4 ms·

> When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. A week later the own

by bobsy 14y ago

> When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over — no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. A week later the owner of the iron was electrocuted. Just kidding. The culture of discard and buy another really comes about from items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high. I personally have this biased opinion that a repaired item is likely to break again. This is almost certainly wrong but it was an idea I was brought up with and is difficult to shake. I really like what these people doing. I would certainly get more items repaired if it could be done cheaply. A repair shop as a place to gather is cool. I do think though there is a limit to what is worth repairing. Things like hoovers, irons etc are worth repairing. Technology really doesn't move that fast and paying £20 to have a hoover patched up is far better than buying a new one. Computers though. If they fail within the warranty you are already covered. If they fail after that then it really depends what the computer cost. If brought a computer for £3-400 you may find the repair cost is 50% of what you paid for it. In this case there is a strong argument that this £200 could go towards a higher spec computer. I have a laptop which overheats, it isn't worth much but it is - or should be - pretty handy. The cost to investigate the fault would cost me £75. This is before a repair is made. I was told if the problem is what he thought it might be then the cost to repair would be a £100 on top of that. In the end I just brought a new netbook for £300. I have a little problem with my iMac. The harddrive is faulty. It has some bad sectors or something which causes programs to crash. Do you know tricky it is to replace the harddrive of an iMac? Its ridiculous. To be honest pretty much all Apple devices are terribly inconvenient to repair. Its a shame that one of the worlds biggest companies isn't doing more to prevent consumer waste.

davidw 14y ago
> items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high I wonder if it's possible to get some of those items to places where the labor costs are low enough, and product prices high enough to make it worthwhile to fix stuff.
gurkendoktor 14y ago
> The culture of discard and buy another really comes about from items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high. Not necessarily. A big part of it is simply our broken economic system. Many, many, many items are made to break.[1] I hope we start to rent more things as a service instead of paying for them. If we paid a flat fee every month to have our houses lighted, I bet our light bulbs would be durable as heck. Obviously this is not going to be feasible for a while. But why can't we pay a flat fee to have a usable Mac? Apple stores can be found all around the world. The incentive for Apple would be to use durable hardware and write highly optimized, a little more portable software. I think gov'ts should force companies to think more about the long term by enforcing a longer minimum warranty for hardware, and force vendors to release security updates for at least 10 years. (All 32-bit Macs will have _zero_ professional use cases once Apple stops patching 10.6. Meanwhile, my mom has owned her XP Word machine for almost a decade.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  > Apple stores can be found all around the world. What I meant by this is: For $1 light bulbs, transportation and time would have to be incredibly cheap to build a service infrastructure that doesn't waste more resources than it saves. Taking a Mac for a repair or exchange is convenient in most parts of the world already because that's what people do in their first year (or three) of using it. Adopting a full-scale rental model isn't that far fetched.
  - rhplus 14y ago
    Apple stores can be found all around the world. This is only true if you consider "the world" to mean the US (~2/3 of all Apple stores) and a handful of major cities in each of just 12 other countries [1]. Most of Apple's sales and servicing are done through third-party retailers. There's zero incentive for Apple itself to get into the rental/servicing business. They can just churn out another 100 million iPods, iPhones and MacBooks every year, take their known profit margin and leave all of the low margin after sales to someone else. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Retail_Store http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Retail_Store
    - gurkendoktor 14y ago
      I know there's no incentive for them under the current circumstances, exactly the opposite is true. You are right about the resellers. I didn't think about the name because I have never bought or repaired anything in an official Apple Store, I am not even sure if I have ever entered one. The authorized stores have been awesome so far! :)
- brc 14y ago
  I don't agree that governments should force warranties on anything. You might think it's going to fix it, but it's just going to create an unexpected consequence somewhere else, like a feeble progress of innovation, risk averse manufacturers or probably something like an oligopoly of a handful of manufacturers who have the financial resources to run such long warranties. We wouldn't have an iPhone 4S if Apple was still spending time and money repairing Gen 1 iPods. It's not a broken economic system. Forcing people to keep things for longer won't make anyone better off.
gouranga 14y ago
Agree with hoovers. I nicked a Dyson DC07 out of a skip. It cost me 30GBP in bits and has done me for about 5 years now :) WRT computers, it depends on the computers and the availability of spares. You're screwed if you have a Mac as the parts are expensive due to scarcity. if you buy Lenovo, you can get every individual part on ebay for very little and they have published FRM and diagnostic manuals which are very good. An overheating T61 will cost me 15GBP including investigation... (Sitting here on a recycled 2007 Lenovo T61).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
snowwrestler 14y ago
I think we need to distinguish between the concept of "repairable" vs. "user repairable." An iMac hard drive is designed to be very repairable; but it's not designed to be easily user-repairable.

by bobsy 14y ago

davidw 14y ago

> items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high I wonder if it's possible to get some of those items to places where the labor costs are low enough, and product prices high enough to make it worthwhile to fix stuff.

gurkendoktor 14y ago

> The culture of discard and buy another really comes about from items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high. Not necessarily. A big part of it is simply our broken economic system. Many, many, many items are made to break.[1] I hope we start to rent more things as a service instead of paying for them. If we paid a flat fee every month to have our houses lighted, I bet our light bulbs would be durable as heck. Obviously this is not going to be feasible for a while. But why can't we pay a flat fee to have a usable Mac? Apple stores can be found all around the world. The incentive for Apple would be to use durable hardware and write highly optimized, a little more portable software. I think gov'ts should force companies to think more about the long term by enforcing a longer minimum warranty for hardware, and force vendors to release security updates for at least 10 years. (All 32-bit Macs will have _zero_ professional use cases once Apple stops patching 10.6. Meanwhile, my mom has owned her XP Word machine for almost a decade.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

gurkendoktor 14y ago
> Apple stores can be found all around the world. What I meant by this is: For $1 light bulbs, transportation and time would have to be incredibly cheap to build a service infrastructure that doesn't waste more resources than it saves. Taking a Mac for a repair or exchange is convenient in most parts of the world already because that's what people do in their first year (or three) of using it. Adopting a full-scale rental model isn't that far fetched.
- rhplus 14y ago
  Apple stores can be found all around the world. This is only true if you consider "the world" to mean the US (~2/3 of all Apple stores) and a handful of major cities in each of just 12 other countries [1]. Most of Apple's sales and servicing are done through third-party retailers. There's zero incentive for Apple itself to get into the rental/servicing business. They can just churn out another 100 million iPods, iPhones and MacBooks every year, take their known profit margin and leave all of the low margin after sales to someone else. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Retail_Store http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Retail_Store
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    I know there's no incentive for them under the current circumstances, exactly the opposite is true. You are right about the resellers. I didn't think about the name because I have never bought or repaired anything in an official Apple Store, I am not even sure if I have ever entered one. The authorized stores have been awesome so far! :)
brc 14y ago
I don't agree that governments should force warranties on anything. You might think it's going to fix it, but it's just going to create an unexpected consequence somewhere else, like a feeble progress of innovation, risk averse manufacturers or probably something like an oligopoly of a handful of manufacturers who have the financial resources to run such long warranties. We wouldn't have an iPhone 4S if Apple was still spending time and money repairing Gen 1 iPods. It's not a broken economic system. Forcing people to keep things for longer won't make anyone better off.

gouranga 14y ago

Agree with hoovers. I nicked a Dyson DC07 out of a skip. It cost me 30GBP in bits and has done me for about 5 years now :) WRT computers, it depends on the computers and the availability of spares. You're screwed if you have a Mac as the parts are expensive due to scarcity. if you buy Lenovo, you can get every individual part on ebay for very little and they have published FRM and diagnostic manuals which are very good. An overheating T61 will cost me 15GBP including investigation... (Sitting here on a recycled 2007 Lenovo T61).

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

snowwrestler 14y ago

I think we need to distinguish between the concept of "repairable" vs. "user repairable." An iMac hard drive is designed to be very repairable; but it's not designed to be easily user-repairable.