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> This is the power of recycling and repair — instead of paying $120 for a screen and throwing away what is largely a functional piece of electronics, I just h
by qwerta 12y ago
> This is the power of recycling and repair — instead of paying $120 for a screen and throwing away what is largely a functional piece of electronics, I just had to pay for the cost of just replacing the broken glass itself.
Some level of replace-ability should be enforced by law. There should be universal interchangeable types of batteries. Board self-test should be available and so on.
- jzwinck 12y agoI presume you would advocate this new law in hopes that it would drive up the feasibility of repairs, therefore lowering costs to consumers. But it won't do that: it will increase costs (and reduce revenues) to manufacturers who will happily pass those costs on to consumers, and the only people who will come out ahead will be the lawyers. Also, you do not want a phone made by the government.
- rayiner 12y agoThat's not how engineering works. There are good designs that can't be achieved while making things replaceable. For example, the reason screen glass often isn't replaceable is because it's optically bonded to the underlying LCD, which improves sharpness, reduces glare, and reduces parallax when using a pen. The reason batteries usually can't be replaced is that it saves space and weight to use naked Li-Poly battery packs molded to the available space. Making say a back case removal reduces structural rigidity and reduces space available for a battery. That's engineering--making trade-offs between features people may not care about in favor of features they care more about.
- stephengillie 12y agoMost phone batteries are electrically compatible, just not physically compatible. I have used Droid phone batteries to power HTC phones by holding the battery in place against the contacts, even though it didn't fit into the phone at all. On the engineering side, we should push for standards, and for components which operate the same at higher and lower volatges (2.0v, 2.2v, 3.0v, 3.5v, 5.0v, etc) where possible.
- madengr 12y agoThere are standards, but 3.5v isn't one. Big waste of power though to run a 1.2V part at 5.0V, and transistor geometry to make it capable of that. Most FPGA and some micros have separate rails for I/O and a low voltage core, like 1.2V.
- collyw 12y agoSure in some cases engineering is the reason, but then some manufacturers put pentalobe screws on their phones to make things as difficult as possible for the consumer to look inside the products that they paid for.
- pekk 12y agoMost people could stand slightly thicker phones. We are dumping huge amounts of toxic stuff because phones are designed for planned obsolescence. If there were pressure to use replaceable or upgradeable parts then we would see thinner phones with these traits, but without that pressure we are going to get more planned obsolescence. That's engineering too.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- lilyball 12y agoInability to repair is not planned obsolescence.
- pjc50 12y agoThis amounts to a legal ban on innovation that doesn't fit the current template. It also increases costs. (The EU charger standard is a good example: it works very well at eliminating the stupid proliferation of chargers which end up in landfill or WEEE, but not everyone is happy with micro-USB and arguably it's now the weak point in many phones which causes them to break early)