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Comment by expedition32 | Hacker News Reader

I live in a rich European country. This is not Shenzhen. The, very scarce, technically inclined people who know how to repair a vacuum cleaner or electronic toothbrush can get a real job with an hourly rate that makes repairs economically unfeasible.

Repair cafes are nice hobby projects for pensionados but it is not going to move the needle.

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Not everything has to be a business. Our local library has "repair café Sundays", and most of the people involved in it are volunteers. There are some "pensionados" among them (and they are cherished for their institutional knowledge), but they are definitely not the majority. There is a strong community of interested tech nerds that like to help each other out and learn how to fix things themselves, and who also want to learn from the previous generation.

The manufacturer/seller already employs people who deal with this, and it's not expensive. Getting my washing machine fixed for 10€ parts + labor instead of 300€ parts + labor sounds mighty nice to me.

> Manufacturers must also provide [...] access to spare parts at a reasonable price.

This is the important part. Stupid shit like 0.3€ soldering buttons to 200€ motherboards so the repair is expensive has got to go.

> Stupid shit like 0.3€ soldering buttons to 200€ motherboards so the repair is expensive has got to go

Hopefully data collection that supports device-specific repair cost breakdowns and tracking is part of this legislation.

Currently, manufacturers optimize for manufacturing -- it's cheaper to assemble with a $200 all-in-one board than a discrete button.

If it were more expensive to use an all-in-one board (say, because they were on the hook for repairs and/or buyers had a place to easily compare repair costs...) then they'd do otherwise.

Price/cost obfuscation is the root of a lot of inefficiencies.

> Stupid shit like 0.3€ soldering buttons to 200€ motherboards

I won't call soldering anything on a 20-layers pcb "stupid shit".

I don't know of any PC motherboard to be 20-layers. "Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Dark Hero" is like 650 euro and it's "merely" 8 layers. Edit: "MSI MEG X870E Godlike" is 1200 euro or so and 10 layers.

EU is huge and hourly rates are different in many countries.

Nevertheless, the point is not the electronic toothbrush, but rather the "BIG" stuff that costs much and it's creating a lot of garbage.

A 1200 euro TV that breaks after 5 years - are you willing to buy a new one just because?

Once you have that infrastructure in place, eventually also the "smaller" things will be cheaper to replace.

TV, unfortunately, are the worst offenders in most cases as they cannot be reliably opened.

Things that are on the not hard scale to fix - cleaning robots, inkjet printers (with fill-in ink), laptops (incl. board repairs as long as they are not a BGA), desktop pc, mowing robots, mowers (all 2 and 4 stroke variants), most battery tools (drills, sanders, saws, etc.). Overall stuff that can opened reliably, even if that requires specialized tools like bearing pullers or impact wrenches.

Things that are hard - anything that uses glue as the prime assembly fastening choice, e.g. TVs and monitors (or just plastic clips). Cheap plastics (ABS) bodies are annoying as well. Fridges, no way to refill or fix the compressor. Serialized components that need specialized tools/software after being replaced.

In that regard that would be my complaint - ease of disassembly and clearly marked parts, exploded views, schematics. Spare parts. Personally, I'd spend half a night to repair 30-40euro device w/o any documentation, just b/c I can -- but that shall not be the norm.

1200 euro TVs don't really break after 5 years anymore, not in any meaningful numbers.

I've played with entrepreneurship most of my life - I know how "a solution looking for a problem" looks like. Any VC would laugh them out of the room.

Edit: don't get me wrong - there is a part of this that is almost free and only requires a bit of enforcement. That part is good, and it's exactly what governments should deal with. But anything that imposes direct or indirect costs should go through serious cost/benefit analysis.

You underestimate my willingness to 'under sell' my free time by spending it to fix something I own.

How does that generalise across the population?

Hard to tell, but if you were to replace anything when doing so would be cheaper I think people would be throwing away a lot more.

If you want an economic argument there's no way to sell my free time for anywhere near the market rate on such a short notice.

Sorry, I can't quite parse either of those sentences. Are you able to say them another way, or a simpler way?

I can spend an hour repairing my bicycle tire and get it working for a few years or I can buy several new tires by working more hours.

If everyone did that we would need a lot more bicycle tires.

Edit: If you want a more extreme example. I might be able to afford more socks by doing paid work than I can wash in the same amount of time.

Have you seen the size of the DIY market across Europe?

For "fix" substitute "assemble": there's the Ikea model.

I've overheard a guy last week in town saying they brought their iPhone to a repair shop and they've done the repair at fraction of the cost they expected. They were excited and told their friends.

Washing machine repairmen never ceased to exist.

My robot vacuum cleaner broke. The lidar sensor is broken. The manufactures asked me to send it to their repair center but the whole thing, including the dock. This is a major pain to do so. I would much rather receive a new lidar sensor with some instructions on how to repair it myself.

When did it become socially acceptable to throw things out rather than repair them ? When did it become economically rational ?

Helsinki (for one) needs some real repair cafés.

The moment manufacturers started making products that didn’t last long enough, with replacement parts expensive enough, and raising hourly rates for labour which made it cheaper to buy a new product rather than repair the old one. Also the new product tended to be more efficient with electricity and water or marketed as such.

My experience in the US is that you can take a broken item to a reputable shop and the guy will spend a minute or two messing with it and then he'll give you an on-the-spot estimate of repairability and price.

In Finland, the standard line is that they'll take your gizmo and put it in the repair queue - and then just to have someone in the back room so much as breathe on it - it's gonna cost ya 50, 80, a hundred.

As someone quipped to me, there's a reason the environmental movement used an priority ordered list.

   reduce, reuse, recycle

Generally, and for small appliances and electronics especially, you can optimize for cost or repairability. Consumers largely do not consider repairability when purchasing but they hugely consider cost. It's easy to see why the market is disincentivized to create repairable goods.

It's because that's what we collectively told them to do.

That's because even people in industry have a hard time determining total lifetime cost and salesmen are paid commission based on shifting the product rather than supporting the customer over the lifetime of the product. This is a problem even in heavy electrical engineering companies where products can be expected to be used for fifty years or more and still be repairable at that age.

Sometimes it makes sense but often we should as a society sacrifice a little upfront convenience and price in service of reducing total lifetime cost. Very often, perhaps always, this will only happen if governments step in and set enforceable targets.

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