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>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

>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.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    I disagree. You can call this "moving the goalposts" if you want, but I don't think it is. You seem to be basically be claiming that something is only "maintainable" if you can easily disassemble it down to the smallest component; I'm not arguing for that at all. If there's an actual engineering reason to reduce maintainability (e.g. it improves performance), that's a worthwhile consideration. What I'm talking about is when a product is made intentionally non-maintainable, or maintainable only by people with service tools which are non-obtainable, solely because it increases profits. There's no good reason for this. Now, for your battery example, I don't think that even applies. From what I've read and heard, most "non-replaceable" batteries are actually completely replaceable, it's just not so easy to do and requires a bit of skill. "Maintainable by a service technician with some common hand tools and half a brain" does not equal "non maintainable". I've seen tons of videos on YouTube showing non-professionals how to take apart their phones and replace those "non-maintainable" batteries. It's not like the things are epoxied in there. And you're right, you can save a bit of space by going that route; it's an engineering trade-off. My example of something that's deliberately designed to not be maintainable (by the end-user or someone not employed by or affiliated with the manufacturer) would be a car that requires regular service, but where it can't be done without connecting a laptop to the car and using an extremely expensive software program to really do nothing more than tell the car the oil has been changed. This makes it impossible for the customer to do the service himself, or have an independent mechanic do it unless that mechanic is willing to shell out the money needed for that tool.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >If you find an engineer willing to argue in favor of non-maintainable equipment, he's not a true engineer And probably not a true Scotchman either. I mean, obviously only a failed engineer would ever propose not maintainable products -- everybody should use old maintainable razors for example, and not (recyclable) disposable ones. /s
  - takno 11y ago
    What is a scotchman? My best guess is somebody made of sticky tape
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Well, "Scotch is an adjective meaning "of Scotland" according to Wikipedia. And Scotch tape was named after the Scots (and features a tartan design).
      - takno 11y ago
        Hmm. Take it from a resident of Scotland, the words are Scot and Scottish. Scotch is whisky or tape, and when it is applied to people is likely to result in contempt at best
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Oh please. It's not engineers who propose non-maintainable products, it's the marketing and business people who make those decisions. Engineers just carry them out. As for razors, that's a terrible example. Gillette is famous for the whole "razor and blades" marketing scheme, which obviously was invented by a business person seeking to maximize profit. Disposable razors are a bad idea all around (and they're not recyclable easily; recyclable things don't have metal and plastic merged together so they can't be separated): they perform terribly and are wasteful and cost more over time. The only thing they're good for is if you left your razor at home while traveling. I like old DE razors personally, but even a modern razor is "maintainable": you can replace the cartridge heads. You can't replace the individual blades because there's no feasible way of making a blade assembly that small, with that kind of precision, where an end-user can replace the blades individually, and besides the plastic part of the blade-holder isn't very much plastic anyway. This example is just silly; it's like claiming a car air filter is "unmaintainable" because you can't wash it out, or you can't separate the paper pleats from the plastic frame. That's just dumb. As long as the filter is fairly easily replaceable, it's OK for the filter (a consumable) as a whole to be a disposable product. I am not arguing for things to be made so they can be easily disassembled to their smallest components.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  I'm sympathetic with your overall point, but the fact is, I own and enjoy a lot of cool gadgets that simply couldn't exist if your words became law. It's best to think of "unmaintainable" things as monolithic components of a larger system. You wouldn't complain about not being able to fix a light bulb, would you? Then don't complain about not being able to fix a smartphone. Your phone is just the tip of a leaf on a very large tree... and the same will be true of our cars, soon enough. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. As for what "true engineers" would do, engineers have to take the big picture into account and design accordingly. Everything real is a compromise of some kind, and maintainability is only one factor among many that can make a product succeed or fail in the marketplace. If you design something that fails in the marketplace, it probably doesn't matter how awesome it is... or how easy it is to fix.

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.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  I disagree. You can call this "moving the goalposts" if you want, but I don't think it is. You seem to be basically be claiming that something is only "maintainable" if you can easily disassemble it down to the smallest component; I'm not arguing for that at all. If there's an actual engineering reason to reduce maintainability (e.g. it improves performance), that's a worthwhile consideration. What I'm talking about is when a product is made intentionally non-maintainable, or maintainable only by people with service tools which are non-obtainable, solely because it increases profits. There's no good reason for this. Now, for your battery example, I don't think that even applies. From what I've read and heard, most "non-replaceable" batteries are actually completely replaceable, it's just not so easy to do and requires a bit of skill. "Maintainable by a service technician with some common hand tools and half a brain" does not equal "non maintainable". I've seen tons of videos on YouTube showing non-professionals how to take apart their phones and replace those "non-maintainable" batteries. It's not like the things are epoxied in there. And you're right, you can save a bit of space by going that route; it's an engineering trade-off. My example of something that's deliberately designed to not be maintainable (by the end-user or someone not employed by or affiliated with the manufacturer) would be a car that requires regular service, but where it can't be done without connecting a laptop to the car and using an extremely expensive software program to really do nothing more than tell the car the oil has been changed. This makes it impossible for the customer to do the service himself, or have an independent mechanic do it unless that mechanic is willing to shell out the money needed for that tool.
coldtea 11y ago
>If you find an engineer willing to argue in favor of non-maintainable equipment, he's not a true engineer And probably not a true Scotchman either. I mean, obviously only a failed engineer would ever propose not maintainable products -- everybody should use old maintainable razors for example, and not (recyclable) disposable ones. /s
- takno 11y ago
  What is a scotchman? My best guess is somebody made of sticky tape
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Well, "Scotch is an adjective meaning "of Scotland" according to Wikipedia. And Scotch tape was named after the Scots (and features a tartan design).
    - takno 11y ago
      Hmm. Take it from a resident of Scotland, the words are Scot and Scottish. Scotch is whisky or tape, and when it is applied to people is likely to result in contempt at best
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Oh please. It's not engineers who propose non-maintainable products, it's the marketing and business people who make those decisions. Engineers just carry them out. As for razors, that's a terrible example. Gillette is famous for the whole "razor and blades" marketing scheme, which obviously was invented by a business person seeking to maximize profit. Disposable razors are a bad idea all around (and they're not recyclable easily; recyclable things don't have metal and plastic merged together so they can't be separated): they perform terribly and are wasteful and cost more over time. The only thing they're good for is if you left your razor at home while traveling. I like old DE razors personally, but even a modern razor is "maintainable": you can replace the cartridge heads. You can't replace the individual blades because there's no feasible way of making a blade assembly that small, with that kind of precision, where an end-user can replace the blades individually, and besides the plastic part of the blade-holder isn't very much plastic anyway. This example is just silly; it's like claiming a car air filter is "unmaintainable" because you can't wash it out, or you can't separate the paper pleats from the plastic frame. That's just dumb. As long as the filter is fairly easily replaceable, it's OK for the filter (a consumable) as a whole to be a disposable product. I am not arguing for things to be made so they can be easily disassembled to their smallest components.
CamperBob2 11y ago
I'm sympathetic with your overall point, but the fact is, I own and enjoy a lot of cool gadgets that simply couldn't exist if your words became law. It's best to think of "unmaintainable" things as monolithic components of a larger system. You wouldn't complain about not being able to fix a light bulb, would you? Then don't complain about not being able to fix a smartphone. Your phone is just the tip of a leaf on a very large tree... and the same will be true of our cars, soon enough. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. As for what "true engineers" would do, engineers have to take the big picture into account and design accordingly. Everything real is a compromise of some kind, and maintainability is only one factor among many that can make a product succeed or fail in the marketplace. If you design something that fails in the marketplace, it probably doesn't matter how awesome it is... or how easy it is to fix.