My quest to fix a broken iPad
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This statement may have some applicability here. If you find it fun and interesting to fix your own gadgets, then by all means, go for it. But go into it with the understanding that the value of the time spent on such DIY repairs will likely far exceed any financial savings.
jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Really? Who said that if you have other stuff to do with your live you are a cynic?
If you just use a Win/Apple box and get done with it, instead of getting "social interaction in Linux groups, general knowledge of how OSes work, etc", and go and DO stuff with your computer -- that implies you know the value of nothing?
How about the stuff you actually want to do with the computer (practice law or medicine, write books, create graphics, work for an NGO, control equipment for your lab, etc etc) are more valuable to you that what you get out of mingling with the Linux crowd?
How do you do that? Someone volunteered me to be support for my entire family, and I can assure you that things that take seconds in linux take hours/days in windows land if not worse, and there'a a huge number of problems in windows land that simply don't exist in linux land.
The primary troubleshooting / repair method seems to be the reinstall OS and all drivers and software, some of which randomly disappears from the internet since last reinstall. Viruses and spyware everywhere, not ready for the enterprise or anything financial related. No software repos. I don't use windows personally other than one gaming partition, but as a family support guy I assure you its a nightmare out there in windows land.
OSX not so bad, at least on a desktop. Its competitive with linux. Takes a lot of domain specific knowledge to know when a job is cheaper on OSX or linux.
Most people don't do law, medicine, write books, graphics art, work for NGO, or control equipment in a lab. Almost no one does any of that stuff. For most people you install Debian and Chrome and leave them alone. They'll probably need working flash player. That's about it.
Well, hundrends of millions of people can and do use Windows just fine, even for power-user, advanced stuff, and the same people would be totally lost in front of Linux. Heck, my dad uses Windows and Office, and he got his first computer when he was 50+, and he haven't even went to college. And he learned how to browse, send email, use Excel, take images with Norton Ghost, use torrent (!), pirate some niche software he wanted etc, re-install windows, etc.
The way Windows are designed most problems can be solved by reinstalling, using some GUI app etc. For us it might sound funny, but reinstalling the OS as troubleshooting is quite a fast process, and not as hair tearing as delving into the console and understanding intricasies of package managers, third party drivers and the like in Linux.
Plus drivers are always available, since it's the number one OS and manufacturers oblige.
>Most people don't do law, medicine, write books, graphics art, work for NGO, or control equipment in a lab. Almost no one does any of that stuff.
Actually millions of people do that stuff every day. Lawyers and doctors ARE millions of people. Scientists ARE millions of people. People working at an NGO are millions of people.
Heck, billions of people work with Office and its ilk of apps for their white collar job.
And I've never met a user who just surfs the internet. Perhaps some too old people. Sooner or later, all the new users I've seen want to write a document, download movies, view and edit their compact camera photos, burn a DVD, burn their CD collection, listen to music, etc etc.
I myself got into soldering because my laptop broke down. 10 years ago replacement would cost my monthly salary and I had nothing to loose. I practiced a bit on old TVs and after two days I soldered laptop motherboard.
Plus some repairs are really trivial. For example several problems can be 'fixed' by baking electronics in oven. Heat will re-solder some connections and electronics could work for another year or two.
It's something like $120 for the screen and replacement, or like $40 for the parts themselves. I value my time at greater than $20/hour, so I would pay to have this fixed every time.
Used IPad 2 sells for over £200 on ebay.co.uk, new device would cost even more. Replacement screen from china costs $60 including shipping. Also Apple is really bad example since its devices are not designed for repairs.
Even $20/hour would be decent pay for many people.
In this case you would get £200 ($330) - $60 / 4 hours = $67 / hour . This is tax free, with tax you are around $100/hour salary.
Edit: added last paragraph calculations
Anyway the relevance is I've been rolling this around in my head for awhile WRT a local disabled veterans group. The prison industrial complex has completely captured the "recycle old desktop PCs" market but I think the disabled veteran group could enter and take over the phone/tablet glass replacement market. One UK journalist took three hours, and cultural similarity between US and UK would imply as a journalist she probably never held a screwdriver before in her life. In comparison two disabled veterans working as a team, each with an arm shot off (or cognitive brain damage, or in wheelchairs, or PTSD anger issues, or whatever) might take an entire 8 hour day and still might not succeed, but if the primary purpose is therapeutic giving a feeling of usefulness, and social interaction, and maybe some manual dexterity, who cares?
I've little contact with the disabled veterans group other than being a non-disabled ex-dotmil guy who makes donations once in a while. There's nothing "disabled veteran" about this idea, so someone else in another area could likely apply this idea to any disabled services organization. Anyone want to "steal" this idea does it with my blessing. No idea how to turn this into a startup other then existing competitors, but if you can do it, best of luck.
This is a powerful tool :)
I remember a post here some time ago claiming that startup CEOs should value their time at $1000/hr, to force themselves to always make best use of their time. I can see how that works in context, but it doesn't mean said CEO shouldn't take a couple of hours off to watch a movie, thinking its true cost is $2000+. That way lies madness.
We can't all work all the time. It's fine to burn a few hours learning something new and just having fun, and it sounds like that's exactly what this woman did.
I didn't mean to imply that recreation or personal fulfillment should be viewed as a cost center. If that were the case, I would owe myself millions of dollars :).
(I guess this is something like the marginal value of the DIY repair could easily be higher than the marginal value of learning something else or seeking and doing work)
Also, it was 200 pounds, $330 USD.
I assume in this case she also learned a lot from the process, which she will value also.
Most people who can directly translate time into money - those for whom four hours of time spent repairing a device equates to 4 hours * x/hour are in a position where they cannot add four hours to their workweek. They do not set their own hours or are at the ceiling of paid hours or cannot acquire additional paying work.
On the other hand, the argument completely ignores the time costs normally associated with acquiring a new piece of electronics. These include the time spent researching hardware, comparison shopping, physical acquisition, learning the features of the new device [since it is unlikely to be identical to the old] and then configuring the device to meet one's expectations.
Consider the author's economic options:
- purchase a used older iPad similar to the damaged one.
- replace it as a tablet and compare Windows, Android,
and iOS products.
- replace it with another Apple product without
considering other products.
Even in the third case, there's still potential for enormous time spent comparing various models and optional configuration and reading reviews to decide on the exact specification, then potentially searching for the best price.
What really makes the third choice attractive is not the time savings but the simplicity of the decision tree. Deciding on another iPad immediately carries less mental overhead. This is exactly the same advantage as repair - a person can make a direct decision as soon as the device breaks.
The advantage of repair is that it scales. Buying a soldering iron potentially reduces the cost of future repairs. Buying a replacement device stands no chance of reducing the cost of future replacement devices. Consumer oriented behaviour produces nothing but more consumer oriented behaviour. In that sense it is economically irrational.
It used to be a lot easier than is not, unfortunately. Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair.
The worst repair I ever completed, was replacing the LVDS cable and hinge in a first gen MacBook Air. 60 something screws, and complete disassembly and reassembly. I got it right the first time, through sheer dumb luck rather than skill I believe.
At this point, I don't bother trying to repair anything other than my iMac, and even that is difficult. It's become too difficult, time consuming, and risky for me to try, and I can only see it getting worse.
How do we repair that?
If it hurts the manufacturers' bottom line, so be it. They've had a free ride for years.
Also I think that companies should be forced to issue internal service manuals for all out of warranty products.
I think it's more than just a side-effect. For example, consider the iPhone's non-user-replaceable battery; one of the most commonly heard reasons for it is that it makes for a thinner device and a bigger battery. But an interesting device I saw recently made me question that; the Jiayu G5. It's an Android phone that looks almost exactly like the iPhone (only very slightly larger), with a metal casing and a removable battery plus dual SIM and expandable storage. It's only 0.25mm thicker but its battery has 33% more capacity. If a relatively small Chinese company can come up with something that has iPhone aesthetics but also retains a lot of the repairability, why can't Apple?
Having been on the other side of product design, it's never as simple as "they should have done that." There's always a good reason.
I don't even do this for a living being but it's extra cash and quite fun.
The big thing that always pops up if you look at the above is: broken glass, overheating and clogged cooling systems (dust) and soldered on disposable components.
All this was fine until someone brought me an iPad 2 as well with a smashed screen. Was a total bastard to get inside, just like it's suggested in the article. Took me 20 minutes but I'm less forgiving and know how the materials all feel and how durable they are.
Absolutely terrible that Apple are guilty for making this situation even worse with their shoddy design. It's annoying because I've got a 2011 MBP I'm using as a workstation at the moment and I'm wary about upgrading it to an rMBP when it's no longer supported and not repairable as there's nothing I can do to an rMBP apart from take it back to the Apple Store and get a replacement (or sue them for our statutory 6-year fit for purpose in the UK).
Total disaster on the horizon. Give me a thick, repairable laptop over some thing disposable trinket.
My only choice is to go and buy a Delll or a Mac Mini next time.
That's what their mission is: Sell as much as possible. (That's the very "clever" idea our economic system is built on.)
You're not supposed to keep your stuff for a long time, you're supposed to buy a new one every 1 or 2 years.
(The fact that the First World is burning trough several planet Earths on its own (resource-wise) is not of the concern of business leaders of our generation/time, they won't be here anymore when brown stuff really hits the fan.)
Not many of us can afford to put down £65/month on a device that lasts a couple of years though. If it lasts 4 years, that's £33/month. Much better.
Edit: I expect 5 years daily 8 hour usage from any kit I buy apart from phones and I expect 3 years of the same there.
For a company with such a mission they surely failed miserably. Given the high lifespan of most of their computers, and the undisputably high resale value you get for them even after 3-4 years.
Or, perhaps their mission is: make our high-end industrial designs smaller, lighter and quiter even if it means they are less serviseable, because computers should be commodities who just use, not something for tinkerers.
When compared to the situation in OS design, GUI design, API design, language design, DRM problems, patent problems, license problems, it really shows "what works" or what is considered a success.
Its a sad situation.
And 3-4 years is if you are lucky. Macs are pretty reliable but when they do go wrong, it's always expensive and catastrophic.
A good friend of mine worked in an Apple Store in London and they had a scary high number of machines with logic board failures in 2012. That never gets recorded on the stats because the machines disappear and come back magically working with no explanation as to what was wrong.
They are pretty good at replacements though. I've had several pairs of earbuds replaced for nothing because they've died.
Well, if it's under 3 years, then you're covered under warranty, no?
>A good friend of mine worked in an Apple Store in London and they had a scary high number of machines with logic board failures in 2012. That never gets recorded on the stats because the machines disappear and come back magically working with no explanation as to what was wrong.
Well, there's not much of an explanation I guess. It just happens that certain productions runs are faulty. Could be a misaligned machine at the factory, some part outsourced that had lower tolerance than expected, etc.
These things happens when you have runs of several million exact same machines outsourced to several factories. So a faulty run of some thousands could have been dropped in London. What could Apple do? Post a bulletin that this sub-component of the logic board is faulty and have users attempt fix it? The logical thing to do was to replace the whole thing and perhaps sell the old machines as refurbished models.
(There was a similar problem with logic boards on G3 iBooks, back around 2003 or so. And there are always problems with a percentage of any production run, sometimes with hard disks, displays, GPUs, whatever. No way to avoid it, nothing is perfect. They cant even test most of those beforehand, because some are issues that develop after some use, and people are always demanding faster delivery and complaint of stores not stocking new models fast enough).
That happens often to laptops thet get thrown around while they're on. Did you suggest an SSD upgrade?
Usually results in repeat customers when they see the difference :)
I'd be willing to bet you can find them in U.S. Chinatowns along with all the unlocked gray-import phone sellers.
The other reason is of course planned obsolescence[0].
Given the increased reliability and processing power of modern electronic components, manufacturers don't want consumers repairing & upgrading devices by themselves. How else will they continue to sell a "faster, thinner, sexier" 2.0 device every 12 months to the same consumer?
[0] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/planned-obsolesce...
(Which means people are demanding some of the compromises)
Except, this isn't true, in my experience. At least not with Apple iOS devices. Quite the opposite.
Apple is starting to offer repair services for their iOS line, particularly phones, and their devices haven't gotten harder to open up and repair, they've gotten easier.
The iPad 2 is notoriously one of the hardest, repairable iOS devices to dig into. The iPad iterations after the iPad 2 are much, much easier.
The iPhone 5 take just a few minutes to replace the screen.
Source: I worked for one of the largest iOS device repair companies.
iPhone 5s: 6/10 iPhone 5: 7/10
iPad Air: 2/10 iPad 4: 2/10
Based on these I can't see how Apple's devices are getting easier to open or repair?
I left the company as repairs for the 5s and newer iPads were just becoming more popular.
It's possible that they were getting better up to the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 and have started to decline since. Repairing devices and offering repairs for screen replacements and such, in-store, is fairly new for Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if they were on their way towards making repairs easier but realized they were making it a bit too easy and went back on it.
The 5 was so easy to open up and repair compared to the 4s and the 3 compared to the 2 was night and day.
So, maybe it was just a temporary blip on the radar and there wasn't a trend at all. Or, there was a trend and it was intentionally reversed. But it at least seemed to be the direction things were headed.
Either way: I updated my original comment to include "in my experience" if they really have gotten worse again.
I prefer recycled laptops now: an X series Duo Core 2 thinkpad (X61(s), X200(s)) can be had for something like £120 in the UK. You can swap the hard drive by undoing a single screw, memory accessible, battery changable (7800mAH battery gives me 8 hours on the X61s).
Good to see these small companies springing up. In Birmingham, its the geezer down the market replacing the glass on phones so far.
This is partly due to the fact that some vintage calculators cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when they were introduced. I was repairing a scientific calculator from the 70s yesterday, and literally every component could be repaired. You could actually order parts (new keys, new display, new faceplate, etc.) from the company. This is in contrast to a calculator of the mid 80s which usually had four screws but was difficult to repair or a calculator of the 90s and later that was usually a sealed unit (with everything on one chip.)
It seems the same thing is happening to computers, with a timescale delayed 20 years.