Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

Providing firmware-updates and spare-parts (especially batteries) should be a requirement for all-purpose-computers i.e. laptops and desktops. And also for smartphones with user replaceable operating-system. For devices which are only appliances (smartphones with boot-lock and worse) this also extends to the operating-system itself.

This makes devices more expensive? The prices will be higher but the value you get also. I'm talking about companies which uses adhesive strips and unusual screws with tiny buckles (Apple - iPhones) or the ones which glue the display onto the baseboard (Google - Pixel). Or companies which used to provided user-replaceable batteries with notches, which now uses screws inside the device (okay!), but now also a firmware to ensure that the user won't get a replacement battery some years later (Lenovo - ThinkPad). Otherwise Lenovos ThinkPads are good example, step-by-step manuals, explosion diagrams, well maintained replacement-part numbers...and yes, more expensive.

> ones which glue the display onto the baseboard

yea funny story about that. I have a google pixel 3 xl. Was in great condition. No cracks or issues. So I'm in the medellin airport waiting for my flight to Lima when I'm talking to a friend and notice that a crack is forming alongside my phone. To my horror, the battery decided to swell open so far that it cracked open the cell case. Here I am with a phone that as far as I know, is about to shit the bed and I'm in the middle of a foreign country on my way to ANOTHER foreign country with no way of activating a new phone. (google fi requires the phone be in america during activation.)

Luckily in Lima, I was able to track down someone that could doa. replacement. This phone was clearly not designed to be repaired as I saw him slowly melt layers of glues and pull apart different pieces to do the actual battery replacement.

He managed to get it working but now the finger print reader isnt' working. So here I am currently in latin america with a phone that has a cracked case and a broken fingerprint reader. I'm waiting till I can stomach coming back stateside to replace this phone because repairability was never a concern.

I'd go even one step further: EOL software and hardware should be forced to be open-hardware (at least open schematics) or opensource. If you're not willing to support a product anymore then it should not be possible for it to simply turn into a brick because you turned off a server.

This would either create a market where companies will sell the license to support old products to other companies, or old hardware and software would finally be able to be supported by the community. There wouldn't be a need to reverse engineer or develop stuff in a "clean room" for fear of litigation.

I really like this idea. I know in the business world a lot of EOL products get spun off into companies that maintain support.

Sounds great until companies sell the license to maintenance as the last buck to squish from a product to a third party that will jack up the price just to keep the service running. Better to either force an open source/schematics approach and let the community keep it, or force to sell a certain number of licenses for maintenance.

> The prices will be higher but the value you get also.

Not everyone values repairability.

Your statement is valid for individuals. But as a society, we could value reparability. And laws are there to enforce what the society values, not the selfish individuals you and me are part of.

But we know society doesn’t value repairability as they don’t prefer repairable devices in practice.

I as an individual hardly have a choice. If they offered a version of the next samsung phone with a removable battery I'd probably buy it.

Just know it’ll be at least 2x as thick if not more.

https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=10001&idPhone...

10 mm vs 7-8 mm for class leading phones. Maybe the Xcover Pro is rugged enough to use it without a case/sleeve ("Drop-to-concrete resistance from up to 1.5 m"), so it might end up being thinner in practice.

Google Pixel 3a XL: 7.6mm Samsung X Cover: 10mm (replaceable battery)

It's definitely thicker. But not double.

My S4 with a removable battery seemed like the same thickness as my S8 without a removable battery.

If that’s what you want then you be the one to build it or pay someone else to build it.

Why should the rest of us pay for your preferences?

If there was no e-waste, you’d have a point. The problems come when negative externalities are not priced in. Then we’re forcing people to pay those costs, though they may be distant in time or space.

This is an odd question. There are "losers" and "winners" with the state of any market. Currently, those of us that prefer repairability are the "losers" in the smartphone market. I therefore put your question back to you.

Why should _we_ pay for _your_ preferences?

Because you lose the vote (we voted with our wallet the other way). Anyway, there’s plenty of room for niche companies to serve your market.

The current situation is people providing the products they want to.

Yours is the position of applying state force to make them do something they don't want to - the burden to justify is entirely yours.

Why do you think the market is providing people the products they want? This may be self-evident for you; it isn't for me. Markets are useful, but they don't work well. People want to be forced to spend an extra buck for guaranteed free returns and another extra buck for minimum warranties, and maybe another buck for 7 year of updates. They also want the resulting costs to be distributed amongst everyone, which makes them trivial. This isn't a particularly unusual idea in a continent that has tended to embrace socialized healthcare.

A big enough majority of people wants it, anyway, to vote for representatives that write these laws. I'm sure there is a small minority of oppressed Randians who suffer terribly from all of this.

https://www.samsung.com/us/business/mobile/phones/galaxy-xco...

There you go.

Society is looking only one immediate issues: Is it comfortable. Only later the notice the long term consequences.

That is the reason why Microsoft was able to dominate the desktop market. Now wonder, the number of professionals on the desktop market is low. Despite the harmful effects of the UNIX-Wars, Linux managed slowly to take leadership of servers, super-computing and some professional devices (Lenovo ThinkPads, Dell Developer Edition).

Naturally some consumer test boards would hint on long term effects and consumers would adapt ("Don't buy car X from Z, it has problems with the engine after 40.000 km.") computing is very fast changing and one bad decision can bound you for years. A large base of Windows users cannot switch, they are not able to switch because they bought sadly hardware from a vendor with not open drivers, or a specially crafted bureaucracy. Of course XMPP existed and was more secure but WhatsApp was more comfortable. And even despite Signal is better, they sheer group pressure is extreme. And your Apple-Music account and all the invested money on the App-Store and your GMAIL-Account...

Interesting enough, if you don't buy the most expensive device you get replaceable batteries. If you buy rough phones ("professional") you get replaceable batteries.

Industry is quite good teaching leymans what the have to buy "blingbling" and then just lock-in the buyers. Of course they would appreciate repair ability - they just don't know it better at time. It actually US which fail to help them before they are in the next trap. Schools now using foreign clouds and Zoom. Holy...why we failed to show them Matrix and Jitsi? Why we didn't improved comfort?

Society is a collection of individuals.

>But as a society, we could value reparability

Only if there is large enough individuals who value reparability.

>And laws are there to enforce what the society values

That laws exist when there is enough individuals to support it.

Something that's hardly ever discussed is reliability; having less parts and fewer points of failures typically means that devices can last longer.

> But as a society, we could value reparability

That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes with a cost, values are encoded as trade offs between desirable outcomes, rather than the desirable outcomes themselves. When some desirable outcome is not obtained in society, almost always the reason is that there are other tradeoffs being made. So society values affordability, competition, performance, longevity, quality, repairability, customizability -- and that's just on the product side. Then these product trade offs compete against things like labor market protections, use of resources for competing products, etc.

When Apple decides to solder RAM into the motherboard, it is making a trade off between performance and repairability. When Tesla chooses megacasting that might result in a fender bender totaling your car, they are choosing reliability and lower production costs over repairability. Just bemoaning that some product is less repairable and that society values repairability so therefore some dark force must be working to subvert society's values is not a useful or insightful analytical approach. Everything boils down to tradeoffs.

repairability = better resale value. more people would value this.

> This makes devices more expensive?

No, it makes them cheaper by pushing back planned obsolescence.

Imagine powerful and lightweight laptops only sold in Americas and Asia while in Europe one will only be able to buy bulky (because repairability) and slow (because high-end manufacturers focus on less regulated markets) versions.

That's what grey-market imports are for!

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