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Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

This is very obviously not always true. For example, the Microsoft Surface line has always been a tiny blip in it's market and yet iFixit rated 5 years of products the lowest score possible on their repairbility scale[0]. And it is not unusual at all for non-leading companies to have pretty anti-competitive practices.

This whole comment feels like "yeah, well don't give them credit for it because they don't really mean it".

I don't give a shit if they mean it. If they are doing pro-consumer things I'm going to reward them and if they stop doing it, I'm going to stop rewarding them. That's how you send a signal and get broadly better practices. Making up complicated theories for why you still shouldn't be happy about good things is both silly and doesn't help anything get better.

[0]https://www.ifixit.com/tablet-repairability?sort=score

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> I don't give a shit if they mean it. If they are doing pro-consumer things I'm going to reward them and if they stop doing it, I'm going to stop rewarding them.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, near the end of a long life, that I realized it’s much more humane to reward good behavior than to keep crapping on those who change their ways “too late”.

> I don't give a shit if they mean it. If they are doing pro-consumer things I'm going to reward them and if they stop doing it, I'm going to stop rewarding them.

The issue is that you have to think two steps ahead.

Microsoft wants to sell hardware, so they sometimes make hardware customers actually want. Reward them, you might say -- buy one of those instead of a Chromebook or a Mac.

But then you get Windows with it. It pushes all of Microsoft's services on you, and if you're not paying attention your files end up on OneDrive and your documents end up in Microsoft-proprietary formats, and then you're stuck with that even if the next Surface goes back to being unrepairable.

Now, you could buy a Surface and put Linux on it, for example. But that's not going to save you if that's not what you actually do.

Would you call it complicated to simply not be interested in software that reverts settings and babysits you, thwarting your control of the machine? Windows 10 and 11 do that and have telemetry baked in.

I wouldn't consider valuing one's security or privacy as a complicated theory.

Maybe you're more easily swayed but it takes more than a token "hey guiz we make repairable stuff" from the very firm that has tried to kill alternatives since its inception, to change my mind. It turns out that reputation matters for a business and I still remember the 90s.

You're letting perfect be the enemey of the good. It's possible to do two things at once: say good job on repairability and also, bad job on software.

I’d frame it more as describing inherent nature versus a minor attribute.

Before this, your options were "Windows with lots of telemetry + non-repairable hardware". Today your option is "Windows with lots of telemetry + repairable hardware". That sounds like a strict improvement to me, even if I agree with you on the issues with Windows as an OS

I am not personally in the market for these devices right now, but my work device is required to on Windows, and I am in a small enough org that my input would be sought if I needed a new device. I would very happily ask for a more repairable machine compared to a less repairable one, and having additional repairable options is a good thing.

And if someone came to me asking for advice on what to get, but was unwilling to switch to linux, I'm glad that I have some new repairable options to provide them.

Yes, the telemetry in windows is bad, but this is still a strictly superior situation that what we had previously, and it doesn't make the telemetry thing worse. I just don't get how bringing up other things that haven't improved (and may never improve!) invalidates the fact that this is better.

Repairability seems to very slowly be becoming more common in consumer devices. Hopefully, it becomes standard enough that it's not something we have to be interested in, and focus can shift to things like software. But for now, both suck, and both need to get better, and I'm going to be happy any time either one of them improves.

Right, reparability is part of the inherent nature of a laptop, while user-hostile software is a minor attribute: it can be worked around (group policies rarely break) or replaced.

It is possible to do those things but they strike me as two positions that cancel each other out.

Perfect is the enemy of the good, but not for the same reason most posit. Why settle for good enough when we can push companies to do better? Why settle for "at least I can repair it" when it's both possible and sustainable to ship quality hardware and software?

Taking babysteps toward acceptability isn't really something I'm willing to budge on. Frogs are boiled incrementally, too.

It’s possible you don’t have experience working in a large company? It’s a bit of a miracle that any hardware project gets done in my opinion. Delivering on time is enormously difficult. Adding “would be good“ features like maintainability means cutting something else, likely more cost, and a schedule hit. That costs the whole team at review time.

Even the most devoted person can have trouble moving the needle without exquisite political sensibilities. There are plenty of people working in toward the goals you describe inside Microsoft already, but it’s insanely hard to get things like this to critical mass.

Very often in real life we have only bad choices.

When Microsoft isn't in the lead they might be pro-consumer. But not necessarily so, as you have found.

The reverse is far more certain. When they're in the lead, they're assholes.

Pro consumer means different things to different consumers. Like I could care less about ease to fix. But make it light with good battery life and good performance that’s what I care about as a consumer. If you have sacrifice any of those to make it easier to fix then it’s a bad “consumer” trade off IMO.

In general these things are not actually trade offs. The amount of weight required to use an M.2 SSD or SODIMMs instead of soldering them is only a couple of grams, for example. It has no perceptible effect on any of the things you care about.

It might, however, save the company a few cents per unit. At the cost of making the device unupgradable -- which lowers your resale value even if you never do it. So they cost you dozens to hundreds of dollars so they can save a few cents. That's customer-hostile.

And, of course, the other reason they do it is to make the device unupgradable, so you have to buy another one sooner. Which is downright malicious.

I thought by removing the screw-in plastic frame and using the aluminum directly you could save thickness on the device?

The battery is already thicker than the logic board even with a slot on it.

And because of that the trade off really goes the other way. If you're that tight for space you could put some logic on the part of the logic board beneath the slot and make the logic board smaller, leaving more room for the battery and allowing you to have a thinner battery with the same capacity.

Moreover, "light with good battery life and good performance" doesn't even specify thickness. And quite sensibly so, because that's always been more of a marketing number about who can shave off an extra millimeter than anything that really matters. It's not as if one of them is 7mm thick and the other one is 70mm. And the pointless obsession with trivial differences is how we got this:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a...

I was referring to the battery screwing into the plastic frame not the logic board screwing into it. For example my Carbon X1 has the battery screwed in. If they glued it to the body they could make the device thinner, although probably would have minor impact on weight.

There are other reasons to care about right to repair:

1. It's infinitely better for the environment. Reducing consumption and reusing working hardware are the most impactful part of the cycle. Recycling is mostly a scam.

2. It's cheaper for you.

- Instead of throwing away the entire product when you run out of storage, you can just upgrade to 2TB drive for about $100 yourself, or pay someone $50 to do it for you.

- Instead of replacing a $1000+ product when some poorly designed $1 component dies, you can get it repaired for $100.

- You might think that paying for a new device is not a big deal, but you should extrapolate these effects across the entire supply chain of everything you consume. How much more are you paying for food when the retailer is wasting money on tech that ends up in a landfill, distribution is more expensive because vehicle manufacturers make maintenance more expensive with proprietary parts only accessible through the dealer, and farms have to wait days or weeks for heavy equipment repair because the manufacturer won't supply them with repair manuals and tools they need to repair their own stuff?

3. This is closely related to #1 and #2, but worth mentioning as a separate point. It provides local jobs for skilled technicians rather than filling landfills and concentrating profits at the companies who are incentivized to design products to have a limited lifespan.

4. As sibling comment mentions, the tradeoffs you mentioned are often a false dichotomy. You can have replaceable batteries without losing water resistance. Replaceable storage drivers in laptops don't add any noticeable weight. Devices don't need to be literally glued together to achieve any goals that end users care about. They do this not because it makes the experience better, but because it's easier to sell you on a new device when repair costs way more than it should, approaching or exceeding replacement cost.

Just buy an Apple, Samsung or whatever device. It's good to have choices. Everything does not have to be made for the same market segment.

The surface laptops were also originally pushing the limits of slimness to push manufacturers to make pretty windows laptops, too, right?

How are you rewarding them? By upvoting HN posts?

That's an uncharitable interpretation. They likely mean they will buy Microsoft hardware until Microsoft becomes customer-unfriendly in this space.

Whether that's a much bigger signal than an upvote might be debatable, though.

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