5 ms·

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. E

by cletus 5y ago

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. People forget how (relatively) expensive products used to be. Example: my family had a very early VHS video recorder. I believe it cost ~$1000 in the early 1980s. I may be misremembering. But that was a lot of money then. So of course it was worth repairing. Labour was considerably less expensive in terms of percentage of outlay costs. That's why it was justified. Computers came along and you had a bunch of chips on a board, some of which were worth replacing. But each interconnect costs money. Each external package costs money. We've seen the rise of complicated SoC chips that basically do everything in one chip. These are overall cheaper to fab (compared to 2+ chips) and have lower build, integration and interconnection costs. The downside? If it stops working, you just throw it away (or at least replace the entire SoC). And if the SoC is relatively cheap, it's not worth paying someone to order a replacement and replace it (with or without soldering). So really what you're missing is tech being very expensive. Personally I prefer what we have now. There are other downsides to modern tech (eg Internet-connected TVs to insert advertising) but durability just isn't one of them.

megaframe 5y ago
There's also the same price but more complex issue. Hybrid engines and washing machines are far more efficient but significantly more complex. Prices are roughly the same +inflation but the added complexity reduces lifetime and repairability.
rglullis 5y ago
Today's tech can be cheap and repairable. Buying a PC in parts is not that more expensive than buying than a box from a retailer. The framework laptop is completely competitively priced with laptops of equivalent specs. DIY audio enthusiasts can buy speaker kits that have amazing performance for one third of the price of the "ready" one, and if a speaker or the amp goes bad, they don't need to buy a whole new kit. It's consumers themselves that got that into that mindset that is not worth to invest time into building and repairing things. We need to start attaching a cost to disposing of obsolete tech, and you can bet they will quickly remember that they too are capable of doing things.
- taneq 5y ago
  I mean, it won't be, but it CAN.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I bought a low-end Chromebook for $92.44 delivered last week. Other than the charge adapter or USB-C cable, there's literally nothing that makes any economic sense to attempt to repair. Even something as bounded as replacing the battery is likely to make no sense several years down the road.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Because everything is integrated, and like I said you are not paying for the cost of disposing it. If electronics are getting to the point that they are as disposable as a plastic bottle, perhaps we should start treating them as such. In Germany, every recyclable (plastic/glass/aluminum) container has a surcharge of a few cents, which you get back by returning them to any supermarket. Imagine if we made something similar for consumer electronics. A tax on electronics products, it being higher in correlation with the level of integration, the difficulty to repair. Your chromebook would be taxed at 100% if sold as a whole package, but if Google decided to produce modules that are independently sold, the tax would drop. Suddenly the whole equation changes for everyone. Manufacturers will have the incentive to produce less integrated products and consumers will have more choice to upgrade/replace only parts of their equipment. Your first-time cost is "higher", but onward you realize that you can upgrade the every three years and the board for $20, the screen last 5 years and costs $40, the battery is $15, etc.
agiacalone 5y ago
> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Much of this, I feel, is survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) and I totally agree with your thoughts on it. Anecdotal story from my grandfather which occurred circa 1955: He purchased a "name brand" television in 1955, when TVs were still very new and rather expensive (I don't know the brand, sadly, and he's long since passed to ask him). Got the TV home, plugged it in, and almost immediately the vacuum tubes in the television burned out. Called a repairman to service the television. Repairman came out, replaced all of the vacuum tubes, ran a few checks on the electronics to see if everything checked out. It did, and the serviceman took care of the billing and left--all the while, the television was on and operating. As the serviceman was leaving the driveway, the tubes burned out again.
fuzzfactor 5y ago
I would say your grandpa was a true broadcast/electronics enthusiast. Lots of the less enthusiastic technology lovers still only had radios at that point. Regardless of the electronics or the decade that spawned it, the unfortunate terminal behavior of that TV set was characteristic of what is known in electronic assembly as a "birth defect". Quite possibly a single marginal key component or miswiring mistake, and from your account most likely not a vacuum tube itself and very much more unlikely the entire set of original tubes or replacements. I wouldn't rule out a bad socket though. Seems to have gone down in history as one of the most ridiculously premature failures people would always remember. Anyway it did seem to perform normally for a short while before it just up and died, both times, and I think that modern electronics having an equivalent assembly goof-up probably would not even make it once. So that may speak a bit about a preference for overly-robust engineered electronics that could be lost for decades now. Entirely unfulfilled with this fateful TV, I know the feeling well but I think it has gotten much worse in the 21st century. Even if only one tube socket was the cause of the failure, those sockets were what made it much more possible from the beginning for users to keep their own electronics running if they were so inclined, simply taking their own tubes to Radio Shack for testing at a minimum could accomplish a lot. Not everyone would do this back then but it would be kind of equivalent to those who would rather not add extra memory to their PCs themselves. Neither one should you be doing willy-nilly. More of an upgrade here than a repair but you're still putting components in sockets. Well a good bit of user repairability was once assumed because there was not any ingrained kind of disposable society, and the devastatingly senseless losses and massive-scale waste of World War II had still not dampened the spirit of Americans for things that last. Then in the 21st century when digital TV broadcasts took over from analog using the same proven radio frequencies, power levels, and antennae, this was the first time a higher resolution picture was possible since way back when analog TV was standardized by NTSC. The picture's capable of being as perfect as cable when you have an interference-free signal, but that's a certain additional requirement for near-perfection that was however not met often enough. Seems engineers "forgot" that analog TV was based on radio and the further you got from the broadcast station the worse your picture got until there was nothing but audio for a number of additional miles away from the antenna. With digital you lost it all, abruptly, beyond a much smaller range. Ever since. And TV channels take a lot longer to change, the difference between zero latency and some latency is most uncanny. Like many things defying the type of expectations people had for progress after 1955, that were futuristically anticipated to be realized during the 21st century.

by cletus 5y ago

megaframe 5y ago

There's also the same price but more complex issue. Hybrid engines and washing machines are far more efficient but significantly more complex. Prices are roughly the same +inflation but the added complexity reduces lifetime and repairability.

rglullis 5y ago

Today's tech can be cheap and repairable. Buying a PC in parts is not that more expensive than buying than a box from a retailer. The framework laptop is completely competitively priced with laptops of equivalent specs. DIY audio enthusiasts can buy speaker kits that have amazing performance for one third of the price of the "ready" one, and if a speaker or the amp goes bad, they don't need to buy a whole new kit. It's consumers themselves that got that into that mindset that is not worth to invest time into building and repairing things. We need to start attaching a cost to disposing of obsolete tech, and you can bet they will quickly remember that they too are capable of doing things.

taneq 5y ago
I mean, it won't be, but it CAN.
sokoloff 5y ago
I bought a low-end Chromebook for $92.44 delivered last week. Other than the charge adapter or USB-C cable, there's literally nothing that makes any economic sense to attempt to repair. Even something as bounded as replacing the battery is likely to make no sense several years down the road.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Because everything is integrated, and like I said you are not paying for the cost of disposing it. If electronics are getting to the point that they are as disposable as a plastic bottle, perhaps we should start treating them as such. In Germany, every recyclable (plastic/glass/aluminum) container has a surcharge of a few cents, which you get back by returning them to any supermarket. Imagine if we made something similar for consumer electronics. A tax on electronics products, it being higher in correlation with the level of integration, the difficulty to repair. Your chromebook would be taxed at 100% if sold as a whole package, but if Google decided to produce modules that are independently sold, the tax would drop. Suddenly the whole equation changes for everyone. Manufacturers will have the incentive to produce less integrated products and consumers will have more choice to upgrade/replace only parts of their equipment. Your first-time cost is "higher", but onward you realize that you can upgrade the every three years and the board for $20, the screen last 5 years and costs $40, the battery is $15, etc.

agiacalone 5y ago

> Most products today are less durable and are generally worse than "yesterday", in my opinion. Much of this, I feel, is survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias) and I totally agree with your thoughts on it. Anecdotal story from my grandfather which occurred circa 1955: He purchased a "name brand" television in 1955, when TVs were still very new and rather expensive (I don't know the brand, sadly, and he's long since passed to ask him). Got the TV home, plugged it in, and almost immediately the vacuum tubes in the television burned out. Called a repairman to service the television. Repairman came out, replaced all of the vacuum tubes, ran a few checks on the electronics to see if everything checked out. It did, and the serviceman took care of the billing and left--all the while, the television was on and operating. As the serviceman was leaving the driveway, the tubes burned out again.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

I would say your grandpa was a true broadcast/electronics enthusiast. Lots of the less enthusiastic technology lovers still only had radios at that point. Regardless of the electronics or the decade that spawned it, the unfortunate terminal behavior of that TV set was characteristic of what is known in electronic assembly as a "birth defect". Quite possibly a single marginal key component or miswiring mistake, and from your account most likely not a vacuum tube itself and very much more unlikely the entire set of original tubes or replacements. I wouldn't rule out a bad socket though. Seems to have gone down in history as one of the most ridiculously premature failures people would always remember. Anyway it did seem to perform normally for a short while before it just up and died, both times, and I think that modern electronics having an equivalent assembly goof-up probably would not even make it once. So that may speak a bit about a preference for overly-robust engineered electronics that could be lost for decades now. Entirely unfulfilled with this fateful TV, I know the feeling well but I think it has gotten much worse in the 21st century. Even if only one tube socket was the cause of the failure, those sockets were what made it much more possible from the beginning for users to keep their own electronics running if they were so inclined, simply taking their own tubes to Radio Shack for testing at a minimum could accomplish a lot. Not everyone would do this back then but it would be kind of equivalent to those who would rather not add extra memory to their PCs themselves. Neither one should you be doing willy-nilly. More of an upgrade here than a repair but you're still putting components in sockets. Well a good bit of user repairability was once assumed because there was not any ingrained kind of disposable society, and the devastatingly senseless losses and massive-scale waste of World War II had still not dampened the spirit of Americans for things that last. Then in the 21st century when digital TV broadcasts took over from analog using the same proven radio frequencies, power levels, and antennae, this was the first time a higher resolution picture was possible since way back when analog TV was standardized by NTSC. The picture's capable of being as perfect as cable when you have an interference-free signal, but that's a certain additional requirement for near-perfection that was however not met often enough. Seems engineers "forgot" that analog TV was based on radio and the further you got from the broadcast station the worse your picture got until there was nothing but audio for a number of additional miles away from the antenna. With digital you lost it all, abruptly, beyond a much smaller range. Ever since. And TV channels take a lot longer to change, the difference between zero latency and some latency is most uncanny. Like many things defying the type of expectations people had for progress after 1955, that were futuristically anticipated to be realized during the 21st century.