9 ms·

IP is but one inhibitor of repair. I'm far from convinced it's the main, or even a major one. It's more a concerted effort to make repair expensive, unexpected

IP is but one inhibitor of repair. I'm far from convinced it's the main, or even a major one. It's more a concerted effort to make repair expensive, unexpected, unfashionable and gratuitously difficult across as many industries as possible. 30 or 40 years ago nearly all simple products were repairable, easily and cheaply. You went to any major retailer and they'd have a spares section along with aisles of new product. All of them. You could buy a new element for your toaster, kettle, heater or coffee machine. They'd keep seals and limescale filters and so on. Some of these were standard enough that they'd fit a wide range of manufacturer's products. They'd still be there years after the particular model was discontinued. There'd be a few third party offerings that were rarely as long lasting but perhaps £1 or £2 instead of £3 or £4. Now? Nowhere sells spares, nor are they an expected part of most products. A kettle manufacturer might condescend to carry a few consumables like a limescale filter for a year or two. Then charge you around £10 with £2 p&p for a simple piece of plastic. Want a replacement element? That's basically never a spare part any more, though they don't last any longer. A fridge manufacturer might charge £18 with £4.95 p&p for a thermistor and a little heat shrink tube, but no longer have the one of the three that fails most often available at all. For a few year old refrigerator. (recent actual examples) For larger products manufacturers are combining parts and modules into indivisible units that might ease manufacture a microscopic amount, but absolutely make many simple repairs no longer possible. So what was recently a £20 simple repair to your fridge or cooker is now a £200 major component and more labour than it's probably worth. > Support producers who believe in repair I've spent years, decades, trying to. There are effectively none left. Even the most expensive brands are aiming to have you throw it away and buy another as soon as they can get away with. Which leaves who?

cm2187 8y ago
I think if you are in china you probably can buy all the parts you want for cheap. It is just that these parts aren't in Europe/US. But I think the main point isn't manufacturers making repairing expensive, it is them making buying new stuff so cheap. It's just not worth the time and hassle to repair most devices. Buy the cheapest device you can find, if it breaks, replace it. Still cheaper than buying the high end, expensive one.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Not convinced. The components simply aren't designed for replacement in most cases any more even in China when you have the necessary part. Though sure there's a lot of creative repairs and spares in Shenzen, especially for phones. That's repairs despite the best efforts of manufacturers. :) Even the cheapest tat domestic appliance brands used to let you replace an element etc for a fraction the cost of new. When it was designed in and a screwdriver-free sub 3 minute job I'm not sure time or hassle really entered into it. A new model often used the same filters or elements. Now the time and hassle is designed in as almost nothing is intended to be replaced, opened or disassembled so it becomes an afternoon's work (eg phone battery replacement). One example of many. Frost free fridge freezers need a small heating element to defrost the coils. That was a simple plug in component for a few pounds, and lowest callout fee from your local repairer. Now they're mostly being combined indivisibly with the coil and that becomes a replacement of a major, mostly working, module and a re-gas that costs half the cost of the damn fridge. Even on the fancy £1k Samsung fridge freezers. Actually I think Samsung were one of the first to do this. Heating elements, of course, still fail with roughly the same regularity. That's an awful lot of metal, plastic, refrigerant and climate CO2 deliberately turned into a disposable. If we can't go back to the old view, at least partially, resolving climate change is going to remain challenging.
tigershark 8y ago
I think that you left out from your otherwise awesome summary products such as the new Mac book pro, or the new Mac book pro with “improved keyboard and perfect dust resistance”. From my narrow point of view I will try to repair my 2015 MacBook Pro as much as possible when it will start breaking down. I would never, ever, buy an apple laptop now, after about 10 years in which I was a very happy and vocal apple user. Honestly I have no idea how or why, but they managed to destroy their top product quality in a handful of years. Apparently they don’t even care anymore to restore it for the angry users given the ever growing list of the disgruntled owners of the new MacBook Pro that was supposed to fix every keyboard problem.
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  If you can get away with a desktop, the DIY scene is still good and strong. I have a PC that I'm pretty sure is coming on 7 years old. I've had to replace the motherboard but otherwise it's still a very quick machine (i7 3770k). I could give it another 4 years of life easily by putting a faster SSD in. Since I built that computer I have had bought and sold 4 or 5 laptops for a comparison. For a number of years I have used 350USD phones instead of upgrading every 2 years to the flagship. Life is good! If you buy a 10 year old Toyota you can run that thing for decades and there'll always be parts!
  - kristianp 8y ago
    I've had an i7 3770 for a while, it's still very snappy. I've had an SSD in it for a while though, definitely recommend one of those.
    - arvinsim 8y ago
      Even my i5 3570k is running fine all these years.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I still earn money on i5 2400 as my primary machine. Over the past couple years I only upgraded RAM, GPU and put in an SSD (that last one made all the difference).
tren 8y ago
There definitely needs to be a paradigm shift so that companies have a motivation to repair their products. One way would be to change the ownership of the products back to those that produce them and the consumer loans them from these companies. Companies would be responsible for repairing any defective products that are on loan; this would mean and emphasis would be placed on quality over quantity in their products. The company would have a large incentive to get the most life out of a product with the minimum amount of repairs if they're liable for all maintenance. They would also have a consistent revenue stream through hired products. If there was a big name player out there who offered this service to me, I'd sign up.
- ianmcgowan 8y ago
  You can lease a car, why not lease your fridge/washing-machine/toaster? If it's anything like leasing a car, you'll pay 150% of the value of the toaster over 5 years, and then have a ridiculous residual at the end. Oh, and a penalty for toasting too many slices on the "extra dark" setting. And you never own the toaster, so you end up paying a small monthly fee forever.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  The point of the companies from the viewpoint of the demos is supposed to be to provide goods; your fix retains high profits. Why not look at the life of a fridge and say the median current ownership period is now the free, transferable guarantee/warranty period; companies have to buy insurance against bankruptcy to maintain forward ability to repair (stops companies closing in order to clear liabilities, then restarting). Rinse and repeat, minimum 2 year warranty for material and workmanship on all goods. Increase warranty to maintain medians. Perhaps then we can start curing 'designed to fail' goods.
sevensor 8y ago
> You could buy a new element for your toaster, kettle, heater or coffee machine. I've heard good things about these folks, although I haven't got any direct experience: http://www.dualit.co.nz/ http://www.dualit.co.nz/
- Lio 8y ago
  I've had a classic Dualit toaster since 2004ish. I can't comment on repairability since it's never gone wrong but it looks like it's easy to service with its 50s style screwed-down pressed panels. On a side note, I like that they're seen as classically British but like other classically British things e.g. Dr Marten's boots, the original Mini car or fish and chips they were all designed by foreign born Brits.
  - Lio 8y ago
    Just in case anyone is wondering what a Dualit Toaster is:- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/interiors/11064079/Toast-of-the-Nation-how-Dualit-became-makers-of-the-ultimate-design-classic.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/interiors/11064079/Toa...
js2 8y ago
I have a pair of Fisher & Paykel dish drawers that I've kept alive since 2004. For a while I was replacing one part or another every year or two. They slowly improved the replacements and now, finally, they're trouble free, except the water inlet valve which needs to be replaced (and is available) every 3-4 years. (BTW, these things are a bit finicky and use a little more plastic than I'd like in places, but the engineering is really beautiful, and at least once they worked out the kinks, they're pretty reliable.) Our Kenmore Trio fridge, also from 2004, I've kept alive. I had to replace the freezer fan and the air diverter motor each once. The water valve needs to be replaced every 3-4 years. We have a GE washer & dryer from 2003 or so. Those too I've managed to keep alive. The washer needs a new timer, for now we just use the permanent press cycle all the time because my wife is patient, a replacement timer is ridiculously overpriced, and I haven't tried to repair the existing timer. :-( The dryer needed a new drive belt at some point, and I've jury-rigged a bearing for it as well. Last year I had to replace the microswitches in our GE microwave. Fortunately, they've used pretty much exactly the same switches for decades and still do so these are easily available. Our 2004 Wayne Dalton garage door openers were damaged by lighting a couple years ago. Was able to find the parts I needed to repair them on eBay. So, I don't know, around my house I've had pretty good luck sourcing parts. I notice a lot of neighbors don't even bother thinking to call a repair man and just replace appliances when they fail. I wonder how many of these things are actually repairable, but it isn't cost-effective if you can't do it yourself.
- discordance 8y ago
  I would love to perform DIY maintenance, but it seems more like a luxury activity. From an economic perspective, the amount of effort spent in researching, diagnosing, ordering and fixing any one device far exceeds the effort being good at one's core job and trading dollars for someone else's experience.
  - ryl00 8y ago
    I think it depends. We recently had an issue with our fifteen-year-old Kenmore dryer not heating anymore. A little scouting around showed new dryers around the $500 mark, so I decided to do a little more research into diagnosing what might be going on, before just buying a replacement. Fortunately the online Sears parts outlet has a great DIY video section that helped me use my very rudimentary multimeter skills to pinpoint the issue to a bad heating element. $50 later and we have a working dryer again (and I'm not so mystified by my dryer anymore :) )!
bigger_cheese 8y ago
Another limitation on repair and maintenance is that some manufactures deliberately make their products hard to repair and maintain because they want you to keep upgrading to newer versions. Some mobile phones do this by making the batteries non removable so once the battery life deteriorates people will buy a new phone rather than a cheaper replacement battery. Some laptops solder the ram onto motherboard so you cannot upgrade. Other companies use things like non standard screws to make it hard for people to replace parts themselves. In my engineering classes at university this was referred to as planned obsolescence.
- ZenPsycho 8y ago
  There's a few aspects to this. 1. as you said, these things are planned obsolescence, done when a company's business model requires constant new purchases for growth and continued existence. If you make a product that lasts for 50 years without ever needing repair, then you go out of business as soon as everyone has bought one, and there's no need to make very many of the new things. 2. Suppose you go a notch down and you make a product that needs repairs. Human labour, especially in the presence of unions, is extremely expensive, and individual repairs can only be potentially profitable to the repair shops. If it's first party repairs, warranty repairs very quickly eat into whatever original profits you had. My partner once worked at a shop that did air conditioning repairs (like Harry Tuttle in Brazil), They would absolutely refuse to install Samsung air conditioners, since they would always require warranty repairs, and each time you do one of those, you lose money. 3. You get your manufacturing and supply chain so efficient, with economies of scale, and offshoring, you can get the cost of making a new thing way way below the cost of even one repair. One replacement part. The inefficient amount of time spent on diagnostics and maintenance work. Viewed in this light, soldering the ram onto the mother board isn't as much about planned obsolescence as it is about getting the cost of manufacture just a bit cheaper. Your BOM is down now, because you're not paying for the ram connector pieces. And so, even this is oversimplifying things, but still I believe it's more complicated than evil apple planning obsolescence. And it's more complicated than consumers creating a market that is biased against repairability. It's about the economies of scale enabled by increased industrialisation. When microchips first came out, computer maintenance people, who were used to working with discrete components, either transistors or vacuum tubes asked "If the circuits are microscopic, how do we repair it?", not quite grasping that repairing a microchip would be a waste of time when you can just replace it with a new one.
NovaS1X 8y ago
> So what was recently a £20 simple repair to your fridge or cooker is now a £200 major component and more labour than it's probably worth. I think this is a large part of the problem. Our goods have become so cheap to produce that they're cheaper to buy new than to repair. For example, I'm rebuilding a small motorcycle engine for a Honda. I can rebuild the engine, paying the machine-work labor cost and a small amount of parts, and it's actually just a bit more expensive than to buy a brand-new Chinese clone that's been in production for over a decade. Labour costs for repairs have gone up, while consumer goods have gotten cheaper. In a lot of cases it's simply more cost-effective to replace than to rebuild. No mechanic rebuilds water pumps in the shop anymore than a home appliance tech would fix a coffee maker. DIY is largely the one holdout for repairs, and it's unreasonable to think that every person can have the aptitude to fix any device that may break in their lives.
- aaronblohowiak 8y ago
  Raw materials are too cheap — the externality of their dissipation has not even begun to be appreciated.
- yellow_postit 8y ago
  I wonder how much a carbon tax would change the economics here.
- xg15 8y ago
  > In a lot of cases it's simply more cost-effective to replace than to rebuild. I think a lot of this is because we can choose to not factor in a lot of additional costs that will show up in other forms. E.g., unsustainable disposal leadss to environmental problems and hazardous living conditions, while the cheap chinese labour only works with far weaker labor protections than we have here.
  - growlist 8y ago
    If we can apply the same ingenuity to the end of life stage as to the creation stage, it actually makes sense to not bother attempting to fix - why expend costly human effort on individual patches when innumerable hours have been spent refining industrial processes to bring the cost of a replacement down? Just buy the replacement. Though of course even with the cleanest lifecycle there's still the power requirement and associated carbon, but perhaps even that can be taken care of via mitigation. I should say instinctively this still seems kind of wrong and wasteful to me, but then on the other hand when so much time has been invested in processes it kind of makes sense to take advantage of that efficiency. I should also say that this still leaves manufacturers with no excuse for taking the decision to deliberately stop making consumables, which is the kind of thing I would like to see legislation against.
killaken2000 8y ago
I've fixed some old stuff before and often there's a schematic affixed to the inside of the case. Knowing how a Mac is connected and what parts are used is a long way away from being able to make one for most people.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Turns out the free market often doesn't work because screwing you is so profitable that nobody is interested in a reasonable market. Require durable goods like fridges to be warrantied for 10 years at no cost to the owner. Develop standards that promote cost effective repairs and make following them a condition of selling your goods in the US/Europe. People that don't like this can go peddle their junk in whatever markets will have them.
- ovi256 8y ago
  This already happens with many things. Cheaper, non-EU-standard compliant electric goods are sold in Africa. Cheaper, sulfur-ladden diesel fuel is sold there too.
- ponow 8y ago
  People can already freely choose to buy goods with comparatively longer, clearer, better-honored warranties, which would put upward pressure towards your 10 year goal. Unfortunately, providing that protection is expensive for manufacturers, who understandably pass it on to buyers. It appears that buyers prioritize lower upfront cost rather than better warranties, a trade-off that ought to be theirs to make.
  - liotier 8y ago
    > It appears that buyers prioritize lower upfront cost rather than better warranties, a trade-off that ought to be theirs to make. Not just an individual choice but a social choice too, therefore the State has a role to play. In trading lower upfront cost for shorter life, consumers produce externalities such as pollution and raw materials depletion. The State must reinternalize those externalities and the mechanism to do that is either regulatory (mandatory 10 year warranty) or fiscal (recycling tax).
    - ponow 8y ago
      The term "social choice" is unnecessarily confusing, and should be deprecated. I don't believe you're referring to a population as a whole making a choice, but rather a population having to endure a consequence of an individual choice. Thus the individual is potentially committing a tort. I have been accumulating unrepaired gizmos in my hoard. When is a tortious act committed? Only when I concede that I will never repair an item? What if I combined parts into a combination? I can't escape the thought that even choosing to possess an unrepairable item will be regarded as a Wrongful Act.
sydd 8y ago
I love this topic, if you are interested in the details how companies engineer products to break watch AvE videos on YouTube. He is disassembling tools and pointing out how they are made to fail. There are a few exceptions still, like Hilti who's business model is to rent tools, so they are interested in building lasting and repairable things.
titzer 8y ago
> It's more a concerted effort to make repair expensive, unexpected, unfashionable and gratuitously difficult across as many industries as possible. I upvoted you because I agree with your overall comment, but on this one point I disagree. I think it's not a concerted effort, just a gentle gradient caused by economics. Meaning, all the companies that made traditionally repairable items (e.g. straight razors) were less profitable in the long run than companies that made disposable/irreparable items, so they eventually went under. Because disposable items are cheaper to manufacture, they could be sold for much lower prices in the marketplace and produced in much greater numbers, reaping much more profit. That expands markets and keeps them producing demand by the need for replacement. While consumers should be the counterpressure to that, consumers generally don't consider TCO[1], so traditional producers lost to the market and humanity irrationality. [1] I mean honestly, who adds up the cost of all the razors they'll use in their life? The way humans used to live two hundred years ago was definitely "waste not, want not". Things were durable because making them took human effort. People were poor and closer to the things that they made and used. Supply chains were not something optimized by logistics companies; shoes were made by people in the same town. In that setting, you better believe they made stuff to last. In short, all of this is because of the techno-industrial marketplace.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Well it's not thousands of manufacturers participating in a global conspiracy, but it's not quite the same as commodity items like disposable razor blades either. Whether it's prevailing economic school, or what they're teaching MBAs the last few decades but there is clear intent to a) remove maintenance and repair options, and b) ensure products are not built to last, but built to last "just long enough". Now, profits are not so knife edge that adding 50p on a connector to permit a part to be changed in a fridge or kettle would cause them to go under. The market for kettles spans £10 to well over £100 for stupid gimmicks. Plenty of space for more ethical options alongside internet connectivity, LCD displays and LEDs that light up the water. Even the ethical extra water saving environmentally gimmicked options don't permit repair. In single blade razors the smallest change could make or break profitability. Even that is a different proposition now thanks to the ever rising blade count and added gimmicks. Many of the companies that made traditionally repairable items are still around. It's just they all started phasing out at roughly the same time. Were lighting a 21st century invention there would be no lightbulbs or bayonet and Edison screw fittings. We'd all be replacing the light fitting every time, and people would be explaining why it was unavoidable. So I suspect it's something more than simple economics, though I don't think there's been a repetition of the 1,000 hour lightbulb cartel. :)

cm2187 8y ago

I think if you are in china you probably can buy all the parts you want for cheap. It is just that these parts aren't in Europe/US. But I think the main point isn't manufacturers making repairing expensive, it is them making buying new stuff so cheap. It's just not worth the time and hassle to repair most devices. Buy the cheapest device you can find, if it breaks, replace it. Still cheaper than buying the high end, expensive one.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Not convinced. The components simply aren't designed for replacement in most cases any more even in China when you have the necessary part. Though sure there's a lot of creative repairs and spares in Shenzen, especially for phones. That's repairs despite the best efforts of manufacturers. :) Even the cheapest tat domestic appliance brands used to let you replace an element etc for a fraction the cost of new. When it was designed in and a screwdriver-free sub 3 minute job I'm not sure time or hassle really entered into it. A new model often used the same filters or elements. Now the time and hassle is designed in as almost nothing is intended to be replaced, opened or disassembled so it becomes an afternoon's work (eg phone battery replacement). One example of many. Frost free fridge freezers need a small heating element to defrost the coils. That was a simple plug in component for a few pounds, and lowest callout fee from your local repairer. Now they're mostly being combined indivisibly with the coil and that becomes a replacement of a major, mostly working, module and a re-gas that costs half the cost of the damn fridge. Even on the fancy £1k Samsung fridge freezers. Actually I think Samsung were one of the first to do this. Heating elements, of course, still fail with roughly the same regularity. That's an awful lot of metal, plastic, refrigerant and climate CO2 deliberately turned into a disposable. If we can't go back to the old view, at least partially, resolving climate change is going to remain challenging.

tigershark 8y ago

I think that you left out from your otherwise awesome summary products such as the new Mac book pro, or the new Mac book pro with “improved keyboard and perfect dust resistance”. From my narrow point of view I will try to repair my 2015 MacBook Pro as much as possible when it will start breaking down. I would never, ever, buy an apple laptop now, after about 10 years in which I was a very happy and vocal apple user. Honestly I have no idea how or why, but they managed to destroy their top product quality in a handful of years. Apparently they don’t even care anymore to restore it for the angry users given the ever growing list of the disgruntled owners of the new MacBook Pro that was supposed to fix every keyboard problem.

ryan-allen 8y ago
If you can get away with a desktop, the DIY scene is still good and strong. I have a PC that I'm pretty sure is coming on 7 years old. I've had to replace the motherboard but otherwise it's still a very quick machine (i7 3770k). I could give it another 4 years of life easily by putting a faster SSD in. Since I built that computer I have had bought and sold 4 or 5 laptops for a comparison. For a number of years I have used 350USD phones instead of upgrading every 2 years to the flagship. Life is good! If you buy a 10 year old Toyota you can run that thing for decades and there'll always be parts!
- kristianp 8y ago
  I've had an i7 3770 for a while, it's still very snappy. I've had an SSD in it for a while though, definitely recommend one of those.
  - arvinsim 8y ago
    Even my i5 3570k is running fine all these years.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      I still earn money on i5 2400 as my primary machine. Over the past couple years I only upgraded RAM, GPU and put in an SSD (that last one made all the difference).

tren 8y ago

There definitely needs to be a paradigm shift so that companies have a motivation to repair their products. One way would be to change the ownership of the products back to those that produce them and the consumer loans them from these companies. Companies would be responsible for repairing any defective products that are on loan; this would mean and emphasis would be placed on quality over quantity in their products. The company would have a large incentive to get the most life out of a product with the minimum amount of repairs if they're liable for all maintenance. They would also have a consistent revenue stream through hired products. If there was a big name player out there who offered this service to me, I'd sign up.

ianmcgowan 8y ago
You can lease a car, why not lease your fridge/washing-machine/toaster? If it's anything like leasing a car, you'll pay 150% of the value of the toaster over 5 years, and then have a ridiculous residual at the end. Oh, and a penalty for toasting too many slices on the "extra dark" setting. And you never own the toaster, so you end up paying a small monthly fee forever.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
The point of the companies from the viewpoint of the demos is supposed to be to provide goods; your fix retains high profits. Why not look at the life of a fridge and say the median current ownership period is now the free, transferable guarantee/warranty period; companies have to buy insurance against bankruptcy to maintain forward ability to repair (stops companies closing in order to clear liabilities, then restarting). Rinse and repeat, minimum 2 year warranty for material and workmanship on all goods. Increase warranty to maintain medians. Perhaps then we can start curing 'designed to fail' goods.

sevensor 8y ago

> You could buy a new element for your toaster, kettle, heater or coffee machine. I've heard good things about these folks, although I haven't got any direct experience: http://www.dualit.co.nz/ http://www.dualit.co.nz/

Lio 8y ago
I've had a classic Dualit toaster since 2004ish. I can't comment on repairability since it's never gone wrong but it looks like it's easy to service with its 50s style screwed-down pressed panels. On a side note, I like that they're seen as classically British but like other classically British things e.g. Dr Marten's boots, the original Mini car or fish and chips they were all designed by foreign born Brits.
- Lio 8y ago
  Just in case anyone is wondering what a Dualit Toaster is:- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/interiors/11064079/Toast-of-the-Nation-how-Dualit-became-makers-of-the-ultimate-design-classic.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/interiors/11064079/Toa...

js2 8y ago

I have a pair of Fisher & Paykel dish drawers that I've kept alive since 2004. For a while I was replacing one part or another every year or two. They slowly improved the replacements and now, finally, they're trouble free, except the water inlet valve which needs to be replaced (and is available) every 3-4 years. (BTW, these things are a bit finicky and use a little more plastic than I'd like in places, but the engineering is really beautiful, and at least once they worked out the kinks, they're pretty reliable.) Our Kenmore Trio fridge, also from 2004, I've kept alive. I had to replace the freezer fan and the air diverter motor each once. The water valve needs to be replaced every 3-4 years. We have a GE washer & dryer from 2003 or so. Those too I've managed to keep alive. The washer needs a new timer, for now we just use the permanent press cycle all the time because my wife is patient, a replacement timer is ridiculously overpriced, and I haven't tried to repair the existing timer. :-( The dryer needed a new drive belt at some point, and I've jury-rigged a bearing for it as well. Last year I had to replace the microswitches in our GE microwave. Fortunately, they've used pretty much exactly the same switches for decades and still do so these are easily available. Our 2004 Wayne Dalton garage door openers were damaged by lighting a couple years ago. Was able to find the parts I needed to repair them on eBay. So, I don't know, around my house I've had pretty good luck sourcing parts. I notice a lot of neighbors don't even bother thinking to call a repair man and just replace appliances when they fail. I wonder how many of these things are actually repairable, but it isn't cost-effective if you can't do it yourself.

discordance 8y ago
I would love to perform DIY maintenance, but it seems more like a luxury activity. From an economic perspective, the amount of effort spent in researching, diagnosing, ordering and fixing any one device far exceeds the effort being good at one's core job and trading dollars for someone else's experience.
- ryl00 8y ago
  I think it depends. We recently had an issue with our fifteen-year-old Kenmore dryer not heating anymore. A little scouting around showed new dryers around the $500 mark, so I decided to do a little more research into diagnosing what might be going on, before just buying a replacement. Fortunately the online Sears parts outlet has a great DIY video section that helped me use my very rudimentary multimeter skills to pinpoint the issue to a bad heating element. $50 later and we have a working dryer again (and I'm not so mystified by my dryer anymore :) )!

bigger_cheese 8y ago

Another limitation on repair and maintenance is that some manufactures deliberately make their products hard to repair and maintain because they want you to keep upgrading to newer versions. Some mobile phones do this by making the batteries non removable so once the battery life deteriorates people will buy a new phone rather than a cheaper replacement battery. Some laptops solder the ram onto motherboard so you cannot upgrade. Other companies use things like non standard screws to make it hard for people to replace parts themselves. In my engineering classes at university this was referred to as planned obsolescence.

ZenPsycho 8y ago
There's a few aspects to this. 1. as you said, these things are planned obsolescence, done when a company's business model requires constant new purchases for growth and continued existence. If you make a product that lasts for 50 years without ever needing repair, then you go out of business as soon as everyone has bought one, and there's no need to make very many of the new things. 2. Suppose you go a notch down and you make a product that needs repairs. Human labour, especially in the presence of unions, is extremely expensive, and individual repairs can only be potentially profitable to the repair shops. If it's first party repairs, warranty repairs very quickly eat into whatever original profits you had. My partner once worked at a shop that did air conditioning repairs (like Harry Tuttle in Brazil), They would absolutely refuse to install Samsung air conditioners, since they would always require warranty repairs, and each time you do one of those, you lose money. 3. You get your manufacturing and supply chain so efficient, with economies of scale, and offshoring, you can get the cost of making a new thing way way below the cost of even one repair. One replacement part. The inefficient amount of time spent on diagnostics and maintenance work. Viewed in this light, soldering the ram onto the mother board isn't as much about planned obsolescence as it is about getting the cost of manufacture just a bit cheaper. Your BOM is down now, because you're not paying for the ram connector pieces. And so, even this is oversimplifying things, but still I believe it's more complicated than evil apple planning obsolescence. And it's more complicated than consumers creating a market that is biased against repairability. It's about the economies of scale enabled by increased industrialisation. When microchips first came out, computer maintenance people, who were used to working with discrete components, either transistors or vacuum tubes asked "If the circuits are microscopic, how do we repair it?", not quite grasping that repairing a microchip would be a waste of time when you can just replace it with a new one.

NovaS1X 8y ago

> So what was recently a £20 simple repair to your fridge or cooker is now a £200 major component and more labour than it's probably worth. I think this is a large part of the problem. Our goods have become so cheap to produce that they're cheaper to buy new than to repair. For example, I'm rebuilding a small motorcycle engine for a Honda. I can rebuild the engine, paying the machine-work labor cost and a small amount of parts, and it's actually just a bit more expensive than to buy a brand-new Chinese clone that's been in production for over a decade. Labour costs for repairs have gone up, while consumer goods have gotten cheaper. In a lot of cases it's simply more cost-effective to replace than to rebuild. No mechanic rebuilds water pumps in the shop anymore than a home appliance tech would fix a coffee maker. DIY is largely the one holdout for repairs, and it's unreasonable to think that every person can have the aptitude to fix any device that may break in their lives.

aaronblohowiak 8y ago
Raw materials are too cheap — the externality of their dissipation has not even begun to be appreciated.
yellow_postit 8y ago
I wonder how much a carbon tax would change the economics here.
xg15 8y ago
> In a lot of cases it's simply more cost-effective to replace than to rebuild. I think a lot of this is because we can choose to not factor in a lot of additional costs that will show up in other forms. E.g., unsustainable disposal leadss to environmental problems and hazardous living conditions, while the cheap chinese labour only works with far weaker labor protections than we have here.
- growlist 8y ago
  If we can apply the same ingenuity to the end of life stage as to the creation stage, it actually makes sense to not bother attempting to fix - why expend costly human effort on individual patches when innumerable hours have been spent refining industrial processes to bring the cost of a replacement down? Just buy the replacement. Though of course even with the cleanest lifecycle there's still the power requirement and associated carbon, but perhaps even that can be taken care of via mitigation. I should say instinctively this still seems kind of wrong and wasteful to me, but then on the other hand when so much time has been invested in processes it kind of makes sense to take advantage of that efficiency. I should also say that this still leaves manufacturers with no excuse for taking the decision to deliberately stop making consumables, which is the kind of thing I would like to see legislation against.

killaken2000 8y ago

I've fixed some old stuff before and often there's a schematic affixed to the inside of the case. Knowing how a Mac is connected and what parts are used is a long way away from being able to make one for most people.

michaelmrose 8y ago

Turns out the free market often doesn't work because screwing you is so profitable that nobody is interested in a reasonable market. Require durable goods like fridges to be warrantied for 10 years at no cost to the owner. Develop standards that promote cost effective repairs and make following them a condition of selling your goods in the US/Europe. People that don't like this can go peddle their junk in whatever markets will have them.

ovi256 8y ago
This already happens with many things. Cheaper, non-EU-standard compliant electric goods are sold in Africa. Cheaper, sulfur-ladden diesel fuel is sold there too.
ponow 8y ago
People can already freely choose to buy goods with comparatively longer, clearer, better-honored warranties, which would put upward pressure towards your 10 year goal. Unfortunately, providing that protection is expensive for manufacturers, who understandably pass it on to buyers. It appears that buyers prioritize lower upfront cost rather than better warranties, a trade-off that ought to be theirs to make.
- liotier 8y ago
  > It appears that buyers prioritize lower upfront cost rather than better warranties, a trade-off that ought to be theirs to make. Not just an individual choice but a social choice too, therefore the State has a role to play. In trading lower upfront cost for shorter life, consumers produce externalities such as pollution and raw materials depletion. The State must reinternalize those externalities and the mechanism to do that is either regulatory (mandatory 10 year warranty) or fiscal (recycling tax).
  - ponow 8y ago
    The term "social choice" is unnecessarily confusing, and should be deprecated. I don't believe you're referring to a population as a whole making a choice, but rather a population having to endure a consequence of an individual choice. Thus the individual is potentially committing a tort. I have been accumulating unrepaired gizmos in my hoard. When is a tortious act committed? Only when I concede that I will never repair an item? What if I combined parts into a combination? I can't escape the thought that even choosing to possess an unrepairable item will be regarded as a Wrongful Act.

sydd 8y ago

I love this topic, if you are interested in the details how companies engineer products to break watch AvE videos on YouTube. He is disassembling tools and pointing out how they are made to fail. There are a few exceptions still, like Hilti who's business model is to rent tools, so they are interested in building lasting and repairable things.

titzer 8y ago

> It's more a concerted effort to make repair expensive, unexpected, unfashionable and gratuitously difficult across as many industries as possible. I upvoted you because I agree with your overall comment, but on this one point I disagree. I think it's not a concerted effort, just a gentle gradient caused by economics. Meaning, all the companies that made traditionally repairable items (e.g. straight razors) were less profitable in the long run than companies that made disposable/irreparable items, so they eventually went under. Because disposable items are cheaper to manufacture, they could be sold for much lower prices in the marketplace and produced in much greater numbers, reaping much more profit. That expands markets and keeps them producing demand by the need for replacement. While consumers should be the counterpressure to that, consumers generally don't consider TCO[1], so traditional producers lost to the market and humanity irrationality. [1] I mean honestly, who adds up the cost of all the razors they'll use in their life? The way humans used to live two hundred years ago was definitely "waste not, want not". Things were durable because making them took human effort. People were poor and closer to the things that they made and used. Supply chains were not something optimized by logistics companies; shoes were made by people in the same town. In that setting, you better believe they made stuff to last. In short, all of this is because of the techno-industrial marketplace.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Well it's not thousands of manufacturers participating in a global conspiracy, but it's not quite the same as commodity items like disposable razor blades either. Whether it's prevailing economic school, or what they're teaching MBAs the last few decades but there is clear intent to a) remove maintenance and repair options, and b) ensure products are not built to last, but built to last "just long enough". Now, profits are not so knife edge that adding 50p on a connector to permit a part to be changed in a fridge or kettle would cause them to go under. The market for kettles spans £10 to well over £100 for stupid gimmicks. Plenty of space for more ethical options alongside internet connectivity, LCD displays and LEDs that light up the water. Even the ethical extra water saving environmentally gimmicked options don't permit repair. In single blade razors the smallest change could make or break profitability. Even that is a different proposition now thanks to the ever rising blade count and added gimmicks. Many of the companies that made traditionally repairable items are still around. It's just they all started phasing out at roughly the same time. Were lighting a 21st century invention there would be no lightbulbs or bayonet and Edison screw fittings. We'd all be replacing the light fitting every time, and people would be explaining why it was unavoidable. So I suspect it's something more than simple economics, though I don't think there's been a repetition of the 1,000 hour lightbulb cartel. :)