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Making maintenance easier requires a fair amount of industry-wide standardization and interoperability, and many corporations view this a threat to their market

Making maintenance easier requires a fair amount of industry-wide standardization and interoperability, and many corporations view this a threat to their market share and hence, profitability. This has been widely seen in the computer industry over the years, although the long-term conclusions might oppose the short-term view, i.e. while at first the closed-system strategy might succeed, in the long term having an open-system approach will bring in customers who've been burned in one way or another by the closed-system world. A particular example I'm very familiar with is bicycles - they're fairly easy to maintain and work on relative to automobiles (no fluids, not much electronics until recently etc.). Ideally a bicycle can be maintained easily and replaced piecemeal from a wide variety of suppliers, i.e. everything is swappable and there are no non-standard parts, such as weirdly threaded bottom brackets or non-standard axle widths. Some companies have tried to do things like that - I think Shimano made an integrated brake lever/gear shifter for a while, whereas most bikes allow you to replace each item separately. For example, if your bicycle frame breaks, you should be able to remove all the parts and install them on a roughly similar frame, even from another manufacturer. As far as deliberately making repair more difficult in the hopes that people would toss their old devices and buy new ones, there's good evidence for that with Apple, such as the introduction of pentalobe screws for no other plausible reason than making repair require specialized tools (IFixit's comprehensive screwdriver kit is nice in that regard). The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc.

Scoundreller 4y ago
Grease points already have a standard: zerk fittings, but many car parts don’t have them anymore, so you end up replacing all of these “sealed” “lifetime” bearings/joints entirely because they dried out and creak away. Would be cool if a bicycle bottom bracket or hub had those fittings. I volunteer at a bike co-op and between the generations, there’s been a toooooon of “standards”. Frequent mixes of imperial and metric. A French/Italian/British bike may have the opposite threading on parts than you expect. Different widths of spindles and wheel dishing and spoke lengths and oh my! How many mm wide would you like your tire? And will it even fit? Can you use that 700C accessory on your 27” or are you SOL? If we didn’t have a boneyard of bikes to scavenge from/strip for parts, we’d get nowhere. Then the corrosion issues when you “upgrade” to an aluminum seat post or stem on a steel frame… I guess part of this problem is the durability of bicycles. Cars probably have the same problem but their lifespan is a lot more limited. Lots of (small s) specialized tools out there because the manufacturer never intended for you to actually take the thing apart. Every design of freewheels required a different tool to remove. Definitely assembled several Frankenstein-bikes in my lifetime where you’ll need a rather diverse set of tools from different generations of bikes to eventually repair!
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Bicycles have actually gotten much easier to work on but I totally know what you are talking about. Bottom Brackets are actually the one thing I now refuse to work on (too many god damn specialized wrenches just to open and close them). Cartridge bearings are so much easier but as you probably know not really repairable (I have a late 1980s touring bicycle that I regreased the bearings and it rides better than new) but also crazy easy to just swap out. Nobody uses 27" anymore and everything being 700C (even many mountain bikes now with the "29er" trend) makes it all definitely better.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    New bicycles won’t have 27” wheels, but they’re still out in the field and manufacturers still mass-produce 27” wheels and tires. But if you want fenders, you’ll have to struggle through mounting a 700C set. At least the tubes are backwards-compatible.
- kqr 4y ago
  Don't get me started on bicycle wheels. My wife and I both had wheels nominally of the standard size (28 inches). Guess what -- standard 622 ("28 inch") tyres did not fit either of our bikes, but her wheels were too small, and mine were too big! So we have two different bikes both ostensibly of the standard size, but both differing from it in different directions! (Yes, I have looked it up on Sheldon Brown's bike tyre sizing guide -- there are two different sizes that are almost the standard size but not quite, one too small, and one too large. So this is not just our bikes that were faulty, these weird sizes are out there.)
sinoue 4y ago
Check lists are useful for dealing with maintenance. Good companies have a process in place to minimize downtime.
donatj 4y ago
> The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc. You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your bicycle argument. The government never forced them to standardize and they did.
- donmaq 4y ago
  > You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your bicycle argument. The government never forced them to standardize and they did. They really didn't though. From different axel widths forcing older ones obsolete (ie my 10yo $450 Chris King hub in perfect condition 135x10QR now has precisely zero frames it will fit), to actual wheel sizes themselves (26" wheel frame are nearly impossible to find, outside of Dirt Jumping), the bike industry is busily doing their own version of 'embrace & extend'. There's even electronic shifting now, adding a teensy bit of advantage to rich roadies, while removing the ability to fix your own derailleur.
patchorang 4y ago
I agree that bikes are a great way to dip your feet into maintenance. But everything is not swappable. There are a handful of "standards" for each part of the bike. It's not insane, but replacing a part often requires researching all the standards and understand what you have and what you could upgrade it to. Getting a new bike often requires getting a couple of new tools. That said, if you ride bikes regularly but take it to the shop for maintenance, try doing your next service yourself. There are tons of online videos to help you. It will require an upfront investment of some tools, but they will pay for themselves the second time you use them.
midoridensha 4y ago
>A particular example I'm very familiar with is bicycles - they're fairly easy to maintain and work on relative to automobiles (no fluids, not much electronics until recently etc.). Ideally a bicycle can be maintained easily and replaced piecemeal from a wide variety of suppliers, i.e. everything is swappable and there are no non-standard parts, such as weirdly threaded bottom brackets or non-standard axle widths. Some companies have tried to do things like that - I think Shimano made an integrated brake lever/gear shifter for a while No, obviously you're not familiar with bicycles at all. When was the last time you worked with a bicycle? 1975? Every modern road bike has integrated brake/shifter levers, and has for 30 years. What universe do you live in? Non-standard parts are commonplace: there's at least a dozen bottom bracket standards, and lots of road bikes have press-fit bottom brackets. The industry is moving away from this thankfully, and threaded brackets are now becoming the norm again (using a particular standard, I forget the name). Axle sizes (diameter, thread pitch, width) are also all over the place, though here again they seem to be converging. As for fluids, every decent bike these days has hydraulic disc brakes, which use either mineral oil (Shimano and clones) or DOT4 brake fluid (SRAM). Your post is really bizarre; was it meant to be satire or something?
Gormo 4y ago
> The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc. In order for the solution to "once again" be government regulation, there has to be a past example of a coordination problem that was solved optimally by government regulation. Do you have such an example? All of the examples I can think of involving political intervention are ones that culminated in a suboptimal status quo being artificially locked in place due to incremental innovation on the margin being suppressed and/or the regulatory system being co-opted by its intended targets to create intentional barriers to entry. Conversely, we have plenty of examples of ecosystems converging to compatible standards organically, as we see in most of the world of computing technology, e.g. with PC hardware standards, internet protocols, etc.

Scoundreller 4y ago

Grease points already have a standard: zerk fittings, but many car parts don’t have them anymore, so you end up replacing all of these “sealed” “lifetime” bearings/joints entirely because they dried out and creak away. Would be cool if a bicycle bottom bracket or hub had those fittings. I volunteer at a bike co-op and between the generations, there’s been a toooooon of “standards”. Frequent mixes of imperial and metric. A French/Italian/British bike may have the opposite threading on parts than you expect. Different widths of spindles and wheel dishing and spoke lengths and oh my! How many mm wide would you like your tire? And will it even fit? Can you use that 700C accessory on your 27” or are you SOL? If we didn’t have a boneyard of bikes to scavenge from/strip for parts, we’d get nowhere. Then the corrosion issues when you “upgrade” to an aluminum seat post or stem on a steel frame… I guess part of this problem is the durability of bicycles. Cars probably have the same problem but their lifespan is a lot more limited. Lots of (small s) specialized tools out there because the manufacturer never intended for you to actually take the thing apart. Every design of freewheels required a different tool to remove. Definitely assembled several Frankenstein-bikes in my lifetime where you’ll need a rather diverse set of tools from different generations of bikes to eventually repair!

Melatonic 4y ago
Bicycles have actually gotten much easier to work on but I totally know what you are talking about. Bottom Brackets are actually the one thing I now refuse to work on (too many god damn specialized wrenches just to open and close them). Cartridge bearings are so much easier but as you probably know not really repairable (I have a late 1980s touring bicycle that I regreased the bearings and it rides better than new) but also crazy easy to just swap out. Nobody uses 27" anymore and everything being 700C (even many mountain bikes now with the "29er" trend) makes it all definitely better.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  New bicycles won’t have 27” wheels, but they’re still out in the field and manufacturers still mass-produce 27” wheels and tires. But if you want fenders, you’ll have to struggle through mounting a 700C set. At least the tubes are backwards-compatible.
kqr 4y ago
Don't get me started on bicycle wheels. My wife and I both had wheels nominally of the standard size (28 inches). Guess what -- standard 622 ("28 inch") tyres did not fit either of our bikes, but her wheels were too small, and mine were too big! So we have two different bikes both ostensibly of the standard size, but both differing from it in different directions! (Yes, I have looked it up on Sheldon Brown's bike tyre sizing guide -- there are two different sizes that are almost the standard size but not quite, one too small, and one too large. So this is not just our bikes that were faulty, these weird sizes are out there.)

sinoue 4y ago

Check lists are useful for dealing with maintenance. Good companies have a process in place to minimize downtime.

donatj 4y ago

donmaq 4y ago
> You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your bicycle argument. The government never forced them to standardize and they did. They really didn't though. From different axel widths forcing older ones obsolete (ie my 10yo $450 Chris King hub in perfect condition 135x10QR now has precisely zero frames it will fit), to actual wheel sizes themselves (26" wheel frame are nearly impossible to find, outside of Dirt Jumping), the bike industry is busily doing their own version of 'embrace & extend'. There's even electronic shifting now, adding a teensy bit of advantage to rich roadies, while removing the ability to fix your own derailleur.

patchorang 4y ago

I agree that bikes are a great way to dip your feet into maintenance. But everything is not swappable. There are a handful of "standards" for each part of the bike. It's not insane, but replacing a part often requires researching all the standards and understand what you have and what you could upgrade it to. Getting a new bike often requires getting a couple of new tools. That said, if you ride bikes regularly but take it to the shop for maintenance, try doing your next service yourself. There are tons of online videos to help you. It will require an upfront investment of some tools, but they will pay for themselves the second time you use them.

midoridensha 4y ago

>A particular example I'm very familiar with is bicycles - they're fairly easy to maintain and work on relative to automobiles (no fluids, not much electronics until recently etc.). Ideally a bicycle can be maintained easily and replaced piecemeal from a wide variety of suppliers, i.e. everything is swappable and there are no non-standard parts, such as weirdly threaded bottom brackets or non-standard axle widths. Some companies have tried to do things like that - I think Shimano made an integrated brake lever/gear shifter for a while No, obviously you're not familiar with bicycles at all. When was the last time you worked with a bicycle? 1975? Every modern road bike has integrated brake/shifter levers, and has for 30 years. What universe do you live in? Non-standard parts are commonplace: there's at least a dozen bottom bracket standards, and lots of road bikes have press-fit bottom brackets. The industry is moving away from this thankfully, and threaded brackets are now becoming the norm again (using a particular standard, I forget the name). Axle sizes (diameter, thread pitch, width) are also all over the place, though here again they seem to be converging. As for fluids, every decent bike these days has hydraulic disc brakes, which use either mineral oil (Shimano and clones) or DOT4 brake fluid (SRAM). Your post is really bizarre; was it meant to be satire or something?

Gormo 4y ago

> The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc. In order for the solution to "once again" be government regulation, there has to be a past example of a coordination problem that was solved optimally by government regulation. Do you have such an example? All of the examples I can think of involving political intervention are ones that culminated in a suboptimal status quo being artificially locked in place due to incremental innovation on the margin being suppressed and/or the regulatory system being co-opted by its intended targets to create intentional barriers to entry. Conversely, we have plenty of examples of ecosystems converging to compatible standards organically, as we see in most of the world of computing technology, e.g. with PC hardware standards, internet protocols, etc.