What Restoring a 30-Year-Old Nintendo Taught Me About Right to Repair | Hacker News Reader

What Restoring a 30-Year-Old Nintendo Taught Me About Right to Repair

debugger.medium.com

31 pointsetrvic30 comments

>Create an account to read the full story.

It looked interesting. Too bad.

The one thing no-one on the internet needs in 2024 is to have to create more accounts in order to access basic functionality.

Maybe because everyone and their mum is able to solder non smd components. Let's have him re-ball a modern GPU and we can talk again. It's okay that the process of fixing something is more complex than 30 years ago. The problem is that you can't get the parts you need from the manufacturer.

Laptops with soldered CPUs require replacing the entire mainboard when the CPU dies, while older socketed CPUs can be replaced for the cost of a new processor (as little as $10 on eBay for lower-spec CPU models, but prices rise exponentially as you get to higher-tier SKUs with more cores or clocks).

That's just plain wrong socketed mobile CPUs are nearly as expensive as the motherboards with cpu. Even for older thinkpads like the t430 the CPUs are more expensive than just getting a "new" t430. Besides the price motherboards die more often than CPUs that's why you see horrendous prices on eBay for decent old gen motherboards. It's a problem in theory that gets brought up all the time and just isn't true in reality.

I don't want socketed CPUs I want all the innovation and advantage of an M3. I just want to get a chip and either replace it myself or get it done for 50-100$ in a repair shop.

Exactly. The problem isn't the advancement of technology. It's the rampant gatekeeping of manufacturers and both politicians as well as some of the user base defending it.

I can buy a decent desktop i5-3570K on eBay for $10, or two lower-tier laptop i5-3320M for $10 (my laptop came with a 3230M which ruins 100 MHz slower). I'm finding Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs for $12-24 (higher-tier CPUs may cost more, not sure what you're looking for).

And for more than 10 generations old processors that's a reasonable price.

Aren't motherboards substantially more expensive than CPUs? I tried looking for a replacement Haswell Dell Inspiron 15 3542 motherboard (almost as old) for someone with a broken laptop, and saw results in the range of $90.

Dude if you want hardware that as ancient you do you.

Medium says "Create an account to read the full story." The full article does not load in Scribe either.

It loads on archive.ph (see the link in the aunt comment)

Video: https://youtu.be/IwMgvRuqvBA

Unpaywalled : https://archive.ph/20201026221350/https://debugger.medium.co...

much appreciated.

Right to repair is great. Does it make sense ecologically to repair that NES with a lot of energy, chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide etc? I honestly don't know and guess everyone must decide for themselves.

The point was that it is possible to do so, and that this is much less true with more recent tech. This is a one time project which makes a point and not a call for everyone to go around restoring very old consoles.

As said, I no longer read any medium article. I understand some in-depth article you may need. But even economists can provide some free article per month. Not even that.

The irony of putting something about a right-to-repair story behind a sign-in-to-read-this paywall.

Taught them nothing about ability to read articles it seems! I feel like there is some irony to be had there... I can't even click on the video without signing up to medium!

Why do people use medium? It seems utterly pointless to write this content then put it somewhere that actively goes out of its way to make sure people can't read it?

This bit becomes particularly ironic:

But the point is that without the available knowledge online and access to components needed to repair it, it would have remained a dead relic of decades past.

It look like he also cites using a lot of free information on the internet in order to perform the restoration. But this opinion piece without any technical knowledge sharing ought to be paywalled, it seems.

> The author made this story available to Medium members only.

Looks like it was the author's decision. +1 on the irony.

Is it ironic, though? "Right to repair" has to do with freedom, sure, but not free-as-in-beer. It doesn't mean "it costs me no money to repair things". It means "I am not prevented from repairing things". Selling stuff - including selling writing - is not incompatible with the right to repair.

> Selling stuff - including selling writing - is not incompatible with the right to repair.

apple also sells kits to repair (and components). Except they do so with high expense, such that they make the same or higher margins on those components than a new buy.

No, i don't believe that information should be gated. The right to repair requires free information, open standards, and commodity components.

True that. We are just incredibly spoiled on that part of freedom.

Fuck Medium.

There is a site called freedium that removes the paywall on Medium articles, although i am not sure it’s 100% safe

Dear fellow dev. please choose other platform rather than medium ! Lock here, login there. Pfft.

Paywall. No, thanks

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