The Shady World of Repair Manuals: Copyrighting for Planned Obsolescence (2012)
wired.com
wired.com
I wonder if Google's noticeably worsening search quality in this area has anything to do with where this info can be found, or the legality of it. I remember it used to be far easier to find a PDF someone shared, but now it's very insistent that you're looking for the user manual even if you search for "service manual", and commercial spam has taken over much of the results.
"If you outlaw repairs, only outlaws will have repairs."
On the contrary, I believe the systematic effort from commercial spams is also responsible for degrading the SNR for everyone.
A common tactic is pretending that you have the files. For example, you can enumerate all the books from a directory and create a single page for every book that claims you have them or tries selling them, while all you get is unwanted software. You can ever create PDF spams, so that even if you filter "filetype .pdf", you'll still see them. Meanwhile, all the genuine files are being taken down.
I used to be able to find even the most arcane manual out there, but it's getting difficult to impossible. Sometimes it seems Google purges and blocks searches for things older than a year. I know this isn't the case, but it seems like it, sometimes.
I have a Dell laptop, and they provide a service manual for it on their website. Parts are inexpensive, ubiquitous, and easily replaceable. No small wonder why I've been a customer since their PC's Unlimited days.
I've had a couple of them, they've been some of the least reliable machines I've ever had. Even getting a set of nubs for the Trackpoint was an exercise in futility - three hours on the phone, followed by finding a local Toshiba dealer (local being a good hundred miles away), only to pay £45 for three clearly used Trackpoint nubs. That was my last new Toshiba, but I do have a Libretto 110CT for programming old radio gear (old enough that the programming software only runs on DOS or Win9x).
My last two laptops were both Thinkpads and I've never looked back. My battle-scarred and heavily-stickered (to cover the scratches) X220 has had a mountain of parts. Heck, I once replaced the DC jack on the table in a convention hotel restaurant, using a friend's iPad to read the service manual...!
The only thing locking down repair manuals and parts will achieve (at least for me) is to make me look at what the company's competition is selling.
> We’re raising funds and hardware on Indiegogo [1] to collaboratively write open source manuals to replace the ones Toshiba forced Tim to take down.
But we don't need your money—the project was successful and we've been teaching people to fix their Toshiba's on iFixit for years now.
Case study: Apple starts using pentalobe screws on the iPhone 4. This did not correlate with a decrease in sales, in fact sales have gone up a lot. Ask random iPhone users what the word "pentalobe" means to them, they probably don't know, nor care.
If your iPhone breaks and can't be repaired and you want another one, you have to buy a new one from Apple, because Samsung doesn't make iOS devices. Meanwhile the fact that old iPhones get minor damage and then cost more to repair than they're worth increases the "I can afford an iPhone" signaling value of having one because they become less common and cost more to maintain in a state of good repair. In other words, it's a Veblen good.
That doesn't work for commodity markets like Android devices and PC laptops because it's all fungible commodity hardware and it all runs the same software. And then even if the user has no idea what "pentalobe screws" are, they do know that their laptop broke after the first year and all the repair shops told them it was unrepairable junk and recommended a different brand.
Meanwhile even Apple is playing a dangerous game here, because eroding repairability increases their new sales in the short term, but it also damages their reputation with technical people over time. So you get more sales, but more of the sales are to douchy investment bankers who then stand around holding your logo in their hand while telling girls they're fat and firing people's dads and bloviating about how much better they are than you because they drive a BMW.
And on top of that, there is a trade off between more sales and more users. When your platform's devices don't last as long you may get more sales, but it lowers your installed base because the devices fall out of it faster. The fact that a used iPhone is more than a new Android phone pushes more people away from your platform. But the number and quality of the apps people make for your platform is proportional to your installed base. This is how Windows got so sticky on the desktop -- it's Office, but it's also the long tail. That line of business app which is only used by 2% of people except that there are sixty of them and they're each mostly a different 2% of people, so 90% of people need Windows. Apple has a long-term problem if that's what accumulates over time with Android, but it's a direct trade off against short-term exclusivity.
They took my removeable battery but they will never take my headphone jack! Oops, I mean freedom!
I'm waiting a bit to upgrade my phone. I've always had a Samsung up until now, but I won't be buying one without a headphone jack. Hopefully they'll come to their senses. Bluetooth is a painful joke.
About your first point, maybe it is naive of me to assume that repair shops acquire laptop repair manuals as soon as they come out and then keep them in case they need to repair a certain model. If this were the case then the only people affected by toshiba’s actions are self repair individuals of which there are few as you point out. If the repair shops rely on databases of these repair manuals then I guess that they are unlikely to tell their disappointed customers that they cannot repair their laptops because they can’t get hold of the manual because the vendor removed them all from the internet.
Costs can easily go past tens of millions of dollars. A 2-4 year copyright period would require new medications to either be prohibitively expensive, or not be researched at all and only the most profitable diseases would ever get looked into.
Functional ideas or features are explicitly excluded from copyright or trademark protection.
Well, of course they would bill more. You're essentially paying for all of the neurotic clients who are going to be fussy about the whole process. On top of that, what if it's not the heater and something else? Means you've just wasted extra time trying to fix it.
Is that a paid podcast?
Raw MP3: https://dcs.megaphone.fm/HSW5294478445.mp3?key=ff7d10535b175...
Right to repair and right to information though are another.
This also means guaranteed minimum supported lifetimes, access to documentation, system upgrades, and the like.
As for laptops: I've been actively putting off upgrading for numerous reasons including the fact that no current offerings really seem to suit my needs, wants, or reasonable expectations, but bullshit games (factory-installed spyware, Lenovo, craptacular ergonomics (Apple keyboards, strips), and BDSM bootloaders (Android) leave me feeling physically ill.
I was reminiscing earlier that in his 1976 book Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke more-or-less pressages the smartphone, with his minisec, though with some glaring distinctions.
There's a physical keyboard (the 'E' key is mentioned as being worn), devices are durable enough to be intergenerational hand-me-downs (the protagonist inherits his father's old device), and apparently the economics and business models of manufacturing, servicing, upgrading, and developing for the platforms have been solved, as they're never mentioned.
It's the business models of hardware, software, and services which are killing us. To the point of creating actively shitty products and business practices.
Upvoted for this, lol. I think using a lot of products are essentially becoming a BDSM game nowadays... i.e. It has some broken useless features because of some bullshit due to the marketing department. To improve something, you would need to hack it to bypass some arbitrary restrictions first, and many enjoy this process of hacking...
Those hackers are heros, but it would be the best if some arbitrary problems are not deliberately introduced by the manufacturers in the first place.
That's not as true if you count the browser as part of a web application, which you should.
Do you know how to keep your stuff from being easily cloned by Chinese?
You make it 'cloudy' by baking all your features in a closed and proprietary API on your premises. That's great for the company as it provides significant leverage against external competitors AND naughty customers. Bans can be instilled by "block user and hardware_id".
Of course, when that API goes away, so does utilizing any of that hardware. And what does that mean? Your $X00 device is now worthy of a doorstop or a space-filling-device in the trash.
I love the new Macbook keyboards. At least, I prefer the keyboard on my 2019 Macbook Air to that on my 2015 Macbook Pro. There's obviously an element of personal preference there, but I don't think it's fair to say that the ergonomics are "craptacular".
(The reliability issues are another matter, of course. We'll have to see if the 4th gen has finally fixed those.)
I have never understood why they can host so much copyrighted material.
I just wish their archive (Wayback Machine specifically) was easier to fulltext search.
I wonder if Thinkpads really survived this after it was bought by lenovo. Maybe high end Dell laptops are durable? ASUS? System76? Honestly I don't know what brand to choose from, and I think I would prefer not to invest in a new laptop if it's not durable, and keep using desktop PCs.
What I've noticed in consumer electronics over the past few years is increased part integration - pretty much every device is just a logic board with a case and display, along with some support components. Pretty much every logic board is just a collection of switching power supplies, soldered ASICs, mem/disk, and connectors.
Even things like power supply ICs are becoming proprietary,with customer-specific part numbers that are hard or impossible to source. Furthermore anything with a microcontroller and firmware on it is perma-bricked should something go wrong on that. This is something Louis Rossmann (the famous MacBook repair guy) talks about a lot.
Now don't get me wrong, I totally support repair documentation, but being able to get replacement parts and materials is probably more of an issue to those "reasonably skilled in the art" than manuals teaching how to mechanically open something (usually possible to figure out) or even what's connected to what (worst comes to worst, you "beep it out" with diode mode and compare with a working exemplar [REWA technology on YouTube does this]).
The issue with parts and materials is that since we're moving towards proprietary ICs, the motive of manufacturers to not provide documentation/parts is even greater as they don't necessarily want to talk about the technology they are using, whether or not it was really novel. It provides a decent excuse for the manufacturers to fight Right to Repair. Furthermore, security issues and proprietary interests come into play, since you don't want hacked fingerprint sensors and Apple probably doesn't want to sell A-series processors.
Futhermore complicating matters is that component and board level repair remains more of a science project than a process. It is logistically difficult for many companies to bother dealing with selling parts (should they sell just subassemblies at 70% of the replacement cost of the product? Resistors for ten cents?) especially to people outside their network of people. And it's hard to deliver consistent experiences when you actually need to try to fix stuff; a lot of people I know are happy with Apple store service because they DON'T try to fix stuff and instead give you a NEW one, without all the warts and scratches, and it's hard to compete with this if you have to swap parts over and over again with subpar or defectively-designed "refurb" parts like I sometimes see happen with the PC manufacturers.
So I'm sort of half and half on Right to Repair every time it gets brought up. People seem to be warming up to first party repair. I think the biggest realistic benefit to RtR at this point is going to be pressure on first party repair to lower prices and improve service. And that's a good thing.
I think the other issue facing RtR discussions is, not that it's anyone's fault or anything but often it is very difficult to have the perspective of actual design and business challenges faced by the engineers and people delivering products. This makes it easier for companies to refute the claims being made. The people actually working on this stuff from the companies' side usually and understandably never talk about it - so we're only representing largely the end user side, or the reverse-engineering side.