Comment by merinofg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by merinofg | Hacker News Reader

My father owns an electronic repair shop specialized in TV, cameras and Music devices. The company has official agreements with the big brands to offer official technical support for their products, meaning that they have internal access to repair manuals and repair pieces to order from the official brand. Having a spare part more expensive than the product is a usual tactic from the manufacturer to not comply with the current EU law of producing and having stock of that piece for a minimum amount of years.

The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one. The funny part is that some customers still decides to repair them, and if you try to call the manufacturer to order the repair piece, either they delay months the shipment, or they end up sending the full original product from some old stock as replacement to give to the customer (or to disassemble in the repair shop if the customer still wants his one).

If current laws are, how to say this, "creatively (but legally) avoided" by companies, I really doubt that new regulations will help at all.

It's just a matter of closing the loopholes then? I see law/regulation as a lot like releasing software, you need to iterate towards an ideal. Expecting an MVP to be perfect right out of the gate seems counterintuitive.

Not just closing the loopholes; specifically imposing consumer awardable penalties for failing to support a product - something like treble damages for willful infringement should do the trick.

Can't provide a part within a specific time frame at maximum cost of the appropriate fraction of the price, for a defined period of time after the product is sold? Great, the consumer is awarded an amount equal to 3 times the MSRP at product release to ensure they can acquire a replacement product!

The "HPE Battery for real-time clock" (otherwise known as CR2032) from the an official Australian HPE spare-parts supplier was listed at $50AUD. Now, those types of listings are behind a "Request Quote" partially, IMHO, because it was shared around a number of VARs as a joke.

Maybe the extra money was for the oversized boxes and packaging HPE spares are sent in...

The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one.

Offer to buy the defective device from the customer, and now you have a source of spare parts to fix others. This was common strategy back then, but of course doesn't help the situation where some parts fail a lot more than others.

How long should a manufacturer being required to provide parts support? Building tons of parts and then warehousing them for decades has a very real cost.

> Building tons of parts and then warehousing them for decades has a very real cost

I wonder how the automotive industry has managed to do just that over decades.

The answer is relatively obvious, laws require them to do so, which in turn limits the amount of "SKU churn" to keep the logistics reasonable. Your usual car design holds on for 3 years, after which it gets a tiny rebrush that fixes usability or other issues that cropped up during the first period, and it will not change too much between the lines internally.

In contrast, we have many manufacturers that are as wasteful as to create "Black Friday" SKUs that are deceptively similarly named to "rest of the year" SKUs but built with slightly worse components.

This is utter, utter madness. There is no reason for this to exist at all.

They don’t tho The, not really. Very few of those parts are actually made by the automaker. They’re by Bosch, AC Delco, or any of the thousands of OEMs of brake pads, fuel injectors, and what have you. If actually try to buy a new exact OEM replacement for anything past about 10-15 years old, you probably aren’t. Instead you’ll be dealing with some 3rd tier anonymous vendor making clones.

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