14 ms·

> Cars also followed this pattern, come to think of it. I remember my dad complaining all through my youth about how the more modern that cars get, the less se

• stcredzero 11y ago
  Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. Not necessarily. Modern airliners are highly reliable, so long as you follow the maintenance schedule. Disposable equipment is a feature of markets driving costs down. It's a sign of commoditization and convenience+short-term reliability winning over long term reliability.
  • selectodude 11y ago
    Modern airliners are highly redundant. Stuff breaks on them constantly though.
    • stcredzero 11y ago
      They're operating closer to engineering limits than your smartphone is, I'd wager.
      • iSnow 11y ago
        Considering structural widths in modern CPU's, I'd disagree. But CPU's are built by the billions and planes by the thousands, so the amount of engineering that can go into a CPU is insane.
• vecinu 11y ago
  > Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. Not quite. The whole purpose of maintenance is to increase the longevity of a product by making small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear. Everything lasts longer if you maintain it. A good knife, a high performance vehicle, a good pair of shoes, a couch, etc ... I don't know of any product that is "as good as new" after years of use. Watches, even spoons, aren't as shiny as they were when you bought them for the first time. Maintenance is the work of the caring.
  • codehalo 11y ago
    I think his point is that the goal is to make equipment that minimizes having to make "small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear".
    • hueving 11y ago
      That's not how it works though. Manufacturers realized they want to force you to buy again so they just made it unmaintainable with the same lifespan. iPhones are unmaintainable and they still become useless after 5 years or so.
      • schrodinger 11y ago
        5 years is a long time for a smart phone! And remember that a longer lifespan costs more money. I doubt many customers (myself included) would be willing to pay more money for an iPhone for it to last more than 5 years.
  • rubber_duck 11y ago
    >Maintenance is the work of the caring Agreed - which is why building mass market convinience stuff that require it is a bad idea - I have limited hours in a day - I do not want to spend any of them doing chores such as maintenence - I'd rather just buy a new working thing every x years and not care. Paying someone else to do the maintenence is nice in theory but finding someone reliable who won't ripp you off is too much hassle.
• dhd415 11y ago
  This is absolutely not true of equipment with moving parts. It must either be maintained or treated as disposable. One of the hallmarks of commercial-grade equipment is its ease of maintenance and repair. You might not find it fun, but professionals who rely on that equipment for their livelihood understand the long-term TCO for well-maintained commercial-grade equipment vs. disposable consumer-grade equipment. Whether that applies to mobile phones with their general lack of moving parts is an entirely different question.
  • lake99 11y ago
    > It must either be maintained or treated as disposable. While I agree with this, I understand where Swizec's comment is coming from. I have a few business acquaintances who have been automotive engineers for 30-40 years now. They have an excellent idea of how their cars work. And yet, they rue that earlier, they could open any broken car and get it to run. Now, there's not much they can do to fix their own cars. Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic. The older generation has learnt that they can't fix their cars. The newer generation, unsurprisingly, doesn't even want to make the effort. The older generation could fill up their oil, change their filters, etc. Now, most people just get their mysterious machine serviced every few months. "I don't want to maintain my car" seems like a natural consequence of how cars work now.
    • jethro_tell 11y ago
      Right but a service interval now is about the same as an engine life from an older car.
    • harshreality 11y ago
      > Pretty much all they can do when they see a blinking light is take the car to a mechanic. Why? Don't they have OBD-2 readers?
      • lake99 11y ago
        Don't know. The last I met them was about 10 years ago.
• Roritharr 11y ago
  >Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. I want to see a two hour debate on that by top engineers from several industries because that seems to be one of the big questions of our time in regards to product development.
  • Grishnakh 11y ago
    If you find an engineer willing to argue in favor of non-maintainable equipment, he's not a true engineer, but some failed engineer who's moved over to management and is more interested in profitability than in users having a quality product that allows them to keep their TCO low by being able to maintain it themselves (or by an independent professional) and keep it for a long time instead of throwing it away early. There is, quite simply, NO good argument in favor of non-maintainable equipment, unless your goal is to increase profits. This doesn't mean we should go back to the days of carburetors and points; modern cars are extremely reliable and actually highly maintainable if you have the right equipment, but there's no reason they can't make the computer-based service tools publicly available so that anyone can service them themselves. They keep that software and those interfaces secret to increase profits.
    • xoa 11y ago
      >There is, quite simply, NO good argument in favor of non-maintainable equipment, unless your goal is to increase profits. As a universal assertion, particularly in the realm of products intended for personal mobile use by the general population, this absolutely and utterly wrong. The fundamental core issue is that many forms of maintainability require dead matter, simple as that. Take removable vs non-removable batteries, perhaps the most classic example in portable electronics: having a removable battery requires user safe contacts that can handle repeated mechanical strain, the battery itself to have its own protective case, the device case to have a way to interface the battery and the resulting structural support and tradeoffs therein, the dimensions and shape of the battery are significantly constrained, etc. All of this boils down to significant additional stuff that isn't battery, or performing any other useful role for that matter, but rather is simply scaffolding/support infrastructure. In other words, dead matter. There is no free lunch. A removable battery fundamentally can never match the size/weight/performance matrix of a non-removable one, full stop. That's the tradeoff for being able to swap it. In this specific example there are additional potential tradeoffs too for some use-cases (it's significantly easier to have a higher degree of harsh environmental tolerance with a fully sealed system for instance). Now, yes, there is absolutely room for reasonable disagreement about what side of the tradeoff is correct for any given application or use-case. There are times where the utility of maintainability or modularity is well worth a reduction in default performance. But there are also many cases where a higher percentage of active matter in a product is a legitimate feature to the majority of its intended users. The "No True Scotsman" fallacy you use to start your argument should have been a flag and caused you to rethink the rest of it.
• smadge 11y ago
  An item that can't be maintained is an dark pattern. It is a sign of planned obsolescence. It is goes against the interests of the user. Items should be designed to have long lifetimes. This only doesn't happen because capitalism incentives manufacturers to sell consumers a new product as often as possible. There is no reason an item can't be user friendly, reliable, and maintainable.
  • tunap 11y ago
    By creating reliance(for service), a future revenue stream is ensured(for manu or 'authorized' provider). Over-engineered products with features of spurious benefit only adds to the reliance. That is The Service Economy, in a nutshell. But don't worry, we can always pay more!
  • mreiland 11y ago
    I bought my Corolla off the lot in 2004. It currently has 120k miles on it and I've never had a major problem with it. OTOH, I always maintain it by taking it into the shop and having them do what they do. The only issue I'm having now is the A/C would sometimes go out last summer, but I'll be getting that looked at as we get into the summer months. I expect this vehicle to be running just as well at 240k miles. I've already got over 10 years in it and I don't expect another 10 years to be outlandish. That's lasting power, but I don't maintain the vehicle myself, I pay others to do it for me.
    • c22 11y ago
      I drive a 1969 chevy with a broken odometer and I maintain it myself.
  • jodrellblank 11y ago
    An item that can't be maintained is a light pattern. It is a demonstration of confidence in good design and engineering; longevity for as long as an item is useful, but no longer. It is in the interests of the user to do away with the costs and complexities of making something maintainable and the consequent obligation to do maintenance. This only doesn't work well because once something reaches a reasonable 'end of life', there often is no identical or equal replacement. This generates in the user a wish that they could maintain their old device to prolong its use, to avoid having to choose and learn a new and different device which may not even have any improvements. There is no reason an item can't be user friendly, reliable, and need no maintenance. The majority of people don't even maintain their bodies, which are priceless and irreplacable - it does not make sense to say capitalism is failing because it's not meeting people's interest in doing maintenance, when people don't show any interest in doing maintenance (outside of a small subset who care about maintaining certain specific highly prized or expensive and necessary items).
• alinspired 11y ago
  >Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. It's the feature of equipment designed for long term
• marincounty 11y ago
  I'm still with you father on modern vechicles. Yes--the engine light comes on, and I can read a PID trouble code on many vechicles. The fault code is not always the problem. It's just not that simple to fix a modern vechicle. I pull a generic pid of XXXX, but maybe, around 30% of the time it's just that error code. Manufacturers have scan tools that read there products very well. Much better than my Snap-on 2500mt. I can't buy their tools, nor will they sell their priority information to most mechanics. So, working on vechicles made after, I say, 2000 is really getting hard. So hard, I believe most vechicles made in the 90's will become collectable? Why--they have less do-dads, and Emmission sensors. It gets monumentally difficult if your trying to get a vechicle to pass CA Emmission tests. I thought OBD2 would make working on vechicles a breeze. I have not found it to be the case. I have found buying a new vechicle is a lifelong relationship with the dealership; at dealership repair prices. I think manufactures did this on purpose. "Get them to buy your vechicle, and keep them coming back?" A sales tatic that software companies have been relying on for years now? I still remember buying Lightroom 1 at $199.00, and thinking that's all I will spend. What a deal? I actually foresee a bunch of bricked, by failing emmission tests, vechicles in the near future.
  • _pmf_ 11y ago
    > It gets monumentally difficult if your trying to get a vechicle to pass CA Emmission tests. In Germany, we have exemptions for what we call Oldtimers and Youngtimers (tax breaks, permission to enter environmentally restricted areas etc.).
    • lttlrck 11y ago
      In Germany the vast majority of cars on the road are well looked after and relatively new - at least that was the persistent impression I got during my time there. In the US the average car age seems much older and they are less well maintained on average - the inspection is a breeze in comparison. So in Germany the overall amount of pollution is lower to start with so exemptions for older cars is a less objectionable and more clear cut. Comparatively. That's my thoughts on it anyway :-) I had a 1974 TR6 with an H kennzeichen! It was an adventure owning that car in Germany.
• ridgeguy 11y ago
  I concur, except I'd state it: one hallmark of excellent design is relentless elimination of required maintenance.
• marcos100 11y ago
  > Maintainability is the feature of unreliable equipment. Would you pay 100x more for a reliable equipment?
• PopsiclePete 11y ago
  It's great, but without tinkering - you never really learn how things actually tick. I always chuckle to myself when I'm told by 40-year-olds how their 14-year- olds are "so amazing with computers!". But yeah - Jimmy can open up Facebook on the iPad like nobody's business, but Jimmy has no fracking clue what's actually happening or why, or how to even diagnose common issues. Then again, maybe that's ok if Jimmy doesn't give a crap about how computers work. I grew up in Europe and never had a car until I was in my late 20's so I never tinkered with them. Now, if something goes wrong, I just take it to the dealer. So I'm like Jimmy with the iPad. There's no problem for me or Jimmy. The world is fine. But then there's Billy. Unlike me, Billy didn't grow up with DOS and early Linux, so Billy has never had to look at a hex dump or figure out what pointers are or registers or flags - Billy just hits "Go" in his Java IDE and prays everything works out. If it doesn't, his eyes glaze over and he heads over to Stackoverflow. Billy is hampered by today's world. He doesn't have to tinker with his PC or iPad, but not only that, he's actively being prohibited from tinkering with them. They're not only appliances, they're sealed off, protected by dozens of copyright and patent laws appliances that you don't even technically own anymore without signing-off on 7 different legal agreements. It's insane. Billy might never learn about how a computer actually works. And one day he'll have to diagnose/fix something that only the 30-somethings can and he won't know how, and not because he's dumb.
  • Swizec 11y ago
    Billy can also take a CS class or two. Those DOS hex dumps meant nothing to me until I had a couple of microcontrollers and CPU architecture classes under my belt. Like you, I'm also nostalgic about those error dumps and tinkering. But I also don't remember a single time when my reaction was more than "Oh neat, I understand my CPU did an error. reboot"
• johnchristopher 11y ago
  May I suggest this book http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2/ http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2/ ? It deals with that topic but the outlook is quite different.