4 ms·

Absolutely classic: A long article about the beautiful engineering and perfection behind the charger, and then - "The ironic thing about the Apple Macbook char

Absolutely classic: A long article about the beautiful engineering and perfection behind the charger, and then - "The ironic thing about the Apple Macbook charger is that despite its complexity and attention to detail, it's not a reliable charger." That's the funny thing about engineering. I have built a lot of things and have used a lot of tools across the entire spectrum from shitty garbage cast out of pot metal (think Harbor Freight, Aliexpress etc) to five-figure Serious Tools for Serious People (cranes, large format cutters, thrusters, advanced measuring equipment etc.) From that experience I can say confidently: It is impossible to know for sure if something is reliable until you actually use it for an extended period of time. I have seen countless absolute hack-job products made of pot metal last decades in a marine environment and I have seen a similarly endless number of beautifully engineered products made of top-tier materials fail catastrophically. Sometimes the shitty product will have two failures that miraculously cancel each other out, or it will rust to shit and keep working, or it will fall to pieces but can be easily epoxied back together to get another ten years out of it. That's the other side of the coin of perfection - repair. With the beautifully-engineered product made with quality materials? Nine times out of ten, fuhgeddaboudit. If you have a serious failure, you're fucked. There is no practical economic way to repair that Mac charger, or your fried fancy oscilloscope, or any advanced motor, or unibody, or virtually anything made of titanium, carbon fiber, et cetera. Give me the cheapest version of your object, however, and I can repair it using only crap from Walmart. Don't get me wrong - give me infinite money and replacements and I will take your beautiful object every time, and in many cases today I have "infinite money" given the price of the product. An Apple Silicon Mac is cheap to replace and it is head-and-shoulders engineered above the rest; it is the pinnacle of all human engineering through history, in my opinion. If mine breaks I will just buy a new one. The problem is that as the world grows richer, this has gone from a luxury attitude to one more people can have each year, and the proportion of beautiful, perfectly engineered objects steadily rises. A hundred years ago no such objects existed. Thirty years ago, they were rare. Today, you can buy anything, from drills to cameras to new unibody cars that are beautiful and flawless and engineered to perfection and completely uneconomical to repair. There are exceptions, wear item parts, manufacturers with repair guides... but they are on the way out. Make no mistake, the moment anything can become a perfect sealed lifetime part, it will. In the distant future, worlds ahead of endless energy and materials, long after the idea of popular repair dies, I only hope it will be reborn as a hobby; bored humans instructing bored robots to choose the inefficient path, to repair and not replace.

astrange 3y ago
Do you actually repair power adapters? Sure I can see it for other things, but for high voltage home electronics it sounds dangerous. Like when you had to remember to discharge CRTs when opening an all in one computer case.
- owenversteeg 3y ago
  Yeah, all the time. In fact, I'm repairing one right this minute. If anyone reading this is near the uws in nyc and has a ruef400 or similar pptc fuse handy I'll trade you for a beer! Email in profile :) As far as dangerous home electronics repairs go, CRTs were pretty much the top of the list and they're all but gone now. Normal 110v work is rarely that dangerous even if you mess it up and most things aren't even 110v anymore - lots of consumer electronics just take a standard 5 or 12VDC or whatever. Besides, 90% of electronic repair is "find the burnt, hot or damaged component and replace it"; you're not exactly designing your own powerboard from scratch. Hell, there are hundreds of thousands of products on Amazon with hot 110V metal cases, which is pretty much the worst imaginable thing, and yet few people get injured by them - the reality is that whatever sin you possibly commit in your DIY repair has a tiny chance of causing any real world injury. But more to my point, these days doing your own repairs are unusual, sixty years ago it was often included in the instruction manual. Even the cheap shitty stuff is less cheap and shitty than it once was; smaller, more efficient parts, SMD components, "sealed lifetime" bits, unrepairable materials etc.
RetroTechie 3y ago
> bored humans instructing bored robots to choose the inefficient path, to repair and not replace. Repair is more efficient than replace! You're replacing something in either case. But in a repair, you replace less: only the part(s) that failed. Reasons we don't (in many cases) are 3-fold: 1) Products are designed for 'easy'/efficient/cheap manufacturing, not to be easily repairable. "Repair-friendly" is often near the bottom on consumers' wishlist. 2) Manufacturers have become laser-focussed on that (successfully!), such that some devices literally cost pennies. Combined with 3) We value human time above machine/production time. So in most cases, the cost of [human time spent on repair] exceeds cost of [just buy replacement device]. Maybe "repair robots" will change that equation some day? Only if those are cheap & skillful enough.

astrange 3y ago

Do you actually repair power adapters? Sure I can see it for other things, but for high voltage home electronics it sounds dangerous. Like when you had to remember to discharge CRTs when opening an all in one computer case.

owenversteeg 3y ago
Yeah, all the time. In fact, I'm repairing one right this minute. If anyone reading this is near the uws in nyc and has a ruef400 or similar pptc fuse handy I'll trade you for a beer! Email in profile :) As far as dangerous home electronics repairs go, CRTs were pretty much the top of the list and they're all but gone now. Normal 110v work is rarely that dangerous even if you mess it up and most things aren't even 110v anymore - lots of consumer electronics just take a standard 5 or 12VDC or whatever. Besides, 90% of electronic repair is "find the burnt, hot or damaged component and replace it"; you're not exactly designing your own powerboard from scratch. Hell, there are hundreds of thousands of products on Amazon with hot 110V metal cases, which is pretty much the worst imaginable thing, and yet few people get injured by them - the reality is that whatever sin you possibly commit in your DIY repair has a tiny chance of causing any real world injury. But more to my point, these days doing your own repairs are unusual, sixty years ago it was often included in the instruction manual. Even the cheap shitty stuff is less cheap and shitty than it once was; smaller, more efficient parts, SMD components, "sealed lifetime" bits, unrepairable materials etc.

RetroTechie 3y ago

> bored humans instructing bored robots to choose the inefficient path, to repair and not replace. Repair is more efficient than replace! You're replacing something in either case. But in a repair, you replace less: only the part(s) that failed. Reasons we don't (in many cases) are 3-fold: 1) Products are designed for 'easy'/efficient/cheap manufacturing, not to be easily repairable. "Repair-friendly" is often near the bottom on consumers' wishlist. 2) Manufacturers have become laser-focussed on that (successfully!), such that some devices literally cost pennies. Combined with 3) We value human time above machine/production time. So in most cases, the cost of [human time spent on repair] exceeds cost of [just buy replacement device]. Maybe "repair robots" will change that equation some day? Only if those are cheap & skillful enough.