The Circular Electronics Design Guide | Hacker News Reader

The Circular Electronics Design Guide

ifixit.com

Is this a good goal? The main problem with phones is not repairability. It's that they need repair. They should not break, short of being run over by a truck. And maybe not even then.[1]

Once solid state batteries start working, battery life should exceed phone life. At that point, phones should be filled with an inert gas during manufacturing, hermetically sealed, have no connectors, and charge inductively. At least 95% should make it to 10 years.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7EBJdPi1eE

Displays break all the time

To be fair they've gotten way better at not breaking. I remember when dropping your phone seemed to be a coin flip of whether you'd crack the screen. I've dropped my phone dozens of times (I'm a fidgeter) with no ill results save for a couple of shallow scratches.

I pretty much break the display of my phone or the display's connector breaks. There's now a yellow vertical line on my phone. Maybe I should replace it whole before the display connector went kaput.

Replacing just the display means I have issue with fingerprint scanner to work properly and it was an annoying software issue I couldn't be bothered to resolve, so I prefer whole replacement even though it's more wasteful and expensive.

No connector? USB-C connections are pretty useful and are not at the mercy of unreliable wifi connection and wonky inductive charging or lack of inductive charging infrastructure.

Do I want my phone to not break and still work even if it's dropped into a pool of water? Ideally, yes. But what is the tradeoff? Those kind of phones in the youtube video looked like specialist phone for construction workers.

??? Lots of phones that are available now and are ingress protected well enough that getting dropped in the pool is a non-issue. Didn't Samsung or Sony have an ad years ago using their flagship phone underwater as a camera?

It's one thing to do it once in fresh water as a stunt, another to put a phone trough hell on a regular basis. Personally, I think salty environments are really tough to protect against, ions have a tendency to creep in along any metal.

I wish the induction charging was standardised as some kind of physical connector instead of just by placing the phone on top of something. Maybe using concentrated light to charge instead. :)

Salt water is a whole different ball game. I have a lot of respect for the engineering that goes into marine environments.

No it's a terrible deal for the end users which is why manufacturers are pushing hard as are iFixit. Manufacturers want to ship a 1 year warranty on stuff and then kick it over the fence to the end user to fix. iFixit etc want to maintain a repair business and culture.

The majority of goods on the market have zero support and are considered disposable. That needs to end. Better consumer protection law and mandatory warranties on devices should be the goal. Repair should be end of life extension only and routine maintenance (consumables like batteries).

Repair should be an exceptional situation on consumer electronics, not normalised!

And it should apply to crap like kids toys as well.

Direct links to the actual publications:

- Circular Electronics Design Guide: https://cep2030.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/CEP_Circular_...

- Circular Electronics Design Guide Blueprint: https://cep2030.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/CEP_Circular_...

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