10 ms·

Whenever repairability of modern electronic devices is discussed, I have to look at my mechanical wristwatch. Yes, there is an enormeous amount of technology in

by _ph_ 6y ago

Whenever repairability of modern electronic devices is discussed, I have to look at my mechanical wristwatch. Yes, there is an enormeous amount of technology integrated into a smartphone or compact laptop, but my wristwatch contains over 100 moving parts in a tiny volume. And still, every trained watchmaker can open and service it. It requires specialized tools, but those have been avialable to watchmakers for hundreds of years. A time traveller could buy a current Rolex and have it serviced in 1950, possibly even in 1850. The watchmakers of those times wouldn't have access to the right spare parts - those are surprisingly high-tech, but basic service would be possible. And that is why I cannot stand the current state of repairs in the electronic world. I am especially looking at Apple in this respect, because they have demonstrated a surprising skill at making things repairable, which they want to be serviceable. Just look at the brilliant mount for the USB ports in the new Air. While end-user serviceability might not be desirable for something highly-integrated, the benchmark really should be whether someone trained like a watch-maker has the ability to service a device. Which would be great for the local economy wherever in the world a customer is, because traditionally most towns would have at least one watchmaker, a well paid professional who would keep the money local vs. creating more electronic waste and shipping a new device around the world.

ThePhysicist 6y ago
Apple seems to be one of the worst offenders in terms of repairability of their devices. You can watch e.g. Louis Rossmann's videos on Youtube, he goes into great detail on how Apple tries to make it impossible for anyone except themselves to service their laptops, even going as far as to restrict market suppliers from selling specific microchips (that were not invented by Apple) to anyone but Apple. I imagine this will only become worse as they switch to their own CPUs in the near future. I expect that Macs will become more like iPhones in that Apple will restrict more and more which software you can easily run on them and how you can extend the devices. Other manufacturers like Dell or Lenovo do a much better job in terms of repairability IMHO: They build their machines with mostly standard components that can be easily replaced and make them easy to open and service. Compare that to recent Apple devices: If you want more RAM or storage in your device they charge you 5-10 times the market price. They also make sure you will never be able to upgrade those things yourself by soldering them to the mainboard.
- bzzzt 6y ago
  About the soldering part: memory prices don't plummet as hard as in 2005 anymore, so when you need more RAM, just buy it. By soldering it you also make it more robust. Most DIMM troubleshooting begins with 'reseat the modules'. And users won't place cheap modules which will cause issues and give your products a bad name.
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    Yes and no. I am all for buying the maximum memory you can order for a laptop, but Apple makes this an issue by asking a huge premium for upgrades. And of course, with ssd-storage, there is the question of wear, eventually you would have might have to replace it.
  - ThePhysicist 6y ago
    Of course, you can select a 16 GB memory upgrade from Apple for 400 $ when you buy your laptop. On the other hand, a user-serviceable laptop would just enable you to buy that RAM yourself for around 100 $ and put it in the laptop. Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. With an Apple laptop you're just out of luck in those cases, the only thing you can do is sell it and buy a new one. Same story with the hard drives or almost any other component. I don't think that the reason they do this is to make the laptops 1-2 mm thinner, I think it's just economically way more interesting to be in a position where your company controls the entire value chain from software to hardware. That's where Apple is headed and it's great for them as a company, for end users it's not so great though. I would really like if the EU restricts this kind of behavior as I think it would be good for Apple users as well.
    - cesarb 6y ago
      > Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. An example of that: when I started working at my current company, the 4GB of RAM I had on my several years old laptop was no longer enough (I could work fine, but it got annoyingly slow when I used the IDE). Since said laptop is a Dell, I just bought a matched pair of 8GB RAM sticks (dual channel, total 16GB), followed the instructions on the repair manual (available as a PDF on the manufacturer website, no login required) to open the back cover, and exchanged the memory. Took me only around an hour, and would have taken only a few minutes if I hadn't insisted on running the full memory test to make sure the new sticks were good (built-in hardware test program, launched from the BIOS, no installation or operating system required). I some time later used that 4GB stick I had removed from the laptop to upgrade another computer from 4GB to 8GB. That is: even the part I had to remove for the upgrade wasn't wasted.
StavrosK 6y ago
> Yes, there is an enormeous amount of technology integrated into a smartphone or compact laptop, but my wristwatch contains over 100 moving parts in a tiny volume I'm not sure what the point here is, a CPU contains 50 billion parts in a tiny volume, it's impossible to fix things this small if they break. If a capacitor or resistor burns, you can probably open up your PC, look at the motherboard, find the faulty component visually (it'll usually be black), desolder it and solder a new one. It's just that they're so small that it's really hard. Many manufacturers (looking at you, Apple) are designing things so they're hard to repair, but it won't be easy to repair electronics, no matter how much you plan for it. The best compromise is to design them so the user has to replace small modules rather than the entire thing.
- rini17 6y ago
  Maybe the watch analogy isn't the best one. But you are probably aware that the display, battery and storage break down more often than CPU? And that noone is proposing to replace individual bad transistors or pixels, but these parts which are manufactured separately and don't have to be glued together.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    I was arguing specifically that comparing tech products to mechanical wristwatches is a bit ridiculous. Obviously tech products could be much more repairable than they are.
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      I hope the clarification I posted shows in what sense it clearly is not ridiculous. Of course you would need spare parts, but the access to be able to exchange parts in the first place ist the essential part.
    - rini17 6y ago
      Actually, comparing exchangeable mechanical gears to a transistors on silicon die or pixels is a bit ridiculous.
knolax 6y ago
The amount of infrastructure and equipment needed to create a watch from raw materials is an order of magnitude less than any piece of modern electronics. A single chip fab probably needs as much physical capital as an entire 1850s Swiss town needed to make a watch from scratch.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Fnoord 6y ago
> A time traveller [sic] could buy a current Rolex [...] Well, no. A wealthy time traveler could buy a current Rolex. Rolex is a terrible example. I'd love to learn about high quality, affordable brands. Also, only being able to know the time is very little information nowadays; smartwatches can do so much more (I have a Fossil Hybrid HR).
- ascorbic 6y ago
  "traveller" is a valid spelling. No need for the passive-aggressive sic
- _ph_ 6y ago
  A non-gold Rolex can be bought for less than a top of the line Macbook Pro :p. I just wanted to give the example of a very fancy and expensive brand, which doesn't have to hide behind glueing their product together. The same applies to any quality brand mechanical wristwatch, be it Seiko, Tissot, Omega, IWC just to name some.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    > The same applies to any quality brand mechanical wristwatch, be it Seiko, Tissot, Omega, IWC just to name some. Thanks for mentioning these. Seiko is a brand I know, and if that fits the requirement then that's telling to me. My parents both had Seiko watches (different ones; mom had a smaller one, dad a bigger one), for a long time. At one point though, my mother replaced hers as it would've been too expensive to repair. For me, that watch was part of her identity, as I grew up with it. My father was (virtually) blind, and he also wore an other watch which he could push to hear the time. That was also an expensive watch back in the days (end 80s / begin 90s), and did require a battery. It also said the time only in English, including PM/AM (we use 24 hours here, so I learned pretty quickly what PM/AM meant). Sadly, he missed the smart device era, though he did receive spoken books from the library for the blind, as well as the Dutch equiv of Consumer Reports (Consumentenbond). I grew up listening to these. And these watches I mentioned.
bonoboTP 6y ago
I think it is a specific branding strategy. And I don't mean that in the direct sense, like planned obsolescence (it's NOT just about lost revenue due to repaired products staying longer in circulaton). The Apple product brand image is that these are sleek smart unified objects. All from hardware to software should be looked at as a singular entity, a well designed black box for my satisfaction as the customer. Opening it up, gutting it out and seeing wires and mechanical parts destroys the illusion. Just as it's not fitting/elegant to think of a celebrity diva or queen farting on the toilet or examining their smelly tooth cavities or whatever, it's not fitting to lay an Apple product barren with all the broken parts sticking out. Because then it looks like just any other contraption, not this futuristic sleek intelligent product. I claim that tinkering (and even just imagining the possibility of someone else tinkering) is in direct opposition to Apple branding strategy. It should just work. If it doesn't work, it should be disposed of, replaced, forgotten.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Replacing a worn-out component doesn't really qualify as "tinkering". And throwing away products, that could be trivially repaired/refurbished should be banned for environmental reasons. At minimum, a company that prevents the repair of their products should be called out for their environmental unfriendliness
- nitrogen 6y ago
  But queens still fart. Denying reality doesn't make it go away. Elegance must adapt.
sireat 6y ago
For consumer notebook repairability the golden standard should be something similar to HP Elitebook 2560p from 2012. No screwdriver required!(with option to have a security screw) While removing battery you can press a latch to remove the back cover. Then you have easy access to everything that a consumer could possible want replacing(HDD/SDD,DVD->HDD, RAM, WIFI). I recently upgraded a cousins 2560p to 16GB and SSD and it was a breeze, took a few minutes at most. Sadly HP stopped offering this kind of notebook case around Haswell in 2014.
- 6510 6y ago
  They could no doubt (at a price) make the inside as spectaculrly looking as the outside.
- shuntress 6y ago
  I think there are definitely some reasonable limits manufacturers shouldn't be expected to reach in terms of easy, intuitive, tool-less end-user serviceability. For example, I think it is unreasonable to expect that a smartphone's battery be replaceable with 0 tools and 0 consumables (gaskets, glues, etc). However, those tools and consumables _should_ be expected to to be reasonably standard and reasonably available.
  - sireat 6y ago
    Why shouldn't smartphone battery be replacable with 0 tools? Why should there be glue involved? It was a standard that mobile phone batteries were easily replacable. In fact https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?idBatRemovable=1 https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?idBatRemovable=1 returns ~6400 results while not removable returns ~2400 results. In fact that's how most smartphones were until some market leaders decided to move to glue on hard to replace models.
    - shuntress 6y ago
      Late reply, sorry. Personally, I prefer the current common design of trading tool-less battery service for size and weather resistance. I want a smaller more durable phone and I am willing to trade away tool less battery hot-swapping to get it. With that said, let me re-iterate that I think battery replacements in particular should be REASONABLY accessible. I should be able to perform a battery replacement myself with easily available tools/consumables provided by either(/both) the original manufacturer or third parties.
cheesecracker 6y ago
Sorry, but isn't a wristwatch like a bazillionth of complexity of a modern smartphone? How many transistors do you need for a wristwatch? The whole idea of servicing modern electronics is romantic nonsense. The hourly rate of an expert will make it too expensive quickly, because industrialized mass production is too effective. (Edit: according to this link on Quora, several billion transistors are not unrealistic in a smartphone https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-there-in-the-average-smartphone?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-there-in-the-... ) What is the hourly rate of a watchmaker?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- conradfr 6y ago
  Maybe we should start with at least a way to change the batteries of otherwise perfectly fine devices or at least a reliable way to have the information about that possibility before purchasing.
- gen3 6y ago
  Almost all those transistors are in a nice little package. Using transistor count isn’t really a good way to define a devices serviceable complexity. People repair phones all the time, it just requires the knowledge to do so.
  - cheesecracker 6y ago
    Then the comparison to watches doesn't really make sense, either, because both can be repaired?
- viraptor 6y ago
  That's not a great comparison. Nobody repairs separate in-chip transistors and they're not the usual source of issues. PCB mounted components however do fail and get replaced regularly. There is space for reasonable pricing too given that Apple's response is normally either: swap the inside, swap the outside, or swap the display. (all of them expensive)
ginko 6y ago
>A time traveller could buy a current Rolex and have it serviced in 1950, possibly even in 1850. That's because mechanical watches are an outdated design. Good luck to them trying to service a quartz watch.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  It depends on the component you need to service. For a battery it's usually quite easy, but that really depends. OPs point is that in many cases, products are being intentionally designed to be difficult to service. It's one thing to introduce a complex component that's not reasonably serviceable and make it modular to replace, it's an entirely different story when you make that modular piece difficult to replace when it doesn't need to be. This is what a lot of product vendors are doing, intentionally designing products to force vendor servicing. It's not a new trick, some auto manufacturers used to and still do it for certain cases. Due to the complexity of the situation, there's usually ambiguity that the product needed to be designed that way to meet some specification/constraint. What usually happens is that a specification/feature/constraint that forces such designs is often sought after or identified, then the design follows suit. These are the types of shenanigans you have accountants and financing involved in the design process of anything. They want to maximize ROI and know engineers are good at optimization problems, so ultimately, we end up with products designed to be more business friendly and less consumer friendly. I know for a fact it happens because I've been in this scenario countless times during product or service development, then someone chimes in, "is there a way we can... so we can get more money."
- _ph_ 6y ago
  And even with a quartz watch a watchmaker can do a lot of things. If you provide the battery, they can exchange it, they can even service the dial and hands. Of course, servicing the quartz movement itself is not possible, but the point I tried to make was, that at least important components should be exchangeable on their own, like for example the battery in a laptop.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stiray 6y ago
Let me tell you a story. 4 Samsung smart TV models bought as a "pack" to bring down the price. Me and 3 friends bought them. 3 of them died in 5-6 years. One was just replaced with larger one but still works. Difference? First 3 were connected to internet, last one, mine, was on stock firmware, never connected anywhere (I have computer near it and lately raspberry pi 4). Coincidence?
- MikusR 6y ago
  Were they connected with ethernet cables? A lightning could do it.
  - stiray 6y ago
    Naah, no one was thinking of ethernet cables in old houses. Wireless all the way.
zepto 6y ago
Rolex’s cost upwards of $6000. Mechanical watch functionality evolves extremely slowly - over generations, not years. Competent Watch repair of actual high end watches is an extremely difficult skill to master taking years. Read watch forums - repair is often botched. Computers are almost always redundant before they need repairing, whereas a mechanical watch can last generations, therefore a far higher percentage will need repair. Watches are not recyclable. Rolex is an exception. Watches in the price range of computers are mostly electronic and are in fact less repairable than computers in general or any Apple device. There is literally nothing about this analogy with watch repair that applies to computers. Also, there is simply nothing to support the hypothesis that Apple makes devices intentionally hard to repair. They offer good warranties, and a lot of people buy AppleCare. It is therefore in Apple’s interest to make devices economic to both repair and/or recycle when replaced. Furthermore Apple has stated that it is their strategy to maximize the useful life of their devices (presumably so they can continue to sell services to users who don’t need new devices). Increasing the device life is not the same as making it repairable. Many things that make a device easier to repair, also make it more likely to fail. People who demand repairability without taking this into account may well be harming the environment, and economically disadvantaged users without realizing it.

by _ph_ 6y ago

ThePhysicist 6y ago

Apple seems to be one of the worst offenders in terms of repairability of their devices. You can watch e.g. Louis Rossmann's videos on Youtube, he goes into great detail on how Apple tries to make it impossible for anyone except themselves to service their laptops, even going as far as to restrict market suppliers from selling specific microchips (that were not invented by Apple) to anyone but Apple. I imagine this will only become worse as they switch to their own CPUs in the near future. I expect that Macs will become more like iPhones in that Apple will restrict more and more which software you can easily run on them and how you can extend the devices. Other manufacturers like Dell or Lenovo do a much better job in terms of repairability IMHO: They build their machines with mostly standard components that can be easily replaced and make them easy to open and service. Compare that to recent Apple devices: If you want more RAM or storage in your device they charge you 5-10 times the market price. They also make sure you will never be able to upgrade those things yourself by soldering them to the mainboard.

bzzzt 6y ago
About the soldering part: memory prices don't plummet as hard as in 2005 anymore, so when you need more RAM, just buy it. By soldering it you also make it more robust. Most DIMM troubleshooting begins with 'reseat the modules'. And users won't place cheap modules which will cause issues and give your products a bad name.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  Yes and no. I am all for buying the maximum memory you can order for a laptop, but Apple makes this an issue by asking a huge premium for upgrades. And of course, with ssd-storage, there is the question of wear, eventually you would have might have to replace it.
- ThePhysicist 6y ago
  Of course, you can select a 16 GB memory upgrade from Apple for 400 $ when you buy your laptop. On the other hand, a user-serviceable laptop would just enable you to buy that RAM yourself for around 100 $ and put it in the laptop. Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. With an Apple laptop you're just out of luck in those cases, the only thing you can do is sell it and buy a new one. Same story with the hard drives or almost any other component. I don't think that the reason they do this is to make the laptops 1-2 mm thinner, I think it's just economically way more interesting to be in a position where your company controls the entire value chain from software to hardware. That's where Apple is headed and it's great for them as a company, for end users it's not so great though. I would really like if the EU restricts this kind of behavior as I think it would be good for Apple users as well.
  - cesarb 6y ago
    > Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. An example of that: when I started working at my current company, the 4GB of RAM I had on my several years old laptop was no longer enough (I could work fine, but it got annoyingly slow when I used the IDE). Since said laptop is a Dell, I just bought a matched pair of 8GB RAM sticks (dual channel, total 16GB), followed the instructions on the repair manual (available as a PDF on the manufacturer website, no login required) to open the back cover, and exchanged the memory. Took me only around an hour, and would have taken only a few minutes if I hadn't insisted on running the full memory test to make sure the new sticks were good (built-in hardware test program, launched from the BIOS, no installation or operating system required). I some time later used that 4GB stick I had removed from the laptop to upgrade another computer from 4GB to 8GB. That is: even the part I had to remove for the upgrade wasn't wasted.

StavrosK 6y ago

> Yes, there is an enormeous amount of technology integrated into a smartphone or compact laptop, but my wristwatch contains over 100 moving parts in a tiny volume I'm not sure what the point here is, a CPU contains 50 billion parts in a tiny volume, it's impossible to fix things this small if they break. If a capacitor or resistor burns, you can probably open up your PC, look at the motherboard, find the faulty component visually (it'll usually be black), desolder it and solder a new one. It's just that they're so small that it's really hard. Many manufacturers (looking at you, Apple) are designing things so they're hard to repair, but it won't be easy to repair electronics, no matter how much you plan for it. The best compromise is to design them so the user has to replace small modules rather than the entire thing.

rini17 6y ago
Maybe the watch analogy isn't the best one. But you are probably aware that the display, battery and storage break down more often than CPU? And that noone is proposing to replace individual bad transistors or pixels, but these parts which are manufactured separately and don't have to be glued together.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I was arguing specifically that comparing tech products to mechanical wristwatches is a bit ridiculous. Obviously tech products could be much more repairable than they are.
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    I hope the clarification I posted shows in what sense it clearly is not ridiculous. Of course you would need spare parts, but the access to be able to exchange parts in the first place ist the essential part.
  - rini17 6y ago
    Actually, comparing exchangeable mechanical gears to a transistors on silicon die or pixels is a bit ridiculous.

knolax 6y ago

The amount of infrastructure and equipment needed to create a watch from raw materials is an order of magnitude less than any piece of modern electronics. A single chip fab probably needs as much physical capital as an entire 1850s Swiss town needed to make a watch from scratch.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Fnoord 6y ago

> A time traveller [sic] could buy a current Rolex [...] Well, no. A wealthy time traveler could buy a current Rolex. Rolex is a terrible example. I'd love to learn about high quality, affordable brands. Also, only being able to know the time is very little information nowadays; smartwatches can do so much more (I have a Fossil Hybrid HR).

ascorbic 6y ago
"traveller" is a valid spelling. No need for the passive-aggressive sic
_ph_ 6y ago
A non-gold Rolex can be bought for less than a top of the line Macbook Pro :p. I just wanted to give the example of a very fancy and expensive brand, which doesn't have to hide behind glueing their product together. The same applies to any quality brand mechanical wristwatch, be it Seiko, Tissot, Omega, IWC just to name some.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  > The same applies to any quality brand mechanical wristwatch, be it Seiko, Tissot, Omega, IWC just to name some. Thanks for mentioning these. Seiko is a brand I know, and if that fits the requirement then that's telling to me. My parents both had Seiko watches (different ones; mom had a smaller one, dad a bigger one), for a long time. At one point though, my mother replaced hers as it would've been too expensive to repair. For me, that watch was part of her identity, as I grew up with it. My father was (virtually) blind, and he also wore an other watch which he could push to hear the time. That was also an expensive watch back in the days (end 80s / begin 90s), and did require a battery. It also said the time only in English, including PM/AM (we use 24 hours here, so I learned pretty quickly what PM/AM meant). Sadly, he missed the smart device era, though he did receive spoken books from the library for the blind, as well as the Dutch equiv of Consumer Reports (Consumentenbond). I grew up listening to these. And these watches I mentioned.

bonoboTP 6y ago

I think it is a specific branding strategy. And I don't mean that in the direct sense, like planned obsolescence (it's NOT just about lost revenue due to repaired products staying longer in circulaton). The Apple product brand image is that these are sleek smart unified objects. All from hardware to software should be looked at as a singular entity, a well designed black box for my satisfaction as the customer. Opening it up, gutting it out and seeing wires and mechanical parts destroys the illusion. Just as it's not fitting/elegant to think of a celebrity diva or queen farting on the toilet or examining their smelly tooth cavities or whatever, it's not fitting to lay an Apple product barren with all the broken parts sticking out. Because then it looks like just any other contraption, not this futuristic sleek intelligent product. I claim that tinkering (and even just imagining the possibility of someone else tinkering) is in direct opposition to Apple branding strategy. It should just work. If it doesn't work, it should be disposed of, replaced, forgotten.

_ph_ 6y ago
Replacing a worn-out component doesn't really qualify as "tinkering". And throwing away products, that could be trivially repaired/refurbished should be banned for environmental reasons. At minimum, a company that prevents the repair of their products should be called out for their environmental unfriendliness
nitrogen 6y ago
But queens still fart. Denying reality doesn't make it go away. Elegance must adapt.

sireat 6y ago

For consumer notebook repairability the golden standard should be something similar to HP Elitebook 2560p from 2012. No screwdriver required!(with option to have a security screw) While removing battery you can press a latch to remove the back cover. Then you have easy access to everything that a consumer could possible want replacing(HDD/SDD,DVD->HDD, RAM, WIFI). I recently upgraded a cousins 2560p to 16GB and SSD and it was a breeze, took a few minutes at most. Sadly HP stopped offering this kind of notebook case around Haswell in 2014.

6510 6y ago
They could no doubt (at a price) make the inside as spectaculrly looking as the outside.
shuntress 6y ago
I think there are definitely some reasonable limits manufacturers shouldn't be expected to reach in terms of easy, intuitive, tool-less end-user serviceability. For example, I think it is unreasonable to expect that a smartphone's battery be replaceable with 0 tools and 0 consumables (gaskets, glues, etc). However, those tools and consumables _should_ be expected to to be reasonably standard and reasonably available.
- sireat 6y ago
  Why shouldn't smartphone battery be replacable with 0 tools? Why should there be glue involved? It was a standard that mobile phone batteries were easily replacable. In fact https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?idBatRemovable=1 https://www.gsmarena.com/search.php3?idBatRemovable=1 returns ~6400 results while not removable returns ~2400 results. In fact that's how most smartphones were until some market leaders decided to move to glue on hard to replace models.
  - shuntress 6y ago
    Late reply, sorry. Personally, I prefer the current common design of trading tool-less battery service for size and weather resistance. I want a smaller more durable phone and I am willing to trade away tool less battery hot-swapping to get it. With that said, let me re-iterate that I think battery replacements in particular should be REASONABLY accessible. I should be able to perform a battery replacement myself with easily available tools/consumables provided by either(/both) the original manufacturer or third parties.

cheesecracker 6y ago

Sorry, but isn't a wristwatch like a bazillionth of complexity of a modern smartphone? How many transistors do you need for a wristwatch? The whole idea of servicing modern electronics is romantic nonsense. The hourly rate of an expert will make it too expensive quickly, because industrialized mass production is too effective. (Edit: according to this link on Quora, several billion transistors are not unrealistic in a smartphone https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-there-in-the-average-smartphone?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-many-transistors-are-there-in-the-... ) What is the hourly rate of a watchmaker?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
conradfr 6y ago
Maybe we should start with at least a way to change the batteries of otherwise perfectly fine devices or at least a reliable way to have the information about that possibility before purchasing.
gen3 6y ago
Almost all those transistors are in a nice little package. Using transistor count isn’t really a good way to define a devices serviceable complexity. People repair phones all the time, it just requires the knowledge to do so.
- cheesecracker 6y ago
  Then the comparison to watches doesn't really make sense, either, because both can be repaired?
viraptor 6y ago
That's not a great comparison. Nobody repairs separate in-chip transistors and they're not the usual source of issues. PCB mounted components however do fail and get replaced regularly. There is space for reasonable pricing too given that Apple's response is normally either: swap the inside, swap the outside, or swap the display. (all of them expensive)

ginko 6y ago

>A time traveller could buy a current Rolex and have it serviced in 1950, possibly even in 1850. That's because mechanical watches are an outdated design. Good luck to them trying to service a quartz watch.

Frost1x 6y ago
It depends on the component you need to service. For a battery it's usually quite easy, but that really depends. OPs point is that in many cases, products are being intentionally designed to be difficult to service. It's one thing to introduce a complex component that's not reasonably serviceable and make it modular to replace, it's an entirely different story when you make that modular piece difficult to replace when it doesn't need to be. This is what a lot of product vendors are doing, intentionally designing products to force vendor servicing. It's not a new trick, some auto manufacturers used to and still do it for certain cases. Due to the complexity of the situation, there's usually ambiguity that the product needed to be designed that way to meet some specification/constraint. What usually happens is that a specification/feature/constraint that forces such designs is often sought after or identified, then the design follows suit. These are the types of shenanigans you have accountants and financing involved in the design process of anything. They want to maximize ROI and know engineers are good at optimization problems, so ultimately, we end up with products designed to be more business friendly and less consumer friendly. I know for a fact it happens because I've been in this scenario countless times during product or service development, then someone chimes in, "is there a way we can... so we can get more money."
_ph_ 6y ago
And even with a quartz watch a watchmaker can do a lot of things. If you provide the battery, they can exchange it, they can even service the dial and hands. Of course, servicing the quartz movement itself is not possible, but the point I tried to make was, that at least important components should be exchangeable on their own, like for example the battery in a laptop.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stiray 6y ago

Let me tell you a story. 4 Samsung smart TV models bought as a "pack" to bring down the price. Me and 3 friends bought them. 3 of them died in 5-6 years. One was just replaced with larger one but still works. Difference? First 3 were connected to internet, last one, mine, was on stock firmware, never connected anywhere (I have computer near it and lately raspberry pi 4). Coincidence?

MikusR 6y ago
Were they connected with ethernet cables? A lightning could do it.
- stiray 6y ago
  Naah, no one was thinking of ethernet cables in old houses. Wireless all the way.

zepto 6y ago

Rolex’s cost upwards of $6000. Mechanical watch functionality evolves extremely slowly - over generations, not years. Competent Watch repair of actual high end watches is an extremely difficult skill to master taking years. Read watch forums - repair is often botched. Computers are almost always redundant before they need repairing, whereas a mechanical watch can last generations, therefore a far higher percentage will need repair. Watches are not recyclable. Rolex is an exception. Watches in the price range of computers are mostly electronic and are in fact less repairable than computers in general or any Apple device. There is literally nothing about this analogy with watch repair that applies to computers. Also, there is simply nothing to support the hypothesis that Apple makes devices intentionally hard to repair. They offer good warranties, and a lot of people buy AppleCare. It is therefore in Apple’s interest to make devices economic to both repair and/or recycle when replaced. Furthermore Apple has stated that it is their strategy to maximize the useful life of their devices (presumably so they can continue to sell services to users who don’t need new devices). Increasing the device life is not the same as making it repairable. Many things that make a device easier to repair, also make it more likely to fail. People who demand repairability without taking this into account may well be harming the environment, and economically disadvantaged users without realizing it.