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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

This attitude is the reason why we have so much e-waste. We need to stop treating technology as disposable.

"The worst-case scenario is I’ll get a new one if it stopped working for some reason." Sure, just chuck it in the trash and let it end up in the ocean—or dispose of it properly and it ends up in an e-waste pile halfway around the world.

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I mean it's a natural progression of how products are designed and made. We have electronics that are relatively easy to break (either through normal use or casual misuse), and then are simply not economical to repair.

All sorts of things (both supply and demand side) are misaligned with respect to minimizing wastage as a whole.

And that all being said, there really is something valuable about the 'cheap product' thinking - and that's specifically the mindset of decoupling your enjoyment and utility of a product from its up-front cost. And this is valuable, because the very thing that we need to do to minimize waste is to increase the up-front cost of like... everything.

> I mean it's a natural progression of how products are designed and made. We have electronics that are relatively easy to break (either through normal use or casual misuse), and then are simply not economical to repair.

The primary reason this happens is that companies don't want you to repair their products because that hurts their revenue. It's only natural in a system that rewards profits above all else and has little to no mechanisms to enforce compensation for the externalities.

A huge portion of the dynamic is that people will buy a $398 device over a $399 device. It isn't just companies relentlessly pushing unrepairable stuff.

I agree, it always comes down to how much the buyer cares about anything other than the price paid.

Markets/companies care about whatever their customers care, and the way customers vote/express themselves is with their dollars.

We can talk all we want about how wrong this is or not, but that doesn't change the underlying reality.

Not disagreeing, but part of the underlying reality is that companies are not financially responsible for the externalities they contribute to (such as climate change) or post-consumer costs such as disposal. The result is that the "true" cost of the product to society is not reflected in the consumer-facing price.

I think regulation should be a last resort, but in this case, some kind of taxation or regulation is necessary, because there is absolutely no incentive to be good stewards of the Earth within our current version of capitalism.

It can sure help, but then, as a company, you might want to find a way to avoid the regulation to keep the price low if that's what your customers care about.

Maybe some form of labelling could have a greater real impact: let the customer know what the real impact/cost of the product is, and let the customer made an informed decision.

No, the primary reason is that being unrepairable is simply a side effect of being the least expensive way to manufacture it and people buy primarily on cost. I used to work for an outfit that made wearable consumer electronics: customer being able to repair something was never on the table. Hell, even with the right equipment, it was difficult for us to repair them sometimes, if we had a limited number of prototypes and needed to get a broken one working.

Yes, it seems like it's in the company's best interest to make something unrepairable, but the reality is that repairing a cheap electronic item simply doesn't even occur to most consumers.

I think you are right, but at the same time, if the cost of manufacturing doesn't reflect the overall cost then we need to make laws for that.

Also in video after video of electronic repairs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfOrKQtC1tDfGf_fFVb8pYw

The primary reasons for why he can't repair something are:

- lack of documentation

- can't find the components for sale

- design choices (like using glue instead of sealing rings)

I think at least some of these things can be easily provided at little to no cost to the companies.

I'll admit upfront that I'm not a fan of more legislation but let's look at that.

Lack of documentation: some components are provided with docs under NDA, so you can't get them anyway.

Can't find the components for sale: many components are only sold through approved representatives and their MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) may be in the thousands.

Design choices: are you planning on legislating how a device is designed?

Look, I'm all in favor of Right To Repair: I'm a cheapass who still uses a 35 year old snowblower (that I've had for 15 years) because fixing it is cheaper than a new one and I Hate Waste. I repair everything. I'm practically on a first-name basis with the guys at eReplacementParts.com but still even I accept that there's a limit to what's reasonably practical. When a watch uses a COB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_on_board) part with the only documentation available in Chinese, you have to accept that it's probably not going to be repairable. And the reality is that that's a common state of consumer products these days.

Cherry-picking wearable consumer electronics as a class that intrinsically suffers from diminishing returns with respect to repairability doesn't negate the fact that there's a crapton of other classes in a common household whose design space isn't fundamentally constrained in the same ways but nevertheless artificially suffer from unsustainable lifecycle trade-offs that could have easily been designed around or avoided altogether if objectively targeted from the onset.

The "problem" is that people get what they pay for. The majority of consumers prioritize cost, so they get price-optimized devices that are difficult or impossible to repair.

When you prioritize, e.g., reliability or ease of service, that problem goes away, but now stuff costs more. Worth it for commercial/industrial products, but it tanks the consumer market.

My Kitchen-Aid mixer has had its sacrificial plastic gear replaced a few times because I keep overloading it with bread dough. It was designed to be repairable. My cheap Walmart TV, OTOH, is in the garage awaiting the annual electronics scrap pickup because although I know what the problem is, for $200 (about what I paid for the mixer 20 years ago) it simply isn't worth my time fixing it when I can buy a better one for the same price.

As maxerickson notes, I believe it's really important to note that this is an issue that impacts and stems from both sides. While I agree that manufacturers are incentivized to increase revenue, we should also be clear that the likely end-game is that everything becomes more expensive upfront.

We can't dance around with bullshit and tell people that right to repair (depending on the flavor), and sustainable pricing, and proper pricing of disposal will just result in the same or cheaper upfront costs - it won't - and we need the right answers for the obvious questions like "won't this just screw over the poorest people"?

But it still works, it is still in use, so no e-waste.

A product you don't use is waste all along. Maybe it will sit in a drawer for a decade or two before it becomes obsolete and you trash it. But it doesn't mean it lasted for decades, it means you kept your waste for decades.

A cheap product you use to its fullest because you are not scared of breaking it is less of a waste than an expensive product you hesitate to use.

I agree. Also I find the word "disposable" to be q misnomer since it's actually very hard to dispose of this junk properly. One time use plastic, e-waste etc really should be called "non disposable" since that crap is still going be around somewhere 1000 years from now in the oceans and land fills.

It’s easy to safely dispose of this stuff, there simply isn’t enough of an incentive to do so. Sure lead and mercury for example are toxic, but they where toxic sitting in the ground before we extracted them in the first place.

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