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Comment by haakonhr | Hacker News Reader

This is great, although it somehow seems to me to be starting in the wrong end. The underlying problem is that it is more profitable/cheaper to just give you a new product (if something breaks while under warrantee) and then just throw away the old instead of repairing it. I don't know if it is because the externalities of waste are not taxed properly or if it is because manufacturing products that are hard to repair gives more robust products and less waste in the end.

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When repair labor costs more than automated production, then it's cheaper to replace whole units than mend parts.

This is very much in line when what the Luddites understood. Fixation on "waste" is a by-product of unrelated worries which are fashionable today, but cheap production at a distance is what labor should worry about, instead.

> Fixation on "waste" is a by-product of unrelated worries which are fashionable today

We have finite resources on this planet. Policies like this that deal with negative externalities aren't driven by fashion, they are driven by our long term needs. And we do need to recycle more and consume less. This is part of the solution.

> cheap production at a distance is what labor should worry about, instead

You're simply describing the status quo. The same status quo which has resulted in the warmest year on record for how many years in a row now...?

It's the most fashionable cause, since it can be shoehorned into anything. Yet carping about warming, and unstated assumptions about efficiency differences between levels of consumption and locations of production, don't guide us to fair labor practices.

>> When repair labor costs more than automated production..

When companies deliberately build products in unrepairable ways then repair labor costs more than automated production.

Imagine if mac butterfly keyboards were replaceable. Or for example I recently fixed my dad's washing machine, but it took a couple hours of labor to replace the pump because you had to remove about 4 other things to get to it (when they could have just made a door on the side/bottom.

It's sort of like if you had to spend an hour disassembling your case to swap the ram in your machine.

> When companies deliberately build products in unrepairable ways then repair labor costs more than automated production.

They don’t. They optimize for production costs, not repairability, that’s all.

And glueing 100,000 iPhones together is faster and cheaper than screwing them together.

> They don’t.

"With consumer electronics becoming increasingly more complex, many electronics manufacturers have instituted systems whereby the only means to repair a device or obtain repair parts would be through one of their authorized vendors or original equipment manufacturers (OEM). " [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_right_to_repair

>When repair labor costs more than automated production, then it's cheaper to replace whole units than mend parts

We're not there yet. There are profitable businesses that can do repair and/or replacement of broken soldered IC chips in laptops and smartphones (see YouTube channels of Jessa Jones and Louis Rossmann). So cost of repair is not a barrier in many cases.

The problems they highlight, that should be very easy to fix through regulation, is lack of access to technical manuals, lack of access to diagnostic equipment and tech giants (like Apple) bullying their suppliers to prevent sale of replacement parts to independent repair shops.

Yes and no, supply chain restrictions leads to some funny outcomes.

When I parted out my 2012 MacBook Air in 2016, I came close to covering the full cost of my brand new 2016 MB Air.

Sure - there are repairs where the costs are higher than replacement. There are repairs where the costs are lower than replacement. The latter should be a low-hanging fruit for regulation to assist with. And we have a model how this could be done - car repair. Because of historical factors, there are regulations that mandate car manufacturers to provide diagnostic tools and replacement parts to independent mechanics and though car manufacturers gripe about it, the system works well. And yes, in some cases, your mechanic will tell you that a particular repair isn't worth it because the car isn't worth it.

Independent mechanic shops are also a sizable market (around 150k+ businesses in US alone) providing good paying blue-collar jobs for hundreds of thousands of people .. and this competition also lowers repair costs for consumers.

No reason why it couldn't be the case for electronics.

When the repair costs are controlled by the manufacturer, you shouldn't be surprised when the repair becomes cost prohibitive. This is why having only Ford being able to repair Fords and Apple only able to repair Apple devices is a negative. When they own the monopoly they can make any claim they want and you have no option of a second opinion.

> I don't know if it is because the externalities of waste are not taxed properly or if it is because manufacturing products that are hard to repair gives more robust products and less waste in the end.

It's because our entire economic system is oriented toward growth and puts profit above everything else.

Profit is fine; the problem is that the true costs aren't borne by the consumers. We subsidize by polluting, by relying on forced labor, by relying on people working in dangerous environments and so on

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