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Comment by cheesecracker | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but isn't a wristwatch like a bazillionth of complexity of a modern smartphone? How many transistors do you need for a wristwatch?

The whole idea of servicing modern electronics is romantic nonsense. The hourly rate of an expert will make it too expensive quickly, because industrialized mass production is too effective.

(Edit: according to this link on Quora, several billion transistors are not unrealistic in a smartphone https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-there-in-the-... )

What is the hourly rate of a watchmaker?

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When I was talking about servicing a laptop, I was thinking about the usualy components, like battery, keyboard, SSD, fans. Things which can break or are going to wear out over time. By that count, a laptop has perhaps 10-20 "parts". Compare that to the complexity of a mechanical watch.

I don't know the going rate for a watch maker, it is probably not cheap. But I know what I paid for servicing my watches before and a multiple of that for having my dealer upgrade the disk in my iMac. Which still has an internal SATA port, but unfortunately is glued together. This is something which should cost less than a watch service, even at the same rate.

Components are glued or soldered together because that makes the device smaller and probably also more efficient to build, wasting less resources, too.

I am not sure what kind of point you are attempting to make: the amount of transistors in an IC hardly matters. No one repairs individual transistors. The chips/IC can be replaced and many ICs are not much more expensive than the cogs in the watch.

Ofc, there are billions of transistors in a phone - that doesn't mean anything at all.

Repeatability depends on being able to open a device/tool non-destructively, being able to assemble it back - glue/epoxy used as cheap fastening/engineering tools is the bane of. Ability to find spare parts and service manuals, schematics and the like. The count of transistors is irrelevant as even a simple and single MOSFET driver is enough to prevent a device being operational.

The comment comes off extremely misguided and ill-informed.

Pretty sure they save materials, time to assemble and "space" by gluing instead of using replacable parts.

I guess your theory is that it is all malice by the manufacturers?

If was time to assemble they would have not been inventions like pentalobe and 'secure' torx screws. If you have seen a pcb with just an IC (chip) potted in epoxy, you'd know the sole reason for.

Glue has its own issues including degrading with temperature - which doesn't really happen to bolts/nuts/screws.

The specific standard would hopefully begin to address the issue with throwaway culture and planned obsolesce (there is min 2y warranty in the EU for all electronic goods, though). I dont care if a company save less than 1euro, making something that costs hundreds/thousands virtually useless for any minor ceramic capacitor that fails.

Almost all those transistors are in a nice little package. Using transistor count isn’t really a good way to define a devices serviceable complexity. People repair phones all the time, it just requires the knowledge to do so.

Then the comparison to watches doesn't really make sense, either, because both can be repaired?

But a watchmaker is also unlikely equally unlikely to have the skills and equipment to fabricate the individual pieces of a watch. We are asking what the repairability is like when all the pieces of the phone (that would be available in the factory at final assembly) are available to the servicer.

I think that's what they did traditionally. If you want pieces of the phone to be replaceable, you'll get a thicker, heavier phone that uses more materials to build.

That's not a great comparison. Nobody repairs separate in-chip transistors and they're not the usual source of issues. PCB mounted components however do fail and get replaced regularly. There is space for reasonable pricing too given that Apple's response is normally either: swap the inside, swap the outside, or swap the display. (all of them expensive)

The components in modern electronics are interchangeable and have interfaces about as complex as a gear at worst but usually solderable components. The number of transistors is completely irrelevant because no one is servicing the individual transistors. If a CPU breaks, you replace it.

Maybe we should start with at least a way to change the batteries of otherwise perfectly fine devices or at least a reliable way to have the information about that possibility before purchasing.

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