All of those systems can be maintained and serve for long. Electronics is not the culprit - it can serve for decades easily. Also, most people don’t need their fridge or whatever to be extra fancy.
But the producer really wants for their product to die - this forces you to buy another unit, which increases their revenue.
Not only do they want the product to die, they also make it really hard to repair. Not offering spare parts, except through official repair centers which charge so much you might as well buy a new unit. Not providing any kind of documentation or schematics. Using chips with custom firmware you can’t download anywhere, so even if you were to replace the hardware, without the software it’s useless. Locking off communication/programming ports behind passwords and custom programming software.
This is why right to repair is so important. It isn’t just phones, it’s all consumer electronics. With proper care, maintenance and repair, a lot of devices could easily double their lifespan. This reduces e-waste and saves consumers money, it’s like a win for everyone except for the people trying to sell you new shit.
This is only partially true. Yes we do engineer things to fail at a certain point, but that’s only because back in the day we naively assumed that we could engineer things not to fail at all.
Yes a stator of an electric engine will probably not fail for 100 years, but the seals will - yes the statically stressed metal part will hold until it crumbles to rust, but the dynamically stressed plastic part won’t - yes the silicon in an IC-Chip is protected from corrosion, but the connector pins aren’t.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s always a part that will fail before another, there’s no way to economicaly engineer around that, today we simply have the data to statistically define a failure point.
A fridge usually has a 10 year warranty. This isn’t even the end of life point. After 10 years it’s most likely that 80-90% of devices will still work. This means that if your device survived 10 years it will most likely work for another 5-10 years.
People say that like the replacement parts are just a mystical thing that spawns out of thin air once they need them.
Most parts that break are injection molded plastic. Injection molding is what differentiates manufacturing and home made garbage. Something home made will never look and function as good as something injection molded by a manufacturer. And the reason for that is cost. To say injection molding is expensive is an understatement. The machines, the tools, the expertise and the material is something that a private individual could never afford and has barely any profit margin for manufacturers. On top of that there’s storage and distribution.
So if a manufacturer has to produce extra pieces of each part that might break, store and keep track of them for 10+ years for models that are no longer produced, then the customer better be ready to cover those costs with their initial purchase or have the replacement part be ridiculously priced.
We accuse companies to want their cake and eat it too, but the we do the same thing. We want products to be cheap but also reliable or look good but be repairable. We can’t have all.\
There are plenty of devices that are cheap AND repairable - looking at a ~15-year old Brother HL-2140 printer by my right hand that still has all key parts readily available (not that I ever needed to change anything other than drum and toner, but parts are there)
The secret to cheap repairability is actually quite simple - make a good, no-fuss model and sell it for long. This will remove the necessity to print specific parts in small batches for older models, and by the time the model actually gets retired, there’s so much spare parts you barely need to produce anything at all.
Granted, this doesn’t work that well with ever-evolving stuff like computers (although it does to a certain extent), but most other tech is just fine a decade or more in.
Real answer is planned obsolescence.
All of those systems can be maintained and serve for long. Electronics is not the culprit - it can serve for decades easily. Also, most people don’t need their fridge or whatever to be extra fancy.
But the producer really wants for their product to die - this forces you to buy another unit, which increases their revenue.
Not only do they want the product to die, they also make it really hard to repair. Not offering spare parts, except through official repair centers which charge so much you might as well buy a new unit. Not providing any kind of documentation or schematics. Using chips with custom firmware you can’t download anywhere, so even if you were to replace the hardware, without the software it’s useless. Locking off communication/programming ports behind passwords and custom programming software.
This is why right to repair is so important. It isn’t just phones, it’s all consumer electronics. With proper care, maintenance and repair, a lot of devices could easily double their lifespan. This reduces e-waste and saves consumers money, it’s like a win for everyone except for the people trying to sell you new shit.
Exactly!
Right to repair is essential, and it’s crazy we allowed the situation to get where it currently is in the first place
Time to protect what was taken away.
Also a dash of survivorship bias
Fair!
This is only partially true. Yes we do engineer things to fail at a certain point, but that’s only because back in the day we naively assumed that we could engineer things not to fail at all.
Yes a stator of an electric engine will probably not fail for 100 years, but the seals will - yes the statically stressed metal part will hold until it crumbles to rust, but the dynamically stressed plastic part won’t - yes the silicon in an IC-Chip is protected from corrosion, but the connector pins aren’t.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s always a part that will fail before another, there’s no way to economicaly engineer around that, today we simply have the data to statistically define a failure point.
A fridge usually has a 10 year warranty. This isn’t even the end of life point. After 10 years it’s most likely that 80-90% of devices will still work. This means that if your device survived 10 years it will most likely work for another 5-10 years.
And then 10 years in you should be able to change the part that’s broken and keep the fridge operational.
People say that like the replacement parts are just a mystical thing that spawns out of thin air once they need them.
Most parts that break are injection molded plastic. Injection molding is what differentiates manufacturing and home made garbage. Something home made will never look and function as good as something injection molded by a manufacturer. And the reason for that is cost. To say injection molding is expensive is an understatement. The machines, the tools, the expertise and the material is something that a private individual could never afford and has barely any profit margin for manufacturers. On top of that there’s storage and distribution.
So if a manufacturer has to produce extra pieces of each part that might break, store and keep track of them for 10+ years for models that are no longer produced, then the customer better be ready to cover those costs with their initial purchase or have the replacement part be ridiculously priced.
We accuse companies to want their cake and eat it too, but the we do the same thing. We want products to be cheap but also reliable or look good but be repairable. We can’t have all.\
There are plenty of devices that are cheap AND repairable - looking at a ~15-year old Brother HL-2140 printer by my right hand that still has all key parts readily available (not that I ever needed to change anything other than drum and toner, but parts are there)
The secret to cheap repairability is actually quite simple - make a good, no-fuss model and sell it for long. This will remove the necessity to print specific parts in small batches for older models, and by the time the model actually gets retired, there’s so much spare parts you barely need to produce anything at all.
Granted, this doesn’t work that well with ever-evolving stuff like computers (although it does to a certain extent), but most other tech is just fine a decade or more in.