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Comment by mikl | Hacker News Reader

Clueless legislation. When you look inside a modern smartphone or laptop, you’ll find that all available space is crammed with components or batteries. If you want components to be replaceable, you’d need much more space for doors and hatches, and waterproofing would be all but impossible.

Especially when it comes to batteries, this is moronic. Ultrabooks are only possible, because multiple, weirdly shaped battery packs can be installed wherever there’s room inside the casing.

This effectively means that hardware producers would need to create a larger, shittier version of their products just for the EU market, and EU citizens would be forbidden from purchasing the good versions of things. I sense a massive wave of parallel imports coming…

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Repairabilty doesn't nessacry mean easily user swappable parts. It just means that it must be possible for a repair shop to perform the repairs. The legislation specifically targets DRM that's designed to specifically prevent unlicensed repairs and agreements that lock out independent third parties. I think it's a good idea as long as it isn't taken to an extreme.

That might sound nice, but smartphone producers can’t support any untrained idiot without a cleanroom opening devices and getting dust inside the screen assemblies and ruining the waterproofing.

Like it or not, at the level of miniturisation we’re at, you need skilled technicians with proper equipment, and the easiest way to guarantee that, is for producers to do the service themselves.

Otherwise, you’ll end up with lots of consumers with broken phones, because they chose the wrong repair-option.

> smartphone producers can’t support any untrained idiot without a cleanroom opening devices and getting dust inside the screen assemblies and ruining the waterproofing.

If I open my phone and break something it's obviously my fault. If I root my phone, that should never void warranty when e.g. internal storage wears out way before time without excessive writes (this happened to me). There are still millions of people averted to the idea of "rooting" because it supposedly voids warranty (it never did under Dutch law) and because phone shops make it sound scary. Meanwhile making backups without sending it all to a foreign nation (Google) is impossible and installing another ROM (which made my Note 2's battery life go from 5 hours to 2 days after three years of use -- I'm currently at 5 years of use and it's finally starting to wear out for real) can't be done without doing effectively the same thing. What a bloody mess.

If the price of progress is that we can no longer repair or recycle stuff then it isn't really progress but a mortgage on the future of our children.

Repairing and recycling are very different discussions. To my knowledge, recycling eletronics is no more a problem than it’s always been. Companies like Apple have pretty impressive recycling efforts.

And repairability? I don’t see the problem. If my iPhone breaks, I can go visit the Apple store, and they’ll take care of it. Having third-party repair services for some so tiny and complex is just a recipe for warranty problems and headaches.

> Repairing and recycling are very different discussions.

They're part of the higher level discussion, and recycling should be placed there where repair is no longer feasible (in the context of appliances/machinery).

Exactly. I would be much more in favour of the (what I call) throwaway economy - because it really is convenient - if I could trust that the stuff I discard is being recycled into new products in an efficient way. As it is, we're still mining raw resources to manufacture new stuff, and the old stuff decomposes itself to uselessness (or poisons the Earth).

Another mortgage on the future of our children, and far from our worst.

Won't you please think of the children?!?

Please

If that's the best you can do try again. Not every comment that mentions children warrants the 'Won't you please think of the children?!?' response, in fact very few of them do. And even when they do you might still pause for a second to think about whether or not there is a grain of truth to the matter.

To make it plain: this is trotted out whenever someone wants to push through some kind of draconian law upsetting the privacy rights of many in order to pretend to go after the few, typically in the context of hypothetical victims of child pornography and/or pedophiles, and in some extremely rare cases actual children.

Since we really are talking about our actual children (and in this case mine) and the context is manufacturing and the environment it is perfectly valid to think about our children.

If you don't have any children do me a favor and re-visit this comment when you have some and see how you feel about it then, it might change your perspective.

'Right to Repair' isn't the same as 'Reparable'.

A device could have everything you claim it needs to be user-serviceable yet without the right to repair that device it would be illegal for a user to do so.

At least as far as I understand the article, EUs program is both about the legal right to (try) to repair things (which I have nothing against), but also to “force vendors to design products for longer life and easier maintenance.”.

ie. the Eurocrats want to dictate hardware design. Hard to imagine anything good coming out of that.

> ie. the Eurocrats want to dictate hardware design. Hard to imagine anything good coming out of that.

This is a pretty bad summary. They don't want to dictate hardware design - only dictate additional constraint of "stop making shitty stuff". How to do hardware design while respecting this constraint is up to hardware designers.

Except that the phone you are describing already exists showing that it's not at all impossible. Google Fairphone. This message was written with one.

It's great that such a phone exists. People should be able buy a Fairphone, or buy an unrepairable iPhone, or whatever phone fits their needs.

The "right to repair" doesn't give people the right to buy a Fairphone. They already have the right. It removes their right to buy other kinds of phone.

Kudos! I thought of buying one but five year old hardware at the price point of a modern high-end was not something I could afford. Maybe once I'm out of university with a job for more than a year, but not now. Kudos for anyone who spends the money on one of those!

So, is your phone waterproof? How’s the reliability? How well does it handle being dropped?

Building a small amount of concept phones is one thing, shipping (and supporting) 100 million devices a year, with extended warranties, quite another.

My phone is doing just fine. Dropped it multiple times. Didn't submerge it in liquid yet but I doubt that an iPhone would survive that. If you have evidence showing that the Fairphone is less robust than other phones, please share.

The laws of scale will make the Fairphone actually better and cheaper when more are produced (as they always do).

> Didn't submerge it in liquid yet but I doubt that an iPhone would survive that.

Actually, the iPhone 7 is specced to be able to survive up to 30 minutes of submersion in 1m water. iFixit had a demo where it survived 8 hours of submersion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIauEB3EMHY

> If you have evudence showing that the fairphone is less robust than other phone, please share it.

Given that it such a niche product, there isn’t a lot of info available on it. Most manufacturers don’t publish their loss/repair rates, but logic would dictate that more openings and loose connections would give more problems.

Also worth noting is that the Fairphone 2 is worse than the current flagship models on almost all metrics. It seems that this modularity does have its price, after all.

Modularity does have a price; that is fairly trivial. But your original statement was much stronger.

The Fairphone's specs are deliberately not top-of-the-line in order to give users better battery life. This is working spectacularly well as evidenced by the fact that my Fairphone 2 has twice the battery life than any of my iPhones ever had. That and repairability is worth much more to me personally than the possibility to submerge the phone in water. After all it's a phone not diving gear. To each their own, but no need to make overblown statements.

> But your original statement was much stronger ("impossible")

No, my original statement was that waterproofing would be all but impossible, which, unless you have an example of a waterproof modular phone, still stands.

> The Fairphone's specs are deliberately not top-of-the-line in order to give users better battery life.

A handy excuse. Still means you’re getting a slower phone, worse screen, camera, etc.

> That and repairability is worth much more to me than the possibility to submerge the phone in water.

Tell that to the thousands of people who were previously losing their phone to water damage every year.

And it’s not like an iPhone is not repairable, its just that you’ll need Apple to do it for you. A small price to pay for a better product.

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