7 ms·

The French repairability index – one year after its implementation [pdf]

bibelo 4y ago
Fairphone all the way I'm french and I was reassured of my choice to buy a fairphone when I saw its indice de réparabilité is 9.3/10
kkfx 4y ago
The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the availability of spare parts. But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Personally, for standards: - anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; - all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else; - ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone; - anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
- bombcar 4y ago
  > anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting. However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance without VAT plus $5 for the repair? If the goal is to reduce people’s consumption and incentivize them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell them.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The idea would be for out of warranty repaired items; in other words, the device was bought years ago and is otherwise destined for the landfill.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Oh, I see. Still seems like more labor required to verify and audit warranty status. Seems simpler to enforce an excise tax on the manufacturer/importer.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability. If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed. If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken. A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    The cheap way to do this (and imo better because much better definition of the breaking strain) is a shear pin.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Great example of why "planned obsolescence" isn't always bad. In this case the weak gear acts alike a kind of mechanical fuse. So long as it's within a context of easy replacement.
  - spockz 4y ago
    But then it isn’t planned obsolescence. It is planned obsolescence if the plastic gear wears and breaks down without a jam occurring. In your model it is a fail safe or circuit breaker. In the GP it a part designed to fail sooner (in wall clock time) to make sure you buy a new product.
    - msbarnett 4y ago
      But that's the crux of engineering: these two things are in tension – the part which is designed to fail safely if a jam occurs will, by its very nature, also be subject to wearing down sooner than if it were made of cast iron and caused the entire mixer to fail catastrophically during a jam. In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!". Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the tradeoffs involved.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general attitude. > sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish excessive returns. > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal. > must be made of standard parts Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies. > all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is demand? > ALL software MUST BE open sourced Gets my vote! :) > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished mercilessly.
  - adamc 4y ago
    How do you know MTBF for recent (new) products? If they get a waiver, why wouldn't manufacturers make every product model-year-specific to avoid such a requirement?
    - stonemetal12 4y ago
      If it is anything like hard drives, then you just make up a big number that no one ever actually sees in the real world.
- w-m 4y ago
  Wouldn’t the simplest way to punish selling crap be to bump up the years of required warranty significantly, for most product categories?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Don't some countries in Europe already have this? Minimum warranties because the product must work for X number of years no matter what? A sliding tax that got larger the shorter the warranty was would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product model; a device that has been made for five years is going to be more repairable than one that changes every year, if everything else is the same).
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some. > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try. The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    > > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. > So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years? Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
- the-smug-one 4y ago
  Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products. Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]). Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
- nicbou 4y ago
  > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. It blows my mind that some vehicle repair manuals are basically impossible to find.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
A bigger success than I expected. - 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource - 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be helpful for orienting their final purchase choice - French authorities hope that the repairability index will contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025 I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things, and expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted. I hope we can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.
  - xedrac 4y ago
    I wish I could buy things that are expected to last a lifetime. The only things I've purchased in recent months that fall into that category are my cast iron pan and some hardcover books.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      There are a lot of things but they are always very very expensive. It’s almost not worth it when functionally many times they perform about as well as something a tenth of its price.
      - TylerE 4y ago
        And if we’re talking electronics, 100x worse than what will be on the Market in 10 years.
        4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
Here's a link to the index in French (lawnmower, battery): https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/jardin/tondeuse-batterie/ https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/jardin/tondeuse-... But you can see the pretty pictures and the numbers.
- robocat 4y ago
  Does durability get any rating? Lawn mowers made from plastic parts can get ratings ~9 out of 10. Interesting because plastic wheels and plastic cowlings etcetera get broken, there is a commitment to replacements but how long before they disappear. . . The index doesn’t seem to contain any metrics for: hardiness, fault tolerance, reliability, toughness, or general ability to avoid breakage in the first place. For foreigners: French numbers 7,1 means 7.1 Here’s a translation of some of the ratings - I think it is out of date - unfortunately most of the docs I Googled were PDF and I couldn’t be arsed dealing with PDF. Criterion 1: Documentation Sub-criterion 1.1: Availability of documentation Sub-criterion 1.2: Instructions for use of product maintenance and updating tips Criterion 2: Disassembly and reassembly Sub-criterion 2.1: Ease of disassembly and reassembly (breakdown/breakage parts) Sub-criterion 2.2: Tools required (breakdown/breakage parts) Criterion 3: Availability of spare parts Sub-criterion 3.1.1: Commitment to the duration of availability (breakdown/breakage parts) Sub-criterion 3.1.2: Commitment to availability (functional parts) Sub-criterion 3.2.1: Commitment over the delivery period (breakdown/breakage parts) Sub-criterion 3.2.2: Commitment over the delivery period (functional parts) Criterion 4: Price Ratio/price of the most expensive part (breakdown/breakage parts) to the price of the new product Criterion 5: Specific criterion In French (pardon the fucking image, sorry, WTF is going on with unpardonable French results? Fuck accessibility huh?): https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/produit/tondeuse-a-gazon-sans-fil-bosch-advancedrotak-36-660-livree-avec-2-batteries-36v-2ah-o-de-coupe-42-cm-jusqua-jusqua-660-m²/ https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/produit/tondeuse-a-gazon-s...
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    Durability is much harder to rate, and use of plastic doesn't imply lower durability. Go look at a car with fenders that are rusting away. My car is one of them. Inside of the wheel well there is a fender liner made of plastic. That thing takes 10x the abuse of the fender and is still in good condition unless its mounting points have rusted away. I wish that they had made my fenders from plastic. My car would be in much better shape if they had.
acd 4y ago
Lets create an open hardware itx like case standard for laptops. Imagine if you had standard displays. L-ITX Imagine a similar itx like standard for phones M-ITX with standard batteries and displays.
- paulmd 4y ago
  That already exists - there are already open, modular phone and laptop chassis standards. The market largely doesn't want that. Standardized components tend to be significantly larger than an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also end up being pretty bad - like I'm curious, why do you point to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing? Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical) and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed and become niche unsupported standards of their own. In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-variety mini-PCs, and those builds are extremely fraught with compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than having to work around layout decisions that were made literally in the 1970s by IBM. For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives (ITX) is extremely unpopular outside the home-builder market, virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw placement vary hugely, because the market doesn't want giant full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den. We also tried a lot of these concepts with the laptop MXM graphics card factor... but it turns out the mezzanine format adds a lot of thickness, cost, etc, for really not a whole lot of benefit. Laptops are inherently such specialized things that you end up with problems with chip placement, memory placement, cooling, power delivery, etc... and in particular it was basically never possible to swap between brands, because these factors meant the laptop just couldn't fit the GPU and actually power/cool it. It's just easier and better to design a solution that sits on the board. Socketed CPU/GPU in laptops are done, BGA is the future. Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue, for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue... dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable issue... people hated it. It would be great if we had one standard that covered everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables, devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were. Again, you can disagree all you want, but these products already exist, there is Framework aimed at the laptop market and Fairphone and others in the phone market. That is not what the market as a whole wants. But hey, government intervention can always force the issue, right?
onli 4y ago
Did someone see an API? I'm specifically looking for a way to get the repairability score for smartphones, via their codename.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  The data is handled by a startup, so I’d expect it to be out of the open data initiative at this stage. You should contact them if you have a specific use case in mind.
tims33 4y ago
I find this statement hard to believe: "76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index." It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most people have of their technology devices. I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.
- thomasahle 4y ago
  I think you are misreading the sentence. It doesn't say how many people noticed the index. It says how many of the people _who noticed the index_ found it helpful. (See nonrandomstring's comment.)
  - tims33 4y ago
    I see what they are saying. I'm still not sure it is a useful data point other than to say the index isn't detrimental. My conclusion from the report is that it is still too early to determine the impact of the program.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I could believe it if French law required it as a sticker or otherwise on the product/ads, like US food details are on each product.
  - bchanudet 4y ago
    I'm not sure if it's actually required by law, but usual retailers have been communicating a lot on this in the last year. Most of them display a sticker in their stores, but the score is also prominently shown on their websites[0][1]. I'm really not surprised that a lot of people willing to buy something noticed the repairability score, because it's near impossible to miss it. [0]: Some examples on two of the biggest appliance/electronics retailers: https://www.boulanger.com/ref/1157777 https://www.boulanger.com/ref/1157777, https://www.darty.com/nav/achat/gros_electromenager/lavage_sechage/lave-linge_hublot/samsung_ww70ta046ax.html https://www.darty.com/nav/achat/gros_electromenager/lavage_s... [1]: One last example on the Orange (mobile services provider) shop: https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/oneplus-9-pro-5g-noir https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/oneplus-9-pro-5g-n...
ab_testing 4y ago
Did I read it correctly that this whole 65 page document was created by interviewing 27 people only.
- ramshorst 4y ago
  1206 people did the survey.
chmod775 4y ago
It can be a bit hard to find reliable/repairable electronics. I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while. I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.). Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver. Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos. To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts. For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.). My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.) The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.
- Mochsner 4y ago
  Try fair phone or pine phone. You wont get anything from apple/google/samsung etc. For smart watches, just dont. Unless it's Joey Castillos sensor watch or something
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Once you've used a Samsung Note for a few weeks, you'll never go back to a phone without a built in stylus. The boost in productivity far outweighs the drawbacks of stock firmware. If you know of another phone with a built-in stylus, or any third-party firmware for a Note 10 Lite, I'm all ears.
ddkwool 4y ago
The films "Kinky boots" comes to mind. Something broke inside me when my manufacturing materials lecturer stated "we do not always needs products to last forever so we have the ability to design materials that wear and tear within a defined envelope of usages and time" Looking at my iPhone cable I'm so glad I failed that course.
- nicbou 4y ago
  But this is essentially correct. It's pointless to design a component to outlast a device's useful lifespan by a decade. I've heard it phrased differently: anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.
  - sublimefire 4y ago
    > It's pointless to design a component to outlast a device's useful lifespan by a decade. No it is not because it can be reused in the assembly of another device. This is not commercially incentivizing though. Think of a car, if EV motors are build to last 100 years then it would make sense for the manufacturer to buy back used EVs and reuse the component, no? Even if it would be commercially more expensive it should make sense because otherwise those components go to the landfill. > anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands This analogy does not fit the current climate of consumables because bridges are built to survive a long time, they are not built for 5 years. The "bridge that barely stands" emphasizes the minimum amount of materials to use to achieve the goal - to make sure it stands for a long time. Consumer items do that already, use the minimum amount of materials but do not make sure their creations live for more than a couple of years - inverse to the analogy.
iasay 4y ago
I hope they apply this to childrens toys as well as high value consumer electronics. Everyone likes to crap on the consumer electronics sector but I have seen with my own eyes literally skips full of plastic trash which barely lasted one use before being disposed of because they were broken or single use.
henearkr 4y ago
In the category of laptops I thought I'd see the Frame.work in the first place (as it has the best iFixIt index), but instead the place is taken by the P775DM3-G, a Clevo laptop, a brand I had never heard of (the brand is listed as a "Why" but that's an error, this is the reseller's name). https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/multimedia/ordinateur-portable/?orderby=price-desc https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/multimedia/ordin...
- wlecometo 4y ago
  the two "why" laptops before the frame.work laptop are ranked 97.6 which is rounded to 98 and then 9,8 as score; the frame.work is ranked 97.0 without rounding so it ends being 9,7 . the frame.work gets a higher score on the ease of disassembly and the tools you need to disassemble, but it gets a lower score on the documentation ( <flame> maybe documentation is not in french </flame> ) and on the price ratio for the component; probably frame.work parts are a bit more expensive in comparison with the price of the laptop.
  - henearkr 4y ago
    It seems like the shipment delay of the parts, as well as the ratio price-of-the-separated-part/price-of-the-part-in-the-laptop are factors. It is not the parts that seem to be expensive, it's that they are more expensive bought separately than bought inside a new laptop. Also the availability duration for the parts. Maybe the uncertainty stemming from that Frame.work is a recently created startup?
- Keats 4y ago
  Clevo is very common, it's just that it's always sold via resellers so you might not realise it. Eg system76 also sells Clevo laptops afaik

Fairphone all the way I'm french and I was reassured of my choice to buy a fairphone when I saw its indice de réparabilité is 9.3/10

kkfx 4y ago

The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the availability of spare parts. But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Personally, for standards: - anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; - all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else; - ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone; - anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.

bombcar 4y ago
> anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting. However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance without VAT plus $5 for the repair? If the goal is to reduce people’s consumption and incentivize them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell them.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The idea would be for out of warranty repaired items; in other words, the device was bought years ago and is otherwise destined for the landfill.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Oh, I see. Still seems like more labor required to verify and audit warranty status. Seems simpler to enforce an excise tax on the manufacturer/importer.
dale_glass 4y ago
Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability. If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed. If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken. A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The cheap way to do this (and imo better because much better definition of the breaking strain) is a shear pin.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Great example of why "planned obsolescence" isn't always bad. In this case the weak gear acts alike a kind of mechanical fuse. So long as it's within a context of easy replacement.
- spockz 4y ago
  But then it isn’t planned obsolescence. It is planned obsolescence if the plastic gear wears and breaks down without a jam occurring. In your model it is a fail safe or circuit breaker. In the GP it a part designed to fail sooner (in wall clock time) to make sure you buy a new product.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    But that's the crux of engineering: these two things are in tension – the part which is designed to fail safely if a jam occurs will, by its very nature, also be subject to wearing down sooner than if it were made of cast iron and caused the entire mixer to fail catastrophically during a jam. In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!". Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the tradeoffs involved.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general attitude. > sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish excessive returns. > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal. > must be made of standard parts Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies. > all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is demand? > ALL software MUST BE open sourced Gets my vote! :) > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished mercilessly.
- adamc 4y ago
  How do you know MTBF for recent (new) products? If they get a waiver, why wouldn't manufacturers make every product model-year-specific to avoid such a requirement?
  - stonemetal12 4y ago
    If it is anything like hard drives, then you just make up a big number that no one ever actually sees in the real world.
w-m 4y ago
Wouldn’t the simplest way to punish selling crap be to bump up the years of required warranty significantly, for most product categories?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Don't some countries in Europe already have this? Minimum warranties because the product must work for X number of years no matter what? A sliding tax that got larger the shorter the warranty was would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product model; a device that has been made for five years is going to be more repairable than one that changes every year, if everything else is the same).
908B64B197 4y ago
> But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some. > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try. The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
- majormajor 4y ago
  > > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. > So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years? Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
the-smug-one 4y ago
Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products. Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.
sokoloff 4y ago
> at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]). Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
nicbou 4y ago
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. It blows my mind that some vehicle repair manuals are basically impossible to find.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

A bigger success than I expected. - 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource - 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be helpful for orienting their final purchase choice - French authorities hope that the repairability index will contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025 I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things, and expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted. I hope we can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.

yodsanklai 4y ago
> A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.
- xedrac 4y ago
  I wish I could buy things that are expected to last a lifetime. The only things I've purchased in recent months that fall into that category are my cast iron pan and some hardcover books.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    There are a lot of things but they are always very very expensive. It’s almost not worth it when functionally many times they perform about as well as something a tenth of its price.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      And if we’re talking electronics, 100x worse than what will be on the Market in 10 years.
      - 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

Here's a link to the index in French (lawnmower, battery): https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/jardin/tondeuse-batterie/ https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/jardin/tondeuse-... But you can see the pretty pictures and the numbers.

robocat 4y ago
Does durability get any rating? Lawn mowers made from plastic parts can get ratings ~9 out of 10. Interesting because plastic wheels and plastic cowlings etcetera get broken, there is a commitment to replacements but how long before they disappear. . . The index doesn’t seem to contain any metrics for: hardiness, fault tolerance, reliability, toughness, or general ability to avoid breakage in the first place. For foreigners: French numbers 7,1 means 7.1 Here’s a translation of some of the ratings - I think it is out of date - unfortunately most of the docs I Googled were PDF and I couldn’t be arsed dealing with PDF. Criterion 1: Documentation Sub-criterion 1.1: Availability of documentation Sub-criterion 1.2: Instructions for use of product maintenance and updating tips Criterion 2: Disassembly and reassembly Sub-criterion 2.1: Ease of disassembly and reassembly (breakdown/breakage parts) Sub-criterion 2.2: Tools required (breakdown/breakage parts) Criterion 3: Availability of spare parts Sub-criterion 3.1.1: Commitment to the duration of availability (breakdown/breakage parts) Sub-criterion 3.1.2: Commitment to availability (functional parts) Sub-criterion 3.2.1: Commitment over the delivery period (breakdown/breakage parts) Sub-criterion 3.2.2: Commitment over the delivery period (functional parts) Criterion 4: Price Ratio/price of the most expensive part (breakdown/breakage parts) to the price of the new product Criterion 5: Specific criterion In French (pardon the fucking image, sorry, WTF is going on with unpardonable French results? Fuck accessibility huh?): https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/produit/tondeuse-a-gazon-sans-fil-bosch-advancedrotak-36-660-livree-avec-2-batteries-36v-2ah-o-de-coupe-42-cm-jusqua-jusqua-660-m²/ https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/produit/tondeuse-a-gazon-s...
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  Durability is much harder to rate, and use of plastic doesn't imply lower durability. Go look at a car with fenders that are rusting away. My car is one of them. Inside of the wheel well there is a fender liner made of plastic. That thing takes 10x the abuse of the fender and is still in good condition unless its mounting points have rusted away. I wish that they had made my fenders from plastic. My car would be in much better shape if they had.

acd 4y ago

Lets create an open hardware itx like case standard for laptops. Imagine if you had standard displays. L-ITX Imagine a similar itx like standard for phones M-ITX with standard batteries and displays.

paulmd 4y ago
That already exists - there are already open, modular phone and laptop chassis standards. The market largely doesn't want that. Standardized components tend to be significantly larger than an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also end up being pretty bad - like I'm curious, why do you point to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing? Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical) and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed and become niche unsupported standards of their own. In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-variety mini-PCs, and those builds are extremely fraught with compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than having to work around layout decisions that were made literally in the 1970s by IBM. For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives (ITX) is extremely unpopular outside the home-builder market, virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw placement vary hugely, because the market doesn't want giant full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den. We also tried a lot of these concepts with the laptop MXM graphics card factor... but it turns out the mezzanine format adds a lot of thickness, cost, etc, for really not a whole lot of benefit. Laptops are inherently such specialized things that you end up with problems with chip placement, memory placement, cooling, power delivery, etc... and in particular it was basically never possible to swap between brands, because these factors meant the laptop just couldn't fit the GPU and actually power/cool it. It's just easier and better to design a solution that sits on the board. Socketed CPU/GPU in laptops are done, BGA is the future. Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue, for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue... dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable issue... people hated it. It would be great if we had one standard that covered everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables, devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were. Again, you can disagree all you want, but these products already exist, there is Framework aimed at the laptop market and Fairphone and others in the phone market. That is not what the market as a whole wants. But hey, government intervention can always force the issue, right?

onli 4y ago

Did someone see an API? I'm specifically looking for a way to get the repairability score for smartphones, via their codename.

makeitdouble 4y ago
The data is handled by a startup, so I’d expect it to be out of the open data initiative at this stage. You should contact them if you have a specific use case in mind.

tims33 4y ago

I find this statement hard to believe: "76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index." It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most people have of their technology devices. I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.

thomasahle 4y ago
I think you are misreading the sentence. It doesn't say how many people noticed the index. It says how many of the people _who noticed the index_ found it helpful. (See nonrandomstring's comment.)
- tims33 4y ago
  I see what they are saying. I'm still not sure it is a useful data point other than to say the index isn't detrimental. My conclusion from the report is that it is still too early to determine the impact of the program.
bombcar 4y ago
I could believe it if French law required it as a sticker or otherwise on the product/ads, like US food details are on each product.
- bchanudet 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's actually required by law, but usual retailers have been communicating a lot on this in the last year. Most of them display a sticker in their stores, but the score is also prominently shown on their websites[0][1]. I'm really not surprised that a lot of people willing to buy something noticed the repairability score, because it's near impossible to miss it. [0]: Some examples on two of the biggest appliance/electronics retailers: https://www.boulanger.com/ref/1157777 https://www.boulanger.com/ref/1157777, https://www.darty.com/nav/achat/gros_electromenager/lavage_sechage/lave-linge_hublot/samsung_ww70ta046ax.html https://www.darty.com/nav/achat/gros_electromenager/lavage_s... [1]: One last example on the Orange (mobile services provider) shop: https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/oneplus-9-pro-5g-noir https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/oneplus-9-pro-5g-n...

ab_testing 4y ago

Did I read it correctly that this whole 65 page document was created by interviewing 27 people only.

ramshorst 4y ago
1206 people did the survey.

chmod775 4y ago

It can be a bit hard to find reliable/repairable electronics. I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while. I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.). Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver. Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos. To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts. For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.). My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.) The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.

Mochsner 4y ago
Try fair phone or pine phone. You wont get anything from apple/google/samsung etc. For smart watches, just dont. Unless it's Joey Castillos sensor watch or something
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Once you've used a Samsung Note for a few weeks, you'll never go back to a phone without a built in stylus. The boost in productivity far outweighs the drawbacks of stock firmware. If you know of another phone with a built-in stylus, or any third-party firmware for a Note 10 Lite, I'm all ears.

ddkwool 4y ago

The films "Kinky boots" comes to mind. Something broke inside me when my manufacturing materials lecturer stated "we do not always needs products to last forever so we have the ability to design materials that wear and tear within a defined envelope of usages and time" Looking at my iPhone cable I'm so glad I failed that course.

nicbou 4y ago
But this is essentially correct. It's pointless to design a component to outlast a device's useful lifespan by a decade. I've heard it phrased differently: anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.
- sublimefire 4y ago
  > It's pointless to design a component to outlast a device's useful lifespan by a decade. No it is not because it can be reused in the assembly of another device. This is not commercially incentivizing though. Think of a car, if EV motors are build to last 100 years then it would make sense for the manufacturer to buy back used EVs and reuse the component, no? Even if it would be commercially more expensive it should make sense because otherwise those components go to the landfill. > anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands This analogy does not fit the current climate of consumables because bridges are built to survive a long time, they are not built for 5 years. The "bridge that barely stands" emphasizes the minimum amount of materials to use to achieve the goal - to make sure it stands for a long time. Consumer items do that already, use the minimum amount of materials but do not make sure their creations live for more than a couple of years - inverse to the analogy.

iasay 4y ago

I hope they apply this to childrens toys as well as high value consumer electronics. Everyone likes to crap on the consumer electronics sector but I have seen with my own eyes literally skips full of plastic trash which barely lasted one use before being disposed of because they were broken or single use.

henearkr 4y ago

In the category of laptops I thought I'd see the Frame.work in the first place (as it has the best iFixIt index), but instead the place is taken by the P775DM3-G, a Clevo laptop, a brand I had never heard of (the brand is listed as a "Why" but that's an error, this is the reseller's name). https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/multimedia/ordinateur-portable/?orderby=price-desc https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/multimedia/ordin...

wlecometo 4y ago
the two "why" laptops before the frame.work laptop are ranked 97.6 which is rounded to 98 and then 9,8 as score; the frame.work is ranked 97.0 without rounding so it ends being 9,7 . the frame.work gets a higher score on the ease of disassembly and the tools you need to disassemble, but it gets a lower score on the documentation ( <flame> maybe documentation is not in french </flame> ) and on the price ratio for the component; probably frame.work parts are a bit more expensive in comparison with the price of the laptop.
- henearkr 4y ago
  It seems like the shipment delay of the parts, as well as the ratio price-of-the-separated-part/price-of-the-part-in-the-laptop are factors. It is not the parts that seem to be expensive, it's that they are more expensive bought separately than bought inside a new laptop. Also the availability duration for the parts. Maybe the uncertainty stemming from that Frame.work is a recently created startup?
Keats 4y ago
Clevo is very common, it's just that it's always sold via resellers so you might not realise it. Eg system76 also sells Clevo laptops afaik