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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

What you're saying is that you left the freedom of your device to jail yourself into simple interface...?

Actually, this is a pattern that many products follow, as they evolve from a newly tinkered thing pioneered by enthusiasts to a mature consumer device.

There is much more "freedom" in 80's and 90's audio equipment. (And markedly higher build quality. Bargain stuff I bought as a teenager is now lauded on ebay as the good old stuff, "built like a tank.") However, there are also a lot more cables to deal with.

The progression is like this:

    1) Pure tinkering, no standards
    2) Enthusiast market, standards, high modularity/complexity
    3) Prepackaged experience, no modularity

Cars also followed this pattern, come to think of it.

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> Cars also followed this pattern, come to think of it.

I remember my dad complaining all through my youth about how the more modern that cars get, the less serviceable you are. That in new cars you need special computers just to tell them that yes, you did fix the problem and the car can stop complaining now.

10 years later ... man, if I have to even think about opening the bonnet and poking at something, I assume the manufacturer has failed at their job. I don't want to maintain my car. I expect my car to be a tool. Even taking it into the shop to get its tires changed every winter (and the additional 30euro checkup and winter-prepr, then spring-prep) are too much of a hassle.

Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

Not necessarily. Modern airliners are highly reliable, so long as you follow the maintenance schedule.

Disposable equipment is a feature of markets driving costs down. It's a sign of commoditization and convenience+short-term reliability winning over long term reliability.

Modern airliners are highly redundant. Stuff breaks on them constantly though.

They're operating closer to engineering limits than your smartphone is, I'd wager.

Considering structural widths in modern CPU's, I'd disagree. But CPU's are built by the billions and planes by the thousands, so the amount of engineering that can go into a CPU is insane.

> Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

Not quite. The whole purpose of maintenance is to increase the longevity of a product by making small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear.

Everything lasts longer if you maintain it. A good knife, a high performance vehicle, a good pair of shoes, a couch, etc ...

I don't know of any product that is "as good as new" after years of use. Watches, even spoons, aren't as shiny as they were when you bought them for the first time.

Maintenance is the work of the caring.

I think his point is that the goal is to make equipment that minimizes having to make "small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear".

That's not how it works though. Manufacturers realized they want to force you to buy again so they just made it unmaintainable with the same lifespan. iPhones are unmaintainable and they still become useless after 5 years or so.

5 years is a long time for a smart phone! And remember that a longer lifespan costs more money. I doubt many customers (myself included) would be willing to pay more money for an iPhone for it to last more than 5 years.

>Maintenance is the work of the caring

Agreed - which is why building mass market convinience stuff that require it is a bad idea - I have limited hours in a day - I do not want to spend any of them doing chores such as maintenence - I'd rather just buy a new working thing every x years and not care. Paying someone else to do the maintenence is nice in theory but finding someone reliable who won't ripp you off is too much hassle.

You know, there are reviews - on the internet - for mechanics and dealer service departments. And really, anyone able bodied can change oil.

In college I changed my oil and filters. It was a pain getting under a car a few inches off the ground, disposal was tricky, and I had to spend time cleaning up nasty gunk. I also could only do it when the car had not been driven recently.

The fundamental problem with changing your oil is that it involves oil. I saved $30, at the cost of an hour of my labor. As soon as I had a job, that equation didn't make sense.

I did the same thing on a late 90's 3 series throughout college. A pair of car jacks or rhino ramps makes the job way easier. Also if you take your oil to pep boys they'll dispose of it for free. Either way I'd still do it if I didn't live in a city. There's something nice about maintaining your things, it brings pride in ownership.

I now have a much newer car (that I probably don't need since I don't need to drive to work and live in a city) and no garage so I pay for oil changes. On the college car I knew how everything fit together, I took everything apart to fix it multiple times, I changed/ upgraded/ retrofitted things in their to make it more enjoyable. On my new car I can't really do those things without more complicated tech. It definitely changes how you view the object. Both are fun "tools" but one was my fun tool the other isn't

Not even $30 as the cost of the filter and oil (not to mention tools and ideally things to make it safer like ramps or jackstands)...

You don't maintain CPU's. 1,000,000,000+ parts and it just works.

But they do degrade over time (slowly).

Yes, slowly. For almost everything I buy, I want it to last as long as possible without maintenance, instead of longer, but with regular maintenance.

Expensive items are an exception - I want my car to last long, not to avoid maintaining it. But there is space for very few exceptions.

Except for when you have to update the microcode due to bugs that freeze your system under certain loads. Or when certain calculations are incorrect and you could NOT maintain it and the whole CPU range had to be recalled

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/intel-skylake-bug-cau... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

CPUs don't have a billion parts. The unpackaged die is one carefully crafted solid.

Oceans have different parts and are far more homogeneous than CPU's. Further individual transistors can break making parts a meaningful distinction.

PS: We call them silicon chips, but there are several tiny blobs of different chemicals involved. The process is closer to 3D printing than you might think.

At first I was a little surprised that we were comparing smartphones to cars to CPUs to...oceans. But then I remembered I'm on Hacker News.

I am aware of how chips are constructed. They are not built of discrete parts even though they are composed of multiple chemical elements. They are assembled through chemical processes that create a unified product through a few hundred steps. They are not an assembly of billions of parts and it is misleading to describe them as such.

Part does not just mean discrete object. The lower part of that beam is damaged.

pärt/Submit noun 1. "a piece or segment of something such as an object, activity, or period of time, which combined with other pieces makes up the whole."

2. some but not all of something. "the painting tells only part of the story"

You might be thinking of Component, but even that's arguable. CPU's often contain nonfunctional parts so each transistor is actually a meaningful distinction.

This discussion isn't about parts, components, or any other pedantic segmentation of matter; it's about the consumer's ability to perform maintenance.

The need to preform maintenance during the useful life of an object is a defect. The ability to extend the life of an object through maintenance is useful. These statements are not in conflict.

Early CPU's where built to be maintained, modern CPU's are not. That in no way makes modern CPU's worse. The Hubble cost more to maintain than it would have been to replace with something better. From a utilitarian standpoint the ability to maintain it was useless, from a political standpoint NASA loved being able to pretend those missions where useful.

At a deeper level maintenance generally means some parts break down before others. So, an ax becomes less sharp over time. Meanwhile the head also loses strength which limits how long that head can reasonably be maintained.

QED: Maintenance is all about having different parts that ware out a different times.

I'm not taking sides in this debate, but I am surprised that we haven't yet seen a product which is a car lease for 3 years where the hood doesn't even open. The car ships with synthetic oil and high mileage tires and literally the only thing you do is put gas in it. The high end version of the lease involves someone driving to your place of work and filling up your car with gas, so that for three years you literally just get in and drive.

I think there is enough of a luxury market for that to be a thing, and I am surprised we haven't seen it yet.

This is absolutely not true of equipment with moving parts. It must either be maintained or treated as disposable. One of the hallmarks of commercial-grade equipment is its ease of maintenance and repair. You might not find it fun, but professionals who rely on that equipment for their livelihood understand the long-term TCO for well-maintained commercial-grade equipment vs. disposable consumer-grade equipment.

Whether that applies to mobile phones with their general lack of moving parts is an entirely different question.

> It must either be maintained or treated as disposable.

While I agree with this, I understand where Swizec's comment is coming from. I have a few business acquaintances who have been automotive engineers for 30-40 years now. They have an excellent idea of how their cars work. And yet, they rue that earlier, they could open any broken car and get it to run. Now, there's not much they can do to fix their own cars. Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic. The older generation has learnt that they can't fix their cars. The newer generation, unsurprisingly, doesn't even want to make the effort. The older generation could fill up their oil, change their filters, etc. Now, most people just get their mysterious machine serviced every few months. "I don't want to maintain my car" seems like a natural consequence of how cars work now.

Right but a service interval now is about the same as an engine life from an older car.

> Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic.

Why? Don't they have OBD-2 readers?

Don't know. The last I met them was about 10 years ago.

>Why? Don't they have OBD-2 readers?

What if they have? It's not like they'd bother to (a) decipher them, (b) fix the issue themselves.

OBD2 doesn't tell you much, in a lot of cases. It might identify a loose gas cap or a broken plug wire, but for everything else that can wrong on a modern car you need the manufacturer's proprietary scan tool and a subscription to their online service documents. These cost thousands of dollars, needless to say.

Not that, but certain "luxury-brand" cars specifically don't want you fiddling with anything, and to simply bring it in for a service.

E.g. The weirdest part of it (after driving an old car for the longest time) was they explicitly tell you not to have gas-station attendants check your oil for you. If you're leaking/losing oil, the lights will at some point come on and prompt you to take the car in for service.

> E.g. The weirdest part of it (after driving an old car for the longest time) was they explicitly tell you not to have gas-station attendants check your oil for you. If you're leaking/losing oil, the lights will at some point come on and prompt you to take the car in for service.

Why is that weird? It's a pressurized system with plenty of sensors, you are certainly better off following the data than a gas station attendant (which itself is an old fashioned concept in most places).

And this becomes even more true as the thing with moving parts becomes more expensive. For an excavator which costs several hundred thousand dollars, when a shaft wears out of spec, they send it to a welder to apply more metal, then onto the lathe to trim it back into spec. In other words, when the equipment gets expensive enough, parts which you wouldn't normally consider to be maintainable become maintenance items.

>Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

I want to see a two hour debate on that by top engineers from several industries because that seems to be one of the big questions of our time in regards to product development.

If you find an engineer willing to argue in favor of non-maintainable equipment, he's not a true engineer, but some failed engineer who's moved over to management and is more interested in profitability than in users having a quality product that allows them to keep their TCO low by being able to maintain it themselves (or by an independent professional) and keep it for a long time instead of throwing it away early.

There is, quite simply, NO good argument in favor of non-maintainable equipment, unless your goal is to increase profits. This doesn't mean we should go back to the days of carburetors and points; modern cars are extremely reliable and actually highly maintainable if you have the right equipment, but there's no reason they can't make the computer-based service tools publicly available so that anyone can service them themselves. They keep that software and those interfaces secret to increase profits.

>There is, quite simply, NO good argument in favor of non-maintainable equipment, unless your goal is to increase profits.

As a universal assertion, particularly in the realm of products intended for personal mobile use by the general population, this absolutely and utterly wrong. The fundamental core issue is that many forms of maintainability require dead matter, simple as that. Take removable vs non-removable batteries, perhaps the most classic example in portable electronics: having a removable battery requires user safe contacts that can handle repeated mechanical strain, the battery itself to have its own protective case, the device case to have a way to interface the battery and the resulting structural support and tradeoffs therein, the dimensions and shape of the battery are significantly constrained, etc. All of this boils down to significant additional stuff that isn't battery, or performing any other useful role for that matter, but rather is simply scaffolding/support infrastructure. In other words, dead matter. There is no free lunch. A removable battery fundamentally can never match the size/weight/performance matrix of a non-removable one, full stop. That's the tradeoff for being able to swap it. In this specific example there are additional potential tradeoffs too for some use-cases (it's significantly easier to have a higher degree of harsh environmental tolerance with a fully sealed system for instance).

Now, yes, there is absolutely room for reasonable disagreement about what side of the tradeoff is correct for any given application or use-case. There are times where the utility of maintainability or modularity is well worth a reduction in default performance. But there are also many cases where a higher percentage of active matter in a product is a legitimate feature to the majority of its intended users. The "No True Scotsman" fallacy you use to start your argument should have been a flag and caused you to rethink the rest of it.

I disagree. You can call this "moving the goalposts" if you want, but I don't think it is. You seem to be basically be claiming that something is only "maintainable" if you can easily disassemble it down to the smallest component; I'm not arguing for that at all.

If there's an actual engineering reason to reduce maintainability (e.g. it improves performance), that's a worthwhile consideration. What I'm talking about is when a product is made intentionally non-maintainable, or maintainable only by people with service tools which are non-obtainable, solely because it increases profits. There's no good reason for this.

Now, for your battery example, I don't think that even applies. From what I've read and heard, most "non-replaceable" batteries are actually completely replaceable, it's just not so easy to do and requires a bit of skill. "Maintainable by a service technician with some common hand tools and half a brain" does not equal "non maintainable". I've seen tons of videos on YouTube showing non-professionals how to take apart their phones and replace those "non-maintainable" batteries. It's not like the things are epoxied in there. And you're right, you can save a bit of space by going that route; it's an engineering trade-off.

My example of something that's deliberately designed to not be maintainable (by the end-user or someone not employed by or affiliated with the manufacturer) would be a car that requires regular service, but where it can't be done without connecting a laptop to the car and using an extremely expensive software program to really do nothing more than tell the car the oil has been changed. This makes it impossible for the customer to do the service himself, or have an independent mechanic do it unless that mechanic is willing to shell out the money needed for that tool.

>If you find an engineer willing to argue in favor of non-maintainable equipment, he's not a true engineer

And probably not a true Scotchman either.

I mean, obviously only a failed engineer would ever propose not maintainable products -- everybody should use old maintainable razors for example, and not (recyclable) disposable ones. /s

What is a scotchman? My best guess is somebody made of sticky tape

Well, "Scotch is an adjective meaning "of Scotland" according to Wikipedia.

And Scotch tape was named after the Scots (and features a tartan design).

Hmm. Take it from a resident of Scotland, the words are Scot and Scottish. Scotch is whisky or tape, and when it is applied to people is likely to result in contempt at best

Oh please. It's not engineers who propose non-maintainable products, it's the marketing and business people who make those decisions. Engineers just carry them out.

As for razors, that's a terrible example. Gillette is famous for the whole "razor and blades" marketing scheme, which obviously was invented by a business person seeking to maximize profit. Disposable razors are a bad idea all around (and they're not recyclable easily; recyclable things don't have metal and plastic merged together so they can't be separated): they perform terribly and are wasteful and cost more over time. The only thing they're good for is if you left your razor at home while traveling. I like old DE razors personally, but even a modern razor is "maintainable": you can replace the cartridge heads. You can't replace the individual blades because there's no feasible way of making a blade assembly that small, with that kind of precision, where an end-user can replace the blades individually, and besides the plastic part of the blade-holder isn't very much plastic anyway. This example is just silly; it's like claiming a car air filter is "unmaintainable" because you can't wash it out, or you can't separate the paper pleats from the plastic frame. That's just dumb. As long as the filter is fairly easily replaceable, it's OK for the filter (a consumable) as a whole to be a disposable product.

I am not arguing for things to be made so they can be easily disassembled to their smallest components.

I'm sympathetic with your overall point, but the fact is, I own and enjoy a lot of cool gadgets that simply couldn't exist if your words became law.

It's best to think of "unmaintainable" things as monolithic components of a larger system. You wouldn't complain about not being able to fix a light bulb, would you? Then don't complain about not being able to fix a smartphone. Your phone is just the tip of a leaf on a very large tree... and the same will be true of our cars, soon enough. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

As for what "true engineers" would do, engineers have to take the big picture into account and design accordingly. Everything real is a compromise of some kind, and maintainability is only one factor among many that can make a product succeed or fail in the marketplace. If you design something that fails in the marketplace, it probably doesn't matter how awesome it is... or how easy it is to fix.

An item that can't be maintained is an dark pattern. It is a sign of planned obsolescence. It is goes against the interests of the user. Items should be designed to have long lifetimes. This only doesn't happen because capitalism incentives manufacturers to sell consumers a new product as often as possible. There is no reason an item can't be user friendly, reliable, and maintainable.

By creating reliance(for service), a future revenue stream is ensured(for manu or 'authorized' provider). Over-engineered products with features of spurious benefit only adds to the reliance. That is The Service Economy, in a nutshell. But don't worry, we can always pay more!

I bought my Corolla off the lot in 2004. It currently has 120k miles on it and I've never had a major problem with it.

OTOH, I always maintain it by taking it into the shop and having them do what they do.

The only issue I'm having now is the A/C would sometimes go out last summer, but I'll be getting that looked at as we get into the summer months.

I expect this vehicle to be running just as well at 240k miles. I've already got over 10 years in it and I don't expect another 10 years to be outlandish.

That's lasting power, but I don't maintain the vehicle myself, I pay others to do it for me.

I drive a 1969 chevy with a broken odometer and I maintain it myself.

An item that can't be maintained is a light pattern. It is a demonstration of confidence in good design and engineering; longevity for as long as an item is useful, but no longer.

It is in the interests of the user to do away with the costs and complexities of making something maintainable and the consequent obligation to do maintenance.

This only doesn't work well because once something reaches a reasonable 'end of life', there often is no identical or equal replacement. This generates in the user a wish that they could maintain their old device to prolong its use, to avoid having to choose and learn a new and different device which may not even have any improvements.

There is no reason an item can't be user friendly, reliable, and need no maintenance.

The majority of people don't even maintain their bodies, which are priceless and irreplacable - it does not make sense to say capitalism is failing because it's not meeting people's interest in doing maintenance, when people don't show any interest in doing maintenance (outside of a small subset who care about maintaining certain specific highly prized or expensive and necessary items).

When my teeth start to rot I get them fixed at the dentist, then start to maintain my teeth by brushing them. If I get a wound on my arm, I wash it and apply bandages, not finalize my will and kill myself. When your toilet gets clogged, you plunge it, not buy a new toilet. When your carpet gets worn out you replace it, not tear down the whole house and buy a new one. If the RAM on your computer fails, you buy new RAM and install it, not scrap the entire computer and buy a new one. Absolutely, ideally everything would run perfectly forever without intervention, but disorder is inevitable in this world.

Without intervention, the artefacts of civilization would literally crumble within decades. With proper maintenance, a building could last for centuries, a car for decades, a computer or phone I would hope for at least 5 years.

Our throwaway culture is threatening our existence via environmental degradation. We're in the middle of a mass extinction, and climate change could literally end life on Earth. We need to consider the long term sustainability of our economy, way of life, and civilization.

The computer I’m using now is from April 2012, last upgraded in 2014.

The computer I used before that was from 2006. Which is now in use by my sister.

Both of them have been unmaintained (except for automated updates of Kubuntu) since first installation.

The same I expect from phones. And from washing machines.

My family’s microwave has been bought and unmaintained since 30 years ago, and that’s what devices should provide:

A literal lifetime of working without maintenance.

>Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

It's the feature of equipment designed for long term

I'm still with you father on modern vechicles. Yes--the engine light comes on, and I can read a PID trouble code on many vechicles.

The fault code is not always the problem. It's just not that simple to fix a modern vechicle. I pull a generic pid of XXXX, but maybe, around 30% of the time it's just that error code.

Manufacturers have scan tools that read there products very well. Much better than my Snap-on 2500mt. I can't buy their tools, nor will they sell their priority information to most mechanics.

So, working on vechicles made after, I say, 2000 is really getting hard.

So hard, I believe most vechicles made in the 90's will become collectable? Why--they have less do-dads, and Emmission sensors.

It gets monumentally difficult if your trying to get a vechicle to pass CA Emmission tests.

I thought OBD2 would make working on vechicles a breeze. I have not found it to be the case.

I have found buying a new vechicle is a lifelong relationship with the dealership; at dealership repair prices. I think manufactures did this on purpose. "Get them to buy your vechicle, and keep them coming back?" A sales tatic that software companies have been relying on for years now? I still remember buying Lightroom 1 at $199.00, and thinking that's all I will spend. What a deal?

I actually foresee a bunch of bricked, by failing emmission tests, vechicles in the near future.

> It gets monumentally difficult if your trying to get a vechicle to pass CA Emmission tests.

In Germany, we have exemptions for what we call Oldtimers and Youngtimers (tax breaks, permission to enter environmentally restricted areas etc.).

In Germany the vast majority of cars on the road are well looked after and relatively new - at least that was the persistent impression I got during my time there. In the US the average car age seems much older and they are less well maintained on average - the inspection is a breeze in comparison. So in Germany the overall amount of pollution is lower to start with so exemptions for older cars is a less objectionable and more clear cut. Comparatively. That's my thoughts on it anyway :-)

I had a 1974 TR6 with an H kennzeichen! It was an adventure owning that car in Germany.

Good post. And that's why if I ever by a car it'll be older and not require a proprietary computer sensor to maintain.

That and I have a hard time with the new "smart" driving technology. I was in my friend's Subaru last week and it beeped anytime he did anything remotely out of line...

The bleeping smart driving features are off by default. If you want them, you have to specifically turn them on every time you start the car.

I have a hard time with cars that panic if I reach in through an open window to undo the lock.

> Good post. And that's why if I ever by a car it'll be older and not require a proprietary computer sensor to maintain.

If that day comes you should find a way to secure it because almost all older cars are very easy to steal. Those computer bits make new cars much more difficult to snatch.

Except when they steal your dongle signal and use that to open the door and start the car.

Nobody really bothers to steal older cars though. Not enough money in them for the risk.

They are in fact the most popular cars to steal. Especially Honda's.

http://www.dmv.org/insurance/most-stolen-cars-and-other-vehi...

I concur, except I'd state it: one hallmark of excellent design is relentless elimination of required maintenance.

> Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment.

Would you pay 100x more for a reliable equipment?

It's great, but without tinkering - you never really learn how things actually tick.

I always chuckle to myself when I'm told by 40-year-olds how their 14-year- olds are "so amazing with computers!". But yeah - Jimmy can open up Facebook on the iPad like nobody's business, but Jimmy has no fracking clue what's actually happening or why, or how to even diagnose common issues. Then again, maybe that's ok if Jimmy doesn't give a crap about how computers work.

I grew up in Europe and never had a car until I was in my late 20's so I never tinkered with them. Now, if something goes wrong, I just take it to the dealer. So I'm like Jimmy with the iPad.

There's no problem for me or Jimmy. The world is fine.

But then there's Billy. Unlike me, Billy didn't grow up with DOS and early Linux, so Billy has never had to look at a hex dump or figure out what pointers are or registers or flags - Billy just hits "Go" in his Java IDE and prays everything works out. If it doesn't, his eyes glaze over and he heads over to Stackoverflow.

Billy is hampered by today's world. He doesn't have to tinker with his PC or iPad, but not only that, he's actively being prohibited from tinkering with them. They're not only appliances, they're sealed off, protected by dozens of copyright and patent laws appliances that you don't even technically own anymore without signing-off on 7 different legal agreements. It's insane.

Billy might never learn about how a computer actually works. And one day he'll have to diagnose/fix something that only the 30-somethings can and he won't know how, and not because he's dumb.

Billy can also take a CS class or two.

Those DOS hex dumps meant nothing to me until I had a couple of microcontrollers and CPU architecture classes under my belt.

Like you, I'm also nostalgic about those error dumps and tinkering. But I also don't remember a single time when my reaction was more than "Oh neat, I understand my CPU did an error. reboot"

May I suggest this book http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2/ ? It deals with that topic but the outlook is quite different.

I don't understand why this is seen as required. A Nexus phone if very modular and easy to use.

It's not a requirement. It's more of a common pattern.

Unlike the HN readership, most people don't want to think about the tech. They just want to get things done, and are willing to pay big bucks for that convenience.

I'm readership.

I want to think about tech, but the right tech, the tech landscape, ecosystem, and tools that have to evolve to achieve my or my customers' mission.

Everything else, don't make me think. Don't waste my time. Toast my toast. Protect my data. Always work when I need, with no cognitive load.

It's only a gradual difference. A Nexus has no SD-Slot anymore, so one important aspect of modularity has been axed there.

"I don't understand why this is seen as required. A Nexus phone if very modular and easy to use."

That's funny, as I see the nexus line as somewhat non-modular, given the lack of a storage expansion (SD card) slot.

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