Comment by nopacience | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopacience | Hacker News Reader

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California always a step ahead.

I remember opening watches and other electronics at circa 199x.

Even 10, 15 years ago most electronics used standard cables and standard screws and anyone was able to open, see whats inside and maybe replace 1 or 2 things.

Now it seems the industry moved to a path of making things break fast and hard to replace anything. Resulting in expansive repairs that will push users to purchase a new item that is cheaper than replacing 1 part. Some companies even weld RAM or processor into the motherboard.

The world has limited resources. In the last 60, 70 years after ww2 and industrial revolution, the population has grown a lot and making thing un-repairable will worsen world limited resources. Some day world will run out of required materials.

Some companies create a specific cable that can only be used on their devices. So if one breaks, the owner cannot use his old one because it is incompatible with that new model.

Standarization of cables would good to have also.

Nice move california!

Given that California "joins 17 other states who have introduced similar legislation, which includes: Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia"...

It seems they're not exactly a "step ahead", just trying to keep pace with Nebraska. ;)

Nebraska: Good Life, Great Legislative Innovations.

Nebraska is surprisingly up to date with its digital frontier laws, weirdly enough.

Farmers want to repair their own stuff.

When a screw breaks, I don’t replace just the broken section, but the whole unit. Judgements aside, I think many people who build products are trying (perhaps unconsciously), to achieve this “screw” level of redundancy and flexibility in their wares, hence soldering and the like. The replaceability of something is usually more reliable than its fixability especially in high stress environments like rock concerts or battlefields.

> The replaceability of something is usually more reliable than its fixability especially in high stress environments like ... battlefields.

I imagine that would depend quite a bit on how close you are to supply lines.

My (admittedly amateur) understanding of most military grade devices is that where possible they reduce them not to the level they can be throw away, but to the level that the number of things that can cause a problem are reduced to a level the average soldier can be trained to diagnose and fix. If your AR-15 jams or gets clogged, you're expected to know how to disassemble and fix it. A few replacements for the parts that are most likely to be unrepairable is likely much easier to carry than full replacement units. I imagine the same is done for their communications equipment.

It's one part of the problem. It's so much worse than this though.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/electronic-wast...

While I agree that moving away from the throwaway culture is a good move, it seems like an uphill battle. Resource recovery / recycling approaches, such as systems that separate dead electronics (and more widely, post consumer products) into constituent elements might be more feasible.

I view this as something separate but equally important. "Right to repair" should ideally be something that strengthens such processes and I find it sad that it isn't already in place as a standard.

But I also think for it to work, it should be simple and easy for the consumer. Ideally, they could mail smaller items or put their larger items in a special trash bag on collection day. Less ideally but also somewhat feasible would be requiring stores selling or repairing certain classes of things to accept the same class for recycling regardless of whether or not the customer buys something from them. We could require a recycling fee on such purchases, refundable if there is a trade-in.

Repair requires both easy assembly and easy disassembly of the device, recovery/ recycling greatly benefits from improvements to the disassembly. There is no conflict.

But it's an uphill battle to force manufacturers to make things easy to disassemble/repair as they wish to discourage both in pursuit of more profit. There's a bunch of hairy details about what constitutes "easy to disassemble", and some perhaps more legit concerns about imposing differing requirements to different products, resulting in claims that the government is trying to 'select market winners', etc. Further are the unintended consequences where the manufacturers come up with creative ways to do an end-run around the rules, eg, rental gadgets where you don't get permission to repair it, but still win in the market as they're not subject to repairable rules and thus have a cost advantage.

A step ahead? Didn't such a law already go down in flames in Idaho or someplace?

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