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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I've been recently trying to resurrect my mom's old 2015 MacBook Air and there's a special excitement in being able to follow the clues on the logic board as to where there's a problem, and then being able to fix it.

When I was going through my father's stuff after he died, I came across a Television manual that had come with the product. It included a full schematic of the TV. Every resistor, capacitor, transistor, and diode. I marveled at the idea that the company who made this TV was more interested in your having confidence in the product than protecting their next sale...

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> I marveled at the idea that the company who made this TV was more interested in your having confidence in the product than protecting their next sale...

Because back then a TV cost an arm and a leg and they broke more often. Being maintainable was a requirement for the initial sale.

In conjunction with repairing a TV costing an arm and a leg nowadays.

Who can possibly fix individual components in a modern integrated chip for less than the cost to manufacture a new one?

Repairing many TV faults like bad caps or bad LEDs is not that expensive compared to TV repairs in the past. It just makes sense to pay a couple hours of labor on a TV in 1960, but it doesn’t in 2022. The TVs today aren’t worth paying the labor to fix them. The labor is more than the price of a new TV.

But, set aside the cost, there is as I see it a not-so-hidden environmental cost, the discarded TV set that could be repaired replacing one or two components needs to be somehow taken care of.

There was a manufacturer in Italy that - at the time - created the "perfect" setup for cheap repairs that produced no or very little waste (old post):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29166395

No one.

But no one could fix a capacitor or resistor for less than it would cost to manufacture a new one. "fix a capacitor" even seems silly to say, because it is beyond the scope of the average person to fix. A similar analogy is a car engine, you can repair the engine, however mostly what a mechanic does is swap out pieces. Some things can be fixed with a welder, most (spark plugs, gaskets, belts, even parts like a carburetor) are just replaced. This is similar for "technology" items. The parts may not be fixable but sub-components should be replaceable; the overall product should be repairable.

While you can't fix the component in the IC, you can replace the IC - and often we're not even dealing with BGA components - Just surface mount or even through-hole. Poking around YouTube reveals a number of folks who have done it.

Though I doubt you could run a TV repair business these days and be very profitable.

Did a quick look and a 21" color TV in the mid-70s was around $3,000 in today's dollars.

This is always an important point that seldom gets brought up these days when people are complaining about "they don't make things like they used to." Of course they don't, and we're generally better off as a result.

And it's not like everything was made to last longer in the "good old days." If you lived somewhere with snow, you were lucky to get a car through 5 years and 50,000 miles--and it probably needed fairly regular tune-ups etc. to keep running.

Where / when was this? Living in Scandinavia, this was not my experience at all - as a kid we went through a number of used cars - Lada, Mazda, even a VW Beetle - and while the Beetle was definitely more of a summer car (heating would have been nice!), I never heard of a car being terribly worse off because of snow.

70s in the US--typically European cars. Even in the last 20 years I had a Ford Explorer that I ultimately got rid of because everything underneath in the vehicle was rusting out at about 100,000 miles.

US states with snow typically salt their roads in the winter, in an attempt to melt it down to the bare road, and it is very corrosive. Not sure about where you lived, but some other places use other strategies, often: requiring vehicles to have snow tires.

Salt is used here as well. Maybe they use less, because while it definitely causes corrosion, 50 k miles seems incredibly short-lived.

Well, before galvanization (and more modern coatings), cars were pretty junky.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/galvanizati...

My first car, built in 1987, was partially galvanized (I know because the sales brochure was proud of this fact), but had rust streaks down the doors at 50k miles and the frame rusted completely through at 80k miles.

The improvements in automotive coatings in the 90s and 00s have been immense.

Yes, today 50K miles would be very short-lived. In my more recent experience, getting to 100K miles and ten years or more is pretty easy. Cars have gotten a lot more reliable both in terms of not rusting out and mechanical reliability generally.

It’s not the snow it’s the salt that’s sprayed on the roads in the colder states. I’m down South and only see small amounts of snow every couple years or so. Our cars do not have this problem.

I think the 70s were more notorious for cars rusting out. It’s still a slight concern for older cars coming from colder states. I watch two people on YouTube who specialize in 90s and 00s Mercedes and BMWs. Many times they are looking in specific spots for rust on older cars.

> If you lived somewhere with snow, you were lucky to get a car through 5 years and 50,000 miles--and it probably needed fairly regular tune-ups etc. to keep running.

And farmers and other rural people all knew how to do this, had welders and other power tools and access to spare parts (or at least a junkyard). The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one).

Today, most cars are locked down so hard you need specialized software from the manufacturer to swap a fucking stereo, and the frame is packed with bits and pieces so even a tiny ding on a parking lot can end up with a five figure repair bill.

> The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one).

A return to this would likely require unwinding decades of global crash and pedestrian safety legislation - it's this more than anything else that has made cars less resilient to small knocks, especially the pedestrian safety rules found in many markets. Yes old cars were easier to fix, but survivability for occupants and anyone else involved in your accident was significantly worse. Personally, I'll take the safety features of 2022 over 1994 - the changes are massive.

Bumpers used to actually be bumpers or, as someone once quipped, braille devices to help you park. Now they're fairly fragile containers for all manner of sensors.

A cars' bumper is still there, it's still steel (save for a few exceptions), and still intended to take the impact from another vehicle. The fragile container for sensors is technically the bumper cover.

Environment would be better off if it was much cheaper to repair things instead of just buying new.

This implies that the prices of goods would be higher relative to wages.

From an environmental perspective it is a reasonable position. But a democracy is never going to support any such transformation. “Make appliances more expensive so that I cannot afford new ones easily” said nobody.

If appliances break less frequently or are repairable more easily they will last longer. That means you can spread the higher cost over a longer period of time.

Appliances generally are quite reliable today, and most failures aren't particularly difficult or expensive to fix compared to appliances in the past. But there are also some limiting factors to spreading appliance cost over a long period of time. People may have limited funds (whether cash or credit) to purchase appliances, and if they can, they prefer to have them all up front. While in the past, it may have been reasonable to save up for years to buy a refrigerator, and use a root cellar in the meantime, that isn't socially acceptable today (nor is it a remotely viable expectation for a business to make of their customers). Also, people in the US move relatively often, and so it makes little sense to buy an appliance for the sole purpose of someone else's benefit.

One of the last times something like this came up I went and looked up the cheapest desk fan in an old Sears catalog. Maybe the ‘60s or so.

It was priced at like $15, about the same as today.

But if you did the math for inflation, it would cost like $120.

So of course they lasted forever. And they were made of metal and designed to be workhorses. They cost $120!

When you make a plastic desk fan for $15, even with razor thin profits for everyone involved there just isn’t much money left to put into lasting quality parts.

And the plastic desk fan probably lasts for years anyway.

A lot of us have way too much disposable odds and ends--I don't even want to tell you how much tech logo clothing I've ended up with over the years. But not everything needs to be pass down to your grandchildren quality.

And just think when you got the tech logo clothing you become a walking billboard. Are you getting paid to wear it?

But yeah most grandchildren auction off their parents belongings anyway. That’s why birds make nests and then they go somewhere else and maybe return, make a new nest.

People are fixated on permanence—perhaps that’s another way to build housing: design it so it is sustainable, then tear it down and recycle the materials every 10 years.

Part of that $15 also paid a wage to the guy who built the fans, who worked in the fan plant in some town that closed up 40 years ago.

About a decade ago we got a Lasko box fan that was all-metal. About $100 versus maybe $25 for the plastic ones (back then—I'm sure both would be worse now, thanks inflation).

It's amazing, and unlike the plastic ones didn't die in 2-3 years. Way more powerful (the "low" setting is somewhere between "medium" and "high" on the plastic fans we've owned), cord's thicker and heavier, whole case and the screens are heavy metal so they're difficult to break and I could probably repair them somehow, if they did.

Unfortunately, last I checked nobody makes anything like it now. Guess we'll have to look for some kind of shop-fan if this one ever dies and can't be fixed, assuming those haven't been shittified by then.

One of the first people I've seen suggest that planned obsolescence is a good thing for consumers. Let me guess, you are somehow financially motivated to see people buying more stuff more frequently?

I think the point being made is that if all you have available is $120 fans, there is going to be a good number of people who can't afford them at all.

Cheap goods make things more accessible to more people. Planned (or even unplanned) obsolescence is an unfortunate side effect.

Re: planned vs. unplanned: I don't think the cheap fan manufacturer really builds it that way so you keep having to come back when yours breaks. At least, I don't think that's the primary motivator. More likely, their goal is just to sell more units in the first place, and lower prices are usually a good way to do that.

(Meanwhile, companies like Apple have found the holy grail: an expensive, high-margin, premium product that's difficult to repair.)

Yes, most consumers prefer a $15 fan that lasts 10 years to a $150 fan that lasts 40 years. Especially the people that have $50 in their pocket.

And there's no real guarantee the $150 fan will last 40 years anyway. A few years ago I bought an unreasonably expensive toaster and it broke after less than 2 years.

I think this is the real issue. A lot of premium priced stuff today is not built to match the quality the price suggests.

If you did spend $150 on a fan today, it would probably last just as long as a $15 one. Emphasis on probably, there are good quality items... just not a lot.

TVs are a great example: a $900 Sony smart TV I got 5ish years ago lasted barely longer than its 3 year warranty (before a hardware-related bootloop). A crappier cheaper TV would have lasted the same.

Seems to be the trend when introducing smarter software features. Near every appliance I had to replace in the last decade died because of "the motherboard" (according to several technicians), which was coincidentally about 50% the price of the appliance. I guess manufacturers like to cheap out on embedded hardware components?

Yeah, it is hard for a consumer to judge long-term longevity, and even harder for a company to demonstrate it.

> Near every appliance I had to replace in the last decade died because of "the motherboard"

Part of this is because appliance repair techs are not skilled in component level repair. They are trained to understand module-level repair, and that's it. It is possible to do more precise repairs, but mass manufacturing makes new modules cheaper than skilled (western) labor.

Sure some things are better—but you won’t find half-decent workmanship in the majority of products—just walk through Home Depot and take a look at anything “Husky”.

And regardless, modern features are pretty much frivolous crap anyway. I mean, a smart refrigerator? A smart oven? Please. Older ovens are designed to bake—not sell ads.

When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity.

I'll take a set of Husky wrenches over any early 20th century hand tools, any day. Sure, many of those wrenches are still around, but they're awful to actually use.

>just walk through Home Depot and take a look at anything “Husky"

For the average person who has one or two projects every year, Husky or Harbor Freight is more than enough.

> When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity.

Not a fan of mid-century sci-fi mass-market paperbacks, I take it? :-)

(they often have some glossy ad pages stuck in the middle, typically at least one of them for cigarettes)

Instead people buy lots of cheaper junk every year and pile the garbage higher.

>Because back then a TV cost an arm and a leg and they broke more often. Being maintainable was a requirement for the initial sale.

Cars being a significant expense do not come today with a schematic or repair manual.

People took their TVs to TV repair shops in the past, as well.

Buyers want their durable goods to be durable. They don’t want to spend a significant chunk of their income on a product and be stuck with a broken product next year. Whether that’s a 10 year 100,000 mile warranty, or a schematic you can take to your local TV repair man, they don’t care.

Cars are a lot cheaper nowadays per feature then 50 years ago.

For example just adding air conditioning to a normal family sedan back then would cost the equivalent of $10000 USD nowadays.

If your fine with paying $10000 for an air conditioner, $20000 for an electric driver's seat, another $20000 for an electric passenger seat, $10000 for heated seats, $30000 for ventilated seats, etc... then I'm sure manufacturers would be more than willing to supply a transistor level diagram.

Don’t they? Not in the glovebox, but there are repair manuals for cars that are easily available. I get access to every model’s repair manual with my .edu account.

The thing is that having the manual or not is not the problem, is the equipment you’ll need that is hard to get, and not only that, for cars you may only use them once, for that particular car, that particular repair, and it may cost hundreds. Maybe if you keep the car for 15 years and 300k miles you get to use it again.

Same with the equipment you need to do circuit repair nowdays.

Back in the day the boards were simple, big and you could use a $10 soldering iron to fix things. Now a regular soldering iron tip covers 3 components at a time.

> there are repair manuals for cars that are easily available. Less than they used to be. It feels like the Chilton manuals have dried up for late model vehicles.

Chilton manuals were great but they got killed by YouTube.

Haven’t been able to find anything that doesn’t have someone on YouTube replacing it.

For late model vehicles, they're also being partially killed by the vehicles themselves being more reliable and with longer warranties.

> It included a full schematic of the TV.

For you and other young 'uns, Apple and other early computer makers did this as well: https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Apple%20II%20Items/Hardw...

You could go even further with the Apple II reference manual (the Red Book)

http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Apple/ (page 122 is where it really gets interesting). It has enough information to wirewrap your own (and hand key the instructions to blow a prom).

One reason they stopped doing that was because it made it too easy to make clones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_clones)

It was Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....) that led to the judgment that software stored in ROM was copyrightable in the US, requiring Phoenix Technologies to make a clean-room implementation of the BIOS of the IBM PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t...)

Business values have definitely changed over the years. This has lead to a drastic change in options available to consumers and what they have come to expect. And even in what schools in the US teach.

When something is a cultural change... and you notice something better in the past... how do you push to make it better, again, in the future?

> better in the past

First you have to define what better means, before you can try to make it better again. What you just said boils down to "make it more expensive, again, in the future"

My mom's first VHS player got repaired when it broke. On a new equivalent it would probably get chucked. Sounds terrible? Her first VHS player cost $700. In the early 80s! That would be absurd in todays money much less back then, of course that bad boy got repaired when it broke.

Same goes for things like washers and dryers. Nostalgic memories of how back in the 60s they were built like tanks. Of course they were, they cost the same price then as they do now, not adjusted for inflation. Spend that kind of money on a washer today and it will be built like a tank.

The context we were talking about was repairability. Modern washers and dryers are still fairly repairable. Even at their lower price point when figuring for inflation

Cars are getting less repairable. I think most people who’ve worked on cars for a long time will argue that car repairability is getting worse. Cars are also a case where the average cost, when figuring for inflation, has gone up

I bought a microwave recently and it came with an electronics schematic for repair too. Now, it uses large capacitors, resistors, etc so it would be fairly easy for a novice or field repairman to work on. I can kind of understand why microelectronics don't come with circuit repair schematics though.

This is what they took from us

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