An Effort To Bury A Throwaway Culture One Repair At A Time | Hacker News Reader

An Effort To Bury A Throwaway Culture One Repair At A Time

nytimes.com

130 pointsolegious119 comments

I just bought a used sewing machine. It cost less than a new one. It's 98 years old, and with a minimum of care will last another 98. It was built to last.

This notion of "bury the throwaway culture one repair at a time" treats symptoms, not roots: there is nothing persuading manufacturers to make stuff which will last. Should the movement take hold, manufacturers may very well respond by making stuff even cheaper, as the effort to make things so inexpensive it utterly undermines the movement is easier than making things robust and durable. I appreciate the movement's intentions, but think they should seek means of persuading production of durable goods, not eeking another 20% of life out of something having a very short lifespan to start with.

Occurs to me that the only durable products made today are firearms. Ironic.

I remember my mother used to have a pedal operated Singer sewing machine that seemed to be largely constructed from inch thick cast iron.

Unless it has been scrapped for it's (not inconsiderable) scrap value I suspect that thing will probably survive the next ice age.

[We also had a typewriter from the same "Forth Rail Bridge" school of over-engineering and conspicuous iron consumption - possibly an Underwood?]

That reminds me of the Linksys WRT54G. Some people predicted that it would disrupt ISPs because it was so hackable.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2004/pulpit_20040527_0004...

The manufacturer responded by replacing the Linux firmware with a proprietary real-time operating system. That allowed them to use hardware that was less powerful than the original both in terms of electricity consumption and computational performance. Furthermore, most people have better things to do than reprogramming their wi-fi routers.

Reading Cringley's predictions in that article is cringeworthy.

Linksys also then released the WRT54GL, which used the same hardware/software as the original WRT54G, and could still run OpenWRT/DD-WRT.

The Wonder Shaper script he mentions is an anti-bufferbloat workaround. Not that that was the stated purpose, but that's what it does.

I just bought the WRT54GL a couple months ago, after suffering through several newer model routers the previous year.

Needless to say, it's brilliant. Fast, stable, consistent (for a change). And not only in my anecdotal experience - it still gets higher average reviews on Newegg and Amazon than any other modern router, despite being an almost decade old tech product.

It may not have met Cringley's predictions, but it is a really interesting case study in what years of software optimization on stable, robust hardware can achieve, vs the competing model of throwaway software on frequently updated hardware.

> the only durable products made today are firearms

I don't think that's quite true. You can seek out many "made in America" products at a higher price point and with a lifetime warranty. I recently ordered a Duluth Pack bag. It cost triple the walmart/target equivalent. But it will likely last the rest of my life, and if it doesn't it is guaranteed.

I have had my two pairs of Allen Edmonds (made in America) shoes resoled a few times. They've lasted many years and will probably last another 10, perhaps even the rest of my life. Likewise my Red Wing boots are tanks.

A lot of high quality, made to last stuff is available. It's just expensive and people are stupid cheap. And Americans are especially stupid cheap. Why buy a crap $250 suit that will disintegrate in a matter of years? Shell out for the fly made in America Hickey Freeman suit that will last forever, man.

This is exactly my experience. You can spend $15 on kitchen knives that will last for 6 months, or $70 on knives with a lifetime guarantee. Etc.

The only difference is that a cheaper, low-quality option exists today. There's nothing inherently bad about that.

An interesting startup idea might be providing some kind of financing for higher quality goods. If the problem is that they don't sell well because the initial price is much higher than throwaway junk, then spread the initial price over a longer period, with the lifetime warranty as finance-cost-reducing collateral?

It's easy to finance consumer purchases these days, but I don't know if there is any financing program specifically aimed at highly durable stuff (besides cars), like consumer goods with lifetime warranties.

"An interesting startup idea might be providing some kind of financing for higher quality goods."

That's basically what layaway was. Now, that's what credit cards do.

Much of the high-end outdoor gear industry values quality and durability. For example I bought my MSR backpacking stove in 1994 and it still works as well today as it did then. I've had to replace a few o-rings, which the product is designed to make pretty easy. It will most likely last me the rest of my life.

A big reason manufacturers don't produce durable devices/clothes is because durability is invisible at purchase time. It is also hard for a manufacturer to signal durability to customers who care about it.

It is similar to the reason for which all restaurants being unhealthy --- because the healthiness of a meal is invisible. A meal may have lots of vegetables and nice-looking meat, but also lots of salt and transparent sauces that are unhealthy but tasty.

> It is also hard for a manufacturer to signal durability

The distribution channels and price are the primary signal. Good stuff made by craftsmen is, of course, much more expensive than crap glued together by slave labor. So spend double or triple. The craftsmen who make the good stuff do not put up with crap from the big box stores and maintain a certain level of distribution exclusivity. You might have to go to a higher end department store, like bloomingdales or saks, to even find the stuff.

The other signal is nation of manufacture. Anybody left making things in America or Northern Europe is probably good. Sadly, made in Italy doesn't mean much anymore because in the south there are many sweatshops full of chinese slaves cranking out stuff on which to stamp "made in italy".

> the reason for which all restaurants being unhealthy

All restaurants are not unhealthy. Cheap restaurants are, because they use cheap ingredients. If you're going to eat out you have to spend money. Just don't go to $15 entree places.

> The distribution channels and price are the primary signal. Good stuff made by craftsmen is, of course, much more expensive than crap glued together by slave labor. So spend double or triple.

Of course, this signal is easily abused - junk sold for high prices will be assumed to be 'better' than equivalent junk sold for low prices...

There are exceptions to this rule where the durability of the product is the key selling point. Example: Tilley Endurables (http://www.tilley.com/default.aspx) and their hat.

I wouldn't say that firearms are the only durable product. I recently bought a Jet Mini lathe, and every piece of it has a part number and can be reordered from the manufacturer. It was a lovely feeling to know that it's build to last.

I would say that consumer items are primarily built to be thrown away.

All machine tools, beyond the absolute cheapest ones, are like that; because they're built by machinists for other machinists. There's no such thing as a consumer-oriented lathe.

Envy! I'd love to have my mom's old Singer. I've shopped around a bit, the new stuff is complicated and breakable.

  When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together,
  two parts were left over — no matter, he said,
  they were probably not that important. He plugged
  the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went
  on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to
  steam.

The risk is significant and far outweighs any benefit gained.

A classic example of poor risk assessment.

When you sell products for a customer, you have to be really careful to make them not-dangerous if used by an idiot. If you fix/build stuff yourself, you get to know the ins and outs of the thing you're working with. So it doesn't matter that much if something may be a little dangerous if misused, you should know what to do with it.

One or two screws missing, it's a whole lot better than buying a new one and wasting raw materials and energy and creating waste.

Just note that everyone has a bad day. This may the day you "forget" all the things you normally know and then accidents happen. I don't want to say that you should never use such things, but it is a good practice - even if you just build them for yourself - to improve them in the long-run to decrease the chance of accidents.

Two scenarios:

1. Performing dodgy repair jobs on your own equipment for your own personal use.

2. Performing dodgy repair jobs for unsuspecting people that don't know the difference between a resistor and capacitor and are trusting your skill and judgement.

In instance [1] you're performing your own risk assessment and will bear any consequences. In [2] you're performing a risk assessment that will directly impact upon someone else's safety. Their level of risk acceptance may be far more conservative than your own.

...and if your bad repair sets a house on fire you risk the lives of the people who come to rescue you, and the lives of anyone else in the building, etc.

3. you throw out the kettle and buy another made in china one for 5quid.

After the fire you discover that the CE mark on the side doesn't mean it has passed all the european safety checks just that it is "china export"

"Nothing is allowed unless its completely perfect" is a dangerous attitude. Its made a lot of people homeless, closed a ton of the soup kitchens and shelters those homeless might have sought refuge in and IMHO prevented a great deal of innovation from seeing the light of day.

Its possible that this pervasive bit of anal retentiveness has made some(1) individuals marginally safer, but its super dangerous to societies.

(1) Except for the aforementioned homeless. They're not safer.

> "Nothing is allowed unless its completely perfect" is a dangerous attitude.

But you can see that there is a big difference between "not completely perfect" and "likely to cause death or serious injury"?

"likely to cause death or serious injury"

You don't know what parts they were, but I'm sure the repairer evaluated the situation.

This is an extreme sheltering mentality

An old product certainly does not conform to modern standarts, but it's reasonably safe (given you don't do anything stupid to it)

"frayed cord" == risk of fire or death. That's not sheltering, it's true.

I don't think that is a necessarily true statement. I would need to see the cord.

Given how horrible reporters are at getting tech and science right, I don't assume "frayed cord" in the article translates to the technical meaning of the term.

That being said, this argument seems to largely consist of 1) some people who assume the repair-man is incompetent and possibly has a psycopathic desire to kill people via shoddy repairs, and at the same time assuming the technical descriptions are 100% accurate, and 2) some people who assume the reporter was being a reporter and willfully being incompetent in reporting, while the humble repairman (basically a hacker working on items) is good enough to know what he is doing with extremely reasonable margins of safety.

Neither of these sets of assumptions particularly valid and they appear to stem from deeper assumptions: what is an acceptable margin of risk, what value various safety rules have on actual safety and so on. IMHO, discussions on these would be far more interesting than wrangling about a passage from a single report without any other evidence of what was (not) done.

I am amazed that anyone thinks this is some kind of over-protective nannying, or expensive over-engineering.

When you have a 2000 watt device operating on 220 v ac mains you can't afford to bodge safety critical components.

Irons are not double insulated (they have a huge chunk of metal on the base) and thus you need to be really careful with earthing and mains cords. This is especially true in a device that needs water to operate.

Since 1.5 metres of good quality mains flex costs hardly anything, and they have have the iron open anyway, there's little reason not to replace the flex. You replace the mains plug at the same time, thus avoiding another common source of risk.

You mention the potential for safety standards to be over-protective and over engineered. I gently agree, some of them do seem a bit much. But then I remember when TV adverts warned people about mains-socket safety - about shoving the wires into the socket by using matches. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwmrBXHFO4)

All electrical appliances need to come with a pre-fitted plug in the UK. Perhaps the wiring coming from mass producing Chinese factories is scary, but so is the wiring I've seen many friends do (skimpy short earth leads and big loops of live leads) with over-tightened or loose screws - I've seen many nasty errors.

It can go a bit too much the other way. A lab full of PhD physicists and engineers designing and building an advanced radar sat and we can't get an extension cord. Instead we get the extension block and a separate plug and wire.

We then need an maintenance 'engineer' who has been on the half day PAT course to come and fit the cable for us.

Well, if the issue is a frayed cord, I agree, substitution, as you said, is cheap.

But of course you could describe a cord as "frayed" but only because it's a little dirty, but the isolation is still in good shape

I like that the PSA ends with "fix things properly", which is sensible, as opposed to "don't fix electronic appliances"

Would you:

* sleep on a heavily soiled mattress made of highly flammable material

* dress your baby in highly flammable second-hand sleepwear

* consume unsanitary meat that has been sitting out in the heat for too long

* feed your family a diet of donated junk food including chocolate, biscuits, chips and frozen pizzas

* give your teenage daughter a second hand hair dryer with a frayed electrical lead exposing live wires

* wear bright fluorescent green clown-like clothing that has been collecting dust in someone's attic for 20 years

* allow your children to play with lead-painted toys that pose a choke/suffocation hazard

What makes it acceptable to purchase a brand new electrical appliance and dispose of the old, worn and unsafe one to the less fortunate? What message does it send?

Charities are forced at great expense to dispose of huge amounts of junk similar to the items listed above. It's not just a case of charities looking out for everyone's safety and well-being. To a large extent it's also a desire not to insult those in need by offering junk that the rest of the world wouldn't want to purchase and use.

The rule of thumb that charities use is: donate items that you would purchase yourself or gift to your friends and family.

I eat junk food, cook food that's past the expiration date as long as it doesn't look/smell fishy, and I wear old clothes. My clothing probably isn't too fashionable either and my mattress isn't spotless.

No, I probably wouldn't dress a baby in “highly flammable second-hand sleepwear” but the critical part of that phrase is “highly flammable”, not “second-hand”. It's ridiculous to suggest that because clothing isn't good-as-new to automatically assume it's a “highly flammable” health hazard.

> What makes it acceptable to purchase a brand new electrical appliance and dispose of the old, worn and unsafe one to the less fortunate? What message does it send?

I use old appliances all the time. Sometimes I do replace them. But just the act of buying something new does not make the old any less usable. What message does it send that those old appliances are good enough for me, but they are below the standards of people who can't afford to buy their own?

You missed the point of my comment — donors contemning the less fortunate by throwing them scraps.

It was not an argument about the minimum technical specifications of donated goods. Nor was it an argument about donated goods needing to be brand new.

This reminds me of the Seinfeld episode when the homeless rise up and reject Elaine's castoff "muffin stumps". This is not food! We are too dignified to eat the stumps left by the customers of your Muffin Top Cafe!

That "Only donate what you would buy" dictum is just as misguided.

I did buy it once. I just don't need it anymore. Maybe someone else can find some use for it.

―The food bank sometimes receives items with virtually no nutritional value -- "candy and crap" says Aason, which are sometimes tossed, and sometimes used as "filler items." It's not stuff that they want, but the junk food is part and parcel with reclamation.[1]

―"There are things that are not even usable. We can't sell it in the store."[2]

―"We want saleable donations only," a Red Cross spokeswoman said[3]

―"What people take out of our store, we would actually wear ourself."[4]

―“Every Monday, we waste time sorting other people’s rubbish instead of preparing clothing and furniture for sale for people in need,” Mrs Barrett said.[5]

―"A good donation is something which is unbroken, complete, clean and sellable."[6]

―“If people are trying to get rid of stuff, use the tip; we only take items that are in good condition and that people can use.”[7]

―Barbara Cunningham, Sails Outlet's volunteer manager, said people dump unusable items at the thrift store two to three times a week. Recently, they found a queen-size mattress tossed outside the door.[8]

―McLellan suggests donors ask themselves, “would I buy this?”[9]

―“They wouldn’t buy it themselves, but they think other people will.”[9]

―“The appliances and that kind of thing, we want them working. We don’t them to come in without a cord, or a broken anything. There are standards — you can’t sell things that aren’t in good order.”[9]

―“These are things that should be taken to the dump,” said Thrift Store Manager Sheila Combs. “Who wants half a pool table — and a broken one to boot?”[10]

―“We couldn’t get rid of the TVs if we slapped a $2 sticker on them,” Combs said Wednesday. “As for these computer things… we don’t even have a computer so we don’t know if they work.”[10]

[1] http://thetyee.ca/News/2012/04/26/Greater-Vancouver-Food-Ban...

[2] http://www.sunjournal.com/node/100881

[3] http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/charities-report-incre...

[4] http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2011/05/11/18135666.html

[5] http://www.portnews.com.au/news/local/news/general/tip-fees-...

[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/sep/06/charities.volu...

[7] http://www.westernadvocate.com.au/news/local/news/general/tr...

[8] http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2011/09/22/1650943/tri-city-th...

[9] http://www.rosslandnews.com/news/121669949.html

[10] http://www.revelstokecurrent.com/2011/05/25/thoughtless-peop...

I feel like you're cherry picking examples to prove a somewhat dubious point.

I would like clarification: Are you advocating we shouldn't donate used items to charity, or that we shouldn't donate unusable items to charity?

If the former, then how do you propose those less fortunate purchase items outside of their budget? I've gone to thrift and goodwill stores; many of the electronics and clothing there are perfectly usable.

If the latter, I completely agree, though am not sure why this is pertinent to the discussion. Broken junk isn't generally sellable except as scrap.

Would you dress your child in last years baby clothes now that the regulations have changed?

We had this panic here - everybody had to throw out their Nalgene water bottles because they contain PBA and it MIGHT leach out AND it might be a health hazard - although we had been using them for 20years

I don't see how the length of use has any bearing on the appropriate response to something (potentially) being a health hazard.

The BPA problem (and hence the Nalgene problem) was discovered because it was interrupting people's research on other things due to BPA leeching out of polycarbonate lab ware, causing differences between cell cultures grown in the plastic and those grown in traditional glass petri dishes when they were supposed to be behaving in an identical manner. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/the-real-story-on-bp... http://suss.stanford.edu/blog/?p=4119 That's Real Science.

If you'd like to dig it out for yourself, the search terms are: Stanford cancer bpa

(Yes, I'm well-aware that studies sponsored by chemical companies find no problem whatsoever. Quelle surprise.)

It's a long way from the cell culture to the human being when it comes to pharmaceutical effects. That is one of the main reasons it costs so much to develop new drugs--most compounds that produce promising effects in vitro are indistinguishable from placebo during human trials (if they even get that far).

The pharmaceutical industry actually tested BPA as an estrogen replacement decades ago, and did not adopt it because BPA did not produce measurable results. Today most of the BPA warnings are based on extrapolations from cell cultures. But based on the history of drug development such extrapolations are rarely valid. This is why U.S. regulatory agencies have not banned BPA; there just hasn't any solid evidence yet that BPA harms humans at the incidental levels of exposure most people experience.

That has always been a funny scene for me: somebody feels guiltily about throwing away there junk, so they "donate" it to charity.

Give me a break, nobody can use that junk!

Pass me that junk, I want the stepper motors.

That sounds a whole lot like everyday life in the "third world".

This attitude has killed many in aviation. The aviation industry is so conservative they've resisted electronic fuel injection for decades. Sticking instead with carburetors which can ice up. and many many people have in fact died from carb icing.

My flight instructor said it best: "At least then we know what killed them". In aviation it seems like its way better to have lots of know risks vs fewer unknown ones. People are desperate for something (or someone) concrete to blame in air mishaps.

But hasn't there been fuel injected engines since the 1960s at least? There are planes like the Beechcraft Musketeer Super III that had a fuel injected Lycoming IO-360 engine for example. I don't know much about motors or aviation to know what the difference would be although.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beechcraft_Musketeer

If the producer would share the design of the iron with the world, the risk would be reduced significantly. The leftover parts could be identified by crowdsourced databases as nonimportant, or as risky to leave out.

> The leftover parts could be identified by crowdsourced databases as nonimportant

In a low-margin business such as home appliances, I'm willing to bet every single part's cost/benefit ratio is carefully examined by experts before being added.

There's always going to be some parts that are just the difference between good and better (or perhaps bad and less bad) rather than working and non-working. For example in an iron that can spray water there could be a piece that breaks up the water into a wider spray rather than a solid squirt.

Good for them.

I'm a firm believer that everything can be repaired cost effectively. You just have to know what you are doing, know when to give up, know how to spot a lemon and start from the right end of the problem. That is the art.

The main trick is to start with the broken item, not an item that you paid full price for and broke...

i.e. I don't mean buying a $1000 item new and when it breaks spend $200 on fixing it.

I mean buying a $100 broken item to start with and spending $200 fixing it, resulting in not spending that extra $700 on the new item in the first place.

Despite the cost of repair in cash and time, the gain usually runs in favour of your own time, satisfaction and knowledge. It also makes you less of a slave to the credit facilities which when you consider interest, results in a lot of time spend earning to pay back.

I will repair anything and everything rather than buy new.

My latest win: Sony Bravia 26EX smart OLED TV. Paid 25GBP as it was completely dead and just out of warranty. 30 mins diagnostics with a Fluke multimeter (which cost me 10GBP that I repaired) pointed to duff PSU. 30 mins on the Tektronix scope (which cost me 30GBP that I repaired) pointed to a problem with a VRM. Replaced VRM in PSU from Farnell order (12GBP incl delivery) - was a bit fiddly as it was an SMD component. Works fine now and the kids have a nice TV.

Also don't buy any old consumer junk. If you can't remove the battery it's not likely to want to be repaired (yes you Apple).

So you're some sort of electrical engineer, then. You need to factor in all the time, energy, and resources it took you to get to this point of self-sufficiency.

For me to fix a dead TV safely, I'd need a few semesters of college or a solid month of shadowing an expert, if I was just interested in TV repair alone. Or just pay you the 700 dollars to do it.

Well yes I admit that but I did the same before I even started the degree and I knew virtually nothing back then...

And I wouldn't charge you $700 to fix it. I tend to do favours like that for cider, swap a few books or mowing the lawn for me.

Not every "transaction" needs a wadge of cash changing hands.

Finding people willing to do it for $50 of goods or casually is fairly difficult by itself.

Not in the UK it's not. Perhaps it's a cultural difference.

Also it's a matter of ability and free time, most people don't have a nack to repair electronics. And if they do, they tend to be busy people.

I tend to find that they work the least as they have highly paid skilled positions where they do a short week.

With tech gear, I think it comes down to finding cheap parts.

I once salvaged two Xerox Star dedicated wordprocessors creating one working unit. They were ancient when I fixed it. Had never seen one before or since. But this person was still doing contract wordprocessing with it (which is so boss).

Counter example...

I dropped a coffee mug onto my Powerbook G4, breaking the motherboard (thru the 'O' key). I kept that brick for a long time, waiting for logic boards to come down in price. At no point was the repair cost lower than the replace (with the latest greatest) cost. In order for this to have worked, I'd have to horde broken and dead Powerbooks.

FWIW, re Apple products, I've repaired my iPod (HDD), iPhone (battery), and laptops (screens, touchpad, DVD). In general Apple products aren't designed to be repaired. Not like a corporate issue Dell or HP. I haven't cracked open my unibody model yet, so don't know if that's improved. But the tear downs of iPad show that it'd be trivial to repair.

Apple decided to not make the battery bay quick swappable to exchange the space and weight cost of a battery bay for more battery. The battery is rechargeable, replacing a battery is a once 2/3 years affair for %90 of users. Replacing an apple laptop battery is pretty easy in practice. The popularity of apple devices also gives us the very well made ifixit guides:

http://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac

The pentalobe screws are pointing to not wanting to be repaired by non apple techs although.

> When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important.

A week later the owner of the iron was electrocuted. Just kidding.

The culture of discard and buy another really comes about from items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high. I personally have this biased opinion that a repaired item is likely to break again. This is almost certainly wrong but it was an idea I was brought up with and is difficult to shake.

I really like what these people doing. I would certainly get more items repaired if it could be done cheaply. A repair shop as a place to gather is cool.

I do think though there is a limit to what is worth repairing. Things like hoovers, irons etc are worth repairing. Technology really doesn't move that fast and paying £20 to have a hoover patched up is far better than buying a new one.

Computers though. If they fail within the warranty you are already covered. If they fail after that then it really depends what the computer cost. If brought a computer for £3-400 you may find the repair cost is 50% of what you paid for it. In this case there is a strong argument that this £200 could go towards a higher spec computer.

I have a laptop which overheats, it isn't worth much but it is - or should be - pretty handy. The cost to investigate the fault would cost me £75. This is before a repair is made. I was told if the problem is what he thought it might be then the cost to repair would be a £100 on top of that. In the end I just brought a new netbook for £300.

I have a little problem with my iMac. The harddrive is faulty. It has some bad sectors or something which causes programs to crash. Do you know tricky it is to replace the harddrive of an iMac? Its ridiculous. To be honest pretty much all Apple devices are terribly inconvenient to repair. Its a shame that one of the worlds biggest companies isn't doing more to prevent consumer waste.

> items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high

I wonder if it's possible to get some of those items to places where the labor costs are low enough, and product prices high enough to make it worthwhile to fix stuff.

> The culture of discard and buy another really comes about from items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high.

Not necessarily. A big part of it is simply our broken economic system. Many, many, many items are made to break.[1]

I hope we start to rent more things as a service instead of paying for them. If we paid a flat fee every month to have our houses lighted, I bet our light bulbs would be durable as heck. Obviously this is not going to be feasible for a while.

But why can't we pay a flat fee to have a usable Mac? Apple stores can be found all around the world. The incentive for Apple would be to use durable hardware and write highly optimized, a little more portable software.

I think gov'ts should force companies to think more about the long term by enforcing a longer minimum warranty for hardware, and force vendors to release security updates for at least 10 years. (All 32-bit Macs will have _zero_ professional use cases once Apple stops patching 10.6. Meanwhile, my mom has owned her XP Word machine for almost a decade.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

> Apple stores can be found all around the world.

What I meant by this is: For $1 light bulbs, transportation and time would have to be incredibly cheap to build a service infrastructure that doesn't waste more resources than it saves.

Taking a Mac for a repair or exchange is convenient in most parts of the world already because that's what people do in their first year (or three) of using it. Adopting a full-scale rental model isn't that far fetched.

Apple stores can be found all around the world.

This is only true if you consider "the world" to mean the US (~2/3 of all Apple stores) and a handful of major cities in each of just 12 other countries [1]. Most of Apple's sales and servicing are done through third-party retailers. There's zero incentive for Apple itself to get into the rental/servicing business. They can just churn out another 100 million iPods, iPhones and MacBooks every year, take their known profit margin and leave all of the low margin after sales to someone else.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Retail_Store

I know there's no incentive for them under the current circumstances, exactly the opposite is true.

You are right about the resellers. I didn't think about the name because I have never bought or repaired anything in an official Apple Store, I am not even sure if I have ever entered one. The authorized stores have been awesome so far! :)

I don't agree that governments should force warranties on anything. You might think it's going to fix it, but it's just going to create an unexpected consequence somewhere else, like a feeble progress of innovation, risk averse manufacturers or probably something like an oligopoly of a handful of manufacturers who have the financial resources to run such long warranties. We wouldn't have an iPhone 4S if Apple was still spending time and money repairing Gen 1 iPods.

It's not a broken economic system. Forcing people to keep things for longer won't make anyone better off.

> We wouldn't have an iPhone 4S if Apple was still spending time and money repairing Gen 1 iPods.

You are right that this makes the transition harder. If there was a rental model, Apple would just replace and recycle Gen 1 iPods.

> It's not a broken economic system.

We can disagree about Apple, but Planned Obsolescence is a fact for some products and I can't see how it is not broken, unless you leave natural resources completely out of the picture. (Then our current model is awesome.)

Building something suitable for repair requires attention to fundamental structure -- design, materials, construction. All of that has costs. I have shoes a decade old that look brand new and will look so three decades hence. I'm wearing a boot of a type that will last forever and could climb Mount Washington or attend a Fortune 500 board meeting. Every time I replace running shoes I curse their irreparability and 6 month life span. But a solid shoe costs three or four times a comparable cheaper shoe and need annual maintenance costing about 10-15% of initial cost.

I have one fountain pen that's twenty-five years old. Pricey, cost about 100x a disposable ballpoint, but it's charged by ink bottles and has now outlasted 500 of those things.

Or t-shirts, you can now get woolen ones that last for years, can be worn several days without washing, and are warmer or cooler as needed. But each is 20x the cost of cotton alternative, and they last best if washed in an expensive detergent and air-dried.

Now I think these are good choices economically, and also socially and even spiritually. But I can see why others might not like those costs. Buying stuff worth of repair is a form of savings. It imposes some new maintenance knowledge and chores. And it forces some long-term decisions, if you want to change the style message of your shoes every year then this is not the route for you.

The culture of repair and retain is already around us and has always been. The question is the proportion of the population willing to pay the cost and acquire the knowledge to access it.

I know what you are saying about knowledge. I want to break out of the terrible world of throw-away razorblades, but it requires some googling (and living in the right country).

One obvious item where I have made the wrong decision twice are bloody Eastpak backpacks. They have a gazillion years of warranty on everything except the zippers. Now both backpacks' zippers are broken and I am shocked that absolutely noone is willing to repair them, even if you'd pay them most of the €90 that the bag originally cost.

The advantage of a service model for computers, cars etc., would be to avoid the huge one-time cost.

> Eastpak

Ohmygod, I accidentally repeated what seems to be an urban myth in Germany. Eastpak DOES repair broken zippers - unlike all the independent repair shops that I have asked.

Grandparent poster, thanks for making me actually google this!

> Every time I replace running shoes I curse their irreparability and 6 month life span.

Psst, there's no scientific basis to claims that certain types of shoes reduce the rate of injury[1]. If it's above freezing and not rocky or thorny, the self-repairing waterproof soles you've had since birth will work just fine.

To drag this slightly back on topic, simply not buying stuff is another route to reducing throw-away objects. How many things do we just buy and use without thinking? I haven't been able to come up with much beyond running shoes myself. A second car for some people? Food items that are easy to make oneself from more basic ingredients?

[1] http://www.time-to-run.com/footwear/mechanisms.htm

> Many, many, many items are made to break.

And many things aren't. These are typically distinguished by the addition of an extra "0" at the end of the price-tag.

But an extra 0 is not a safe indicator of a durable product. Only a service contract or law can guarantee this.

Conversely, the durable Nokia phones that half my friends and family still happily use never had an extra "0" on their price tag. They probably incurred losses to Nokia by being well-crafted.

No, and the absence of the 0 doesn't say anything definitive either. But there's a general tendency that you can get more durable products if you're willing to pay for it.

Nokias came at a premium a decade ago, and in the "dumb-phone" market still do. Not exactly 10x, though. Their dumb-phones division is hugely profitable, it's smart-phones that are weighing them down. By the way, while they are durable, they're not the least bit serviceable.

Agree with hoovers. I nicked a Dyson DC07 out of a skip. It cost me 30GBP in bits and has done me for about 5 years now :)

WRT computers, it depends on the computers and the availability of spares. You're screwed if you have a Mac as the parts are expensive due to scarcity. if you buy Lenovo, you can get every individual part on ebay for very little and they have published FRM and diagnostic manuals which are very good. An overheating T61 will cost me 15GBP including investigation...

(Sitting here on a recycled 2007 Lenovo T61).

I think we need to distinguish between the concept of "repairable" vs. "user repairable." An iMac hard drive is designed to be very repairable; but it's not designed to be easily user-repairable.

The participatory/social aspect of this is pretty interesting beyond repairs. It seems like a plausible low-barrier route to learning something more about how things work, by getting some help from someone who knows how to disassemble and explain the innards of a particular item.

But, seems like it'd work better for older stuff, unfortunately. A lot of newer stuff is just not made to be dis/reassembled or to have parts replaced, so it's much more difficult to do. I tried to repair a toaster recently, and as far as I can tell you can't even open it without some serious hard-to-reverse effort, because unlike older toasters, the housing isn't closed with removable screws, but is stamped/crimped together somehow.

I bought a clothes steamer a while back (Jiffy Steamer), and I was pleasantly surprised that it had a full circuit diagram and component list included in the instruction book. I can take that sucker apart, fix things, and put it back together.

(well, maybe not me, but somebody could).

I am willing to buy more products like that. Where do I find them?

A lot of people I know simply throw away things. It hurts sometimes. However, sometimes it is tough given that technology simply becomes old so fast.

I do think that there are certain electronics that can last along time. In particular, it annoys me when people buy LCD TVs and one year down the road throw it away because it stopped working. The manufactures give limited warranty and suggest to buy another one. I purposely bought a TV with a much longer warranty, three years. It did cost 3x as much as a cheaper one from costco. It does look wonderful and function nearly 4 years after I bought it.

Right, it's a matter of perception and quickly changing "fashion". Many people regard devices of a year old already as very old. So they choose in favor of replacing it, even if it is a minimal problem that is easy (and cheap) to fix.

I do suspect that financial pressure (due to increasing resource prices) will cause this to change around in the near future, and make people hold on to their devices for longer. In some circles, like described in the article, I'm already seeing this happen. Also, many skilled people are out of a job and have time enough to do basic repairs for each other.

Hopefully this will reduce the e-waste problem...

cstross mentioned the extraordinary cost of stuff in a recent post. A pair of jeans was fantastically expensive. People had no option but to repair things.

> Studies of retail pricing indicate that, after correcting for inflation, a good pair of workmans' trousers -- jeans, in other words -- would have cost the equivalent of roughly $400 in 2001 dollars in 1901. A reasonable quality man's suit would have cost the equivalent of $2-3000.

I get annoyed by jumpers[2] that get holes after a year or two, and try to darn or patch them. I'd be really angry if that jumper cost me £400.

See also semi-disposable scandinavian furniture. It sort of looks okay, and it works alright so long as you don't move it. But a bit of solid wood is nicer (and probably better for the environment) than chipboard and veneer, and will last a lot longer, but is a lot more expensive.

I'm not sure society will be comfortable with children that cannot afford to move out (or who will be without almost any possessions) when that same society cannot cope with light bulbs that need a few seconds to warm up.

[1] (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934728)

[2] sweater? A woollen garment with sleeves and not buttons up the front.

I get very annoyed by clothes and shoes that do not last. I'm lucky to get a couple of years out of shirts and shorts. The only thing that seems to last is levis jeans - I've been faithfully buying them for decades and the style goes before the fabric does.

As for disposable furniture - it's frustrating as it deterioates quickly if moved around. I learnt to make my own furniture. Very rewarding but painstakingly slow. But then, if you plan to keep something for 50 years, what's a couple of months to build it? Everything I have built myself (with help from my Dad, who hands down the knowledge and tools) is still in perfect condition. That's because it's made properly in the first place, from quality materials.

I've also taken up my own car maintenance. Cars are big complex devices, and debugging one can be fun if you know where to start. Modern mechanics can't possibly keep up with all the various models and if they can't diagnose something in 30 minutes they won't, and just start replacing parts at random. Armed with a home data port program, an analytical eye and plenty of internet research, it's possible to track down problems yourself for a fraction of the cost.

Re the levis - I always find the front right hand pocket (and especially the "mini pocket" inside) starts fraying after a year or two. Maybe it's because that's where I put my keys

Get a key pouch!.. 10 dollar item that has saved me many many pants ever since I got it

Do you darn your socks? I knew how to do so, maybe 45 years ago.

No, because even fair trade socks are cheap enough for me to not bother. I'm not great at darning, and I'd have uncomfortable socks.

Maybe it's something I should learn.

Mildly off topic, but I buy BDU pants, (Former American military uniform) and they're pretty durable, as well as quite cheap. Several manufacturers make them to mil-spec, and they come in colors other than "camouflage".

The root cause of the "throwaway culture" seems to be the assembly line: Stuff becomes cheap when it can be produced in a series of simple, non-varying steps.

Stuff just doesn't break in a consist way. If every repair were identical, we could fix stuff on an assembly line, and we would no longer constantly run into ridiculous situations where it costs less to buy a whole new widgit than to repair your old one.

Yes and on top of that a lot of products are "designed for assembly" which often means using parts that 'click' together, instead of using screws. This means they're fast to assemble, but almost impossible to take apart again, making repairs overly difficult and costly.

Indeed. There was even a "Design for Manufacturability" elective in my ME undergrad. I don't recall seeing a countervailing "Design for Serviceability".

I think another factor is the inordinate price sensitivity of the aggregate consumer.

It's also important that assembly lines can be offshored, whereas a lot of repairs really need to be done locally by someone who can interact with the consumer to understand the problem. Countries where labor is cheap relative to imports don't have the same throwaway culture, because in those circumstances it's economically viable to repair things rather than replacing them.

I don't think it's the assembly line at all.

I think the cause is the move to doing stuff on PCBs, doing logic in proprietary controllers rather than electro-mechanically with relays, limit switches, etc, and consumer demand for lower prices, which generally leads to lots of molded plastic and other similar cost-cutting methods, rather than use stamped metal or other more expensive processes.

There's a few comments here about old appliances and the cliche that "back then," things were built to last. Barring contrary statistical evidence, sentiments like those can largely be attributed to survivorship bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

i always regret that i didn't take my parents valve radio when the house was cleared and sold over a decade ago. it was bulky, inefficient but worked perfectly. had a lot of fond memories of that radio as a kid. they got it as a wedding present in the early sixties. the valves would eventually need replacing but there are still places selling the parts if you know where to go.

but my favourite bike as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s was a bsa bike that had been built in the early forties. that thing was a tank. it's probably still out there in use every day. completely indestrucible with a little light maintenance.

now however things are not built to last. ignoring electronics or computers which date fast. casettes, vcrs. analog mobiles 8bit, 16bit and now even 32bit computers are edging towards obsolescence for desktop use. a crappy tin opener still needed for those tins still sold without a prestressed ring pull will die in less than a decade. the bullhead tin opener in my parents kitchen seems to have been one of the first types sold in the late 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BullOpener.png

i like to think that growing up with ancient hardware gave me an appreciation for well designed and easy to maintain items. i try to avoid flashy insubstantial items.

It's entirely possible that the extra material required to make items that can be repaired, wastes more material than making objects that are "disposable"

Modern manufactured goods have -huge- volumes (there are a lot of people on this planet) and low failure rates.

If serviceability takes more material, it will probably be more waste, than otherwise.

Another facet to consumption culture is the cost of ownership. After a tipping point, your stuff owns you.

Having stuff and clutter makes me feel anxious.

I've been unloading everything that's not essential. eg, I only used my microwave to heat water for tea. And it was pain in the ass to clean within and around. So it went to the curb, snatched up within minutes.

I think buying new things is great, not only in that you get something new and shiny to play with, but it also has great social benefits, stimulating economic growth, rewarding entrepreneurism and people who create things, and creating jobs.

So I applaud the throwaway culture that loads of people seem to complain about. We need more of it!

If repair is cheaper than replacement, buying a new one is a waste of resources. This smells like the broken window fallacy.

Limiting use of resources should not be humanity's main ambition. Encouraging human creativity - which buying new things does - is more important, in my view, than minimising use of resources. It is only this generation's environmentalist mindset that make such a big issue of resource use, at the cost of almost anything else.

Having said that, I am not saying that people should not repair stuff - people can do what they want. I was just pointing to the benefits of buying new things, which has somehow become a contentious issue nowadays. Hence, the downvotes...

I'm not convinced new things is the best way to encourage creativity: consider buying a new (factory-produced, line) car vs. a cheap repair plus commissioning a nice painting.

(I think scarce vs. abundant resources is too big a topic for a HN comment thread; suffice to say that I disagree, especially with the notion that we "make such a big issue of resource use, at the cost of almost anything else.")

I agree. Buying a new painting would certainly encourage and reward creativity, which is kind of the point I am making.

"Encouraging human creativity - which buying new things does"

Citation needed/please explain.

See great grand parent

That does not talk about creativity, but of creating things. Even if it did, I do not find it a valuable argument, in the current large-scale economy. Making him/her richer may stimulate the creativity of that entrepreneur, but the price of that is a horde of zombie consumers who cannot express his creativity by making/repairing stuff themselves.

In a small-scale economy, say where every village has a blacksmith, a tinker, a tailor, etc. the net effect might be positive, because it allows many people to spend time to become good at expressing their creativity.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window.

If person A throws away his widget which could have been repaired for $2 and buys a new, identical widget for $10 his balance sheet shows $10 of assets (scenario A). If person B repairs his widget, he now has a widget worth $10 plus the $8 cash he saved - his balance sheet shows $18 of assets. Thus, person A destroyed $8 of assets by behaving irrationally/inefficiently.

One may say person A's frenzied purchasing of widgets drives R&D dollars into the development of better widgets. A good counter-argument is that it was more important to develop things other than widgets and that by focusing so much on accelerating widget development scenario A forsook technological progress in more productive areas.

We saw this happen with the construction industry across the developed world siphoning dollars and talent away from other areas that would have produced more long-term benefit.

I take what you say but I don't think that the term "throwaway culture" is to do with throwing away broken things. It is more to do with throwing away old or unfashionable things.

And actually this desire for better, shinier versions of existing things drives creativity, forcing companies to innovate and endlessly create newer and shinier things. I think this process of renewal and innovation is generally a good thing, rewarding creative people.

The downside, you could argue, is in this scenario all the cash goes into shiny new products, rather than some boring but vital product or services. There, I suppose, is where the government comes in.

Broadly I see what you're saying and agree with you. When it is more efficient to produce a new thing on an assembly line than fix it, we actually all benefit. But knowing where that crossover is is tough. You can't use the same rule for everything.

The worst case of throwaway was the 'cash for clunkers' scheme. That saw wholesale destruction of large amounts of serviceable vehicles, with replacements being created on production lines. It was wealth destruction all around and benefited nobody but a couple of car salesmen who got better comission checks that month.

And air quality, and road safety. That kind of scheme is an incentive to lower the externalities of motoring - older cars burn more fuel, produce more pollution, and have less safety features.

And drove the price of used cars through the roof. A car that might have run you $100 twenty years ago ("drive it until it's dead") will now run you a cool kilobuck - granted, the high value of scrap (a Geo Metro is worth about $300 locally at a scrap yard) - if you can find a bargain. Here's a 19 year old car that the owner is asking $2300 for: http://kansascity.craigslist.org/cto/3003688305.html

I'm not in the US. Over here, the idea of a car worth driving costing only 100 euros is ludicrous, and was so even before the local scrappage schemes took plenty of 10-years-or-older cars off the road.

(100 euro cars used to be found; people who don't want to admit their car's worth nothing. They were often bought by teenagers, driven psychotically for a night, and burnt out. These days I assume they're being driven into the ground instead.)

A car that cheap here isn't expected to last long, either, but some of them do. You might have a door wired shut, the windows may not work, the air conditioning, if the car had any to begin with, doesn't work, and it might be loud. But it's a car, and they're near-essential in the USA, thanks to our lousy transportation and sprawl-encouraging policies.

Indeed - and it goes much further than just the prices in regional USA or Europe.

Some guy in Africa will be wondering why his cab fares mysteriously went up, and will have no idea that it was a vote-buying scheme halfway across the world in a country he'll never visit.

Some of the cars scrapped were worth several thousand, and would have lasted for years, both as serviceable vehicles and donor vehicles to keep others on the road. But they were forcibly destroyed and scrapped, taking all their parts with them.

The scheme, in all its incarnations around the world, was stupid and destructive.

Jeremy Clarkson summed it up best with his quip 'we'd be better off giving everyone in the Taliban a decent used car if they promised to stop shooting at us'.

Road safety is a maybe, air quality is a theoretical as the numbers are so low. Contrary to popular belief, most of the cars weren't 70's gas guzzlers but late '90s models with relatively efficient fuel injected engines.

The energy used to create and deliver the new cars far exceeds the energy used to continue using the old ones.

There is no defending this insane scheme unless you want to get into partisan politics and go for the symbolism of it.

Knock yourself out; I'm not in the US, I don't even know which side proposed it. I was just pointing out some benefits other than increased commissions, ones that could be observed from the scrappage scheme we had a few years ago.

I'd love someone to make a tank of a laser printer. Like just clone an HP LaserJet 6 (the pinnacle). Make the internals open source, the paper trays modular, and boom.

Most printers are sold on price. But I think a small niche player selling durable printers with low consumable costs could do well.

I'm pissed when things brake. But: Repairing things is an opportunity to save your own money. And to save your own planet. And possibly explore and learn something new, or at least harvest some spare parts. And just enjoy the fun of disassembling stuff.

Get these guys a Rep-Rap and a connection to thingverse...

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