7 ms·

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops woul

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly integrate with the hardware. Repairing a broken part with a third-party is exactly the opposite of tight integration. If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. It’s not like the phone and computer markets are monopolies either. Androids and PCs of all form factors and OSes exist. It would make more sense to me to call for regulation against pricing abuse for the repairs of tightly integrated products. The Right to Repair movement as it stands just doesn’t resonate much with me, nor do I agree with it, because integrated products that come with everything you need make for great user experiences.

blacksmith_tb 4y ago
Even if that was entirely true, I am fine with regulation leaning on manufacturers to make products that aren't full of soldered ram and storage, glued shut so even their own techs have trouble repairing them, because of the implications for generating mountains of avoidable e-waste. The ability to fix to fix your own gear is just a nice plus of that arrangement, I agree it won't be of use to most people, but it's still a plus.
- minimaul 4y ago
  Soldered RAM isn’t just to be difficult. It has genuine performance & power consumption advantages for DDR4/DDR5/LPDDR4/LPDDR5. Storage though, I agree with :)
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Yeah, LPDDR sockets don’t even exist. Machines that use this type of RAM have to solder it, there’s no other choice.
chubbnix 4y ago
I think this is kind of a strange position to take when the article is demonstrating you wouldn’t even notice the increased repairability as a consumer. What tight integrations were lost in Apple’s redesign?
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
  Increased repairability != enough repairability, as per the comments here. Beyond the article, Apple products still aren’t as repairable as the Right to Repair Movement would like, because people still have to peruse thousand-page highly technical manuals and buy specialized equipment if they wanted to fix certain parts of their Apple devices.
  - boucher 4y ago
    You're conflating multiple issues. Having the right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair. I think we've gone too far down the road of not owning anything we buy, and thus having no rights to use things outside of narrow legal agreements nobody even reads. Making the device easier to repair is also desirable, both for Apple and for third parties, because these things break all the time and need to be repaired. It saves everyone time and reduces waste.
    - rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
      > right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair Huh? If the act of repairing is difficult (and extremely, in Apple’s case), then do you actually have the right, or is it only a right on paper? Is Right to Repair nothing more than printing out manuals no matter how difficult the process of repair itself is?
      - boucher 4y ago
        Nobody actively wants it to be difficult, but if you don't even have the actual legal right to modify the hardware or software it doesn't matter how easy it is.
smoldesu 4y ago
Apple has proven with this iPhone (as have other manufacturers) that these goals don't need to be mutually exclusive. You can have wild products designed in all manner of ways (with satellite connectivity!!!), they just need to be user-servicable. That's not an unreasonable request for a company with 200 billion dollars sitting in their R&D coffers. Right-to-repair regulation isn't about stifling innovation, it's about giving the consumer leverage in the lifecycle of the product they own. Before now, Apple has gone out of their way to make life as hard as possible on third-party repair shops - that shouldn't be an engineering incentive. Regulation gives us the power to force Apple to put consumers before profit margins, and innovation somewhere in between.
- baskire 4y ago
  An organization only has so much mental capacity to focus on challenges. Having a required repair-ability goal would hinder the pace of innovation. It might be worth the hit, but naive to think such an accomplishment is without innovation cost.
  - ckosidows 4y ago
    Isn't innovation frequently a result of limitations?
  - boucher 4y ago
    Seems to me like Apple was more innovative when they had fewer employees and fewer resources, so perhaps we should break up the company in order to increase innovation.
- Joeri 4y ago
  Design is a balancing of constraints, some of which are constraints of the product of the design, and some of which are constraints of the process. Repairability is a constraint, and when that constraint becomes stricter something else has to give. Maybe this is more expensive to manufacture (and given the massive price hike in europe it wouldn’t surprise me), maybe this design took up a lot of designer hours, which held up other products. Whatever the trade-off is, it must be real. My point is: improved repairability always comes at the expense of something else.
GeckoEidechse 4y ago
Repairability and device thinness are by no means mutually exclusive IMO. When LTT did a review of the Framework laptop for example they also did a size comparison with a similarly specced Dell laptop and found that the framework both thinner and sturdier than the Dell laptop, next to being obviously more repairable ¯\_( ツ )_/¯
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
incanus77 4y ago
> If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. This, a million times. I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product. And because many of us are hackers/makers/programmers/tinkerers, one of those priorities is the ability to have all of the above, but also unfettered access to the internals to modify it as we please. It’s like… this car is perfect for my needs in every way, and far and above the best in its class. But I want it to run on hydrogen, so if they could just do that, it’d be perfect. Why are they forcing me to run on electric? Dude, don’t buy it?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  > I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product. Just because a product is a runaway success does not mean it's also not a potential environmental disaster waiting to happen. Cars were also a runaway success. So were plastic bags and straws. So was snake oil and so are various sugary fizzy drinks that destroy your health. We can't just leave everything to the free market and the uninformed preferences of the consumers and watch everything around us burn because $THING is successful because $CORPORATION advertises it and consumers love it, otherwise we end up in the dystopian Idiocracy scenario of "Brawndo is what plants crave because it has electrolytes and is the no. 1 thirst mutilator". That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
  - incanus77 4y ago
    > That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us. Yes, I agree completely. But I wasn't talking about regulation, I was talking about tinkerer users not understanding how the delicate balance achieved by a product is the reason that it is successful and good.
greenn 4y ago
Third parties are perfectly capable of making replacement parts that match the OEM parts in functionality and quality. This has no effect on integration. The other parts of the phone don't care who manufactured the part, unless they were programmed to, as long as they are functionally equivalent. The user certainly doesn't care who manufactured the part as it does not effect the user experience.
- anonymouse008 4y ago
  3rd parties are very much not able to match. Just do a side by side of screen quality and battery life. That is what upsets a customer more than anything - but they never know exactly why. (Old 3rd party repair shop; thousands of data points)
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  I think when you look at it from a profit-driven lens, though, third-parties are always going to have to compromise on something to keep costs down in order to make a profit. Apple, historically, overcompensates on its parts and has higher tolerances so, in order for a third-party to be able to make replacement parts at significant enough profits, they need to be parts that don't match the OEM in quality or function, by definition. Just look at screen repairs. Apple checks in software to verify the integrity of some of the hardware in screens and, in the past, it led to people being locked out of their devices when they were repaired with screens that had dummy FaceID/TouchID sensors.
ojagodzinski 4y ago
> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. No one should have the "right" to create products that turn to garbage when any part of it breaks. A clean planet is more important than "great user experiences". The second thing that they did it only for profit, is ergonomics of new repairable iphone any worse? Also "software locked" parts should be banned by EU regulators.
- astrange 4y ago
  The EU preserving the rights of people to steal your phone and sell it for parts would go well with their trying to preserve the rights of people installing malware on it.
manojlds 4y ago
If any company can figure out how to do it and be a tight integrated product that works amazingly, it's Apple. Let's not forget, this is also about reducing e-waste and it's not an option anymore to dump new phones because one part broke and you can't repair yourself.
- dkonofalski 4y ago
  If there's any company that cares about e-waste and could do this, it would be Apple. They're the only company, from what I can see, that does any kind of changes with regard to an eye on environmental sustainability.
yreg 4y ago
I have been of the same opinion (and I guess I still am, albeit less strongly). However, user wants aside, easily repairable products are better ecology-wise. I want Apple to be allowed to create any device they want, but I think iPhone and Mac repairability can be currently improved without noticably hurting features. Prioritizing it would be the right trade off to do. In that case they should go for it (as they apparently decided to do). Even without fighting for regulation, we can still celebrate companies when they decide to create repairable products with long term software support and complain about them when they don't. A regulation that I would like to see would be to perhaps force 'makers' to sell genuine spare parts to anyone (same goes for Tesla and others).
actionablefiber 4y ago
There are substantial externalities to commercializing products that cannot be repaired. Fantastic amounts of non-biodegradable waste, overconsumption of nonrenewable material resources, and of course financial loss to consumers and opportunity cost to the secondary market. "Just choose not to buy the product" is only sensible if choosing not to buy the product fully insulates you from the effects of its existence. Regulation places the cost of those externalities and/or the responsibility to prevent them back in the lap of the manufacturer.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
  Couldn’t recyclability and repairability be mutually independent, though? It sounds possible to me that a product that is not highly repairable could still be highly recyclable just because its shattered parts can still be reprocessed into new products.
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    Repairability and reusability precede recyclability in effectiveness. Anything you can take to a shop to swap a broken part, or list on a secondary market as a "fixer upper phone" beat out whatever Apple's internal recycling process does.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Right to repair is a societal and environmental topic. You personally not seeing a benefit to it is mostly beside the point: think about battery disposal laws, toxic material regulations, wireless power limitations, available frequencies, etc. These mostly matter at scale, taking input from single individuals would probably not land on the right trade-offs for the society as a whole.
r00fus 4y ago
> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. I think for me repairability comes down to: how long do you think this phone is supposed to be usable? Even if you don't own it (have gifted or sold it). Probably an ecological argument there. Primarily, given there is no up-to-date free/opensource phone OS (not to mention baseband software updates) after Apple iOS support ends... the phone can realistically only last till then unless you want to use legacy software (I have one relative who has such a device - but I'd not want one myself).
Melatonic 4y ago
There is no reason that it would make the phones worse at all. Apple in the past intentionally made the phone harder to repair for no advantage.
lapinot 4y ago
Imho you're missing the point, or at least, you've stated a valid conclusion but the point lies below. Sure, by tightly integrating you are getting material benefits (size, consumption, optimization, etc). But by doing this, you go further down into high-tech, which means complexity and energy intensive build/repair/dispose [1]. At this point i'm reformulating your tradeoff, in which you choose the material benefits. Now, one part of the right-to-repair movement comes from "low-tech" underpinning and objects the material benefits. Indeed, the point of a smartphone is not to crunch some machine instructions, it's to communicate with friends/family/world, interact with network services etc. Crunching code is just a byproduct of reaching this goal. It's even the same with supercomputers which one could think as performance-oriented: their goal is not to do the peta-flops, it's to solve some simulations at a given precision level. Nothing is built just for fun (or should): if you build a tool you better have a problem. And if you forget the goal, your tool will most likely be garbage. This is the objection of the r2r/lowtech movement: it's an assertion that a lot of high-tech has lost the sight of it's actual use and hence is hindering progress more than anything else. This is a direct opposition with the pov which is widespread in modern western tech thinking that "if you build the tool they will use it". Obviously this pov has some depth to it, it's not completely nonsense (in the sense that creative and explorative processes are useful, i know i'm myself doing research in foundations of math). But this pov is also very extreme, and is in fact a corner-stone of the offer-driven production that is hegemonic today (with market economies). This same offer-driven production is also posing many social problems because of the need for aggressive marketing, problems with long-term stable availability of basic goods, with the focus on big/fast/shiny. We've gone too far into that direction and that a part of the reason for the pollution and resource exhaustion crisis (being themselves big parts of the climate and biosphere crisis going on rn). The position of r2r/lowtech is obviously not to go to the other extreme which would be completely planned production based on somehow knowing what needs to be done (which we already see cannot really work and is very conservative by nature). But there has to be a balance. My position: the bulk of the energy-intensive and stable mass-manufacturing of basic known-to-be-useful-and-desirable goods should be done by planning, with open standards, user-groups, cheap repair, and some fraction of the resources should be reserved to the free-for-all market-driven exploratory research. Obviously this poses a couple problem with the fat cats running mass-manufacturing and other commodity services. Hope this was a balanced explanation of the position. [1] The matter will be ordered on a smaller scale so: (1) to build it you need to put a lot of energy into putting everything in order (entropy!); (2) to repair you both have to diagnose a complex thing and then act on it precisely; (3) to dispose of properly you need to put a lot of energy into separating everything again (entropy again!). Here i say "energy" in a large sense, this energy might be embodied as direct energy put into the process but also as human time, dependency on high-tech tooling (hence cost), etc. Another concept linked to this is "capital intensity".
babypuncher 4y ago
The iPhone 14 more or less proves that you can build a device as thin and sleek as Apple and still have it reasonably repairable. I think the same is true of Macbooks. There is no real reason that the SSD has to be soldered to the motherboard, Apple could easily put the NAND chips on a slim socketed daughterboard (they already do this on the Mac Studio). I won't say that every laptop needs to be built like the Framework, but I do think that any component that could be considered a "wear item" (batteries, NAND flash, OLED screens) should be designed to be replaced.
fomine3 4y ago
Note that current MacBook is neither portable nor lightweight, compared to better repairbility laptops
restore_creole_ 4y ago
"Right to repair" laws don't require manufacturers to design their products to be easy to repair. It is about mandating the selling of replacement components to third parties. Just because they sell replacement components doesn't mean the products need to be designed to have their components easily replaced.

blacksmith_tb 4y ago

Even if that was entirely true, I am fine with regulation leaning on manufacturers to make products that aren't full of soldered ram and storage, glued shut so even their own techs have trouble repairing them, because of the implications for generating mountains of avoidable e-waste. The ability to fix to fix your own gear is just a nice plus of that arrangement, I agree it won't be of use to most people, but it's still a plus.

minimaul 4y ago
Soldered RAM isn’t just to be difficult. It has genuine performance & power consumption advantages for DDR4/DDR5/LPDDR4/LPDDR5. Storage though, I agree with :)
- kube-system 4y ago
  Yeah, LPDDR sockets don’t even exist. Machines that use this type of RAM have to solder it, there’s no other choice.

chubbnix 4y ago

I think this is kind of a strange position to take when the article is demonstrating you wouldn’t even notice the increased repairability as a consumer. What tight integrations were lost in Apple’s redesign?

rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
Increased repairability != enough repairability, as per the comments here. Beyond the article, Apple products still aren’t as repairable as the Right to Repair Movement would like, because people still have to peruse thousand-page highly technical manuals and buy specialized equipment if they wanted to fix certain parts of their Apple devices.
- boucher 4y ago
  You're conflating multiple issues. Having the right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair. I think we've gone too far down the road of not owning anything we buy, and thus having no rights to use things outside of narrow legal agreements nobody even reads. Making the device easier to repair is also desirable, both for Apple and for third parties, because these things break all the time and need to be repaired. It saves everyone time and reduces waste.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
    > right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair Huh? If the act of repairing is difficult (and extremely, in Apple’s case), then do you actually have the right, or is it only a right on paper? Is Right to Repair nothing more than printing out manuals no matter how difficult the process of repair itself is?
    - boucher 4y ago
      Nobody actively wants it to be difficult, but if you don't even have the actual legal right to modify the hardware or software it doesn't matter how easy it is.

smoldesu 4y ago

Apple has proven with this iPhone (as have other manufacturers) that these goals don't need to be mutually exclusive. You can have wild products designed in all manner of ways (with satellite connectivity!!!), they just need to be user-servicable. That's not an unreasonable request for a company with 200 billion dollars sitting in their R&D coffers. Right-to-repair regulation isn't about stifling innovation, it's about giving the consumer leverage in the lifecycle of the product they own. Before now, Apple has gone out of their way to make life as hard as possible on third-party repair shops - that shouldn't be an engineering incentive. Regulation gives us the power to force Apple to put consumers before profit margins, and innovation somewhere in between.

baskire 4y ago
An organization only has so much mental capacity to focus on challenges. Having a required repair-ability goal would hinder the pace of innovation. It might be worth the hit, but naive to think such an accomplishment is without innovation cost.
- ckosidows 4y ago
  Isn't innovation frequently a result of limitations?
- boucher 4y ago
  Seems to me like Apple was more innovative when they had fewer employees and fewer resources, so perhaps we should break up the company in order to increase innovation.
Joeri 4y ago
Design is a balancing of constraints, some of which are constraints of the product of the design, and some of which are constraints of the process. Repairability is a constraint, and when that constraint becomes stricter something else has to give. Maybe this is more expensive to manufacture (and given the massive price hike in europe it wouldn’t surprise me), maybe this design took up a lot of designer hours, which held up other products. Whatever the trade-off is, it must be real. My point is: improved repairability always comes at the expense of something else.

GeckoEidechse 4y ago

Repairability and device thinness are by no means mutually exclusive IMO. When LTT did a review of the Framework laptop for example they also did a size comparison with a similarly specced Dell laptop and found that the framework both thinner and sturdier than the Dell laptop, next to being obviously more repairable ¯\_( ツ )_/¯

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

incanus77 4y ago

> If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. This, a million times. I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product. And because many of us are hackers/makers/programmers/tinkerers, one of those priorities is the ability to have all of the above, but also unfettered access to the internals to modify it as we please. It’s like… this car is perfect for my needs in every way, and far and above the best in its class. But I want it to run on hydrogen, so if they could just do that, it’d be perfect. Why are they forcing me to run on electric? Dude, don’t buy it?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
> I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product. Just because a product is a runaway success does not mean it's also not a potential environmental disaster waiting to happen. Cars were also a runaway success. So were plastic bags and straws. So was snake oil and so are various sugary fizzy drinks that destroy your health. We can't just leave everything to the free market and the uninformed preferences of the consumers and watch everything around us burn because $THING is successful because $CORPORATION advertises it and consumers love it, otherwise we end up in the dystopian Idiocracy scenario of "Brawndo is what plants crave because it has electrolytes and is the no. 1 thirst mutilator". That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
- incanus77 4y ago
  > That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us. Yes, I agree completely. But I wasn't talking about regulation, I was talking about tinkerer users not understanding how the delicate balance achieved by a product is the reason that it is successful and good.

greenn 4y ago

Third parties are perfectly capable of making replacement parts that match the OEM parts in functionality and quality. This has no effect on integration. The other parts of the phone don't care who manufactured the part, unless they were programmed to, as long as they are functionally equivalent. The user certainly doesn't care who manufactured the part as it does not effect the user experience.

anonymouse008 4y ago
3rd parties are very much not able to match. Just do a side by side of screen quality and battery life. That is what upsets a customer more than anything - but they never know exactly why. (Old 3rd party repair shop; thousands of data points)
dkonofalski 4y ago
I think when you look at it from a profit-driven lens, though, third-parties are always going to have to compromise on something to keep costs down in order to make a profit. Apple, historically, overcompensates on its parts and has higher tolerances so, in order for a third-party to be able to make replacement parts at significant enough profits, they need to be parts that don't match the OEM in quality or function, by definition. Just look at screen repairs. Apple checks in software to verify the integrity of some of the hardware in screens and, in the past, it led to people being locked out of their devices when they were repaired with screens that had dummy FaceID/TouchID sensors.

ojagodzinski 4y ago

> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. No one should have the "right" to create products that turn to garbage when any part of it breaks. A clean planet is more important than "great user experiences". The second thing that they did it only for profit, is ergonomics of new repairable iphone any worse? Also "software locked" parts should be banned by EU regulators.

astrange 4y ago
The EU preserving the rights of people to steal your phone and sell it for parts would go well with their trying to preserve the rights of people installing malware on it.

manojlds 4y ago

If any company can figure out how to do it and be a tight integrated product that works amazingly, it's Apple. Let's not forget, this is also about reducing e-waste and it's not an option anymore to dump new phones because one part broke and you can't repair yourself.

dkonofalski 4y ago
If there's any company that cares about e-waste and could do this, it would be Apple. They're the only company, from what I can see, that does any kind of changes with regard to an eye on environmental sustainability.

yreg 4y ago

I have been of the same opinion (and I guess I still am, albeit less strongly). However, user wants aside, easily repairable products are better ecology-wise. I want Apple to be allowed to create any device they want, but I think iPhone and Mac repairability can be currently improved without noticably hurting features. Prioritizing it would be the right trade off to do. In that case they should go for it (as they apparently decided to do). Even without fighting for regulation, we can still celebrate companies when they decide to create repairable products with long term software support and complain about them when they don't. A regulation that I would like to see would be to perhaps force 'makers' to sell genuine spare parts to anyone (same goes for Tesla and others).

actionablefiber 4y ago

There are substantial externalities to commercializing products that cannot be repaired. Fantastic amounts of non-biodegradable waste, overconsumption of nonrenewable material resources, and of course financial loss to consumers and opportunity cost to the secondary market. "Just choose not to buy the product" is only sensible if choosing not to buy the product fully insulates you from the effects of its existence. Regulation places the cost of those externalities and/or the responsibility to prevent them back in the lap of the manufacturer.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 4y ago
Couldn’t recyclability and repairability be mutually independent, though? It sounds possible to me that a product that is not highly repairable could still be highly recyclable just because its shattered parts can still be reprocessed into new products.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  Repairability and reusability precede recyclability in effectiveness. Anything you can take to a shop to swap a broken part, or list on a secondary market as a "fixer upper phone" beat out whatever Apple's internal recycling process does.

makeitdouble 4y ago

Right to repair is a societal and environmental topic. You personally not seeing a benefit to it is mostly beside the point: think about battery disposal laws, toxic material regulations, wireless power limitations, available frequencies, etc. These mostly matter at scale, taking input from single individuals would probably not land on the right trade-offs for the society as a whole.

r00fus 4y ago

> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. I think for me repairability comes down to: how long do you think this phone is supposed to be usable? Even if you don't own it (have gifted or sold it). Probably an ecological argument there. Primarily, given there is no up-to-date free/opensource phone OS (not to mention baseband software updates) after Apple iOS support ends... the phone can realistically only last till then unless you want to use legacy software (I have one relative who has such a device - but I'd not want one myself).

Melatonic 4y ago

There is no reason that it would make the phones worse at all. Apple in the past intentionally made the phone harder to repair for no advantage.

lapinot 4y ago

Imho you're missing the point, or at least, you've stated a valid conclusion but the point lies below. Sure, by tightly integrating you are getting material benefits (size, consumption, optimization, etc). But by doing this, you go further down into high-tech, which means complexity and energy intensive build/repair/dispose [1]. At this point i'm reformulating your tradeoff, in which you choose the material benefits. Now, one part of the right-to-repair movement comes from "low-tech" underpinning and objects the material benefits. Indeed, the point of a smartphone is not to crunch some machine instructions, it's to communicate with friends/family/world, interact with network services etc. Crunching code is just a byproduct of reaching this goal. It's even the same with supercomputers which one could think as performance-oriented: their goal is not to do the peta-flops, it's to solve some simulations at a given precision level. Nothing is built just for fun (or should): if you build a tool you better have a problem. And if you forget the goal, your tool will most likely be garbage. This is the objection of the r2r/lowtech movement: it's an assertion that a lot of high-tech has lost the sight of it's actual use and hence is hindering progress more than anything else. This is a direct opposition with the pov which is widespread in modern western tech thinking that "if you build the tool they will use it". Obviously this pov has some depth to it, it's not completely nonsense (in the sense that creative and explorative processes are useful, i know i'm myself doing research in foundations of math). But this pov is also very extreme, and is in fact a corner-stone of the offer-driven production that is hegemonic today (with market economies). This same offer-driven production is also posing many social problems because of the need for aggressive marketing, problems with long-term stable availability of basic goods, with the focus on big/fast/shiny. We've gone too far into that direction and that a part of the reason for the pollution and resource exhaustion crisis (being themselves big parts of the climate and biosphere crisis going on rn). The position of r2r/lowtech is obviously not to go to the other extreme which would be completely planned production based on somehow knowing what needs to be done (which we already see cannot really work and is very conservative by nature). But there has to be a balance. My position: the bulk of the energy-intensive and stable mass-manufacturing of basic known-to-be-useful-and-desirable goods should be done by planning, with open standards, user-groups, cheap repair, and some fraction of the resources should be reserved to the free-for-all market-driven exploratory research. Obviously this poses a couple problem with the fat cats running mass-manufacturing and other commodity services. Hope this was a balanced explanation of the position. [1] The matter will be ordered on a smaller scale so: (1) to build it you need to put a lot of energy into putting everything in order (entropy!); (2) to repair you both have to diagnose a complex thing and then act on it precisely; (3) to dispose of properly you need to put a lot of energy into separating everything again (entropy again!). Here i say "energy" in a large sense, this energy might be embodied as direct energy put into the process but also as human time, dependency on high-tech tooling (hence cost), etc. Another concept linked to this is "capital intensity".

babypuncher 4y ago

The iPhone 14 more or less proves that you can build a device as thin and sleek as Apple and still have it reasonably repairable. I think the same is true of Macbooks. There is no real reason that the SSD has to be soldered to the motherboard, Apple could easily put the NAND chips on a slim socketed daughterboard (they already do this on the Mac Studio). I won't say that every laptop needs to be built like the Framework, but I do think that any component that could be considered a "wear item" (batteries, NAND flash, OLED screens) should be designed to be replaced.

fomine3 4y ago

Note that current MacBook is neither portable nor lightweight, compared to better repairbility laptops

restore_creole_ 4y ago

"Right to repair" laws don't require manufacturers to design their products to be easy to repair. It is about mandating the selling of replacement components to third parties. Just because they sell replacement components doesn't mean the products need to be designed to have their components easily replaced.