your policy". We had to ring them up and demand the GPS trace, and guess what - at one point she was going on the motorway above a 20mph road, but the system probably just did "what is the speed limit at X/Y coordinates" and was getting 20mph for the nearest road. We've had to do this several times when she had the policy.
My own Volvo XC60 frequently tells me I'm going over the speed limit as it thinks the road I'm on has a 50mph limit when in fact it's 70, and in another place it thinks it's 30 when in fact it's also 70.
Not to mention that the speeds entered on Google Maps are often just wrong and take forever to update. And it's funny when people like Harry Metcalf say that every new car he tests insists that his own private drive has a 20mph limit when obviously there is none. Imagine if you couldn't turn that off!
So yeah, very easy to implement(and it's a great idea!) but in practice it's one of these "looks easy on paper, but in reality it's super hard to do reliably".