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My niece broke the screen on her dirt cheap Chromebook. A Samsung Chromebook 3. I bought her a new screen for about $30 and was able to replace it myself in abo
by wishfish 4y ago
My niece broke the screen on her dirt cheap Chromebook. A Samsung Chromebook 3. I bought her a new screen for about $30 and was able to replace it myself in about 5 minutes after watching a short Youtube howto.
The Lenovo Chromebook 3 seems to be similar. I bought one during the recent $79 sale. Was curious if I could DIY an upgrade to an IPS screen. Found some screens that looked like a good fit for around $40 and the screen is easily user serviceable. There's many videos on how to fix various aspects of this ultra cheap laptop, and Lenovo has an easily downloaded service manual.
- ericmay 4y agoThen what's the issue? Apparently we already have right to repair in practice. Or is specifically that people want to be able to do this with Macbooks and iPhones? Vote with your wallet then.
- bornfreddy 4y agoNot enough. Right to repair should be mandated by law, because throwing away perfectly good hardware damages our planet, so it is not just a matter of the money exchanged between the producer and the customer.
- ericmay 4y agoThen don't throw away your hardware? The person I'm responding to didn't. Would you also mandate recycling? I'd certainly support that. I'm just not sure what a right to repair law is addressing here that's different than what's currently happening. I would hypothesize that mandatory recycling would go further in effect than right to repair.
- threeseed 4y ago> Then don't throw away your hardware? No you see the world is black or white. So either you can repair it yourself or it has to be thrown out. Definitely no way to take it to Apple or a third party repairer to have it fixed.
- wishfish 4y agoI was responding to your mention of Chromebooks and how expensive you thought they would be to fix. And also because I thought it was interesting that these two very cheap gadgets were easily fixable. I guess since the main customers for these cheap laptops are schools, they'd have to be repairable. School budgets would almost mandate their hardware acquisitions be cheaply repairable instead of having to replace the entire unit. Especially when they hand these things out to accident prone kids. But we don't have right to repair across the board. Would be nice if manufacturers took this into account.
- ericmay 4y agoTo nitpick a bit I was more so criticizing what I envision Google's support for repairing these devices to be. More from an infrastructure/customer support perspective. I did mention that these devices were inexpensive and I would guess that for most people they'd prefer to throw the device away instead of repair it given our current cultural climate. Now I do not have a lot of experience fixing devices, I tend to use and then either gift old devices to family members or recycle them, but I am curious about how much more repairable one of these devices is compared to, say, a new Macbook Pro. Also I wonder if current state is indicative of future state. For all we know Apple might make repair and upgrade of devices a top priority. Certainly they're showing some serious movement here in my opinion.