Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

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I really want to buy hardware that allows easy repair. That goes for laptops and cellphone in particular.

Laptops used to allow easy replacement of battery, memory and hardrives at the very least.

All that sacrificed in the name of making the devices "thinner" and the design more attractive.

What bits me most is that a lot of younger friends I have, have no such expectations.

Talk to them about a cellphone the answer is usually "well if you have had it for 2 years it is probably time to buy a new one anyway"

Apples wireless earplugs are use and throw away. With a life expectancy of a little over 2 years from what I have read. No way to swap the batteries. I do not know if that figure is accurate.

I live in Norway now and the government is doing all sorts of things "for the environment" but have no interest in laws to force hardware makers to sell equipment that can be easily repaired.

Not that it would matter much for Norway, hardware makers would just pull out and the citizens would be very angry at the government.

If the EU and the US could join forces on it there would be repaid change.

I wonder if a latest generation Apple Air would be "easily" updated by Apple to allow end user replacement.

I doubt it.

Let say such a law could be passed, and it mattered, how much thicker and "less" attractive would things get. I wonder what engineering could come up with.

Buying less, keeping things longer, and making things repairable should be at the very top of the green agenda. That would all results in less sales so no major government seemsm to go that way.

> All that sacrificed in the name of making the devices "thinner" and the design more attractive.

I think the other major factor you're overlooking here is battery life. High-end laptops these days are mostly battery (right up to the 100 Wh carry-on limit set by the FAA), with everything else designed to fit into the space left over.

high tech and environment considerations are conflicting way harder than most nerds care to acknowledge and it's a real issue.

I'm not sure that's quite true. High tech marketing and profits may be conflicting with environment considerations, but those are not technical issues.

I would argue that after many years of customisable/repairable desktop PCs and servers, it is clear that a more modular and standardised design is a good thing in most ways. It tends to be gamers who are the big upgrade-in-place fans and will look at things like new CPUs or graphics cards or even motherboards, but the modularity and standardisation are also good for simple things like adding more storage or RAM, or replacing a failed PSU or drive in an otherwise working system.

Even if you never use the flexibility yourself, an old PC can potentially have the storage devices wiped or replaced for security and then be passed on to another user. That might be a recycled home PC going to a less developed country where someone otherwise wouldn't be able to afford one. It might be a business clearing out some old pro-level equipment that finds its way to a homelab enthusiast. Either way, it's saving someone money and making more use of the equipment for longer.

Modern laptops and phones have fought against this modularity and flexibility, and that's not a good thing. There have been all kinds of arguments made about achieving smaller and lighter devices that people carry with them, or needing carefully engineered airflows to keep high performance components cool in limited space, or achieving better fluid resistance in case of accidents. Sometimes those arguments do have some merit. But let's not kid ourselves that all the sealed cases and ever-changing connectors (or lack of connectors) and active steps to prevent systems working with "unofficial" replacement parts aren't heavily in the interests of the manufacturers and doing real harm to both customers and the environment.

> I really want to buy hardware that allows easy repair. That goes for laptops and cellphone in particular.

IFixIt: Smartphone Doesn’t Have to Be Glued Shut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCccpgposh4

I'm pretty sure Apple goes far more for the green agenda than the old PC makers ever did - even taking into account the tiny savings you get from the few people that upgraded or repaired their laptops in the past.

Apple, when you had repairs for a device, rather than repairing it, have actually ended up just throwing away the old device in favor of swapping for a new one. The past 6 years, they've made devices with no serviceable parts. Your RAM, Storage, Keyboard, among other parts - are all soldered to the board, riveted to the chassis, or glued shut. There is no way to service those machines. Once your Flash chips die, you need a whole new motherboard.

Sure, Apple recycles some of the parts of the device, but environmentally, it's much better to support and repair a device than it is to simply crush it and recycle it.

Nah, not anymore. SSD and RAM are soldered on the motherboard in newer Macbooks [1]. And you can't even swap parts in iPhone 12 unless you reprogram their EEPROMs [2].

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability [2] https://youtu.be/FY7DtKMBxBw

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