We’ve mistaken complexity for progress — and forgotten how things work. A 41-year-old computer still boots instantly, while today’s “smart” tech buckles.
Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.
I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn’t boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn’t anything too important on it that I hadn’t backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).
All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).
I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
Yet there’s zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn’t work, trash it.
There are real limits to repairability in modern devices, some placed there just in order to force you to pay the manufacturer more money. But you’re right that there’s a lot we could do that we’re just not bothering to do.
You don’t have to fix everything, but just doing stuff like replacing connectors and capacitors could probably save 10% of the shit that we throw away, and it’s not that hard to try.
While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play:
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people generally don’t have this skill set
electronics tend to be made cheaper, this means they may fail faster but also means they can be replaced cheaper
it costs real money for tech support that can fix said issues, often many times more money than the thing costs to replace
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As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff.
This is exactly it. I used to work for a manufacturer that made devices they would often need to repair. They would bill non-warranty labor at $100/hour, plus the cost of parts. Their products were primarily used by professionals, so that was fine when it was being done to repair something that cost between $700-$4,000 new, especially for people who were making money using the product. When they launched a product at a $500 MSRP, though, it started to get harder, and even more so when competition forced them to lower the price to $400. When I left they were about to launch a product targeted at amateurs, originally aiming for a $200 price. It was actually being built by a Chinese competitor, with our software guys contributing to the system and putting our logo on it. Spending $100 labor to repair a $200 device was going to be a tough sell, and when I left the plan for warranty “repairs” was to just give the customer a replacement unit and scrap the defective one. And I’m sure the repair labor rate was going up; they had a hard time hiring qualified technicians at the rate they wanted to pay, and most of the department had quit/moved to new roles when I left, so they were surely having to increase pay and the rate they billed.
When something’s being built on an assembly line mostly by machine and/or low-cost Asian labor, it’s harder for a company to justify paying a skilled technician’s labor in a western country when that makes the cost of repair close to the cost of a new unit.
Except with Internet shit, it’s usually some dumbass at your ISP who is only trained to answer the phone and parrot from 3 different prompts. Actually getting someone who can flip the switch/register your device in the proper region to make shit actually work on their end.
In a world where electronics were really expensive and did not go out of date so quickly, maybe people actually would have tools and spare parts lying around for the power electronics. But a) that’s not the world we live in, and b) usually the software is not user serviceable, at least with reasonable effort, and the microelectronics never is
I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
This is a symptom of industry switching to cheap “disposable” electronics, rather than more expensive, robust, and repairable ones.
From the treadmill company’s point of view, it’s cheaper to just lose one unit and pay shipping one way rather than pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.
About 50 years ago, you could find appliance repair shops that would fix your broken toaster or TV, and parts for stuff like that were easily available. Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
The other valid component to your argument is the cost of labor now. It is more expensive to maintain a staff of people to perform repairs and manage the logistics of transporting units to service than it is to simply lose 100% of the wholesale value of the handful of items that fail within the warranty period. Labor, especially skilled labor, is really really expensive in the western world.
pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.
My point is that in a better world, people could fix this kind of thing themselves. Like offer a discount for their trouble and have them or their mechanic aunt come by and fix it.
I really want to go back to electronics and appliances being both more robust and more repairable. It’s just that the vast majority of the population disagrees with that once they learn that it will make things cost more initially.
Agreed it definitely depends on what you buy. I inherited a stereo amp from my uncle who always buys really nice gear. I have had it repaired or been able to repair it anytime a component failed and it is now 30 years old. But it was built to last that long not to be disposed of in five.
Right to repair is not just for nerds and tinkerers. We all deserve repairable products.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
My buddy has a $6000 projector. He found it in the trash. The only thing wrong with it was a cracked solder on the power supply.
Similarly, I have a $5000 audio console that I got for ~$100 in parts; it had a bad power supply. Honestly, probably just a bad capacitor on the power supply, but I didn’t feel like desoldering every capacitor to check their capacitance. Diagnosing the power supply took about 5 minutes, and most of that was just finding all of the screws that were holding the case together. A quick read with a multimeter told me everything I needed to know. Swapped out the supply, and it has been working fine ever since.
I’d argue that 10-15% of issues are trivial issues and are worth investigating even without a schematic if the alternative is just throwing something away.
and i do because i don’t want to throw away this expensive piece of tech. but like, manufacturers in the early 2000s were still sharing this very valuable information with me. i hate planned obsolescence with a passion.
I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn’t boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn’t anything too important on it that I hadn’t backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).
All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).
I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
Yet there’s zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn’t work, trash it.
This guy might be looking in the wrong places.
There are real limits to repairability in modern devices, some placed there just in order to force you to pay the manufacturer more money. But you’re right that there’s a lot we could do that we’re just not bothering to do.
You don’t have to fix everything, but just doing stuff like replacing connectors and capacitors could probably save 10% of the shit that we throw away, and it’s not that hard to try.
While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play: `
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.
This is exactly it. I used to work for a manufacturer that made devices they would often need to repair. They would bill non-warranty labor at $100/hour, plus the cost of parts. Their products were primarily used by professionals, so that was fine when it was being done to repair something that cost between $700-$4,000 new, especially for people who were making money using the product. When they launched a product at a $500 MSRP, though, it started to get harder, and even more so when competition forced them to lower the price to $400. When I left they were about to launch a product targeted at amateurs, originally aiming for a $200 price. It was actually being built by a Chinese competitor, with our software guys contributing to the system and putting our logo on it. Spending $100 labor to repair a $200 device was going to be a tough sell, and when I left the plan for warranty “repairs” was to just give the customer a replacement unit and scrap the defective one. And I’m sure the repair labor rate was going up; they had a hard time hiring qualified technicians at the rate they wanted to pay, and most of the department had quit/moved to new roles when I left, so they were surely having to increase pay and the rate they billed.
When something’s being built on an assembly line mostly by machine and/or low-cost Asian labor, it’s harder for a company to justify paying a skilled technician’s labor in a western country when that makes the cost of repair close to the cost of a new unit.
Except with Internet shit, it’s usually some dumbass at your ISP who is only trained to answer the phone and parrot from 3 different prompts. Actually getting someone who can flip the switch/register your device in the proper region to make shit actually work on their end.
In a world where electronics were really expensive and did not go out of date so quickly, maybe people actually would have tools and spare parts lying around for the power electronics. But a) that’s not the world we live in, and b) usually the software is not user serviceable, at least with reasonable effort, and the microelectronics never is
This is a symptom of industry switching to cheap “disposable” electronics, rather than more expensive, robust, and repairable ones.
From the treadmill company’s point of view, it’s cheaper to just lose one unit and pay shipping one way rather than pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.
About 50 years ago, you could find appliance repair shops that would fix your broken toaster or TV, and parts for stuff like that were easily available. Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
The other valid component to your argument is the cost of labor now. It is more expensive to maintain a staff of people to perform repairs and manage the logistics of transporting units to service than it is to simply lose 100% of the wholesale value of the handful of items that fail within the warranty period. Labor, especially skilled labor, is really really expensive in the western world.
My point is that in a better world, people could fix this kind of thing themselves. Like offer a discount for their trouble and have them or their mechanic aunt come by and fix it.
Oh, I fully agree.
I really want to go back to electronics and appliances being both more robust and more repairable. It’s just that the vast majority of the population disagrees with that once they learn that it will make things cost more initially.
Agreed it definitely depends on what you buy. I inherited a stereo amp from my uncle who always buys really nice gear. I have had it repaired or been able to repair it anytime a component failed and it is now 30 years old. But it was built to last that long not to be disposed of in five.
Right to repair is not just for nerds and tinkerers. We all deserve repairable products.
My buddy has a $6000 projector. He found it in the trash. The only thing wrong with it was a cracked solder on the power supply.
Similarly, I have a $5000 audio console that I got for ~$100 in parts; it had a bad power supply. Honestly, probably just a bad capacitor on the power supply, but I didn’t feel like desoldering every capacitor to check their capacitance. Diagnosing the power supply took about 5 minutes, and most of that was just finding all of the screws that were holding the case together. A quick read with a multimeter told me everything I needed to know. Swapped out the supply, and it has been working fine ever since.
I can top that. I got a broken $100 BlueYeti microphone for $10 on eBay. The USB cable they shipped it with was bad.
eh. give me schematics. i can’t fix anything beyond trivial issues without it.
then it won’t be as much of a black box.
I’d argue that 10-15% of issues are trivial issues and are worth investigating even without a schematic if the alternative is just throwing something away.
and i do because i don’t want to throw away this expensive piece of tech. but like, manufacturers in the early 2000s were still sharing this very valuable information with me. i hate planned obsolescence with a passion.