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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

PCs and even most laptops have been very repairable for decades. You can still run Windows or Linux on a 10+ (20+?) year old laptop without an issue. The idea that a 5 year old laptop would be unusable or not get the latest version of Windows is unacceptable.

Yet phones cost similar amounts and have nowhere near the repairability. A decade ago you could argue that it wasn't that important - specs were changing so quickly that new phones became obsolete too quickly. But now it's a maturing technology, older devices are perfectly good and we still don't have an ecosystem which encourages longevity and re-use.

This is eminently doable - phones are essentially integrated computers. The only reason phones are locked and PCs aren't is historical. If phone manufacturers aren't willing to do it themselves, we should legislate before even more e-waste is generated.

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Repairable is not limited to just OS support, but fair and equal access to replacement components. For example, apple can ask Texas Instruments to not sell a particular chip that is used on their logic boards to anyone else but them, rendering odds of third party repair slimmer [1].

Apple went as far as to prevent genuine, that is, salvaged parts, from legitimately bought phones, from being used to replace camera units [2,3,4], or lock phones with replaced batteries.

[1] https://youtu.be/w4eHZCuHob8?t=175 Louis talks about part availability

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542242/apple-iphone-12...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnG3h3Jewq4

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez3f1HgOa1o

Yes, it is often impossible to source things like Intel CPUs or chipsets. They sell them to device manufacturers only in millions. Even if you have IR rework station and can solder BGA chips you have no reliable source of these chips. It is even worse with Apple devices where they often use parts not publicly available at all (custom-made for them) and sometimes if they use a common STM32 micro, there is no firmware available to program it and it won't work without the firmware.

5 year old laptops are repairable, but fewer and fewer new ones are not. I've been in the market recently and it's extremely frustrating trying to find a laptop that doesn't have the RAM soldered in place. Sure, it can technically be desoldered, but that's not how it used to be.

I'm hunting for a new laptop just now, and just about everything has at least one DIMM soldered, with many having both soldered. Driving me nuts!

Is there a convincing technical reason why everybody is doing this nowadays?

Force you to choose more RAM from the factory where they charge high margins.

Well, that's not a very convincing technical argument :)

Even this wouldn't be so bad if they actually sold configurations with more than 16GB RAM...

To make it thinner.

And I 100% blame Apple for this. IMO, Apple is not a tech company, but a fashion company. Or more accurately, they produce technology that's optimized to be fashionable. Thin laptops are more sleek, but to make them thinner will require parts to be soldered to the motherboard, since an actual slot will add 3mm or whatever.

Other companies feel like they have to match Apple, and so they follow suit.

The thing is, AFAIK, nobody is asking for laptops to be only 0.63 inches (16.1 mm) thick, but that's what people are buying. Apple advertises how thin the MacBook Air is, and the masses go wild over it.

I'm with you on this - the marketing spiel of thinness at the expense of all else drivers me nuts!

I do want a thin laptop, and as someone who travelled a lot for work while living with a physically disabling medical condition, lightness is important to me too. But I don't care half a shit if it's 16mm thick instead of 16.1mm, if you've disabled the device to do it!

Apart from costs and size there's could be good reasons to do this - power, inteferance, placement and cooling.

Hardware specialisation (doesn't always but) can reduce energy by allowing for more efficient designs. Just think of the power circuitry required to support all the SODIMM variants.

Since soldered ram is smaller it allows greater flexibility in board design - they can be placed to avoid inteferance or to benifit thermals.

The trend for lack of reparability in smartphones is because of consumer preferences. Consumers are consistently choosing devices that are smaller, lighter, higher durability, waterproof, cheaper etc. vs. devices that are more repairable that do not have those features.

Where does this crazy idea come from that you have to glue shut a device to make it waterproof? A rubber gasket and a few screws work just as well without compromising repairability. Wristwatches have been constructed like this for centuries, while being a lot smaller and lighter than any smartphone. Maybe it would slightly increase the BOM and assembly cost, but considering that it fits in the budget of a 30€ Casio, probably not by much. I guess the real problem is that manufacturers really don't want you to repair your phones and customer's don't care enough for it to make a difference in the market.

> Where does this crazy idea come from that you have to glue shut a device to make it waterproof?

Glue helps with heat dissipation, physical shocks, vibration knocking plugs loose, provides electrical insulation, chemical resistance, and makes the components less able to vibrate over time and knock things loose, makes sensor positioning more stable, and even makes things easier to assemble since less individual fasteners are needed.

Your response doesn't actually address the point you quoted.

But yeah. You can either do thoughtful engineering and careful assembly... or you can achieve close to the same thing with glue.

The demand for smartphones is hundreds of millions per year. Manufacturing a hundred million of a complex thing is orders of magnitude more difficult than manufacturing ones of millions of a complex thing. A small complex thing with tight tolerances is harder yet.

Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts.

Apple and Samsung pump out tens of millions of phones a quarter. The more effort required for each stage of assembly ends up the difference of millions of phones manufactured in the same period of time.

Assuming you've already researched the time and material costs - Why does it matter if more effort is required?

We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies.

We don't allow industries to pollute the planet, we require expensive filters and waste-treatment for chemical plant effluents and catalytic converters for cars, and what not.

> We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies.

It's not necessarily about overall profit. Apple profits on iPhones because they sell them for many times their cost. A marginal cost increase in manufacturing wouldn't impact them much.

The problem for Apple (and other large manufacturers) is production volume. It is a massive (and expensive) undertaking to mass produce something like an iPhone in the volumes Apple does. There's a lot of orchestration between component suppliers, component transport, assembly, packaging, and channel distribution. Contracts covering all of those things are signed years in advance to reserve capacity.

If final product assembly volume drops because a worker has to spend five seconds screwing parts rather than two seconds gluing that back pressure affects everything. Supply chains are such that there's literally no warehouse space available to store backed up components or finished products.

That doesn't affect profitability but just economic feasibility of whole lines of products. There's massive demand for smartphones and there's only so many ways to get the production volume to meet that demand.

Consider PC shipments in terms of production. The global demand is tens of millions of units a year vs hundreds of millions of phones per quarter. Like I said, there's challenges to making a hundred million complex widgets that simply don't exist at smaller scales. Screws might be fine in laptops but they're a volume killer for phones.

I don't agree with your assessment, so we have a disagreement, no biggie :)

Car assembly lines were changed to include adding the seat-belt and the catalytic converter, etc, etc due to regulatory mandates. Heck they had to redesign their entire car to include crumple zones for safety! I don't think a screw is all that much.

And so, electronics companies will figure out how to optimize their assembly lines to comply with the regulations and they will figure out how to manage the supply chain and everything else. Apple employs tons of smart people, and there are many smart people in the world who can help as well.

Cars are big items. Phones are small.

Worldwide car sales are tens of millions per year. Smartphone sales are hundreds of millions per quarter.

So not only are phones orders of magnitude smaller than cars there's two orders of magnitude more manufactured every year.

You can disagree with me all you want but it doesn't change the fact of those scales. Phones don't just pop out of a mold or an extruder. Manufacturing billions of them is a big deal and anything making them more difficult to manufacture affects volumes.

>Manufacturing billions of them is a big deal and anything making them more difficult to manufacture affects volumes.

Sorry, but the environment comes first. They'll will just have to deal with it. This problem is imminently solvable, and tractable. We put a man on the moon, we can figure out how to automate putting on a few screws and a gasket as is done with watches and other commonplace items. Or they can come up with another modular design that is still repairable. We shouldn't put an artificial limit or human creativity and ingenuity.

> Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts.

In my imagining of this, a robot is doing it. Which makes me think the opposite is true: the tightness can be controlled and errors can be managed better with a screw, than with glue.

Robots do not in fact do most assembly on smartphones. There's a reason Foxconn's factories are the size of towns. It's thousands of meat robots doing a majority of the work.

None of this makes any sense. In modern smartphones, the PCBs (i.e. the parts that get hot and contain the sensors and other components) are usually screwed into the frame without any glue. Only the battery, display, and back covers are glued in. This makes repairs of the most commonly damaged parts much more difficult without providing any functional benetfits.

You ignored a significant part of the list. The list is not mine - it's listed on manufacturing process feature availability when you source things.

You're saying "glue helps" but you seem to mean "glue is required". Those are not identical concepts. Yes glue may help, just like using bolts screws and gaskets may help. The entire point is that glue is not _required_ to achieve those goals.

What is glue is cheaper and works better at achieving all those disparate goals?

It doesn't though. It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste. This is the topic of the primary article, and therefore the context for this thread.

You can also weld an entire car together to make it cheaper, but this is not something we should celebrate or promote if it impacts the environment in terms of repair.

But yes, I value your opinion so don't want to shut you out of the discussion, I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills.

>It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste

Around 1.5 billion phones are sold a year. What percent of phones are thrown out due to breaking versus people want an upgrade? Then compare to the costs and waste of using inefficient assembly techniques.

It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops.

I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts.

> I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills

I think this type of simplistic framing makes the discussion end, not pointing out that there are good engineering merits for using glue.

I've worked on enough hardware design that needs MIL-SPEC ratings that I know it is highly non-trivial to make things rugged. And that things like glue go a long way towards making it so.

How much increased waste would there be if phones were significantly easier to break?

>I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts.

Okay, this is your view, and we have a disagreement. We'll just have to agree to disagree :)

Also, its not just about glue vs nuts/bolts - Please consider the larger picture here about repair.

>It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops.

That is not accurate, Apple for instance, chokes the supply chain by banning sale of components to repair shops. They prevent replaced parts from working by employing DRM. In any case, you're missing the general point. Right to repair isn't just about phones. We're talking about a common movement across multiple industries - Agriculture, Appliances, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, etc, etc. You can find more information here - https://www.repair.org

People don't make their decisions in a vacuum. They know they can repair their laptop, their PC, their car, etc. They know this based on their experience and experience around them. We need to promote the same mindset for other consumer electronics.

In any case, any added change will force the companies to innovate their assembly technique to reduce costs - just like every industry does when there is a new environmental regulation. The reality is we are seeing piles and piles of electronics fill up the landfills, and we need to do more to address re-use, repair and extending the lifetime of devices - This is the just one component of an overall plan to reduce e-waste.

>Okay, this is your view, and we have a disagreement. We'll just have to agree to disagree :)

The number of phones wasted a year due to non-reparability is a fact, not an opinion like vanilla tasting better than chocolate.

US for example, spends around 80B annually for new phones, 3B annually for repairs, with 300M smartphone users. From this you can dig further or make reasonable estimates of a lot of behavior.

> That is not accurate, Apple for instance, chokes the supply chain by banning sale of components to repair shops.

I have family that both works at phone repair shops and that have iPhones, and they both repair them and get them repaired quite regularly. There is literally over a dozen iPhone repair shops in town, town size ~200k.

You can find more information here https://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+repair+shops

People generally don't throw out a phone because it's not repairable. They throw it out because there is a better, nicer, more featured one. And of those people I know that do get rid of them, they almost all sell to one of those places that pays you for scrap and then recycles the usable parts.

Can you present me a sleek smartphone design with a rubber gasket and screws? I'm genuinely curious what you have in mind.

Look at this comparison. Fairphone has a smaller screen but is larger, heavier, lower quality screen, and is not dust/waterpoof, and costs double compared with the Galaxy S8. Fairphone only matches or loses on all other specs.

https://versus.com/en/fairphone-3-vs-samsung-galaxy-s8

But also look at the AirPods Pro vs Galaxy Buds+:

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds++Teardow...

One has a zero whilst the other has a 7 by ifixit's rating.

Buds are heavier, larger by volume, and are less water resistant.

Weight isn't an important metric unless it's greater than the threshold of uncomfortableness. The majority of the weight difference comes from the extra battery which is a tradeoff.

Similarly for volume, in which the case dimensions is the important metric. Once again the volume is a battery tradeoff.

As for water resistance yes, the buds+ are IP2X versus IP4X. Under normal use this isn't important, but if argued this is the better point than bulkiness.

https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/samsung-gala...

The point is that these are comparable devices and repairability doesn't have to make the drastic tradeoffs as your example of the fairphone 3.

Most of the the newest devices are perfectly repairable if the manufacturer would release the schematics and not block their suppliers from third parties buying the parts (and as newest trend lock the parts together on hardware level). Maybe not all problems but a lot of the most common ones for sure.

Repair shops have managed to source new screens and cameras for the latest iPhones for example. Apple just firmware locks them to the device that stops them from working even though it is a identical part (except for the serial number burned into the chip).

Basically it is not about making designs that just happen to be hard to repair but instead the manufacturers are making them intentionally hard or impossible to repair for third parties to protect their own repair line and/or force you to buy a new one especially now that phones have started to last 3+ years just fine as progress on cpu speeds have slowed done.

For independent repair shops newer devices aren't inhenrantly more ddifcult to repair. It's just more difficult to source the parts or get around the "security features".

Smartphones are an interesting market. They've only been around 14 years and their rate of growth and improvements have been staggering. Just a few years ago every new generation brought a leap in performance, battery, features or design.

Increasingly consumers are not buying phones every year but every two or even three years. As a result manufacturers have been designing planned obsolescence and fighting against the right to repair.

We can see from the results of direct ballot initiatives that consumers want right to repair. They want the choice if they accidentally dropped and cracked the screen to buy a new one, get a repair from the manufacturer, an independent third party or even learn to do it themselves if they're feeling up to it!

So yes, consumers can want features over repairability but they can also be against barriers for their right to repair at the same time.

Even if the phone is glued shut, I should still be able to install a different OS on the thing after the vendor drops support for it.

meanwhile phone screen are larger nowadays

> or not get the latest version of Windows

Not sure about this one: the continued support for older versions - yes, but the latest? Nobody can give you such promise (unless they explicitly do, for one reason or another).

I can easily install the latest version of windows 10 on even a 10 year old computer. But more importantly, I can still install Windows 7 on a 10-year-old computer if I want to. And it will still work, and most programs will still run on it. Or I can install an alternate operating system like Linux.

Whereas with my iPhone, I literally can’t install an old version of the operating system or an alternate os, no matter how old or new the device. And if I do happen to have a device that still has an old operating system, most apps refuse to run because the API surface area changes constantly. And if you have old versions of apps, they mostly all phone home to check versions now and won’t run until you update them. It’s a never ending cycle and you have no control over it.

I have a 10 year old desktop and a 12 year old laptop that both run the latest Windows 10 with no issues.

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