There are plenty of discrete components in a modern phone/laptop/roomba/whatever, that could be replaceable/upgradable by advanced user or entry-level technician, but are not:
- battery
- screen
- storage
- RAM
- list goes on and on...
For example, it's nice that I can drop my iPhone in water w/o worrying (too much) about destroying it. I spent ~$1500 on an iPhone 12 Pro in November & dropped it in a lake in December. Part of the reason it's (more) waterproof if because it's not covered w/ ports/hatches/openings that would allow me swap out the battery/RAM/SSD/something. If I had to choose between having a fully customizable phone & one that doesn't die when it gets wet, I think I'd rather have one that resists water.
Just one person's opinion.
This may be true, but we shouldn't confuse 'a decision made by a product manager' with 'the customers want this'.
Some design decisions succeed because of the other strengths of a product (and the competition cargo-cult copies them), not because they are good design decisions. Some design decisions are made because they are more convenient for the vendor, not better for the customer. Some design decisions are made because of inertia. Pointing to any particular design trade-off in a successful product, and saying that 'Well, this is obviously what the market wants' is not always a correct conclusion to draw.
USB is unarguably the most successful mechanism for two hardware devices to communicate with each-other in history, and yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in. Should we conclude that customers want to play the cable fandango every time they plug one device into another?
I used to know one of the folks involved with the USB standard pretty well professionally. At one point, he told me that this aspect of USB is one thing he wished they could have dealt with differently.
(That said, the fact that the mini and micro versions are more explicitly keyed doesn't make that much of a different and I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs.)
Interestingly, reversible USB-A cables are readily available (at least here in Japan). They just have a too-thin "lip" in the middle which is prone to breaking. https://www.sanwa.co.jp/product/syohin.asp?code=KU-RMCB2W
I think it's just that nobody thought of it when the plug was designed, because this wasn't a problem that serial cables etc before USB-A had (and even USB-B is keyed!)
It's a self fulfilling prophecy that customers will buy it. I dont have another choice
That's an important insight.
I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline:
RAW > PRODUCT > FINISHED > A BIT > WASTE
MATERIALS > COMPONENTS > GOODS > OF USE > MATTER
Here's the bad part though: adding recycling to any stage of this pipeline doesn't alter the overall behavior. It only recirculates some of the matter - recycling is never perfect. But as we know, if you recycle less than 100%, and then re-recycle that, and then re-recycle again, it still converges to zero. With an exponentially growing pipeline, recycling is only delaying the crisis a little bit.
Ultimately, we need to remove the exponent (or at least couple it to population growth, in the scenario where humanity expands into space). For now, we need to reduce it. And one of the best ways of doing that is... reducing use. Buying less. The less matter flows through the pipeline, the longer we have before it runs out.
>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!
The relationship between economic growth and environmental damage is more complicated than this. Something like transitioning from fossil fuels to cheap renewables is both a case of economic growth, and a reduction waste matter. Similar principles might apply to everyone having an iPod instead of buying new CDs, miniaturization in computing, productive uses of what used to be considered waste, building mass transit infrastructure over cars, etc.
If you want to slow damage to the natural environment, I'm all for it, but if you aim to do that by slowing economic growth, rather than accepting slowed economic growth as a potential side-effect, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Economic growth often means more people can have better lives using fewer resources.
We can and must develop more environmentally responsible sources of matter and energy. Trying to change human behavior with our current regulatory controls have been demonstrably inadequate. There are sources of matter and energy that do not run out, I believe them to be in space.
If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials.
I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you needed a computer, maybe a calculator, a form of MP3 player, a camera, maybe some DVDs to watch in the back of the car along with a DVD player to watch them on.
Today you have all of that in a phone.
But you replace them every two years. And the market for them is still growing. And there's now a resurgence of a market for single-purpose appliances that happens on top of the smartphone market - not replacing it.
(It's also possible more matter goes into making a modern smartphone than a bunch of devices it replaced, because of the demand for more exotic and more pure materials in the processes along the way. But maybe it doesn't, maybe an individual smartphone is a net matter and energy saver. I can totally buy that, we've made a lot of efficiency improvements in manufacturing in the past decades. But there are limits to such improvements, and in the meantime, manufacturing as a whole keeps growing.)
Perhaps I've simplified my diagram too much - I should've drawn an additional "bypass" into "WASTE MATTER" from every other node, because every step in the pipeline loses some of its input as waste.
I would love to see the amount of resources that are used to produced each iPhone, because I don't have a big issue assuming that each phone brings, say 3 or 4 percent more utility to its user than the previous model would have.
So, assuming the battery is the most dirty part of the phone, I found the battery size for all the iphone models[0] and even if we exclude the the large ones, the iPhone 11 has a 54 percent larger battery.
The phones were released in 2007 and 2019, 12 years and 3 months apart[1]. That works out to a growth of approximately 3.3%.
So my original assumption was wrong, there has been an exponential growth in materials that nearly matches GDP growth.
[0]: https://itigic.com/how-much-battery-does-an-iphone-have-capa...
[1]: https://www.knowyourmobile.com/phones/every-single-iphone-re...
Say the world (after some unfortunate incident) turns into [say] something like Cuba? In just a few years no one will have a phone.
It’s got nothing to do with planned obsolescence, new devices get new features because technology makes those features possible.
You get non-serviceable devices because users want smaller, faster, better hardware. Any latches, connectors, or sockets are purely subtracting from battery life as that’s the only part of a phone that can be resized, and even that is subject to constraints.
Repairable/serviceable means by definition more expensive and worse feature set.
I just want to make sure you're not confusing "repairability" with Right to Repair... R2R is not asking for changes to product design - only that replacement parts and documentation are made available in a compulsory way.
How long should production lines be kept producing out of date products?
How long should a company like GM that designs its own engines have to continue manufacturing replacement ones? That's not cheap... (etc.)
Thinking about a mature market where we do have right to repair is a good test of these questions and helps reveal the hidden complexities. GM makes replacement parts for a while. A thriving non-OEM market persists long after the manufacturer ceases making more.
This is distinctly different from the status quo in Apple-land, where they prohibit partners like Texas Instruments from manufacturing or selling units to anyone but Apple.
Note also that there is no legislation in front of us with explicit terms set in stone here, so while your questions are good ones to consider when drafting such legislation, they should preclude a right to repair bill passing into law.
I have a 1965 and 1966 Mustangs. Original body panels are difficult to find, but I’ve not found any mechanical part that was the least bit difficult (aided by high-volume production and a lot of parts crossover up through the early 90s Fox body Mustangs).
The reality is this, when your device gets old or your screen cracks , Apple will offer to fix it for 70% of a new device price, so you are pushed to buy a new device. I hope this is not controversial and has nothing to do with the water proof preference you have.
Maybe things changed a bit but you could not buy screens or use refurbished ones. But all parts should be available for phones and laptops, including screens,batteries, chips, ports. Also there should be a way where parts from broken phones could be reused (I know the argument about stolen phones but competent Apple people can find a way to make it possible so we can reuse components from borken devices and not send them some far away to be "recycled" instead of reuse.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...
Look at a random PC (or, until recently, a random laptop): it's made from a lot of individual components that can be swapped out or upgraded independently. Storage, RAM, CPU, GPU, cooling, motherboard, WiFi chip, Bluetooth chip, speakers, microphone, screen, all the peripherals - they're all designed to work together as a category, and to be easily replaceable. I can source each one from a different vendor, and they'll still work. Hell, in many cases, you can even fix individual components, with a hot air station and a steady hand. And if I upgrade a component, my old one can often get a second life inside another computer, possibly someone else's.
It's a good thing to have, and there's nothing stopping modern laptops, tablets and phones to have the same level of upgradeability and swapability. Nothing - except that the vendors don't want to[0]. These things run on the same set of hardware standards as larger computers, and on literally the same software stacks. I[1] should be entirely able to open up my phone, desolder its battery and memory, swap them out for newer and better ones, apply sealant, close the case and have the whole thing work. There's no technical obstacle here - the only problem are the business strategies of the vendors.
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[0] - I have another long rant for the usual "it's customers who chose integrated over repairable" argument, and I'll post it elsewhere in this thread. For now, I'll just say: it's not like anybody is asking customers to choose. These options are not being made available in the first place.
[1] - Or my friend who spent half his life tinkering with electronics. Or the repair shop down the street. A point commonly missed in discussions about Right to Repair (and Free Software) is that it isn't about expecting consumers to do hardware/software work themselves - it's about making it possible for local markets for software and hardware maintenance and repair to exist.
Could it be because it's not financially feasible? If you present the idea of a repairable alternative to an iPad, are any investors going to take you up on it?
I think a big aspect of this whole debate is that manufacturing efficiencies have gone up so much, that it's simply not economically worth it to sacrifice the resiliency and cost effectiveness of making it completely integrated. The cost to launch a new product and manufacturing line is also very high, so that you have to be really sure a sufficient number of consumers will want it.
On top of that, as a seller, you get to keep costs low when you have to spend less on dealing with people tinkering with it and then sending it in for warranty.
Unfortunately, I don't think a "tinkerable" option can compete on price to value ratio such that sufficient people would buy it to make it a feasible investment.
>it's about making it possible for local markets for software and hardware maintenance and repair to exist.
Efficiency is frequently a trade off for a word that I can't think of, but maybe can be described as "security" or "local security". It's similar to not needing a butcher, produce market, shoe store once a Walmart Supercenter rolls into town. I struggle to come up with a legal requirement that would restrict efficiency such that it does not give others (globally) a competitive advantage, but still retains "local security".
Many of the modern smartphones can still be fixed as are laptops.
However, these repair shops only exist if they have the schematic and parts available.
it's not an efficiency issue. It's planned obsolescence.
I vote yes for right to repair, both with my dollar and my desire to favor the rights of the citizens of this country.
I believe all of that is true.
Which is why this needs to be corrected by regulation. If making a more user-respecting and environmentally-friendly products isn't economical enough for the market to do it on its own, the economical landscape needs to be altered so that it is.
> as a seller, you get to keep costs low when you have to spend less on dealing with people tinkering with it and then sending it in for warranty
This must be solvable, because somehow it isn't a problem on the PC market, or on the car market.
> Efficiency is frequently a trade off for a word that I can't think of, but maybe can be described as "security" or "local security".
"Distribution" and "decentralization" are the words you're thinking of. Despite the common propaganda to the contrary, centralization is usually increasing efficiency. That's why the market loves it so much (and why every country ends up with laws to limit it). The cost to that efficiency is usually resilience (failure of any single actor becomes a large-scale issue) and slower innovation (bigger actors take less risks, smaller actors tend to cover more of the possibility space, by virtue of numbers).
> It's similar to not needing a butcher, produce market, shoe store once a Walmart Supercenter rolls into town.
And it is a contentious issue. On the one hand, the food gets cheaper. On the other, the jobs get worse, the local community suffers, and money gets siphoned off the local economy. On an international scale, the same thing is called "globalization", which is both widely praised and criticized. In particular, the current pandemic has revealed the resilience problem of our globalized economy, which is why so many countries are now making moves towards reversing it a bit.
I would find it a lot more compelling to talk about trade-offs than to just throw out uninformed ranting. We used to have laptops like what you're describing, and they no longer sell very well, or are no longer available because they are thicker and heavier than the models that replaced them.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2dyuxa/can_any_engin...
On laptops you have a choice: buy a Thinkpad that is not an ultrabook, but even then you see people prefer thinner and lighter models than ones that are servicable.
And if I have to do that anyway, the phone being less than 100% watertight because the battery is swappable won't be a problem in the first place.
Maybe I am just paranoid, but I would like to know my phone doesn't die on me when it is exposed to rain.