Comment by streetfighter64
6 days ago
> Not everything you personally dislike needs to be illegal.
I'm having a hard time seeing why making stuff more difficult to repair just so that people are incentivized to throw it away and buy a new one, should not be illegal. If not for the anti-customer attitude, at least for the amount of waste and environmental destruction it results in.
Half the responses in this thread are from people who replaced the keyboard for about 50$ or so.
Even then, if I want a new ultra thin device that doesn’t have replaceable storage or user input devices, that’s my right to buy.
Who is going to magically determine what replaceable means ? From the post it looks like OP tried to fix it incorrectly.
Does apple owe op a new laptop even if they damaged it ?
Well yeah, you can probably fix it for pretty cheap if you've just got some know-how. But why do Apple need to make it more difficult to fix for no reason? Riveting the keyboard to the frame doesn't make the device "thinner", and as proved by people being able to fix it without rivets, doesn't even really serve a purpose. Your last sentence is a total non-sequitur; as far as I can tell it does not relate to anything I've said.
Why are you so adamant about protecting your "right" to buy a worse product?
I don’t understand this authoritarian need to ban everything you don’t like.
Should the government have a reparability board ? Who gets to be on it ?
If it pleases the King , may I buy a laptop while traveling and bring it home.
An argument could be made for a refundable recycling fee. Say 5% that gets returned when you take the device to a recycling center after your done with it
3 replies →
You might be interested in the vast world of public policy.
There's more to the world than banned / not banned.
In this instance, people might want a sensible pragmatic government to levy against companies that have high numbers of items ending up in eWaste processing (or discarded in fly tipping) and offer reductions to companies that invest in eWaste processing and collection.
There are also legitimate total lifetime cost of item models that suggest clean, fast, simple manufacturing that leads to a product hard to deconstruct might actually be "cheaper" in time, resources, and energy across a large consumer population than a functionally equivalent item designed to be "unbuilt" and rebuilt (ie repaired).
> clean, fast, simple manufacturing that leads to a product hard to deconstruct
This seems like a total fantasy. Do you actually have any examples of non-repairability making the process cheaper?
Sure there are lots of economical incentives to making stuff that you use until it breaks and then throw away, but that's just because the cost of e.g. mining metals or taking care of e-waste are externalized, due to using unethical labor in third world countries. If the "large consumer population" of the west actually had to bear the real cost of the electronics they produce, things would be vastly different.
Another point regarding your last paragraph, there are actually tons of examples of Apple (and others) making a more complicated (and thus expensive) design sorely to prevent independent repair shops from providing cheap repairs, thus "encouraging" customers to buy a replacement, or use Apple's own "repair", which just replaces entire parts instead of repairing them, and bills enough for Apple's liking.
I guess you can make the argument that legislating repairability will raise the price floor for devices because it increases the cost to the manufacturer. This isn't a problem for most of us in tech, but affordability can be an issue for many.
Making devices un-fixable often costs more than just building them in the most straightforward way. In either case, I don't think a few dollars more or less in manufacturing costs will impact the consumer prices in any way. Let's not pretend that Apple (or other computer / phone companies) has thin margins.