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The trend for lack of reparability in smartphones is because of consumer preferences. Consumers are consistently choosing devices that are smaller, lighter, hig

The trend for lack of reparability in smartphones is because of consumer preferences. Consumers are consistently choosing devices that are smaller, lighter, higher durability, waterproof, cheaper etc. vs. devices that are more repairable that do not have those features.

fsh 5y ago
Where does this crazy idea come from that you have to glue shut a device to make it waterproof? A rubber gasket and a few screws work just as well without compromising repairability. Wristwatches have been constructed like this for centuries, while being a lot smaller and lighter than any smartphone. Maybe it would slightly increase the BOM and assembly cost, but considering that it fits in the budget of a 30€ Casio, probably not by much. I guess the real problem is that manufacturers really don't want you to repair your phones and customer's don't care enough for it to make a difference in the market.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  > Where does this crazy idea come from that you have to glue shut a device to make it waterproof? Glue helps with heat dissipation, physical shocks, vibration knocking plugs loose, provides electrical insulation, chemical resistance, and makes the components less able to vibrate over time and knock things loose, makes sensor positioning more stable, and even makes things easier to assemble since less individual fasteners are needed.
  - chmod775 5y ago
    Your response doesn't actually address the point you quoted. But yeah. You can either do thoughtful engineering and careful assembly... or you can achieve close to the same thing with glue.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      The demand for smartphones is hundreds of millions per year. Manufacturing a hundred million of a complex thing is orders of magnitude more difficult than manufacturing ones of millions of a complex thing. A small complex thing with tight tolerances is harder yet. Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts. Apple and Samsung pump out tens of millions of phones a quarter. The more effort required for each stage of assembly ends up the difference of millions of phones manufactured in the same period of time.
      - passivate 5y ago
        Assuming you've already researched the time and material costs - Why does it matter if more effort is required? We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies. We don't allow industries to pollute the planet, we require expensive filters and waste-treatment for chemical plant effluents and catalytic converters for cars, and what not.
        giantrobot 5y ago
        > We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies. It's not necessarily about overall profit. Apple profits on iPhones because they sell them for many times their cost. A marginal cost increase in manufacturing wouldn't impact them much. The problem for Apple (and other large manufacturers) is production volume. It is a massive (and expensive) undertaking to mass produce something like an iPhone in the volumes Apple does. There's a lot of orchestration between component suppliers, component transport, assembly, packaging, and channel distribution. Contracts covering all of those things are signed years in advance to reserve capacity. If final product assembly volume drops because a worker has to spend five seconds screwing parts rather than two seconds gluing that back pressure affects everything. Supply chains are such that there's literally no warehouse space available to store backed up components or finished products. That doesn't affect profitability but just economic feasibility of whole lines of products. There's massive demand for smartphones and there's only so many ways to get the production volume to meet that demand. Consider PC shipments in terms of production. The global demand is tens of millions of units a year vs hundreds of millions of phones per quarter. Like I said, there's challenges to making a hundred million complex widgets that simply don't exist at smaller scales. Screws might be fine in laptops but they're a volume killer for phones.
  - fsh 5y ago
    None of this makes any sense. In modern smartphones, the PCBs (i.e. the parts that get hot and contain the sensors and other components) are usually screwed into the frame without any glue. Only the battery, display, and back covers are glued in. This makes repairs of the most commonly damaged parts much more difficult without providing any functional benetfits.
    - ChrisLomont 5y ago
      You ignored a significant part of the list. The list is not mine - it's listed on manufacturing process feature availability when you source things.
  - passivate 5y ago
    You're saying "glue helps" but you seem to mean "glue is required". Those are not identical concepts. Yes glue may help, just like using bolts screws and gaskets may help. The entire point is that glue is not _required_ to achieve those goals.
    - ChrisLomont 5y ago
      What is glue is cheaper and works better at achieving all those disparate goals?
      - passivate 5y ago
        It doesn't though. It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste. This is the topic of the primary article, and therefore the context for this thread. You can also weld an entire car together to make it cheaper, but this is not something we should celebrate or promote if it impacts the environment in terms of repair. But yes, I value your opinion so don't want to shut you out of the discussion, I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills.
        ChrisLomont 5y ago
        >It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste Around 1.5 billion phones are sold a year. What percent of phones are thrown out due to breaking versus people want an upgrade? Then compare to the costs and waste of using inefficient assembly techniques. It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops. I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts. > I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills I think this type of simplistic framing makes the discussion end, not pointing out that there are good engineering merits for using glue. I've worked on enough hardware design that needs MIL-SPEC ratings that I know it is highly non-trivial to make things rugged. And that things like glue go a long way towards making it so. How much increased waste would there be if phones were significantly easier to break?
- scientismer 5y ago
  Can you present me a sleek smartphone design with a rubber gasket and screws? I'm genuinely curious what you have in mind.
- JoshTko 5y ago
  Look at this comparison. Fairphone has a smaller screen but is larger, heavier, lower quality screen, and is not dust/waterpoof, and costs double compared with the Galaxy S8. Fairphone only matches or loses on all other specs. https://versus.com/en/fairphone-3-vs-samsung-galaxy-s8 https://versus.com/en/fairphone-3-vs-samsung-galaxy-s8
  - operator-name 5y ago
    But also look at the AirPods Pro vs Galaxy Buds+: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds++Teardown/132702 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds++Teardow... One has a zero whilst the other has a 7 by ifixit's rating.
    - JoshTko 5y ago
      Buds are heavier, larger by volume, and are less water resistant.
      - operator-name 5y ago
        Weight isn't an important metric unless it's greater than the threshold of uncomfortableness. The majority of the weight difference comes from the extra battery which is a tradeoff. Similarly for volume, in which the case dimensions is the important metric. Once again the volume is a battery tradeoff. As for water resistance yes, the buds+ are IP2X versus IP4X. Under normal use this isn't important, but if argued this is the better point than bulkiness. https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/samsung-galaxy-buds-truly-wireless-vs-apple-airpods-pro-truly-wireless/792/1625 https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/samsung-gala... The point is that these are comparable devices and repairability doesn't have to make the drastic tradeoffs as your example of the fairphone 3.
doikor 5y ago
Most of the the newest devices are perfectly repairable if the manufacturer would release the schematics and not block their suppliers from third parties buying the parts (and as newest trend lock the parts together on hardware level). Maybe not all problems but a lot of the most common ones for sure. Repair shops have managed to source new screens and cameras for the latest iPhones for example. Apple just firmware locks them to the device that stops them from working even though it is a identical part (except for the serial number burned into the chip). Basically it is not about making designs that just happen to be hard to repair but instead the manufacturers are making them intentionally hard or impossible to repair for third parties to protect their own repair line and/or force you to buy a new one especially now that phones have started to last 3+ years just fine as progress on cpu speeds have slowed done.
africanboy 5y ago
but that's not a dichotomy you can have both we had smaller, lighter, more durable, waterproof, cheap phones in the 90s and they were also highly repairable
operator-name 5y ago
For independent repair shops newer devices aren't inhenrantly more ddifcult to repair. It's just more difficult to source the parts or get around the "security features".
operator-name 5y ago
Smartphones are an interesting market. They've only been around 14 years and their rate of growth and improvements have been staggering. Just a few years ago every new generation brought a leap in performance, battery, features or design. Increasingly consumers are not buying phones every year but every two or even three years. As a result manufacturers have been designing planned obsolescence and fighting against the right to repair. We can see from the results of direct ballot initiatives that consumers want right to repair. They want the choice if they accidentally dropped and cracked the screen to buy a new one, get a repair from the manufacturer, an independent third party or even learn to do it themselves if they're feeling up to it! So yes, consumers can want features over repairability but they can also be against barriers for their right to repair at the same time.
amelius 5y ago
Even if the phone is glued shut, I should still be able to install a different OS on the thing after the vendor drops support for it.
tsejerome97 5y ago
meanwhile phone screen are larger nowadays

fsh 5y ago

Where does this crazy idea come from that you have to glue shut a device to make it waterproof? A rubber gasket and a few screws work just as well without compromising repairability. Wristwatches have been constructed like this for centuries, while being a lot smaller and lighter than any smartphone. Maybe it would slightly increase the BOM and assembly cost, but considering that it fits in the budget of a 30€ Casio, probably not by much. I guess the real problem is that manufacturers really don't want you to repair your phones and customer's don't care enough for it to make a difference in the market.

ChrisLomont 5y ago
> Where does this crazy idea come from that you have to glue shut a device to make it waterproof? Glue helps with heat dissipation, physical shocks, vibration knocking plugs loose, provides electrical insulation, chemical resistance, and makes the components less able to vibrate over time and knock things loose, makes sensor positioning more stable, and even makes things easier to assemble since less individual fasteners are needed.
- chmod775 5y ago
  Your response doesn't actually address the point you quoted. But yeah. You can either do thoughtful engineering and careful assembly... or you can achieve close to the same thing with glue.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    The demand for smartphones is hundreds of millions per year. Manufacturing a hundred million of a complex thing is orders of magnitude more difficult than manufacturing ones of millions of a complex thing. A small complex thing with tight tolerances is harder yet. Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts. Apple and Samsung pump out tens of millions of phones a quarter. The more effort required for each stage of assembly ends up the difference of millions of phones manufactured in the same period of time.
    - passivate 5y ago
      Assuming you've already researched the time and material costs - Why does it matter if more effort is required? We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies. We don't allow industries to pollute the planet, we require expensive filters and waste-treatment for chemical plant effluents and catalytic converters for cars, and what not.
      - giantrobot 5y ago
        > We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies. It's not necessarily about overall profit. Apple profits on iPhones because they sell them for many times their cost. A marginal cost increase in manufacturing wouldn't impact them much. The problem for Apple (and other large manufacturers) is production volume. It is a massive (and expensive) undertaking to mass produce something like an iPhone in the volumes Apple does. There's a lot of orchestration between component suppliers, component transport, assembly, packaging, and channel distribution. Contracts covering all of those things are signed years in advance to reserve capacity. If final product assembly volume drops because a worker has to spend five seconds screwing parts rather than two seconds gluing that back pressure affects everything. Supply chains are such that there's literally no warehouse space available to store backed up components or finished products. That doesn't affect profitability but just economic feasibility of whole lines of products. There's massive demand for smartphones and there's only so many ways to get the production volume to meet that demand. Consider PC shipments in terms of production. The global demand is tens of millions of units a year vs hundreds of millions of phones per quarter. Like I said, there's challenges to making a hundred million complex widgets that simply don't exist at smaller scales. Screws might be fine in laptops but they're a volume killer for phones.
- fsh 5y ago
  None of this makes any sense. In modern smartphones, the PCBs (i.e. the parts that get hot and contain the sensors and other components) are usually screwed into the frame without any glue. Only the battery, display, and back covers are glued in. This makes repairs of the most commonly damaged parts much more difficult without providing any functional benetfits.
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    You ignored a significant part of the list. The list is not mine - it's listed on manufacturing process feature availability when you source things.
- passivate 5y ago
  You're saying "glue helps" but you seem to mean "glue is required". Those are not identical concepts. Yes glue may help, just like using bolts screws and gaskets may help. The entire point is that glue is not _required_ to achieve those goals.
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    What is glue is cheaper and works better at achieving all those disparate goals?
    - passivate 5y ago
      It doesn't though. It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste. This is the topic of the primary article, and therefore the context for this thread. You can also weld an entire car together to make it cheaper, but this is not something we should celebrate or promote if it impacts the environment in terms of repair. But yes, I value your opinion so don't want to shut you out of the discussion, I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills.
      - ChrisLomont 5y ago
        >It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste Around 1.5 billion phones are sold a year. What percent of phones are thrown out due to breaking versus people want an upgrade? Then compare to the costs and waste of using inefficient assembly techniques. It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops. I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts. > I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills I think this type of simplistic framing makes the discussion end, not pointing out that there are good engineering merits for using glue. I've worked on enough hardware design that needs MIL-SPEC ratings that I know it is highly non-trivial to make things rugged. And that things like glue go a long way towards making it so. How much increased waste would there be if phones were significantly easier to break?
scientismer 5y ago
Can you present me a sleek smartphone design with a rubber gasket and screws? I'm genuinely curious what you have in mind.
JoshTko 5y ago
Look at this comparison. Fairphone has a smaller screen but is larger, heavier, lower quality screen, and is not dust/waterpoof, and costs double compared with the Galaxy S8. Fairphone only matches or loses on all other specs. https://versus.com/en/fairphone-3-vs-samsung-galaxy-s8 https://versus.com/en/fairphone-3-vs-samsung-galaxy-s8
- operator-name 5y ago
  But also look at the AirPods Pro vs Galaxy Buds+: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds++Teardown/132702 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds++Teardow... One has a zero whilst the other has a 7 by ifixit's rating.
  - JoshTko 5y ago
    Buds are heavier, larger by volume, and are less water resistant.
    - operator-name 5y ago
      Weight isn't an important metric unless it's greater than the threshold of uncomfortableness. The majority of the weight difference comes from the extra battery which is a tradeoff. Similarly for volume, in which the case dimensions is the important metric. Once again the volume is a battery tradeoff. As for water resistance yes, the buds+ are IP2X versus IP4X. Under normal use this isn't important, but if argued this is the better point than bulkiness. https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/samsung-galaxy-buds-truly-wireless-vs-apple-airpods-pro-truly-wireless/792/1625 https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/samsung-gala... The point is that these are comparable devices and repairability doesn't have to make the drastic tradeoffs as your example of the fairphone 3.

doikor 5y ago

Most of the the newest devices are perfectly repairable if the manufacturer would release the schematics and not block their suppliers from third parties buying the parts (and as newest trend lock the parts together on hardware level). Maybe not all problems but a lot of the most common ones for sure. Repair shops have managed to source new screens and cameras for the latest iPhones for example. Apple just firmware locks them to the device that stops them from working even though it is a identical part (except for the serial number burned into the chip). Basically it is not about making designs that just happen to be hard to repair but instead the manufacturers are making them intentionally hard or impossible to repair for third parties to protect their own repair line and/or force you to buy a new one especially now that phones have started to last 3+ years just fine as progress on cpu speeds have slowed done.

africanboy 5y ago

but that's not a dichotomy you can have both we had smaller, lighter, more durable, waterproof, cheap phones in the 90s and they were also highly repairable

operator-name 5y ago

For independent repair shops newer devices aren't inhenrantly more ddifcult to repair. It's just more difficult to source the parts or get around the "security features".

operator-name 5y ago

Smartphones are an interesting market. They've only been around 14 years and their rate of growth and improvements have been staggering. Just a few years ago every new generation brought a leap in performance, battery, features or design. Increasingly consumers are not buying phones every year but every two or even three years. As a result manufacturers have been designing planned obsolescence and fighting against the right to repair. We can see from the results of direct ballot initiatives that consumers want right to repair. They want the choice if they accidentally dropped and cracked the screen to buy a new one, get a repair from the manufacturer, an independent third party or even learn to do it themselves if they're feeling up to it! So yes, consumers can want features over repairability but they can also be against barriers for their right to repair at the same time.

amelius 5y ago

Even if the phone is glued shut, I should still be able to install a different OS on the thing after the vendor drops support for it.

tsejerome97 5y ago

meanwhile phone screen are larger nowadays