Hacker News Reader

Comment by HeyLaughingBoy | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com