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My dad has set up a repair cafe near where he lives, and they're popping up in loads of places now. While some electronics are hard / impossible to repair, sure

My dad has set up a repair cafe near where he lives, and they're popping up in loads of places now. While some electronics are hard / impossible to repair, sure, there's still a lot that can be done with the rest. Household appliances, for example. The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run, but to make a living out of anything you need to charge an X amount per hour, and if the repair is more expensive than a replacement it's simply not worth it. All the e-waste going to e.g. India like in the article is stuff where repairing it where it comes from is not worth it.

pjc50 2y ago
> The main issue of course is cost; This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour. We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something. As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't. People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).
saidinesh5 2y ago
> The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run There is cost, and there's also the companies/devices themselves. We are losing modularity. With almost no benefit to the user. I mean companies have the audacity to solder an SSD to the motherboards of laptops. And make the batteries - one of the biggest points of failure - non user replaceable. We had all that. It was cheap. It was user friendly. When one failed, you were able to replace it yourself. Once there is enough momentum on letting users fix these failing parts themselves, the ecosystems would automatically fix themselves imo. That's one of the things that companies like Framework, Valve etc.. seem to do really well with their hardware endeavors.
- iszomer 2y ago
  Framework and Valve are brands for their end products but the meat of the argument really should be what occurs in the background, eg: formal contractual and agreement say, the integration of a Sony co-designed and manufactured camera component and its integration into an Apple iPhone for example, as well as all the intermediaries involved up and down the chain.

pjc50 2y ago

> The main issue of course is cost; This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour. We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something. As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't. People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).

saidinesh5 2y ago

> The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run There is cost, and there's also the companies/devices themselves. We are losing modularity. With almost no benefit to the user. I mean companies have the audacity to solder an SSD to the motherboards of laptops. And make the batteries - one of the biggest points of failure - non user replaceable. We had all that. It was cheap. It was user friendly. When one failed, you were able to replace it yourself. Once there is enough momentum on letting users fix these failing parts themselves, the ecosystems would automatically fix themselves imo. That's one of the things that companies like Framework, Valve etc.. seem to do really well with their hardware endeavors.

iszomer 2y ago
Framework and Valve are brands for their end products but the meat of the argument really should be what occurs in the background, eg: formal contractual and agreement say, the integration of a Sony co-designed and manufactured camera component and its integration into an Apple iPhone for example, as well as all the intermediaries involved up and down the chain.