[HN Gopher] EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable ...
___________________________________________________________________
EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in
household items
Author : Tomte
Score : 852 points
Date : 2022-03-13 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eevblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eevblog.com)
| MrYellowP wrote:
| Ah, so batteries will be getting more expensive. (ignoring the
| already roaring inflation)
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| alisonkisk wrote:
| bencollier49 wrote:
| The next thing I'd like to see is a rule on maintaining security
| updates for devices beyond 3-4 years. I'm going to have to give
| up my perfectly operating 4/5 year old Samsung phone shortly
| because it'll be falling into the "no support" bracket.
| walterbell wrote:
| Microsoft Linux on Azure Sphere devices come with 10 years of
| security updates. If an Azure Sphere network router gains
| traction, it could influence the policy of competitors.
| fastball wrote:
| Would you be happy to pay a subscription fee for this?
| eulers_secret wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to gate security updates behind a
| subscription paywall. People in poverty deserve device
| security.
|
| Besides, this is a false dichotomy- chrome books are very
| cheap, but come with years of updates. Move them to Linux and
| it's decades of updates.
| blagie wrote:
| I would be much happier with a law requiring this, or a tax
| if this doesn't happen.
|
| Windows, MacOS, Linux, and other systems receive updates
| nearly forever even on ancient hardware. The choice to not do
| this with Android or ChromeOS is one Google made pretty
| deliberately.
|
| Keeping hardware abstracted from higher layers has been a
| solved problem for at least a half-century now.
|
| It's an economic inefficiency that's exploiting information
| asymmetry between Google and consumers.
| brap wrote:
| Who do you think will pay for this tax or regulation, if
| not the consumer?
| blagie wrote:
| No one will pay for this. The point of a more efficient
| economic system is that everyone is better off.
|
| Capitalism assumes perfect information and transparency.
| When this doesn't happen, you have inefficiencies, and
| those require regulation to address.
|
| Throwing away my phone before it's broken is extremely
| inefficient economics. If you address that through
| regulation, those same resources will get reallocated
| elsewhere. Google might be an epsilon smaller, but that
| will be more than compensated for with more gainful
| employment elsewhere.
|
| Same thing with regulations to prevent polluting a
| commons, to prevent monopolistic trusts, truth-in-
| advertising laws, and otherwise.
|
| Indeed, in many of these places, without regulation,
| *everyone* is worse off. For example, if you can lie in
| advertising, and my business does and yours doesn't, mine
| will win in the free market system. As an executive, you
| don't have the choice to be honest. With truth-in-
| advertising laws, everyone is required to be honest, and
| that's better for the executives, businesses, and
| consumers.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The cost of supporting a product for it's lifecycle should be
| baked into the original cost.
| brap wrote:
| So would you be happy to pay this "baked in" cost (which
| will cost you the same as paying for a subscription)? And
| should all buyers be forced to pay this cost as well, even
| those who can't afford it? Should we not allow any
| alternatives?
| wolrah wrote:
| > So would you be happy to pay this "baked in" cost
| (which will cost you the same as paying for a
| subscription)? And should all buyers be forced to pay
| this cost as well, even those who can't afford it? Should
| we not allow any alternatives?
|
| An alternative would be to require that all products with
| an "expiration date" list it prominently on the packaging
| and marketing materials. Make it very clear that the
| device will no longer be receiving security fixes and
| will be increasingly likely to be dangerous to use after
| that date.
|
| Then you still have the option to produce and purchase
| devices that won't be supported a reasonable time, but
| the consumer is aware of exactly what those limits are
| before purchasing so they can compare prices accurately.
|
| What you seem to be suggesting is that it should be OK to
| sell people products that NEED to be supported to not be
| dangerous, with the knowledge that they will be used
| beyond their support period, just to save money.
| Sometimes there is a minimum cost a thing has to be to be
| done right, and anything cheaper than that is cutting
| corners somewhere.
|
| ---
|
| If it's connected to the internet it needs to be
| receiving security updates, period. No exceptions. If you
| can't update for whatever reason (crappy software,
| ancient but irreplaceable hardware, production
| requirements), it shouldn't be connected to the internet.
|
| ---
|
| edit: Another point to make, specifically when referring
| to cell phones and similar systems, is that in a lot of
| cases the vendors making these devices are themselves at
| fault for them being hard to support long term. They're
| the ones who choose to hack up the Linux kernel in their
| own weird ways, with no common base. A phone vendor
| should be able to update their entire line more or less
| one-shot for the majority of fixes, but they usually cant
| due to bad decisions made in-house or by their SoC
| vendor.
|
| And all of those bad decisions are things these vendors
| have been getting yelled at about for well over a decade
| now, so they know they're doing it wrong and choose to
| continue.
| brap wrote:
| How is this different than a warranty, which already
| comes with every device? I agree with you that this
| should be very explicit, although it's the consumer's
| responsibility as well to understand what they're
| purchasing.
|
| Not sure I understand the 2nd part. If Apple or Google
| don't want to issue security fixes after N years, should
| they remotely disable the device? How many of us are
| currently using devices beyond their warranty period? How
| many of us will appreciate it if our devices got disabled
| "for our own good"?
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| In practice it often is -- even in the case of many bad
| Android phones.
|
| It's just that the lifecycle they work to is the two year
| phone contract replacement lifecycle, not the longer one
| you might imagine.
|
| It's Darwinian: as long as the phone is not abandonware by
| the time the user's contract runs out, it doesn't matter.
|
| And the only Darwinian pressure to resolve this would be
| longer plan terms.
| hughrr wrote:
| I think they should actually forcibly separate buying a
| phone from the carrier.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| In the UK and the EU at least, there's not much of a tie
| anymore, and the market probably has enough choice; not
| sure how much things have improved in the USA or
| elsewhere.
|
| I suspect the increasing discussion of longer support
| periods does suggest my Darwinian scenario is changing. A
| bit.
| jpindar wrote:
| In the US it is a choice, at least for anyone willing and
| able to pay the full price of the phone up front.
| judge2020 wrote:
| the lifecycle of the unit, or the lifecycle of the model?
| Because there's already an issue with both Android phones
| and iPhones where you might buy a phone whose near the end
| of its production run, and that can mean you only get 1
| year of updates on it if that.
| [deleted]
| the_duke wrote:
| I believe a law mandating 6 or 8 years of security updates is
| in an advanced stage already.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If it were mandatory for them to be rooted, we wouldn't need
| Samsung for updates.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Good shout, actually.
| fsflover wrote:
| Pinephone and Librem 5 will have lifetime updates, because all
| drivers are FLOSS.
| titzer wrote:
| The whole trend toward custom Lithium-ion battery packs seems to
| be driven by making devices thinner--not just phones, tablets,
| and laptops, but everything. They then integrate a USB, micro-
| USB, or even USB-C charger.
|
| Rechargeable is nice...replaceable is nice. But rechargeable
| _and_ replaceable?
|
| I hope that we get back on a trend to use standard batteries,
| like AAAs, which have many excellent rechargeable Lithium-ion
| options now. I have plenty of AA/AAA-powered devices and about a
| dozen or so rechargeable AAA's cycling in and out. For some
| reason rechargeable 9-volt batteries haven't really caught on.
| They seem to have weak capacity and are expensive.
| netfl0 wrote:
| Overdue for sure. I wonder if there could be unintended side
| effects, I can't think of any...
| judge2020 wrote:
| Depending on what it actually does, we can predict side effects
| by imagining it was in place 10 years ago. What if the Apple
| Watch required a user-replaceable battery? Would the design
| have changed demonstrably to accommodate this design
| restriction?
| netfl0 wrote:
| In that case it would probably affect water resistance.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Important to note here is that when it comes to household
| gadgets and personal electronics, not everything needs to
| be engineered to have water resistance like a diver's
| watch.
|
| Making sure something survives splashes or a minute at the
| bottom of the swimming pool will be enough to keep most of
| these things working.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Bullshit. Watches (mechanical and quartz) have been water
| resistant since forever.
| cesaref wrote:
| Cheap quartz watches have been waterproof since whenever,
| and all have replaceable batteries. Why is an apple watch
| any different?
| endemic wrote:
| Haven't we had water resistant watches for quite a long
| time already?
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Why? There are children's water toys that take batteries
| and do a fine job keeping the water out of the compartment.
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| My water-resistant watches with user replaceable batteries
| beg to differ. I bet the margin wouldn't be as high but it
| would certainly be doable from an engineering point of
| view.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Just curious, which watch(es) do you have?
| teh64 wrote:
| I don't know about OP, but as far is I know every "non-
| smart" watch that is waterproof has a replaceable and
| standard sized battery. Normally, you also have to
| replace the o-ring, which are also pretty standard.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Water resistance was my first thought as well, however I
| suspect a company with the R&D budget of Apple could likely
| find a way. The small dimensions of the watch might be a
| problem, but for phones I'm fairly certain it can be done.
|
| For a while companies like Motorola were selling nano-
| repellent (essentially hydrophobic) coating phones and
| calling them splash proof. You could easily design a gasket
| or something, existing waterproof phones already have parts
| that open for eg the sim card or microsd slot (which are
| gasketed).
| choko wrote:
| So this would impact big players less, leaving startups
| in a more difficult position. That's regressive.
| Tams80 wrote:
| If they want to design, manufacture, and sell rugged
| devices, then they should shoulder the costs.
|
| If they don't want to, then they can make something less
| rugged.
|
| No excuses for resource waste and pollution.
| everdrive wrote:
| I've got an IP-68 (or whatever is waterproof) phone with
| a user-replaceable batter. It effectively has weather
| stripping along the battery door, and uses a screw to
| keep it tight. It's cheap, simple, and effective. (and
| no, it's not a smart phone)
| [deleted]
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| More expensive phones, more materials wasted, bulkier phones.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| But on the flip side, phones can last twice as long (or
| longer, assuming the software and other hardware doesn't crap
| out instead) and the total materials in that time are one
| phone plus two batteries, not two phones and two batteries.
| choko wrote:
| The choice should be up to the consumer, not the EU. We had
| phones with removable batteries co-exist with phones with
| non-removable batteries. Most people preferred a slimmer,
| more attractive device and chose that over a removable
| battery. Ditto with keyboards. I would have preferred a
| phone with a hardware keyboard and a removable battery, but
| my tastes are niche. That doesn't mean I want a regulator
| to force the issue.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Except it's never a straight choice to a consumer.
|
| If a company asked me do I want 50% more battery life or
| 1mm thinner, I'm going for the battery. And lots of
| people would. How many people moan about their battery,
| and how many say "ooo, I with this phone was just a hair
| thinner"?
|
| But you don't get a choice, because it's all bundled up
| with other features to make it for you. Want NFC? Ok, you
| have to have the flagship model with the thinner case.
|
| Oh, you want the bigger battery, sorry we don't actually
| do one because we only had one model called the
| FailChungus 0.1 with a big battery and no one bought it
| (never mind that it came only in brown and had a 480x480
| screen).
|
| Same for the 3.5mm jacks: no one has ever gone out and
| deliberately bought a phone without them. You just don't
| get a choice if you want everything else. I specifically
| got a non-flagship phone to keep that port, but I missed
| out on a lot of other stuff.
|
| While it's nice to think that consumers lead these
| choices, I don't think that's actually what's happening:
| the illusion of choice is given but the companies
| gradually do what they wanted to do anyway.
| archi42 wrote:
| Thanks, I wanted to say something very similar. "Choice
| by wallet" is a nice theory and even in practice it can
| work (e.g. buying fairtrade, organic meat alternatives IF
| you can afford it). But in that case it failed. And the
| manufacturers have little incentives to make it succeed -
| after all, buying these high margin products more often
| is in their shared interest. So even a first mover to
| offer flagship phones with removable batteries (again)
| would just cut their profits a little less than the
| competition. Proof for claim: If phones with replaceable
| batteries were competitive in the current market, they
| would be offered.
|
| I think it can not be denied that the current smartphone
| business has a negative ecological impact (waste during
| the whole life cycle except during usage) and
| additionally also a negative social impact (manufacturing
| conditions as well as rare material extraction; not sure
| if broken phones are shipped to Africa like other
| e-trash, but would expect that as well). These long-term
| impacts are not in our interest, but no individual alone
| can change that in the current market. But that's often
| the case: If we are not strong enough alone, we work
| together and bundle our power. Like in a state or even
| above the state level.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| "I think it can not be denied that the current smartphone
| business has a negative ecological impact"
|
| Living has a negative ecological impact.
|
| How do you measure that? People seem to get more benefit
| out of the phones than their cost.
| Tams80 wrote:
| The more variables any one product as, the less 'choice
| by wallet' works.
|
| Choosing between a battery-farm chicken and a free-range
| chicken has one variable - the provenance. But then let's
| say you like KFC for their 'secret' spice blend. But KFC
| don't care for offering free-range chicken. If you want
| that spicy chicken: you can sacrifice your preference for
| free-range chicken, get spicy chicken from somewhere else
| (not what you wanted), or go without.
|
| Smart devices have many more variables. So the likelihood
| of something you want not being there is much greater.
|
| And once a feature has been removed from such products,
| it partly becomes self-fulfilling.
| kasabali wrote:
| > More expensive phones
|
| Phones aren't cheaper now than when they've had user
| replaceable batteries:
|
| Galaxy S5 (2014): $650 ($780 in 2022)
|
| Galaxy S22 (2022): $800
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| That comparison is complete nonsense, as presumably the
| specs of those phones are completely different. You can now
| get cheap phones that perform better than a 2014 S5.
| notriddle wrote:
| Global warming was less of a problem during the golden age
| of piracy.
| wyager wrote:
| A couple that come to mind:
|
| This will make various compact designs difficult/impossible
| (such as airpods or other small wireless earbuds).
|
| This will make waterproofing difficult/impossible/lower quality
| for many device classes (phones, earbuds, etc). Waterproofing
| on these devices requires adhesive (not easily replaceable) or
| ultrasonic welding (not user serviceable at all).
| ComradePhil wrote:
| To keep up the sales, they will have to find other methods of
| planned obsolescence.
| bluescrn wrote:
| What about EVs?
|
| It seems a big problem that 50%+ of the cost/value of a vehicle
| is a battery pack that will inevitably degrade over time, and
| that usually needs replacing in it's entirity in the event of a
| fault or damage.
|
| We need some sort of standardised 'battery modules' that can be
| shared between vehicles, replaced/upgraded, salvaged from crash-
| damaged vehicles, etc. Instead of one single battery pack,
| there'd be a bank of maybe a dozen modules. They don't need to be
| user-replacable, but should be replacable by any competent
| mechanic.
|
| Some vehicles could come with unpopulated battery module slots,
| for optional range upgrades. Maybe others would be sold
| 'batteries not included', and you could buy or lease batteries
| from a choice of providers.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| If I understand the new Tesla structural battery pack thing
| right, it seems the direction for EVs will inevitably be to
| build batteries in the chassis of the car for lower weight and
| higher capacity and thus range. If this technique delivers on
| its promises, there will be no convincing automakers _or_
| consumers to prefer swappable batteries, because those will not
| be able to compete with the specs of the structural battery.
| And I think to replace that one, you'll have to basically take
| the whole car apart. I'm interested to see how this is going to
| develop.
|
| I don't know if the EU law referenced in the forum thread is
| supposed to apply to mobile phones (are mobile phones household
| items?), but we can see this already happening there - in order
| for phones to be thin and slick, they no longer have user-
| swappable batteries, unless that user happens to be handy with
| a screw driver and owns the special bits you need to get into
| the phone. If a ban on hot-gluing batteries is going to be a
| thing, great, I think adding pull tabs doesn't increase the
| thickness or the weight of the phone significantly, so that
| makes sense.
|
| But how is this going to work out with cars with batteries
| built into their chassis?
| judge2020 wrote:
| > I don't know if the EU law referenced in the forum
|
| Apparently it's not even close to the headline[0].
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662158
| sschueller wrote:
| Hilarious how Tesla was the one showing of how great their
| replacement charging is compared to filling an Audi with the
| largest gas tank on the market and now did a 180 to fuse the
| battery in such a way that you can throw out the while car
| when the battery dies.
| Dunedan wrote:
| I don't find that hilarious at all. Customers didn't want
| to get their their batteries swapped [1], thus Tesla didn't
| further pursue this path.
|
| [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/teslas-battery-
| swapping-plan...
| Neil44 wrote:
| I would think that the design compromises to make batteries
| interchangeable between vehicles would be too great at the
| moment.
| kevingadd wrote:
| The batteries in my Prius were replaceable, and lasted a very
| long time before I had to replace them (upwards of 10 years).
| radicalbyte wrote:
| One of the big Chinese brands - Neo - have removable battery
| packs.
|
| Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTsrDpsYHrw
| sokoloff wrote:
| My LEAF had an individual battery module replaced (under
| warranty) and I've heard anecdotes of several other EV owners
| online with a similar repair story. They're not "all or
| nothing" already.
|
| More details:
| https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?t=30380
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You can get replacement packs for most common EVs from either
| the manufacturer or third parties. They are on the expensive
| side. But they last quite long and tend to come with pretty
| decent warranty of e.g. eight years or 150 k miles, which means
| they are very unlikely to fail before that (because that would
| be expensive for the manufacturer) and very likely to last a
| lot longer than that. E.g. Tesla seems to design for half a
| million miles.
|
| Two challenges with standardizing battery packs:
|
| - There is a lot of innovation in this space. A standardized
| battery would be obsolete by the time it would get widely used.
| The whole point of buying a premium model EV is getting good
| range and performance. So, manufacturers work hard on improving
| their battery packs and are competing on how well they work.
|
| - Battery packs and cars are designed together to make best use
| of space, manage center of gravity, re-enforce the structure of
| the car, etc. Inevitably, you are going to end up with
| different shapes of battery packs. Better designs here maximize
| cabin space, minimize manufacturing cost, etc. Most car
| manufacturers buy battery cells and design their own battery
| packs for this reason: they need to customize their packs.
|
| That makes workable standards in this space unlikely. But of
| course most bigger manufacturers do standardize components
| internally exactly so they can minimize their cost for
| servicing vehicles and leverage some economies of scale. No
| doubt over time, third parties will emerge that are able to
| service popular EV models with aftermarket battery
| replacements. Right now that's a tiny market because most EVs
| sold ever (i.e. produced in the last ten or so years) are still
| completely fine and not actually in need of new batteries.
|
| Probably in a decade or so this market will get a lot bigger
| and by that time battery replacement might also be a lot
| cheaper. For the same reason, battery recycling companies are
| not yet able to scale their business because there simply is
| not a lot of supply of badly degraded batteries. Actually, most
| batteries coming out of EVs end up having a second life in e.g.
| power storage solutions because even in a degraded state they
| still can hold some power.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > E.g. Tesla seems to design for half a million miles.
|
| Tesla supposedly only warranties for 150k on the S[0],
| although they have been known to last longer (194k then 324k
| miles [1] on a 2014 model year car).
|
| 0: https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty
|
| 1: https://www.motorbiscuit.com/tesla-model-s-that-
| surpassed-40...
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's not standard, but this basically already exists. It just
| makes sense for the car makers themselves to build batteries
| from modular components at various levels.
|
| e.g. VW group uses one MEB 'platform' across it's different
| brand's EVs cars/vans, and the different models with different
| battery sizes, have different amounts of modules like these in
| them:
|
| https://www.secondlife-evbatteries.com/products/vw-id3-batte...
|
| And it's almost guaranteed, though I haven't checked, that this
| module contains a bunch of smaller batteries.
|
| https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/modular-electric-driv...
| [deleted]
| judge2020 wrote:
| I understand the lure to link to forums, but this one is
| particularly light on details; the only hard info about the
| law(s) is a link to the text itself. This is pretty important
| since the carve-outs will make or break this bill, because I
| doubt user replaceable batteries will be mandated for a
| pacemaker, electric vehicle, or high-volume home energy storage
| equipment like RESU battery.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I don't even see the link to the text itself.
|
| I watched the EP parliament press release on Wednesday and the
| actual proposal is nowhere near what these headlines are
| saying. It has more to do about tracking components during
| battery manufacturing to ensure that the ecological cost is
| appropriately reported, that they do not come from conflict
| regions, promote alternatives to rare earths, etc.
| toyg wrote:
| EU directives can be relatively light on details, at times,
| because they are meant to be made more explicit at the national
| level; the ECJ will eventually rule on the spirit of the law
| anyway, as soon as somebody appeals a judgement to them.
|
| Obviously a degree of common sense will be applied (i.e.
| peacemakers), but EV should definitely be a target - you can
| replace a car battery today, why should it not be possible
| tomorrow?
| archi42 wrote:
| I don't like the link either. But a quick Google search didn't
| bring up a good English speaking source (yesterday), so I can
| understand tomte linking to the eevblog forums.
|
| This was published yesterday by Golem [1] (German tech news)
| and two days ago by the FAZ [2] (respectable German news
| outlet). While both might be better links, they're in German.
| You can try Google Translate or DeepL, which usually work
| pretty well. Since this is happening on the EU level there will
| eventually be official translations of their plans; as well as
| international coverage.
|
| [1] https://www.golem.de/news/nachhaltigkeit-eu-parlament-
| beschl... [2] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/eu-
| parlament-will-fes...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| But I love my MacBook Pro swelling up really thick! It's like
| getting a free upgrade to a bigger computer!
| leroman wrote:
| This is a great first step but this needs to go further..
|
| Case in point- I just replaced a 2018 Macbook pro 15 (i9/32g/1t -
| top model) with a new Macbook pro 16, the reason? it just died
| (apparently due to connecting a bad USB-C cable), this is the
| second time this happened to this laptop, the first time was
| under warranty and they had the motherboard replaced. Actually,
| when I say "motherboard replaced" I mean
| motherboard+memory+CPU+HDD !!!! because it's all soldered on-top
| of the motherboard, so I have to pay as much as a new laptop to
| replace it if either one of these component dies.....
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It's unfortunate because while I want replaceable batteries I
| don't think it is the government's place to mandate it.
|
| I want a lot of things but it would be wrong to mandate them. I'd
| like iPhones to have headphone ports, I want my laptop to support
| Linux, and all USB-C cables to be interoperable. But the problem
| is that the government shouldn't be picking winning and losing
| technology. What if a company comes out with a battery that lasts
| 15-20 years (Which is already the case with some newer
| chemistries)? Maybe I, as a consumer, don't want the government
| making my phone thicker or increasing the cost of a product
| because of an obsolete regulation.
| Rygian wrote:
| The point of the law is not to please those who would like to
| exchange batteries, but to have 90% of the batteries actually
| recycled, and reduce dependency on raw materials.
|
| The government isn't picking winners or losers, it's regulating
| the waste of scarce raw materials (those present in the
| battery, and to a lesser degree, those present in the rest of
| the device).
|
| The first company to come up with a battery that lasts 15-20
| years will of course have to wait for regulations to adapt,
| like every other advance in technology in the history of
| mankind.
|
| Your position seems to be that you'd like the government to
| keep turning a blind eye on companies' wasteful strategies,
| just in case someone in the future might do something less
| wasteful.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything,
| and at a reasonable cost.
|
| It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater
| pump goes, it's around PS100 for a new one, but the whole machine
| costs maybe PS400. Are you telling me that all that steel and
| plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and
| shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of
| the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that
| one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
|
| And don't get me started on cars!
|
| If we as species cared about sustainability (we don't), companies
| would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could
| buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the
| cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using
| interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain
| SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place.
| Rather, now, it's highly profitable to make parts fail: you
| either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500%
| markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old
| one goes to scrap.
| technobabbler wrote:
| Why would they do that when they could sell you the dishwasher
| AND the razor blades? Unreliability is service profit.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| The parts in a product should be available anywhere it's sold
| for at least 5 years and sum to less than the lowest price it
| has sold for.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| In my mind, if everything was open source or there were no IP
| restrictions, a lot of this stuff would happen automatically.
| Companies would tend to standardize on parts after a while as
| everyone would clone the good parts of everyone else. Open
| source 3D printers always have cheap replacement parts widely
| available.
|
| These regulations are trying to use the state to correct for
| problems that in some cases occur because the state granted
| them monopoly protections for their IP. The state could simply
| not offer those protections to prevent a lot of these issues.
|
| See also a recent comment I wrote on this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512363
|
| As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP
| restrictions:
|
| https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284
| bsder wrote:
| > As well as this on the ground report of a culture without
| IP restrictions:
|
| The Chitubox people are the counterexample.
|
| Because they exist in a situation without IP restrictions,
| they are trying to tie everything to subscription and add
| encryption to the harwdare in order to extract money.
|
| And, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. My personal opinion is
| that you _should_ be able to get paid for developing good
| software. However, without IP protections, people can just
| scarf up your work.
|
| I see this from both the perspective of machine tools and
| electronic test equipment. Anything under $5K has shit
| customer support--deal with it. Anything above $25K generally
| has ok customer support. Anything in between gets crushed out
| of the market.
| flowerbeater wrote:
| Wouldn't the manufacturers just take over, and only survive
| in the lowest cost place for manufacturing? The
| inventors/designers would get nothing and no one would want
| to do that anymore. What would be the incentive to share your
| open sourced designs?
|
| Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant
| manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product,
| and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this
| cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply
| chains would become even more brittle.
|
| Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed
| identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone
| would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make
| anything new anymore.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _And don 't get me started on cars!_
|
| The cost of replacing a key for my wife's car ($1,200) is more
| than the value of the car.
|
| If she loses her key again, it's cheaper to just buy a new car.
|
| What a strange world we've made.
| userbinator wrote:
| Can you buy a _new_ car, especially in today 's market, for
| $1200?
| dboreham wrote:
| Parent probably means "new to me".
| sly010 wrote:
| Perhaps some rental model could work, where appliances are not
| owned but rented. Although the renter would probably still be
| on the hook for breakdown due to mis-use and once mis-use is an
| excuse, there is no incentive to make things last.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| You are free to open a company that operates to your standards
| and serve customers with similar demands. But why do you need
| to force your ideals on other customers?! There is only one
| answer to that: You think you know better what they want than
| they themselves which is a very sad world view imo.
| Angostura wrote:
| > But why do you need to force your ideals on other
| customers?!
|
| Because we all share the same limited ecosystem.
| Tams80 wrote:
| Sustainability-wise, parts need to have a significant mark-up.
| Otherwise:
|
| 1. People will either themselves bodge devices together, or get
| someone else to do so. 2. Companies will find it hard to sell
| new products if they can all be fixed easily. If the parts have
| a mark-up, they can be a good revenue stream.
|
| Unfortunately, companies are greedy and still make stuff
| hard/impossible to repair while charging high mark-ups for what
| can be.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Sustainable in the "humanity gets to live above ground in
| 2100" sense, not "CEO yachts-per-year must never fall" sense.
|
| Funnily enough the second sense does eventually require the
| first, but not in _this_ accounting period.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _It 's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the
| heater pump goes, it's around PS100 for a new one, but the
| whole machine costs maybe PS400._
|
| The heater pump when originally manufacturer costs PS20 because
| it is done in lots of (tens of?) thousands and assembled in
| bulk by cheap labour, and shipped in a large container that
| costs not-a-lot of to move over an ocean.
|
| The replacement part is stored by (potentially) a third-party
| company that ordered it for PS30, by an employee who is paid
| PS40,000 per year, in a warehouse that costs >PS100 per square
| metre to rent (potentially for years), and when requested then
| has to be delivered by someone paid PS20/hour, to be installed
| by someone paid >PS50/hour (with a three hour minimum). And
| don't forget the VAT.
| ornornor wrote:
| > to be installed by someone paid >PS50/hour (with a three
| hour minimum).
|
| That one shouldn't factor into the part price. It's your
| choice to hire someone to install the part and at what price
| vs doing it yourself.
| agilob wrote:
| My friend bought a smart fridge from Samsung with 2 years
| warranty. After 26 months of usage thermostat failed. This
| fridge is purely electronic, without old-type thermostat that
| "clicks". Seller shop refused fixing it, Samsung quoted fix for
| more than the fridge cost 2 years ago. There it goes PS1800
| "worth" of more electronic waste.
|
| My coworker damaged dishwasher seal, no way to buy new seal at
| all, could only be acquired from another dishwasher of this
| model. Had to give it for recycling and buy another one.
|
| I just hope this doesn't happen to me, so I always do days of
| research online before buying a hairdryer...
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| It happens at all levels. Try buying a pair of kitchen
| scissors that don't have overmoulded plastic handles that
| break at the end of the handle tangs.
|
| There are about 2 models of all-metal scissors.
| syshum wrote:
| Stop shopping on Amazon or Consumer store. Go to a Kitchen
| Supply store, or for scissors look outside kitchen branded
| ones, nothing about scissors need to be "kitchen"
|
| a Kitchen supply shop will have more than 2 models, some
| will have plastic but they will be over molded full-tang
| metal under them, then you can just get scissors designed
| for something other than kitchen use, lots are out there
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Kitchen/carving scissors are a specific design with
| features (curved notch, semi-serrated, steep blade angle)
| for cutting up ie. a chicken not found on other scissors.
|
| That said, plenty of all metal ones exist
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| "Why didn't I just?" so glad you asked.
|
| Funnily enough, choice was so limited specifically
| because I didn't want any plastic and I refused to
| consider the ones on Amazon on general principle, which
| ruled out the Newness ones and I didn't like the Grunwerg
| ones because I suspect those over-handles are sintered
| crap that's barely better than plastic.
|
| So now it's a choice between the ones on Sinplastico, a
| Chinese brand and a handful of artisan "best of British"
| brands that were very expensive (and also generally have
| ostentatiously old-fashioned styling).
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Well,... "Samsung". There's the problem, right there.
|
| I wanted to buy a new fridge a couple of years ago, my
| emphasis/overriding criterion being energy efficiency. I
| could get _actual_ energy use stats (not mere "A*" or other
| bullshit "ratings", based on standard models of use) from
| every manufacturer I looked at, _except_ Samsung. Noooo, Mr
| Customer, the best we can tell you is "A*". Well fuck that.
| Guess what make of fridge I _didn 't_ buy...
| syshum wrote:
| Samsung is trying really hard to be more anti-consumer than
| Apple. That takes real effort
| cricalix wrote:
| At least in Europe, all manufacturers have to produce a
| standardised format document specifying things like energy
| usage. This is how I worked out that a particular Neff
| model washing machine is the same as a Bosch one, just with
| a different fascia. Pricing difference at local stores was
| about 100 EUR between the two, but identical specs and
| identical "responsible company".
|
| What is a bit of a pain is the standard changed in the last
| few years, so trying to compare an old energy efficiency
| label that specifies kwh/year and litres/year against one
| that's per-cycle is .. hard. They also changed the rating
| system, so what used to be an A-rated TV is now about a D
| or E rated one.
| userbinator wrote:
| You could probably mod the fridge with a traditional
| mechanical thermostat. There are plenty of cheap ones
| available on the aftermarket. Ranco is a common brand, at
| least in the US..
| agilob wrote:
| That's what I said and did, put BLE temperature monitor
| inside with silica gels packed. Power fridge from TPLINK
| HS110 (smart power switch) and automate it using HASS.
| folmar wrote:
| I've seen an even more brutal approach at a friend - he
| shorted the thermostat and put a mechanical socket timer
| set to approximately 25% duty cycle - works good enough
| for a fridge, no one cares if it is 2 degrees off.
| superjan wrote:
| > companies would have to sell their parts for little enough
| that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine
|
| Something like that could be a law. We could allow them a
| little markup to cover distribution cost, but one could argue
| it could be that simple.
| e-clinton wrote:
| I just paid $475 to fix the door latch on a $1000 washing
| machine. It's obnoxious.
|
| I do think cars are much better than most items. Maybe not some
| of the electronics which are all tightly integrated, but
| certainly the mechanics.
| a-priori wrote:
| What this could be saying is that it's very inefficient to buy
| the parts in units. If you were to buy a thousand of these
| parts, as a manufacturer might, I doubt they'd each cost PS100.
| [deleted]
| imglorp wrote:
| Yeah motors are expensive, but I have saved so many large
| appliances needing a minor component from the trash with a
| little basic troubleshooting and a site like
| appliancepartspros. So often, it's a sensor, a pawl, heating
| element, belt, or roller that's 1% of the machine's price. This
| is in reach of anyone with a few hand tools and the internet.
|
| A repair company (always 3rd party now) will charge %50 of the
| machine's price for a trip charge, marked up parts, and labor.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Oooh yes, don't get me started on inaccessible little plastic
| sacrificial parts. Yes, having one part be sacrificial to
| protect the others is good engineering, but only if it's also
| easily replaced and inexpensive. If you can't get
| replacements or they're 3 hours of disassembly away, that's
| just planned obsolesce in a dress.
|
| And the number of times I've broken a little plastic tab! How
| much can it cost to put a extra 0.5mm of plastic in the mould
| just there? What fraction of a penny was saved and now
| requires a whole new part, comprising probably at least
| thousands of times more material plus shipping energy?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Re: sacrificial parts, I recently had to rebuild a two-car
| wood (read: heavy) torsion spring garage door system.
|
| The cleverest part was the plastic coupler [0] between the
| door-connected shaft and motor.
|
| When the system originally locked up, the coupler broke.
| Consequently after restoring the system, I needed a $9
| piece of plastic, rather than a $xxx new motor.
|
| Made me sad that more modern things aren't designed with
| such value-protective degradation modes.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/LiftMaster-Coupler-Chamberlain-
| Crafts...
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| There is no cost savings associated with the size of tabs,
| for example. It's an assembly thing. Usually you want the
| easiest to assemble as labor and QA is expensive. Ease of
| disassembly has by comparison very little upfront value.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even better - just ship with a few extra parts slipped in.
| I've actually seen this - extra screws and clips right
| inside the cover just like extra buttons sewed into the
| corner of a shirt.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A lot of those plastic tabs work just fine when something
| is just made because the plasticizer is still present
| abundantly, then later, when it has evaporated the parts
| become brittle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasticizer
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I had a motor go out on my dishwasher. When looking online it
| seemed common - apparently a shaft or ball bearing somewhere
| in it wears out in 2-3 years which makes it so it can't spin
| anymore. There were full instructions on how to replace this
| piece of the motor that costs a few cents.
|
| That said, I noticed LG offered a 10 year warranty on the
| same motor, so I decided to buy a new dishwasher instead.
| swores wrote:
| While I'm not defending the fact that many companies do rip
| people off in their spare parts prices,
|
| > _Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and
| motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and
| everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire
| value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one
| part, the one that happened to need replacement?_
|
| You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar
| logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would
| expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more
| than ordering a single machine even before they put any further
| markup on it.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Right, and those aspects are expensive because they don't
| have economies of scale because they either don't really want
| people to use them too much, and if people do want to use
| them they'll squeeze them. They'd rather people scrap
| machines and get new ones. And even if I then swear off
| "unreliable" Hotpoint machines and go for Siemens, some
| Siemens customer will make the reverse trip, so they all
| profit together.
|
| If they _all_ had to provide all the parts at a reasonable
| cost, they 'd figure out a way to get it done. I'm sure
| Siemens, say, can figure out a way to ship a part by part
| number efficiently, considering its already on a shelf
| somewhere.
|
| And if you a company don't want to pay for that? Use a
| standard part. Now it's not your problem.
|
| It'll never happen, but it's nice to think about as the world
| drowns in piles of ruined single-use equipment, while the
| money spent on replacing them flows endlessly corporate
| pockets.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Bosch/Siemens actually have really good website for buying
| spare parts and they sell them at reasonable prices even to
| consumers, and even for things that cost <50EUR.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's the thing: they're _already_ selling the service
| parts at a reasonable cost.
|
| What's "too cheap" in your situation is the highly
| automated, continuous conveyance, mass production line that
| can take in parts by the container load and pump out fully-
| functioning dishwashers for less than a week's wages.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > That's the thing: they're already selling the service
| parts at a reasonable cost
|
| What is the basis for this assetion? What data or
| information have you used to come to this conclusion?
| sokoloff wrote:
| That there are a variety of OEM and third-party parts
| suppliers to choose from and when I buy appliance parts,
| I frequently find them to be "pretty what I expect them
| to cost as compared to automobile service parts". This is
| not a monopolized supply chain.
|
| The last appliance part I bought was the motor for my gas
| dryer. Several parts places had it. Amazon had the best
| price by a small amount and I got an exact fit OE motor
| in 2 days for $114. A year later, that price has soared
| to $109 and is now available for next-day delivery.
|
| How much less do you think it should possibly cost to be
| able to order an exact fit ~10 pound, ~1/3 HP dryer motor
| on a Sunday for Monday delivery? $109 seems like an
| incredible bargain to me, even if Amazon and Frigidaire
| pocketed $20 each of pure, obscene profit.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053Y3A8M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_g
| lt_...
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| They can just put every tenth one in the box unassembled.
|
| Problem solved.
| nelgaard wrote:
| Yes, and we all could understand say a 200 percent markup
| plus international shipping. And even more for a cheap part.
|
| But they make it really hard to get the parts.
|
| In 2010 my Fisher-Paykel dishwasher broke. I called the
| repair service. They charged a little over $100 to tell me
| that it would cost DKK 6500 ($950) to replace the two broken
| water softener modules. I spent a long time time searching
| for a place to buy those modules. Eventually I found a place
| called Leeds Applicances (closed now) that would sell it to
| me for PS68 + VAT + PS20 shipping. I took me maybe 30 minutes
| to replace the modules, just a lot of connectors and tubes
| that had to be connected the same way.
|
| Before that I had a dryer that started to make a horrible
| rattling sound. I refused to just replace the dryer and took
| it apart. I was some nylon wheel on the belt drive that was
| worn out. But no one was selling a replacement. I spent about
| a month complaining to the importer and in the end I went on
| my bicycle to the Zanussi importer in an industrial area
| outside Copenhagen and after waiting in their office for a
| long time I was allowed to buy this piece of nylon for $50.
| It probably cost less than $1 to produce and they had newer
| sold one to a consumer before.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a ton of third-party parts companies--which do tend
| to be _somewhat_ cheaper, albeit of probably more variable
| quality. So unless you assume there 's some global conspiracy
| of spare parts pricing, you're probably seeing a reflection
| of a bunch of piece parts actually costing more than the
| assembled appliance/car/etc.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar
| logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would
| expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more
| than ordering a single machine even before they put any
| further markup on it.
|
| This seems like a problem that could be solved by
| standardizing the parts among multiple models (possibly
| between different brands), so if legally mandating
| availability of replacement parts encourages that, it might
| not be a bad thing.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Why even have multiple brands? Why not just have the
| government enforce a single manufacturer for each type of
| item and standardize everything? They could plan if all
| centrally and... oh wait.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Why have any rules about what the manufacturers must do
| at all?
|
| Let them sell us autonomous cars for $1,000 which need a
| $5,000 subscribtion to drive. Oh, you want to put child i
| a car, the car won't start unless you add a child add-on.
|
| Oh, you need to go to the hospital, because your wife is
| giving birth, that will be extra $5,000 one-time fee.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I can hear Amazon's self driving car division furiously
| taking notes.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| The point is, if you don't want to support spares for
| your device, you have the option of using standard parts.
|
| If you want your own part, you have to either make it
| available, or you have to make it reliable enough that
| you don't need to.
|
| That would remind the incentive to have parts that fail
| be profitable. Making unreliable and unserviceable
| devices _should_ cost you more.
| thfuran wrote:
| Just mandate reasonably long warranty to force things to
| be reliable.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Ask any Detroit auto design shop and they'll tell you an
| auto maker's parts bin (parts they can throw into every new
| vehicle to avoid needing to set up more logistics
| pipelines) often hurts more than it helps in terms of
| improving on pain points in building and using cars;
| Tesla's octovalve is the testament to what can be improved
| when you don't have to use existing parts to fulfill a
| function with headroom for improvement in terms of weight
| and efficiency.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| Tesla doesn't buy the octovalve from other suppliers but
| it uses the same module in every model they make.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| This makes total sense. Rewriting code is often easier
| than reuse. The purpose written code doesn't have to
| fulfill use cases that don't apply to it, it can make
| optimizations because of that. The old code doesn't have
| to start supporting use cases it was never designed for
| too, so it can stay simpler. Don't repeat yourself, but
| its ok to speak in original sentences rather than use
| somewhat applicable quotes for everything you want to
| convey. For physical parts the number of ways an old part
| might fail to meet new use cases seems vastly larger than
| in software, so I'd guess its even more applicable.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you search appliance parts you'll discover that's
| already being done - the part for your dishwasher will fit
| fifty other dishwashers from a very surprising cross
| section of brands.
| syshum wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I still buy dumb appliances. I
| recently just more or less rebuilt my cloths dryer for
| less than $75, New element, new belts, new sensors,
| etc...
|
| Of course the sheet metal frame, motor, and controls are
| the same but on a dumb appliance those rarely fail. on a
| "Smart" appliance those the replacement "smart" controls
| can be more costly than the entire replacement unit
| ethbr0 wrote:
| At this point, "brands" are just the multiple marketing
| face of conglomerates.
| beebeepka wrote:
| 3 years ago I was tasked with buying a cheap TV for an
| older relative. After spending an afternoon checking
| what's available, I realized virtually all low end models
| look the same and have the exact same menus.
|
| Not terribly surprising but I didn't expect everything to
| be exactly the same across that many know and unknown
| brands
| bombcar wrote:
| TVs are down to three panel manufacturers if I recall
| correctly - so it's literally the chrome and maybe the
| bundled apps that differ.
|
| This can be an advantage as sometimes you can flash
| default firmware to turn a cheap yumcha monitor into a
| better one.
| coolso wrote:
| Not entirely true. Some manufacturers / more expensive
| product lines have access to higher quality panels.
| Furthermore anti-reflective coatings, backlights, and
| wide angle view coatings can all vary widely.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I have a two year old Bauknecht machine. Sadly realized too
| late the brand had been bought by the consumer-hating
| Whirlpool group. 600EUR for a machine, that breaks exactly 25
| months after we started using it. Lots of small plastic parts
| already broke in this time period as well, e.g. the basket.
|
| It would be 180EUR to get it repaired, spare parts are not
| available even aftermarket/Ali baba/... But then I know I'm
| going to need to call them once a year or so - so instead we
| buy a miele which is a higher initial price but longer
| lifetime in every test a d at least decent reparability.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Sears had a parts department where you could buy replacement
| appliance parts on appliance brands they sold. This is not a
| totally radical concept.
| rr808 wrote:
| True, Sears had a great traditional operation with full
| pricing, well trained and paid employees, good service and
| sensible follow up support. However most people seem to
| want cheap appliances they can throw out and replace which
| is why Sears went bankrupt.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yes, but the company that assembles the (eg., in my case) an
| oven is 30minutes away from my home, and the company that
| makes the railings for the trays is 5 minutes away, but the
| railing mechanism still costs 100eur.
|
| Lets be real here, the companies want you to buy a new
| product, and expensive parts are just one of the parts of
| planned obsolescence.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another
| way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass
| manufacturing is.
|
| Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That's
| the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line,
| in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence
| from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery
| route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially,
| everything they can do to reduce the cost.
|
| None of those things are true for a replacement part you
| order. It's an entirely different logistics chain, with
| entirely different costs.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| > The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is
| another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass
| manufacturing is.
|
| Reminds me of the Planet Money multipart story where they
| made a tshirt, from scratch. Bought cotton from a farmer,
| shipped it to a textile industry, contacted a tshirt making
| company, shipped it to the US.
|
| The bulk of the cost in the end came from transporting the
| tshirt from the harbor to the store where it was sold.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > That's the cost of that part, being delivered to the
| assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular,
| predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier
|
| I am not buting this reasoning - the assebly line costs
| money to run, worker's time and salaries need to be paid,
| quality control and warranty to be done. A part sold by
| itself needs none of those things.
|
| While you are taling to me about how difficult logistics of
| a $200 part justifies a 500% markup, i can buy a $3 led
| from China with free shipping. This doesnt add up
| judge2020 wrote:
| This is generally because USPS effectively subsidizes
| international shipment. The same $2 LED shipment might be
| $10 DHL (and free shipping isn't free, the seller is
| making their margins with shipping costs included).
| rootsudo wrote:
| Not anymore, Trump modified the EMS packet from china to
| USA thing to remove subsidies. https://www.theatlantic.co
| m/technology/archive/2018/10/trump...
|
| This was 2018.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| So you allow the manufacturer to charge for delivery
| (based, on, say, some average delivery cost for the
| weight, rather then allowing inflated S&H costs to be a
| new profit centre rewarding unreliable items).
|
| Or, if you really want to stamp down about it, you do
| _not_ allow them to recoup delivery costs and that 's
| their punishment for making an unreliable machine in the
| first place.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Yes, and in your perfect world - manufacturers know full
| in advance about part life? There are hundreds of parts
| that make up the build of material of an appliance.
|
| This means simply that parts won't ship and service is
| only done at approved manufacturer facilities. OH wait...
| logifail wrote:
| > i can buy a $3 led from China with free shipping
|
| International shipping is not even close to being a level
| playing field:
|
| "Arcane rules established by the 144-year-old Universal
| Postal Union make it possible for a Chinese e-retailer to
| send a package across the Pacific to a customer in the
| U.S. at a cost lower than what an American competitor
| would spend to ship the same item to a neighboring
| state"[0]
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-18
| /trump-...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I am not in US
| kube-system wrote:
| You're probably in a country in the UPU.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Interestingly, the same is valid for Europe - I got tons
| of shipping from Shenzen for free, and the item costed
| like 1$ (ie USB cables).
| sokoloff wrote:
| That's a 2018 article and EMS rules have materially
| changed since then.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That assembly line's costs are amortized over the rate of
| production (high): that's the essence of mass
| manufacturing.
|
| > _A part sold by itself needs none of those things._
|
| A part sold by itself needs so many _more_ things!
|
| Where do you store it? How do you organize it there? How
| do you keep track of your inventory? How do you re-order
| new inventory? How much do you re-order? How long do you
| typically have to store? How do you source substitute
| suppliers when your original goes out of business? How do
| you QC stock? Etc. Etc.
|
| All of that for multiples of the part count that goes
| into a single model, because you sell more than one
| model.
|
| You can buy a $3 LED from China (see sibling comment for
| economics on free shipping) because you're buying the
| current model / whatever version they feel like giving
| you.
|
| "Part specs may be subject to variation" doesn't work so
| well with more complex systems.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Where do you store it? How do you organize it there? How
| do you keep track of your inventory?"
|
| I am sorry but these questions come across as extremely
| silly - this is not rocket science, even manufacturers of
| beer have to figure out these things, if you can't manage
| a warehouse, you would not be able to be any kind of
| serious manufacturer in the first place.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| They're not _difficult_ , but they are _expensive_. Which
| is what ends up in prices.
|
| Check warehouse rates or spot freight shipping.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Wow, no one says you have to get a spare part to a
| customer tomorrow morning. Just grab one before it goes
| to assembly line, ship it with the actual completed
| machines to a distribution center where it will go to the
| customer from there. There's nothing "new," except at the
| beginning/end of the chain, just add a few more of those
| parts to the next order of them. If it will impact
| operations to take a few from the beginning, some of
| those spares will have to be delayed. That's ok, tell the
| customer 6-8 weeks to deliver a spare part. That was
| pretty standard shipping times when I was younger.
| [deleted]
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Just grab one before it goes to assembly line, ship it
| with the actual completed machines to a distribution
| center_
|
| So customers can only order replacement parts while
| assembly lines are currently doing production runs?
| rootsudo wrote:
| What if it's no longer being manufactured or on assembly
| line? HOw do you grab it before assembly line?
|
| And comingling parts with completed machines? Heh. You
| have no idea of the distribution chain of b2b retail
| goods vs b2c service repair and such.
|
| 6-8 weeks repair time is still common, especially
| nowadays.
| tibbetts wrote:
| This is sort of liking saying "how hard could it really
| be to do a special software build for one customer?"
| withinboredom wrote:
| I guess it depends on how you CI and build process is
| setup. Caddy does an excellent job of doing per-customer
| custom builds.
| s1mon wrote:
| If you just "grab one before it goes to assembly line"
| this will likely have a huge impact on the assembly line.
| Factories put a lot of effort into managing inventory of
| material. Lead times on parts can often be in the months
| if not years. If there are unexpected shortages of parts
| and subassemblies, the hourly or daily costs of a line
| down can be enormous. Shipping one of something to an end
| consumer is usually a completely different supply chain
| than shipping containers full of finished goods to
| distribution centers which then go to retail. Taxes,
| tariffs, shipping methods, etc are all completely
| different. You can't just commingle things like this
| easily.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| We once had to drive special parts for one car by taxi
| cab to the factory, in single figure quantities, to not
| let the line stop and pay the fine... "just in time"
| production can be hell...
| ksec wrote:
| And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech
| have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics
| works. Even distribution alone, within a single country (
| ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| We're used to every "part' being downloadable at zero
| real cost.
|
| It's hard to think about physical reality when that's how
| most of your life is.
| syshum wrote:
| We have many industries of examples where this solved also
| by market forces as well
|
| Cars as an example, the key here is to allow the market to
| MAKE replacement parts, and compete to selling them. Stop
| vendor lock-in
|
| If I want to buy replacement part for my car I often have a
| selection of 3-5 different vendors making the replacement
| in addition to the OEM.
|
| You can not tell me that appliances, electronics, etc are
| that much different from cars that similar solutions can
| not be found. Especially given that most of these things
| are just off the shelf parts that the OEM combines into a
| product anyway
| ghaff wrote:
| There are many third-party appliance/electronics parts
| companies.
| eropple wrote:
| Yeah - and the problem here is that there are many
| _parts_.
|
| Getting a plastic wheel for my dishwasher's lower roller
| shelf is $12 from a third-party source (it's $16 from the
| manufacturer). It's like four grams of plastic. But the
| rarity of demand just doesn't make it make sense to keep
| in stock.
|
| (That sort of thing has me halfway convinced to buy a 3D
| printer. I just don't have anywhere to put it yet.)
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Make sure to check for generic wheels too! I think 90% of
| dishwashers have the same wheels but with different parts
| numbers.
| syshum wrote:
| true, however the current trend is to lock down the parts
| and prevent companies from making replacement parts via
| the use of DRM, serialization, and other controls that
| have nothing to do with security, usability, or anything
| other than preventing repair
|
| Hell even Paper has DRM now, see the Latest Dymo label
| printers
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Just my 2 cents, but worth noting I do run a retail
| business and about 20% of our revenue comes from old
| electronics we refurb in-house.
|
| The reason that spare parts are so expensive has nothing to
| do with the cost of logistics or the scale of mass-
| production. The warehouse can simply order an extra pallet
| of parts and leave it on a rack as spares. Hell, this is
| probably what all of these businesses do.
|
| The real reason the pump costs 100 pounds is because the
| customer has no reasonable alternative, so they will
| (begrudgingly) accept that before spending 400 pounds on a
| brand new machine.
|
| If they found out the specific part number of the pump and
| ordered something compatible from an alternative supplier
| (I used to go to this effort when younger), it generally
| ends up costing around 1/5 of the price of an official one.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The heating element of my Miele washing machine broke after
| about 4 years, and a genuine spare part would have cost
| 100EUR. I got a 3rd party replacement part that looks
| completely identical for 20EUR. I'm pretty sure there's
| still a healthy profit margin on that, since they cost half
| of that on Ali Express. And if the original part breaks
| after 4 years, the aftermarket part can't be much worse.
|
| The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking
| expensive is because they make a lot of money with service.
| They don't want people fixing their own machines for 20EUR,
| they want to have a Miele service person come and swap the
| part for 250EUR.
|
| EDIT: And don't tell me that logistics for a heating
| element are hard. All Miele washers have been using the
| same heating element for 15 years or so, it's a drop in
| replacement for the previous version of the part, and it's
| probably also the single part that breaks most often. That
| part should be easy to stock and the cost to do so should
| be trivial.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Looks identical and is identical are two different
| concerns though. I bought a (used) dryer from a small
| appliance vendor that looked identical to the new one
| right next to it for half as much. It was only a year
| later when it stopped working and I opened it up that I
| discovered where a thermal fuse should be there was just
| a straight piece of non high temp wire that had melted
| and thankfully not burned my house down when it failed.
| Which isn't to say that first party parts may not be
| marked up for profit, just that external looks of things
| don't tell you anything about the actual internal
| construction.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| It's typical to have a markup goal of at least 10x going
| from place of origin to destination market. It _is_ a
| scam. Source: involved in electronic design and
| manufacture.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not a scam - they just don't particularly want to be
| in the business of supplying parts, so they charge a
| premium. You can buy an alternative if you like.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Differences beyond 2x are still a clear indication that
| official replacement parts are a scam.
|
| Also, the costs were not so absurdly high 20, 40 or 60
| years ago!
| pc86 wrote:
| Making a profit, even a large one, is not in and of
| itself a scam.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I agree with your point in general. I have bought spare
| parts from sketchy websites in the past and sometimes
| they are not as good as the original. You can usually
| tell the difference if you look at them closely.
|
| But heating elements are very simple parts, and I bought
| it from a reputable local store, so I don't really worry
| that I'm getting an unsafe part. It's probably going to
| fail in a few years due to corrosion just like the
| original part (we have very hard water), and then I'll
| swap it again.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Heating Element sounds just the trick to start a fire
| [deleted]
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Replying to myself to add another data point:
|
| Other manufacturers manage to sell spare parts at more
| reasonable prices. I just checked a random washing
| machine from Siemens, and they sell the heating element
| for 28EUR. Not quite as affordable as the aftermarket
| part I got, and they'll probably charge 5-10EUR for
| shipping, but it's a lot more reasonable than the Miele
| part.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking
| expensive is because they make a lot of money with
| service. They don't want people fixing their own machines
| for 20EUR, they want to have a Miele service person come
| and swap the part for 250EUR.
|
| Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
|
| I have some Miele kit, and I have an insurance policy.
|
| If something breaks, I call the insurance company, get a
| code. Then I call Miele and book a service appointment
| using the code. As a result, I have never paid a thing to
| Miele, not parts, not labour. But I still get official
| Miele engineer and official Miele parts.
|
| And for some of my older Miele kit (10+ years), they've
| been out a lot, because the insurance company still deems
| it more economical to repair than to get Miele to ship me
| a new one.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
|
| If the goal is convenience, then definitely. Home
| insurance policies are quite a lot more expensive than
| actual repair costs are likely to be. Which of course is
| expected, the product being sold is peace of mind and
| convenience -- both of which people happily pay a premium
| for.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Home insurance policies are quite a lot more expensive
| than actual repair costs are likely to be.
|
| Hahaha that's a good one... especially as we're talking
| about Miele here. ;-)
|
| And you're factually wrong anyway.
|
| I didn't say "home insurance", I said "household
| appliance insurance". Different thing, unless your home
| insurance happens to cover appliances.
|
| My household appliances insurance is not expensive. It
| covers 5 appliances, unlimited call-outs, and you don't
| get screwed at renewal time if you've claimed on the
| insurance.
|
| As I said, I've had Miele out _A LOT_ over the years and
| I 've never paid them a penny, and trust me on some of my
| older large appliances they've pretty much replaced 100%
| of the internal parts.
| after_care wrote:
| Insurance companies operate at about 17% over premiums.
| Which means, for every dollar someone spends on insurance
| the company pays $0.83 in claims. This happens at a
| population level. Maybe you individually have a
| statistically above average amount of claims and
| collected more money than you spent. In which case
| congratulations. Maybe you are in a subpopulation (5x
| Miele owners) that the company is not accurately
| accounting for in their actuary tables. In which case the
| more this subpopulation signs up for insurance the higher
| premiums will increase, and perhaps if large enough the
| actuaries will catch on and raise your premiums as a
| subgroup.
|
| Either way, the insurance company will turn a profit from
| premiums. I'm glad this policy has paid off for you, but
| "reducing costs" is not a good reason to purchase
| insurance. Insurance reduces risk and makes expenses more
| predictable.
| [deleted]
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| In sum, insurance companies are not selling their product
| at a loss, and if they are operating efficiently, they
| aren't selling their product to you at a loss either.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| In fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the
| people who have these insurance policies fail to claim on
| them or decide to replace their item when it breaks
| regardless of the insurance policy. A bit like the gym
| membership model, 90% of people don't use it at all.
| hgomersall wrote:
| As always the adage "if you can afford to self-insure,
| you should" applies. There are two reasons you should buy
| insurance: because you are required to by law, or because
| the cost of covering replacement or repair would be
| problematic (either financially or logistically).
| martyvis wrote:
| The other issue with appliance insurance or extended
| warranty and the like, it dilutes the obligation of
| companies to honour consumer guarantees. Certainly in
| Australia companies have been fined and otherwise
| penalised for promoting paid extended warranties when
| they should have been instead offering to make sure they
| meet the "fit for purpose" obligations
| londons_explore wrote:
| The insurance company may have a deal with the repairers,
| so they're able to get repairs done cheaper than you can.
| If that's the case, it may be cheaper (on average) to
| have insurance than not to.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
|
| Any insurance is a conflict of interest. The entity
| responsible for paying out is the same entity responsible
| for if/how much you get paid out. Any for-profit
| insurance company is incentivized to pay out as little as
| possible, if any. Any litigation is likely to cost way
| more than the payout.
| Joeri wrote:
| It seems to me insurance companies must break into two
| categories. The first are honest agents operating on a
| house-always-wins model. Meaning, over a sufficiently
| large time and sufficiently large customer base they pay
| out less than they receive, but only a normal cost +
| profit margin amount less. Pay out more than that and
| they go out of business.
|
| The second category would be dishonest agents, which try
| to avoid payout and have windfall profits and basically
| skirt the line where lawsuits and reputational damage
| make that kind of profit impossible. Long term operation
| as such a business is challenging due to word of mouth,
| so they must often rebrand or change business names, or
| just make their products too confusing to understand.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Any insurance is a conflict of interest. The entity
| responsible for paying out is the same entity responsible
| for if/how much you get paid out.
|
| What are you on about ?
|
| Let me spell out how my appliances insurance policy
| works: 1. I call $insurance_company
| and say "my appliance is broken" 2.
| $insurance_company says "Ok, here's a code, call Miele,
| give them the code" 3. Miele sends out engineer
| with parts who fixes the appliance 4. I sign
| engineer's job sheet. 5. The end.
|
| To reiterate: - At no point have I
| given Miele my credit card. - At no point have
| I given the Miele engineer my credit card. - At
| no point have I received a bill from Miele. - At
| no point have I paid Miele in any way shape or form
| - $insurance_company has taken care of everything, 100%
| of everything, every single time.
| bombela wrote:
| But how much does the insurance cost? Are you positive
| this insurance, over the years, is cheaper than what you
| would have paid Miele directly?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > But how much does the insurance cost?
|
| Mine is about 350 a year, but they work out a rate per-
| appliance and then give a discount on the total, so you
| can pay more (or less) depending on how many appliances
| you cover.
|
| > Are you positive this insurance, over the years, is
| cheaper than what you would have paid Miele directly?
|
| Absolutely.
|
| A Miele call-out will set you back 150 call-out +
| 100/hour, plus parts on top.
|
| Or (if Miele agree) you can pay a "fixed-price" 300 which
| covers parts and labour (but again, this is subject to
| Miele's agreement and that agreement is given on a per
| call-out evaluation).
|
| And as I said, one of my Miele appliances is 10+ years
| old, they've been back a good few times replacing
| increasingly major parts each time, so now the only thing
| 10+ years old about it is the external casing !
|
| Even if I bought the "official" Miele parts myself, I
| value my time at greater than zero ! So its still cheaper
| than me buying the parts and spending a half a day
| pulling out appliances and fitting parts.
|
| And given the price of new Miele appliances, its not
| exactly like after 5 years I could afford to replace
| everything with brand new appliances, since that would
| cost _A LOT_ more than 350x5.
| [deleted]
| Clubber wrote:
| You must not live in the US. I see it's a German company,
| they have much stronger laws governing how they operate.
| In the US, there are laws, but they are scantly enforced.
| "Buyer beware." Corruption is gonna crash the insurance
| industry before too long.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Any insurance is a conflict of interest._ *
|
| * Except group catastrophic
|
| Ultimately, it's a math problem that must have a positive
| answer for the insurance company. If 100% of
| policyholders make claims, you generally pay that profit
| yourself.
|
| However, in group catastrophic policy, the numbers add
| up. Substantially <100% of people file claims, so
| premiums can be set much lower, effectively giving you
| protection against an unlikely scenario at reasonable
| cost.
|
| My grandfather was an actuary, and constantly griped that
| low-deductible policies shouldn't even be called
| "insurance."
|
| If you want to create something like a national health
| benefit, do so. But don't confuse people by mislabeling
| it.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Ultimately, it 's a math problem that must have a
| positive answer for the insurance company. If 100% of
| policyholders make claims, you generally pay that profit
| yourself._
|
| Not necessarily. Simply holding onto large piles of other
| people's money can he profitable - eg banks.
| pc86 wrote:
| That's part of the math problem.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Group catastrophic, like all other insurance, is negative
| expected value in first-order effects, but improves
| predictability.
|
| This is not fundamentally different from low-deductible
| policies. (Which may do more, proportionately to cost, to
| improve predictability if most variance is the number of
| frequency of low-cost events)
| danw1979 wrote:
| Miele came to my house and replaced my heating element
| for free on an 8 year old machine !
|
| If it was out of the very generous warranty, I expect it
| would cost loads.
| ksec wrote:
| Aliexpress vendors operate on very low margin. Compared
| to Miele, considering Washing Machines are such low
| volume products, and their brand commands premium,
| selling it at 80% margin gross doesn't sound too
| ridiculous.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| To make it clear, I didn't buy the spare part from Ali
| Express. The spare part would have cost around 10EUR on
| Ali Express.
|
| I bought it for 20EUR from a reputable local electronics
| parts dealer. The part I got for 20EUR was a high quality
| 3rd party heating element compatible with Miele washers.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Why can aftermarket suppliers make the same part much
| cheaper?
| FlyingAvatar wrote:
| This works when a part is widely used, creating a decent
| market for the part.
|
| If the part is only used say in a single model of
| dishwasher, there will never be enough demand to justify
| the creation of an aftermarket one.
| tibbetts wrote:
| Sampling error. Aftermarket suppliers only get involved
| when they can make and sell a replacement part at a
| compelling price point.
| jupp0r wrote:
| This is called survivorship bias
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias.
| Retric wrote:
| As was just pointed out, making the part isn't a large
| fraction of the cost of a replacement part. So, they need
| to both make the part and handle the full logistics chain
| to undercut prices.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Aftermarket suppliers have even more of a logistical
| burden than the OEM. They cater to a smaller market, and
| need to set up manufacturing for the part (which the OEM
| already has). Yet they still can sell the parts for
| substantially less.
| clusterfish wrote:
| I don't buy that as a factor. Given that the OEMs
| overprice the parts that they have to compete with
| aftermarket suppliers for, why would they NOT overprice
| the parts for which they have no such competition?
|
| Note that being unable to profitably replicate the part
| does not necessarily mean that the part is naturally
| expensive, or that the OEM already sells it at a
| reasonable price. The part could just as well be hard to
| reverse engineer and QA for a third party, or the effort
| to do that might not be worth it given unknown level of
| demand, etc. OEM can actually have a natural price
| advantage over third parties in such complex parts.
| 13of40 wrote:
| If that's true, the weight of a spare part should correlate
| closely with its price, yet spark plugs are an order of
| magnitude cheaper than oxygen sensors.
| simonh wrote:
| There are a lot of factors in supply chain costs aside
| from weight. Order volume is a huge factor. If two parts
| have identical component costs and weights, but one is
| ordered in the UK say in the thousands per year, the end
| purchaser cost will be a lot lower than for a part where
| only a few people order one each year. In fact for the
| latter, it might not be possible to order it directly in
| the UK at all.
| chris_wot wrote:
| It works fine for cars, there is a massive third party
| market.
| christophilus wrote:
| There are also perverse subsidies at play. My dad is in
| manufacturing, and realized that he could buy a complete,
| assembled part from his Chinese competitor for less than he
| could get the raw steel involved in manufacturing it. I
| imagine similar skewing is part of the story for the
| dishwasher.
| Closi wrote:
| A spare part does not need similar logistics or shipping - in
| the case of a dishwasher for instance the delivery of a
| dishwasher requires a 2-person delivery which likely costs
| cPS60-PS70 in the UK, while a motor would be sent through a
| parcel carrier for cPS3.50-PS5.
|
| Sure, ordering and delivering all the parts separately and
| individually would be more expensive, but let's also not
| pretend that selling and shipping spare parts is
| prohibitively difficult and costly.
| jakear wrote:
| Why would a dishwasher need two people to deliver it in UK?
| Just one dude and a couple wheels is all I've seen needed
| in US.
| swarnie wrote:
| It doesn't, my last dishwasher, washing machine and dryer
| all came with a single bloke and his trolley in the UK.
| Closi wrote:
| In the UK from most retailers this would be a 2 person
| delivery (and typically white goods form a large part of
| the volume of 2-man delivery networks).
| Closi wrote:
| > Why would a dishwasher need two people to deliver it in
| UK? Just one dude and a couple wheels is all I've seen
| needed in US.
|
| Usually retailers will offer "room of choice" delivery in
| the UK for these sort of appliances, which means that the
| dishwasher will be delivered into the house which often
| requires a 2-person delivery. If you required an item
| such as a dishwasher to be delivered to a flat for
| instance, rather than just dropped off curbside outside a
| block of flats, that would typically require a 2-person
| delivery in the UK (See services such as DX 2-Man as an
| example of this type of operation).
|
| Secondly, there is often a requirement for light assembly
| (i.e. simple installation, removal of packaging, plug in
| the appliance) which is usually a paid addition by the
| customer. As soon as you do this, it's often more
| effective to have all deliveries be 2-person rather than
| split up the delivery territories (although if you are
| going through a pallet network, depending on the item and
| service required, you may be able to split these).
|
| If you don't need this and just want it dropping off
| outside the customers home (curbside delivery), the cost
| would usually be cPS40 via a pallet network.
| maccard wrote:
| A man with a van is PS90 for a half a day. Loading up a
| hackney with 15 dishwashers from a warehou seee on the
| outskirts of a city is also probably PS90.
| Closi wrote:
| To clarify, my costs are from a central distribution
| center to home (not some sort of local washing machine
| shop delivering to your house).
|
| The prices I've given are pretty normal commercial prices
| for a large item delivery to anywhere in the UK (excl.
| some parts of Scotland).
|
| I gave a 2-person price because I was assuming some sort
| of 'white glove' service would be required for this, i.e.
| not just a curbside delivery but there would be an
| expectation to deliver the item to the kitchen, including
| if the person lives in a flat for instance. If a 2 person
| delivery wasn't required, the price would be closer to
| PS40 for a curbside palletised delivery these days.
|
| You might be able to get 15 dishwashers in a van, but
| delivering to 15 customers in 4 hours is way beyond what
| is realistic for this type of delivery (you simply won't
| get the delivery density required). A typical van
| delivery cost from a regional hub would be cPS25-PS30,
| but then you also have to consider the trunking cost from
| the NDC.
|
| (Logistics is my day job, which is why I have a good idea
| on the costs of pallet networks, van networks and
| 2-person delivery networks, all of which I have received
| recent quotations for or calculated the costs of)
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and
| motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and
| everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire
| value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one
| part, the one that happened to need replacement?_
|
| Obviously not, but that's how economies of scale, combined with
| planned obsolescence and rent seeking works.
|
| That's how Apple who makes disposable earphones that last two
| years is worth trillions and Sennheiser who makes headphones
| lasting 20+ years is going bust.
|
| It's not profitable making fair priced products that last
| forever or are cheap and easy to repair.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Which is why it should be required (if sustainable
| manufacture was deemed a bugger social benefit to profit).
|
| If Apple had to make headphones that were either robust or
| repairable (or both, can you imagine), they'd find a way, if
| only to avoid losing money on replacing broken ones.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Yes, because if it wasn't required, companies like Apple
| could make products that people wanted beyond the
| robustness and repairable aspects. By keeping all companies
| hobbled by the same regulatory requirements, Apple can no
| longer cheat with better functionality and aesthetics.
|
| Of course, there is obviously a trade off.
| afandian wrote:
| Is Sennheiser going bust? Can't the pro market sustain them?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I've had multiple Sennheisers crap out on me after way less
| than 20 years.
| judge2020 wrote:
| That's why Apple gets to be worth $3T, but that's not why
| people buy AirPods over Sennheiser. If they can make longer
| lasting fully wireless ANC headphones for not much more on
| the price, they'd be good competition for AirPods customers.
| Bud wrote:
| Could we at least make this comparison in good faith?
|
| Apple is not a company that "makes disposable earphones".
| AirPods are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of its business. The
| vast majority of its products can easily last a decade or
| more and are recyclable after that.
|
| Saying that Apple is worth trillions because of a side
| product like AirPods is ludicrous. Make your argument without
| this sloppy, inaccurate Apple-blaming.
| syshum wrote:
| > "and are recyclable after that."
|
| Ohh come on... Apple requires them to be shredded, after
| which some of the base metals can be recovered but there is
| still a ton of waste in that.
|
| > products can easily last a decade
|
| As long as you are fine with them reducing your battery
| life to get you to upgrade.
|
| Apple, and the carriers have lots of incentive programs
| design to get people to "upgrade" the phones and when using
| those programs those phones go strait to recycle (i.e
| shredder)
|
| Recycle is the LAST RESORT for sustainability, remember the
| triad is "REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE" Apple only even plays lip
| service to the Recycle part, and want to prevent the Reduce
| and Reuse part by preventing / disincentivizing repair and
| resell.
| robin_reala wrote:
| You can look at the figures. Their most recent earnings
| statement[1] has "wearables, home and accessories" at 11.9%
| of their revenue. We don't know how much of that is AirPods
| but I'd be surprised if it's less that 50% given Watch and
| HomePod sales.
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q1_Consolidate
| d_Fin...
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you bought a dishwasher one part at a time, how much more is
| it reasonable to expect for it to cost?
|
| I think a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part at
| a time is reasonable. Your car is likely well over $100K if you
| ordered it one part at a time.
|
| If you want to insist that the sum of the parts costs no more
| than the MSRP of the dishwasher, you won't find the parts
| falling to 1/5 their current cost, but rather the dishwasher
| now listing for $2500 (and likely having frequent deep-discount
| sales).
| buran77 wrote:
| And yet if you buy a computer one part at a time, through the
| magic of standardization you may end up even cheaper than the
| fully build OEM option.
|
| You won't see too many industries attempting this kind of
| standardization anytime soon.
| ghaff wrote:
| That was _maybe_ once true. If you 're literally starting
| from zero today and buying new parts? I sort of doubt it.
|
| (Though I don't really disagree that it's generally easier
| to swap out parts on a (home-built) tower computer than it
| is with most things because of standards.)
| buran77 wrote:
| It's perfectly true today if you ignore the recent price
| hikes which happen under different forces (silicon
| shortage, crypto stuff). An OEM might be cheaper because
| they will put in lower quality stuff you'd never buy
| yourself (the absolute cheapest part that fits the bill,
| the cheapest motherboard, the worst thermal paste), and
| they have to cover extra services, warranty, building and
| distributing the systems, etc. I think you can still get
| cheaper and/or better systems by yourself.
| ghaff wrote:
| Comparisons are a bit hard because (perhaps outside of
| some specialty--and more expensive--gaming systems) what
| you build yourself is arguably "better"/more optimized
| than a random HP or Dell box. At the same time, the
| percentage of people who care about optimization at that
| level is pretty small. I built/upgraded PCs for years and
| now I pretty much have zero interest.
|
| But again to the basic point, it's certainly close to a
| wash which wouldn't be true with most things.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It's definitely true for PCs. At best you can get the
| same price for pre-assembled but usually it's more
| expensive.
|
| Not sure about laptops though.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I bought a Chromebook for $92 delivered to my door this
| winter. It's definitely not the case there.
| ghaff wrote:
| Realistically, you can't even really build your own
| laptop from scratch in the sense of buying a case,
| motherboard, etc. OK--maybe someone offers this--but it's
| hardly mainstream. And you can buy a Dell desktop for
| ~$800 and I'm sure I could find cheaper deals elsewhere.
| No, it's not an optimized gaming machine but most people
| don't have any use for that.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Admittedly it's been a while, but the last I checked
| crypto-driven GPU scarcity made it much harder and more
| expensive to build a gaming PC than to buy premade.
| zucker42 wrote:
| It's still completely true, except for the GPU shortage.
| II2II wrote:
| There is value in building with a combination of new and
| used parts. Why do you need a new case each time you
| build a new PC. There may be cosmetic benefits, but an
| old case will rarely affect anything else. Likewise, I
| have a couple if bike frames laying around. I could
| pretty much build a bike to my spec and not bother with
| the expense of a frame.
| ghaff wrote:
| Though bikes are another good example of something with a
| lot of standardization/interchangeability of parts. Most
| mechanical/electronic things around the house aren't like
| that to the same degree.
|
| ADDED: I suspect people who say that it's cheaper to
| build your own PC are mostly thinking in terms of it can
| certainly be cheaper to _upgrade_ a DIY system than to
| buy a new one off the shelf.
| II2II wrote:
| There are a couple of scenarios where you can possibly
| build cheaper. Consider when the purchaser is looking for
| certain components or to meet a particular specification.
| In those situations they would have to pay someone to
| build a custom system or pay the vendor to customize the
| system (in those cases the vendor frequently charges a
| premium).
|
| Of course the big question is, why aren't household
| devices/appliances using standardized and interchangeable
| components? In many cases, it could probably be done. I
| suspect the main differentiator is consumer expectation.
| A significant number of consumers of bikes and desktop
| computers will repair, upgrade, and accessorize their
| purchase. Very few people will expect to do the same with
| their blender or television.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Many years ago, I believe late eighties, a documentary was
| made in Italy, sponsored by FIAT (basically to show how good
| was their new automated warehouse) when a group of people,
| members of an automobile club, built a Fiat 131 completely
| from the body buying _everything_ through the "normal" spare
| parts channels, ordering parts as the rebuilding went on.
|
| It came out that the built car costed more than 500% without
| counting any of the man work/hours.
|
| And FIAT (at least here in Italy) was famous for having
| rather cheap spare parts (when compared to - say -
| Volkswagen).
|
| Most probably the 500% is nowadays not enough, at least for
| cars.
| dsego wrote:
| A lot of people discover this when they try to build a
| custom bicycle from the frame up with off-the-shelf
| components.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one
| part at a time.
|
| I guess I agree, but when I read it I couldn't help but think
| that Johnny Cash built his Cadillac one part at a time and it
| didn't cost him a thing!
| pessimizer wrote:
| I disagree with using "what sokoloff thinks is reasonable" as
| a standard.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I think a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part
| at a time is reasonable.
|
| So the cost of assembly line, robots, power and salaries of
| workers is -400%?
|
| Why do you feel the need to come with excuses for whats is
| ibviously a cash-cow?
| tbihl wrote:
| How can it be a cash cow when everyone comes to the
| conclusion that it's not worth buying?
|
| In any case, you've neglected logistics, which is at least
| complicated enough that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has
| been stalling out on multiple fronts against a much smaller
| force (this not to denigrate the bravery or capabilities of
| the Ukranians.)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Offering low cost parts cannibalises new sales. Over-
| charging on parts is a cash cow as you now sell more full
| price machines, the only cost is the decimation of the
| environment and waste of limited planetary resources ..
| but shareholders make even more money, so who cares /s.
| tbihl wrote:
| I'm actually open to this argument for larger things that
| last longer and are less internalize-able, because the
| friction in the market starts to overwhelm its
| efficiency.
|
| But dishwashers are not that expensive that you're stuck
| with them. Buying new, cost is less than most new
| appliances and similar to a phone, less than a laptop.
| The used market is so soft that, even in my LCOL area
| (with consequently tighter Craigslist market), I bought
| my 3 year old stainless steel dishwasher for $150. All
| this to say, you can bail on your dishwasher if someone
| starts selling one that is extraordinarily better than
| everything on the market.
|
| As another thought exercise, you have apartment complexes
| or apartment buildings (working in hand with national or
| regional builders). These parties have the time horizon,
| large sample sizes, accounting capacity, and concern for
| costs to know the absolute best option for appliances in
| terms of how often maintenance is required and how much
| it costs. They're a large enough buyer, at least
| collectively, to constitute a market. Despite all this,
| the dishwashers in apartments where I've lived or visited
| seem exactly the same as the ones in friends homes. Why
| don't apartment complexes use low maintenance
| dishwashers? My suspicion is that they're complex
| machines with heaters (highest wear), pumps (high wear),
| and pressurized water in close proximity to electronics,
| built to a standard so they can be affordable in every US
| home.
|
| But please, make it better. I like paying extra money for
| things built with engineer driven design.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > you've neglected logistics, which is at least
| complicated enough that the Russian invasion of Ukraine
| has been stalling out
|
| I am honestly amazed at this segway.
| tbihl wrote:
| I'm coming to appreciate how far the devastation and
| misery of Ukraine are from most Americans' minds. It's
| probably the first news story I've followed closely since
| last year's attack on the Colonial Pipeline, but I've
| been completely absorbed by it since December. I don't
| understand how the story of the global American military
| presence can be obtained coherently through the national
| embarrassment that is leaving Ukraine to stand up, alone,
| for Western civilization. But it is hardly the first
| empire to be shown as hollow, and the collapse is all the
| cleaner (for the US) because the foreign military
| presence doesn't accompany foreign territories that will
| need to be shed.
| jameshart wrote:
| The benefit of the assembly line, robots, consolidation
| into a factory, and salaries of people dedicated to the
| assembly process is obviously easily enough to account for
| this difference. That's why factories exist.
|
| If you don't believe that mass production has benefits, you
| have to come up with some alternative explanation for the
| 20th century.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Maybe you should go into business to undercut this obvious
| cash-cow? I bet if you start with $10M and undercut the
| current suppliers, you could become a millionaire.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Do you think you can start a dishwasher business for
| $10M?
|
| My preferred modus would be to buy a current
| manufacturer, then strip out the high paid execs and
| minimise the profits in the form of very cheap repairs.
| sokoloff wrote:
| No, but you can start a business that manufactures the
| parts that HN experts have identified as "cash cows" for
| less than $10M.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Your whole attitude indicates that you are largely
| unaware of the shenanigans manufacturers have been
| pulling to cutoff supply of repair parts.
|
| our taxes pay for customs to seize components of iPhones
| and file charges on behalf of apple for counterfeit
| goods. If you take your iphone, travel to china, take it
| apart there, and send to to the US by post, the customs
| will seize it as counterfeit.
|
| Honest people are going to jail to preserve Apple's
| profits.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3yadk/apple-sued-an-
| indepen...
|
| You also probably don't know about part serialisation and
| other efforts that mean that even if you product a
| compatiable part, the device will reject it.
|
| This is the case with tractors and phones. I am not 100%
| up to date with dishwashers.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Your attitude indicates that you think dishwasher parts
| manufacturers are making excessive profits on repair
| parts somehow, since at least this post of yours:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662019
|
| Why not go disrupt them and put some of those cash cows
| into your barn instead?
|
| On phones, last weekend I replaced my wife's iPhone X
| battery with one from Amazon for $18.99 + $1.19 in tax
| and 45 minutes of very straightforward work. If that
| $20.18 repair to get an extra 2 years out of the phone is
| the result of excessive profiteering or protectionism on
| the part of Apple, I'm pretty sure I'm OK with it and
| don't need/want government intervention to "fix" it.
|
| I could have sent taken it to Apple and gotten it
| replaced for $70, which also seems totally reasonable to
| me for a parts-and-labor repair to get 2 more years of
| service.
| treis wrote:
| Probably shouldn't be quite so snarky when you're wrong.
| There's a huge industry of non-oem parts that do undercut
| the OEM and presumably make money.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part at a
| time is reasonable
|
| A 5x multiplier is in no way reasonable unless the
| replacement parts are being shipped to the moon.
| kasabali wrote:
| Comments in the linked thread are spot on. Manufacturers would do
| anything to avoid abiding spirit of that law to keep their bottom
| line.
|
| What's more depressing is "tech enthusiast" circle (eg. in reddit
| or hardware forums) will be more than eager to rationalize,
| defend and disseminate any weak technical excuse made up by
| manufacturers for keeping their anti consumer practices.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Comments in the linked thread are what is annoying about nerd
| fights.
|
| This is a good and necessary first step. Focusing on all the
| ways it could be circumvented isn't a rationale for not doing
| it, they are all just rationales for strengthening it.
| loeg wrote:
| I like my electronics waterproof. That's a hell of a lot harder
| with replaceable batteries.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Define "hell of a lot harder"
|
| Phone replaceable battery; a rubber gasket and 3-4 screws -
| waterproof up to 5-6ft.
|
| Though I guess you could get away with a cheaper clip based
| approach... Like some cheap Chinese ham radios. I had a
| friend drop one in a lake, then pull it out (maybe 3ft deep).
| You wanna know what part broke? The speaker - it was a bit
| muffled, but that's due to probably water penetration and
| pressure on that membrane.
|
| It really is shocking how many people think it's "hard" to
| waterproof a small battery if it can be removed. Tupperware
| is water proof, doesn't cost a lot to make. Why would a
| battery encased in plastic be any harder? Especially for
| multi-billion dollar companies who can afford to scoop up
| some of the best engineers and have them work on consumer
| devices.
| anuvrat1 wrote:
| How can people forget Samsung Galaxy S5, IP67 with removable
| battery.
| vvillena wrote:
| Or the old Motorola Defy from 2010. IP67, removable
| battery, and near indestructible.
| Izkata wrote:
| Or, before smartphones, waterproof with removable
| batteries was really common.
| agumonkey wrote:
| what kind of excuse ? i'm curious
| goosedragons wrote:
| Anything that justifies it. You still see people claim that
| losing the headphone jack on the iPhone was "worth it" so it
| could be waterproof without port covers despite the fact
| phones with both already existed before it. So expect a lot
| of claims about how people NEED their laptop to be 1 cm
| thick, that by not having a removable battery it can have
| more battery, etc.
| Multicomp wrote:
| I still look to the Galaxy S5 Active[1] for a phone that
| puts to the lie the claims that smart devices need to
| entirely lose ports and functionality in order to be water
| resistant. Tidily enough it had all 3 of the so-called
| 'must go' features and was still water resistant.
|
| 1. MicroSD card
|
| 1. Headphone Jack
|
| 1. Removable battery
|
| If it was possible in 2014 and the days of Micro USB, it's
| possible today.
|
| [1]
| https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s5_active-6356.php
| Bud wrote:
| "Water resistant" is a meaningless, vague term, of
| course. The question is _how_ resistant. That phone was
| IP67 rated.
|
| Current iPhones are IP68 rated, which is markedly
| superior.
| raron wrote:
| The S9+ is IP68, it has MicroSD, USB type-C and headphone
| jack (unfortunately no user-replaceable battery).
| tobias2014 wrote:
| IP67 is as "waterproof" / "immersion proof" as IP68. Both
| must withstand 1 meter immersion depth up to 30 minutes.
| The only advantage as far as I can tell is up to the
| manufaturer "The test depth and duration is expected to
| be greater than the requirements for IPx7":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code
| bongoman37 wrote:
| Tams80 wrote:
| Ummm, you chose one of the standards that compared to the
| tier below it is only differentiated by manufacturers'
| own specifications.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'Superior' is meaningless, vague judgement of course. The
| questions are how resistant does it _need_ to be, and how
| resistant _can_ it be?
|
| Does anyone care that iPhone is IP68 instead of IP67?
|
| Does anything stop you drom making a phone with a
| headphone jack and microSD card that will survive
| submersion to the depth of 2 miles?
| [deleted]
| hughrr wrote:
| On the 3.5mm jack front I spent the 80s, 90s and 00s living
| with crackly ass headphone jacks on stuff. I'm glad they
| have died finally.
|
| My MacBook battery is replaceable. I don't want removable
| as I don't ever swap batteries.
|
| These aren't losses. They are whimpers from people who are
| living through rose tinted glasses.
| Tams80 wrote:
| You should have just not bought such cheap stuff.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Yeah. Bluetooth sound quality is perfect. Never ever
| drops out, has static, never sounds compressed either and
| you certainly don't have to consider what codecs and
| versions both devices support to get the best listening
| experience.
|
| Is your MacBook battery easily replaceable or is glued in
| making it a danger to be removed by an amateur at home?
| And even if you never swap batteries how does having it
| removable effect you really?
| hughrr wrote:
| Can't say I've ever had those problems. It just works
| here.
|
| I've got a 14" MBP. It has pull tags and is easy to
| replace. I'd still take it in apple store to get it
| replaced.
| goosedragons wrote:
| And I've never had crackly ass headphone jacks. Just
| works here.
|
| Pull tabs are only slightly better. If the tabs break
| you're just back to prying off adhesive and the tabs do
| break if you're not careful.
|
| And what are you going to do in 7 years when you're
| trying to get it working as a laptop for your kid or
| something and Apple tells you they no longer service that
| model as it's "vintage"?
| hughrr wrote:
| My kids have current, supported Apple computers.
|
| I've also replaced several batteries in Apple products,
| even without pull tabs and it's not difficult.
|
| Regarding replacements, my mother's 6s just got a second
| new battery last month and it's still supported after 7
| years.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Apple's vintage clock starts when they stop selling
| something. They sold the 6s until 2018. They rarely sell
| MBPs for more than a year so usually in 7 years they're
| done.
|
| I'm glad you're currently well to do and can afford all
| new shit for your kids. Some people can't and sometimes a
| repair is the only option. Is it worth making repair
| considerably harder for a few extra mm of thinness and
| less than a hundred grams of weight? I'd argue no.
| Compare the repair of a 2010 MBP with one from 2016 and
| then tell me the 2016 one is easy.
| hughrr wrote:
| There was a bit of a black hole I agree. The 2021 models
| are much improved.
| ambrose2 wrote:
| Bluetooth sounds fine, but it can introduce latency that
| you wouldn't experience with a direct connection. Which
| is fine for listening to music and even video calls are
| ok, but a minor proportion of the population working on
| music production will experience that latency. On a
| smartphone that's a pretty rare use case, so it's fine.
|
| Batteries: I extended the life of my 2010 MacBook by
| swapping the battery and it was very easy. Apple is going
| to come out with kits for amateurs to do part changes
| themselves for the iPhone, where that part change will be
| harder (broken screen swap) than swapping out a MB
| battery.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Bluetooth sounds fine
|
| Bluetooth is absolutely atrocious, every 2-way call over
| bluetooth is sampled down to absolute garbage because the
| meager bandwidth is halved and the codec in prehistoric
|
| https://habr.com/en/post/456182/
| hughrr wrote:
| Sounds amazing when I make calls with my airpods so I
| don't think that statement holds.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Latency is extremely noticeable with some headphones for
| videos/games. My Bose QC buds are just completely useless
| for them. Other pairs I have are better but the Bose are
| music/call only headphones. Thanks for reminding me of
| that extra problem.
|
| 2010 MBP were far more repairable than the modern stuff.
| After that Apple started gluing down the batteries which
| required prying to remove.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I've seen the following:
|
| - Notebooks would become thicker and clunkier. They don't
| want that.
|
| - Same for cellphones, added with things like less
| waterproof/humid resistance.
|
| With that said - many of the most vocal "tech enthusiasts"
| consume a lot. These are the people that are passionate about
| consumer electronics, and will purchase new
| phones/laptops/TVs/etc. every 1-2 years. So I'm not really
| sure why they'd care too much about phones etc. potentially
| not living their maximum lifespan.
| agumonkey wrote:
| thickness I don't mind but waterproof would be sad, that
| said it would be weird if companies can't make sealed case
| without glueing everything
| [deleted]
| kasabali wrote:
| I don't know how much glue was involved but Galaxy S5 was
| waterproof and had a user replaceable battery.
| Bud wrote:
| No, it was not "waterproof". It had an IP67 water/dust
| rating, which is inferior to the IP68 rating achieved by
| current iPhones.
| tobias2014 wrote:
| IP67 is as "waterproof" / "immersion proof" as IP68. Both
| must withstand 1 meter immersion depth up to 30 minutes.
| The only advantage as far as I can tell is up to the
| manufaturer "The test depth and duration is expected to
| be greater than the requirements for IPx7":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| IP68 is not 'waterproof', Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro is
| IP69 rated and has an SD card
| Tams80 wrote:
| Stop repeating something you clearly know nothing about.
| wrycoder wrote:
| There are "tech users", like myself, who buy a quality
| product and run it until it becomes unsupported. I keep
| iPhones about five years, which requires a battery
| replacement.
|
| I've replaced several iPhone batteries myself - I have the
| necessary tools, including the opening tool. Outside of it
| being a fiddly job involving miniature connectors, I find
| that the replacement batteries don't last as long as the
| OEM ones, even when bought from iFixit.
|
| Also, the battery is glued to the back shell, and the
| release tapes usually break, because the hot rice bag isn't
| as hot as the heated vacuum stage that Apple uses. Then you
| have to work a monofilament under the battery, which is an
| annoying three hand job, if you don't have the stage.
|
| Apple gets $69 to replace the battery. Given the above,
| that's reasonable. But, the nearest service is an hour
| away. The real decision is the personal time and delay to
| get to and from the service place (twice, or wait around
| for a couple of hours) vs spend an hour to do it myself.
|
| If the battery was OEM and came out easily, I'd do it
| myself, every time.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| True, but the alternative of not pushing back leads to an even
| more dystopian future so I'll take picking a fight with them
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, but tech enthusiasts typically prefer to stay in their
| comfy chairs, and in their favorite echo chambers, so they
| don't have any real world impact.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Says the tech enthusiast on his armchair?
| naoqj wrote:
| I like my phone thin and sturdy and I have no interest in
| replacing batteries myself.
| bobbean wrote:
| There's some pretty smart people in the field, don't you
| think if they are forced to come up with a solution that they
| will?
| palijer wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy. User replaceable batteries don't
| come at the cost of thin and sturdy phones.
|
| Laptop manufacturers have been saying that for years, and
| look at the Framework.
| noirbot wrote:
| As someone who bought a Framework to try to support a
| better model, my #1 complaint about it by far is that the
| battery is essentially worthless. It maybe gets 3 hours of
| use on a full charge, and 9 hours while closed and
| hibernated.
|
| I returned a M1 Macbook Air to get the Framework instead,
| so essentially, I've now paid 50% more to get a laptop with
| almost infinitely worse battery life when idle and 3-4x
| worse battery life in use. It's also slower, heavier,
| thicker, and has a screen resolution that a lot of apps
| don't know how to use well.
|
| At this rate, I better be able to replace the battery
| because I'm having to do a full charge/discharge cycle
| multiple times a day if I'm not just constantly leaving it
| plugged in.
|
| I love the idea of it in theory, but it's essentially a
| worse laptop than even the decade-old Apple laptops that
| did have replaceable batteries.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| You seem to think that Framework can fix their battery by
| gluing it in and welding the case shut?
| noirbot wrote:
| I don't know, but whatever they did has made for a
| decidedly worse laptop, and I assume they didn't set out
| to make a laptop that had an essentially unusable
| battery. I'm assuming good intent on their part that this
| is the best laptop they could make with the parts/design
| constraints. I'll be happy if the v2 of it is better
| though.
| gcthomas wrote:
| > It's also slower, heavier, thicker,
|
| The Framework and M1 Macbook Air weight the same at 1.3
| kg, and are both 16 mm thick, according to the specs that
| I can find. Did it really _seem_ thicker and heavier to
| you?
| noirbot wrote:
| I'm a little surprised, but the weight being roughly the
| same makes sense. The thickness is a little deceptive. I
| think they're both measured from their thickest point,
| but the Framework is essentially a solid brick with only
| a slight taper on the front and back edge, while the Air
| tapers to nearly a point on a number of sides. For
| reference, Apple lists the Air at:
|
| Height: 0.16-0.63 inch (0.41-1.61 cm)
|
| So they're the same thickness at their thickest point,
| but I'd guess that the Air has much less of the laptop at
| that thickness. I'd be curious about a volumetric
| comparison.
| Dunedan wrote:
| It's not the battery size which is the issue here, but
| how much power the hardware uses. The capacity of the
| battery of the Framework is 55W, while the capacity of
| the battery of the M1 MacBook Air is 49,9Wh. So
| apparently Framework managed to fit a larger battery in a
| equally large case, without the need to glue it in.
| noirbot wrote:
| To my point above, I'm pretty sure the Framework case is
| quite a bit larger in volume than the MBA case, so it's
| not really apples to apples there. Perhaps it's just that
| the Intel processor in the Framework is a massive energy
| hog (likely), but even my old Intel Macbook had easily 2x
| the battery life.
|
| In the end, I wasn't even trying to say that the battery
| size mattered. If anything, the fact that it's a bigger
| battery almost makes it worse. They crammed more battery
| in and it's still a drastically worse user experience
| when it comes to everything about the battery.
|
| Some of this is definitely because they're having to buy
| worse parts to try to make sure they're replaceable, and
| maybe that would improve if more places made parts for
| it. Maybe I could upgrade to a more efficient CPU/Mobo in
| the future, or a better battery, but then what do I do
| with the old one? I'm still contributing to e-waste.
| tjoff wrote:
| Well, you'd have almost twice the battery-life, if you
| used Windows.
|
| And you can get comparable results in Linux, but you need
| to tweak it yourself at the moment.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| You can have both thin, sturdy, and replaceable batteries.
|
| It really isn't that hard. Maybe a few extra days of design
| and development by a team of engineers. If that... Once you
| come up with your preferred design, it more or less can be
| replicated to every other similar device.
| dotancohen wrote:
| My Note 3 with replaceable battery was 8.3 mm thick. How thin
| is your non-battery replaceable phone?
| naoqj wrote:
| 7.4 mm. (iphone 12)
| frenchman99 wrote:
| Is 0.9mm really worth throwing away so many phones?
|
| It's important to remind ourselves that the metals in
| these phones are mined in part by people with very
| difficult life conditions, often so bad that they die on
| the job. We ought to be able to repair what they
| contributed to build instead of asking them to mine yet
| another pound of metal just so we can save 0.9mm. This
| will also reduce need for mining, which creates all sorts
| of pollution.
| Bud wrote:
| You don't have to throw those phones away right now.
| Apple can easily replace batteries for you. The consumer
| doesn't need to be able to do this with a bigass Philips-
| head screwdriver in order to accomplish this goal.
| frenchman99 wrote:
| If any third party repair shop can replace it, that'd
| already quite good. But manufacturers have been known to
| make it impossible even for 3rd party repair shops to do
| anything, or at least to make their lifes as hard as
| possible. That's a no-no.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Define "but ass Philips head screwdriver".
|
| You could do this #2 screws which are tiny, use 3-6 of
| them around the edge. Add a rubber gasket. And you have a
| water proof battery that is replaceable in under 5
| minutes with a precision Philips head (aka those little
| screwdriver heads you get with the multi-head screwdriver
| kits)
| goodpoint wrote:
| I don't understand this fetish with thin phones and
| laptops.
| naoqj wrote:
| I am going to give you a candid answer: I don't give a
| shit.
|
| That answer is going to sound unpopular here, but deep
| down is how most people feel.
| rpdillon wrote:
| This is one of the central supporting arguments for
| government regulation: customers won't pick what's better
| for society, but rather according to their own short-term
| needs. Since customers don't care, companies don't either
| (save those that use their environmental concern as part
| of their marketing...I suspect most of those measures
| don't really move the needle, though). That leaves only
| government. I wish it weren't this way, but I can't argue
| with the evidence.
| Tams80 wrote:
| It's unpopular because it makes you a selfish cunt.
|
| And yes, many, if not most people are selfish cunts in
| many ways. Myself included.
|
| But that does not make it good. It is something that you,
| I, and everyone else should be deeply ashamed of.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I don't give a shit
|
| Applying the golden rule, so why should anyone give a
| shit about what you think?
| ensan wrote:
| When did how most people "feel deep down" become a sound
| policy making strategy?
|
| To be candid: in some matters, the regulators should not
| give a shit about how you want your phone.
|
| Good for EU and their mandates.
| naoqj wrote:
| I don't understand. Are you saying that the government
| should do whatever they want even if it goes against what
| the majority of the population wants? That is everything
| but democratic.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Democracy has many flaws, you just identified one of
| them.
| Tams80 wrote:
| Democracy isn't and shouldn't be absolute.
|
| And you do realise that no countries have complete
| democracy? Even Switzerland with their many referendums
| doesn't put every decision to a democratic vote. Partly
| for practical and pragmatic reasons, but also because
| some things are best not decided by the masses.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The clear point is people that don't "give a shit" about
| the environment or their fellow people are not the
| majority and so the government should continue to make
| environmentally lead decisions regardless of the
| existence of sociopaths.
| frenchman99 wrote:
| Whether you give a shit or not isn't important.
| Regardless what you personally think, a law is accepted
| if it's acceptable. And most people will think "OK, I get
| that we can't continue to throw away phones and keep
| using some countries as slaves just because we want the
| latest iPhone now". Just like people in Europe accept to
| pay more taxes than in other places of the world because
| we get that solidarity is important.
| ornornor wrote:
| I guess cars would be slightly lighter and faster without
| seatbelts or airbags.
|
| Or planes would cost slightly less to fly if they were
| not required to carry safety equipment.
|
| That's exactly because people like you don't give a shit
| and corporations will do anything to save/make a buck
| that laws and regulations like this have to be made and
| enforced.
| naoqj wrote:
| That makes no sense because people won't buy cars without
| seatbelts or airbags - and if they do, it's them dying,
| which they should have the freedom to do.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| I'd say you're dead wrong here - just look at the
| pushback against seatbelts when the laws were introduced.
| Look at the devices on sale, today, to defeat seat belt
| alarms.
|
| Regarding your second point, that's also objectively
| incorrect. When accidents happen, passengers, especially
| backseat passengers, become projectiles that cause
| additional injuries or excess deaths for other occupants.
| It's not just the dude not wearing a seatbelt dying, it's
| also the people around them.
| ornornor wrote:
| It's not only the owner of the car dying. It's also the
| passengers who may or may not have had a say in the
| decision. Never mind the cost to society as a whole from
| medical bills resulting in these preventable injuries,
| the psychological trauma for survivors/witnesses, or the
| effect of orphaned children growing up without parents.
| frenchman99 wrote:
| Don't you worry, if we keep using the planet like we
| currently do, and like you do by saying you don't give a
| shit, then we'll all die soon enough because of our lack
| of respect for our environment -- lack of access to clean
| water will hit loads of people in the coming decades.
|
| Either that or we come up with laws that keep us
| competitive without destroying everything around us. I
| hope that's what Europe will do and I will support
| regulation that takes a tiny bit of comfort away if it
| makes us more resilient in the face of climate change and
| geopolitical difficulties.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Just ask for someone else to replace your battery, these laws
| wouldn't prevent that.
|
| Making better designs to allow for easier to replace
| batteries isn't crazy hard either, current designs already
| tend toward that. This proposal seem to only mandate that
| "users should be able to exchange them with commercially
| available tools." so it leaves a pretty wide array of options
| for the manufacturers. They could probably even make their
| own custom tools available if this is what it takes yo keep
| phones thin and sturdy as you want them.
| plandis wrote:
| I'm okay with this as long as it doesn't impede engineering
| efforts from making smaller devices.
| p1mrx wrote:
| If this happens, we're probably going to need more "standard"
| battery sizes.
|
| I've noticed Chinese manufacturers using the Nokia BL-5C as a de
| facto standard for portable electronics (bluetooth speakers,
| radios, game consoles, etc.), but that's a bit small for a modern
| smartphone.
| userbinator wrote:
| Perhaps one of the widely cloned Samsung Galaxy models which
| still had a removable battery? Seems to be around the right
| dimensions and intended application, in any case.
| kawsper wrote:
| The BL-5C is a great standard for internally mounted batteries,
| for externally mounted ones I really like the Sony NP-F550.
| avar wrote:
| For even sturdier externally mounted ones something like the
| Makita battery format becoming a standard would be fantastic:
| https://www.worldofpower.co.uk/blog/makita-one-battery-
| fits-...
| kkfx wrote:
| IMVHO the main point is "circularity vs linearity" of anything:
| if something can be recycled ad infinitum like a glass bottle
| there is no much need for "repair", we can keep rebuilding at
| best quality, for things can't be that "circular" instead
| repairing is a must.
|
| Batteries themselves are kind-of modular, in the sense that most
| tools batteries so far are made of standard elements soldered
| together, they _tend_ to be easy to replace, that 's not the case
| for mobile phones, laptop etc but for that electronic there are
| many more problems, starting from the design for planned
| obsolescence, IMVHO the _real_ solution is making mandatory open
| hardware and free software, this way certain bad design can 't
| simply survive because someone who know denounce defects, some
| propose corrections and OEM who refuse them get a bed reputation
| so quickly they can't recovery.
|
| The actual norms have failed to be effective, for instance
| recently the EU mandate the availability of spare parts for
| various home appliance, BUT they mandate only for "official
| repair center", so OEMs decide that to be an "official repair
| center" someone need to pay a non marginal annual fee for
| training, updates etc and the resulting costs are so high that's
| still convenient drop a damaged appliance instead of repairing
| it. Being open in hw terms by design and free in software terms
| prevent that effectively: if you try to circumvent norms that
| clearly appear and you end up quickly under fire. Even
| competitors are pushed to act one against another.
|
| Again to make that work we need _public_ research, made for the
| sake of humanity not for profit, doing so ensure a _real_
| constant innovation that the market can 't ignore and can't
| hijack for business reasons. And again that's not that hard to
| accomplish, we have had more or less in the past, at least in EU
| countries, with public universities and big research labs not
| entirely public, unfortunately, but publicly founded enough that
| the private part have to obey, can't lead the public one.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Congratulations EU you just managed to raise the price of all
| household items due to regulation.
| m101 wrote:
| Whilst the EU's war on waste and reparability legislation may be
| looked at through rose tinted glasses I think it has a number of
| negative side effects.
|
| 1) cost: The reason goods are cheap is that companies can rely on
| you needing to replace them ever [3] years. If you start to make
| it such that they only need to be replaced every [9] years then a
| manufacturer may only be able to rely on one third of the
| revenue. This has two effects - less money to go around for
| innovation / development (resulting in less good technology), and
| higher cost of goods (impacting the poorest the most).
|
| 2) livelihoods: The higher level thing going on here is that
| consumption of goods has raised living standards for many people
| around the world. On the other side of every good purchased are
| the livelihoods of people working in whole supply chains to
| produce that good. Reducing consumption will mean that those
| making all the things we consume will have less take home income
| for themselves (again, probably impacting the poor the most). It
| is a bit of a sad fact that the best way we have of organising
| society where people may gain a sense of dignity and meaning in
| their lives is through pushing consumption.
|
| 3) cost of business: all these rules and regulations are
| expensive to comply with. The EU will legislate itself to a
| bureaucratic death.
|
| My view in general of regulation is that it is designed to
| protect the interests of the wealthy, or those most willing to
| make a cost versus quality of life / fuzzy feel goods trade off.
| If replacing the battery was really that big a deal to consumers
| then people would buy a phone that had a hot-swappable battery -
| i.e. no need for regulation!
|
| Having said all that, I find the EU legislation mandating vampire
| power drain from not-in-use chargers is probably something i'd be
| on board with. This has the somewhat unique property that
| literally no one cares about something costs 0.1EUR a year, but
| it adds up at a country scale. I'm not entirely sure why i'm on
| board with this though.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Let me summarize: not damaging the enviornment might cost
| money.
|
| Yes, and it is worth it.
| m101 wrote:
| Well, that's where it comes down to who you are. It is worth
| it to some, but not to everyone. The problem is that blanket
| rules are applied to everyone, without compensation. Even
| those that claim the are doing it to prevent environmental
| damage are damaging the environment in some way unless they
| live off the land in a hut. So it's just a matter of where
| the line is drawn, and almost all cases it's unfair in some
| way.
| jokoon wrote:
| I remember that upright vacuum cleaner (it's a vacuum cleaner
| without a long flexible pipe, it's just a long arm with wheels).
| I did not buy this.
|
| The head was pivoting and had a small part of a flexible pipe.
|
| After 6 months or so, that flexible pipe broke, it was impossible
| to fix it properly even with a strong duct tape. They asked about
| 100 euros to remplace the ENTIRE head part. The seller said
| "normal wear".
|
| It's impossible to find a solution for this, unless you create
| some "durable design" label, which would essentially be an
| independent company testing every devices and items out there,
| and certifying those object as being "durable enough". The brand
| would just use those certifications.
|
| Same thing for right to repair.
|
| There are durable brands (Miele for example), but they are so
| much of a niche that they overprice their articles. Consumers are
| never aware because it's difficult to know what part will break
| and when.
|
| Oddly, there are almost no brand that advertise the durability of
| their product. It's very easy to suspect all those brands agree
| with each other to not make durable items. Such anti competitive
| practices are often quite difficult to prove.
|
| Look at how Louis Rossman spent YEARS making video for people to
| hear about just Apple. The electrical appliance is also a huge
| market, and electrical appliances will break more often, so
| without doubt it makes it much much harder to fight.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Miele is niche?!
|
| Having grown up in 90s & 00s Germany, it's one of _the_
| household names for me...
| Lio wrote:
| Miele are ace. Lovely designs. We bought a built-in fridge
| freezer from them recently. i.e. hidden behind a cupboard
| door.
|
| The sales guy couldn't understand why we would pay extra for
| an appliance that no one would see the name on. He was all
| about impressing any visitors to the house.
|
| It was the most energy efficient unit I could find according
| to Which magazine.
|
| Should recover the difference in price to the no-name unit
| they were offering with 2 years. (Actually probably quicker
| now given changes in the energy market).
|
| I expect to keep it for at least 10 years and as well as
| better performance it has other useful features not on a
| bottom of the range unit.
|
| E.g. It's really quiet and if you go away on holiday you can
| switch the fridge part separately to the freezer to save more
| energy.
| Lio wrote:
| > normal wear
|
| In the UK the manufacture couldn't get away with that. Goods
| are expected to "last a reasonable length of time", that
| includes even after the warranty has expired.
|
| I once contacted Apple about a blown 4 year old MacBook Pro
| PSU. The Apple support guy told me I'd have to buy a
| replacement as it had reached the end of its life. At the time
| they were really expensive.
|
| I asked him how long exactly Apple PSUs were expected to last
| and he went silent for a moment and then said he'd ask his
| manager.
|
| His manager came back to me with the offer of a new PSU no
| questions asked, which I gratefully accepted.
|
| One of the those questions not to be asked was what the
| lifetime of an Apple PSU was. :P
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Great,
|
| Now could you please do the same with the chargers, should be
| easier. In The last five years Ive bought maybe 5 different
| electric trimmers/shavers from Philips and they all have
| different charger-connectors. Even the two small green blade ONE
| are only two years appart and I specifically asked in the store
| if it was the same charger but it's not. They make ever so small
| changes in the plastic and voltages to make every new trimmer
| charger incompatible with another model. So if you the charger
| brakes or you loose it somehow you might as well buy a new.
| Terrible!
| AJRF wrote:
| I suspect replacement batteries are going to become very
| expensive in the EU. The laws that the EU try to bring in always
| sound so good in practice - but they are very surface level and
| the implementation never accounts for second order effects.
|
| See; cookie banner laws, GDPR.
| xxs wrote:
| A daily reminder that cookie popups have very little to do with
| GDPR and cookie laws. If a site doesn't track you (w/ 3rd
| parties) and uses its own session cookies to provide service,
| it'd need no banners.
|
| Case in point - look at github.com - they did the right thing.
| Or look at apple.com... or even gs.com.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Lost faith in this whole idea of EU trying to force companies
| to do better after the cookie law.
|
| Now every single website I have to dismiss a pop up before I
| visit. Yet once dismissed the site functions completely fine so
| really the law should have just made whatever happens when I
| click accept illegal because you clearly don't need it for any
| of these services to function.
|
| But no, now I have to dismiss a pop up every time instead.
| feanaro wrote:
| What cookie law? The cookie banner was never mandated, except
| in cases where you're trying to set cookies which are not
| legitimately necessary for your business but are for
| surveillance purposes. The trouble is businesses either don't
| understand this or pretend not to.
| tgv wrote:
| My company doesn't understand it, and shows a banner
| because you never know. However, I've turned it into a
| simple thing that tells you we're not tracking you (it's
| only a session cookie, after all), and after clicking goes
| away for a year (plus a cookie to track consent, of
| course).
| mqus wrote:
| In fact, most of the problems stem from the fact, that the EU
| did _not_ agree on a new cookie law (ePrivacy directive),
| which promised that you can set your preferences once (e.g.
| in the browser) and make sites agree to them. But no,
| lobbying was big and the law was delayed indefinitely.
|
| GDPR was never(and never intended to be) a technical law, it
| is by name "general"! You get the same "notification" if you
| walk into a public space where security cameras are
| installed.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| As annoying as dismissing the popup is:
|
| > Yet once dismissed the site functions completely fine
|
| This is one of the intended outcomes of the law, because it
| prevents companies denying service to those who do not wish
| to be tracked on an all-or-nothing basis. Which is something
| that was beginning to happen.
|
| It may seem like there was no outcome from the legislation,
| but this is partly because it outlaws some outcomes. It's
| like the Y2K thing, when people tell you that it was all a
| fuss over nothing.
| tgv wrote:
| You're a free market defender, and you think battery prices go
| up when there's more demand?
| tarr11 wrote:
| Why not just tax products extra that don't comply? Seems far less
| invasive.
| Macha wrote:
| In regards to this comment:
|
| > Guess there will be some more lawmaking involved, to define
| these expected lifetimes.
|
| There are expected lifetimes established as part of the track
| record of consumer cases about laws implementing EU directive
| 1999/44/EC. While some countries go further (e.g. the UK's 6
| years for manufacturer defects was in place even while they were
| in the EU), for electronics that's usually held at 2 years for
| the EU minimum.
| alexklark wrote:
| But you still need to call a 95 euro/hour certified battery
| changer professional licensed by the EC battery changing
| association or pay fines and all your appliances battery licenses
| will be revoked and issued for a mandatory inspection of
| certified battery EC inspection professional (169 euro/ hour).
| aldebran wrote:
| This (https://toothbrushbattery.com/guides/braun-oral-b-
| profession...) is why we need laws such as this one.
| skipnup wrote:
| Do you know of any toothbrush with an easily replaceable
| battery? I'm in the need for a new one as my battery slowly
| dies and I don't want to solder my toothbrush.
| Tams80 wrote:
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Omron-Healthcare-
| HT-B210-G-Ele...
| aldebran wrote:
| Unfortunately no. ^That's the one I have. OralB and Phillips
| are the good ones and both do this battery not replaceable
| nonsense.
|
| My 10+ year old OralB had a replaceable battery and it worked
| fine and had no issues with water safety even though I washed
| the entire unit under water.
|
| We need a podswap like thing for electric tooth brushes.
| lotu wrote:
| quip uses a AAA battery that is easy to replace. They use
| multiple gaskets to keep it safe from water.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| This is a very good start.
|
| If they did the same for screens, I wouldn't be surprised if the
| phone sales dropped to half or even less.
|
| There is no way companies like Apple and Samsung will be OK with
| this. I expect big pushback from them.
|
| If these steps go through, it will be interesting to see what
| other planned obsolescence [1] methods will these companies go
| for.
|
| The one big tool Apple has is the full control of the software
| ecosystem. They can simply make newer apps unavailable for old
| phones for example. That will need to be tackled at some point.
|
| [1] Veritasium video on planned obsolescence which is
| interesting: https://youtu.be/j5v8D-alAKE
| aardvarkr wrote:
| You're picking on apple but they're the best when it comes to
| this... I don't know a single android phone that's still usable
| after five years and still gets software updates. At a certain
| point the old hardware just can't handle the new OS as new
| features get added. Planned obsolescence is certainly a thing
| but you'd be wise to lobby Samsung to add updates past two
| years before focusing your wrath on apple.
|
| Edit: looks like Samsung bumped it up to 4 years of updates in
| 2019
| ComradePhil wrote:
| > they're the best when it comes to this
|
| When all other electronics companies always had user
| replaceable batteries, Apple was the company that decided to
| not do it. Because the regulatory bodies did nothing to fix
| this, other companies copied Apple because that was
| profitable for them. Apple is not only not the best, it is
| THE worst. In fact, it wouldn't have come to regulatory
| intervention if Apple had done the right thing in the first
| place.
|
| > At a certain point the old hardware just can't handle the
| new OS as new features get added
|
| It doesn't necessarily need a "new OS". My fridge has the
| same OS it came with 8 years ago and it works fine, my
| raspberry pi 2 model b from 7 years ago works just as well as
| it did when I got it, with essentially the same OS. Even the
| first gen Raspberry Pis from 10 years ago work just as well.
| Most people don't necessarily need "new features". And if
| they do, they can make that choice and get a new device that
| does those features better.
|
| > Samsung to add updates past two years before focusing your
| wrath on apple.
|
| Samsung provides official updates for less time as Apple (4
| vs roughly 7 years) but they provide an official way to
| unlock your bootloader and install other operating systems,
| so you can go with community supported ones. If phones
| themselves start lasting longer, there will be bigger demand
| for these operating systems and maybe even third party
| commercial ones which are easy to install, maybe with a
| subscription even.
|
| BUT, just because Samsung does this NOW does not mean they
| will continue to do so. They have demonstrated that if some
| shitty company comes along and abuses their position for
| profits, Samsung is happy to copy the strategy.
|
| I understand that this forum has people who work for Apple or
| some other company or have investments in them or have
| positioned themselves to benefit from their success... and
| have incentives to defend them for short term profits for
| themselves... and those ideas are also picked up by even
| those who have nothing to do with it... and I believe that is
| the biggest group of people. Which is why I think brining
| this out and discussing it is important.
|
| Anyways, there are a lot of possibilities if we are to focus
| on quality long-term sustainable products. Just because the
| current market is filled with disposable short-term products
| designed to be replaced all the time, doesn't mean this is
| the only way.
| toyg wrote:
| Apple gets the stick because they effectively invented the
| model and pushed _hard_ for it. Nokia-era batteries were
| replaceable, the the iPhone showed up and it all went to
| hell.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Exactly, and it wasn't just phones. It was pretty standard
| to be able to upgrade a ton of parts (memory, disk, boards)
| in a desktop PC until Apple taught the industry how to
| solder everything in place.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| You can still upgrade a number of parts on desktop PCs
| (including the disks and memory). Do you mean laptops or
| am I unaware that desktop PCs could be upgraded even more
| in the past?
| toyg wrote:
| He probably meant laptops, but Apple does it even in
| their desktops these days.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| To be clear, yes, on most PCs you _can_ still upgrade RAM
| and disks, but on, for example, a Mac Mini you cannot,
| and other PC makers have been coming out with more "all-
| in-one" or "mini" designs that mimic Apple's lack of
| upgradability.
| causality0 wrote:
| Seems to be putting the cart before the horse as long as
| batteries are allowed to have DRM that hinders third-party
| replacements, but a good step nevertheless.
| jmainh wrote:
| printer business, your end may be near
| ab_testing wrote:
| When will the iPhone or the iPad (which can be used by the whole
| family) be considered a household item ?
| Duralias wrote:
| I really hope a law like this actually affects something.
|
| I know it isn't a thing most people think about, but after
| loosing so many things to just passive battery degradation
| because I forgot to keep them charged, I would just really want
| batteries to be easier to swap.
|
| And I really cannot understand the people that _want_ their
| device to be unusable if they forget to charge it. The dumbest
| one being VR controllers, since you quite simply cannot
| comfortably /usably charge them with a wire while playing, but
| people want integrated batteries still.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Socialist planning economy, that is all that is. It sounds good
| on paper, but will just make things more wasteful and expensive.
|
| I personally haven't had top change batteries in phones for over
| a decade.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Regulations != socialism.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Regulation to take care of externalities is OK. "Regulation"
| in the form of telling businesses how to build their products
| is not. Politicians are not experts in making smartphones
| consume less resources, so they are unlikely to make the
| right calls.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Ehhhh there's a middle ground solution that will almost
| certainly be lost on all the Eurocrats, largely going by the
| previous prescriptive attempts with micro-usb for all phones
| etc:
|
| Instead of mandating user-replacable whatever parts, go with
| right-to-repair type of legislature, where the manufacturer
| cannot try to lock you out from being able to replace what you
| need. We've already seen Lexmark and Apple lead the way with
| this BS in the consumer device space (crypto-pairing the parts
| and not letting anyone have the private keys), so right to
| repair would be of far more benefit that mandating that the
| next phone should have functionally have the form factor of
| 2000s Palm pilot.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| And I've replaced batteries in 4 phones in 3 years (not all
| mine, after seeing my phone come back to life, everyone else
| around me wanted the same service). So I see your anecdote and
| raise you my anecdote.
|
| It's not easy to replace, since the batteries are glued in and
| cases are hard to open, but my PS10 kit of opening tools has
| paid for itself about 50 times over already.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Certainly you know folks that have. More commonly, you've
| probably known folks that replaced their tablets or laptops
| because of a bad battery.
|
| Replacing a battery is definitely less waste than replacing an
| entire device, even if that battery has packaging.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| No I don't know folks that have done that - not for many
| years.
|
| Sure replacing a battery is less waste than replacing an
| entire device. But what percentage of devices needs
| replacing? That has to related to the extra cost for every
| device, not just the ones that break.
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| How will this make things more wasteful? If anything it should
| cut down on waste by allowing people to replace just a battery
| rather than throwing the whole phone away
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| You need more materials to construct the phone with a
| replaceable battery. You need connectors, latches for
| opening, screws...
| Kbelicius wrote:
| You need more resources to construct one phone with a
| replaceable battery than 2,3,4 or however many phones
| without a replaceable battery? I'm not well versed in
| hardware but that sounds like bullshit.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Most people don't have to replace their phones because of
| the battery. Your assumption that people would buy only
| one fourth the amount of phones if they could exchange
| the battery is wrong.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I can easily see more replaceable systems being less
| waterproof, leading to more water-damaged units, which means
| more trash and higher replacement rates. Also, nooks and
| crannies on stuff tends to get broken and lost (just remember
| how your TV remote looks after a few years), something a
| monoblock-style phone doesn't have. Sure, we know you can
| build consumer electronics to be virtually indestructible -
| but few people wantt to walk around with a Nokia 3310 these
| days.
|
| To add insult to injury, this ruling will be quoted to
| justify price increases.
|
| Replaceability exists on the market already, but it does not
| seem to be competitive outside of very niche (very
| ecologically-conscious folks for the fairphone, outdoor
| enthusiasts for ruggedized phones) customer groups.
| hestefisk wrote:
| What does standards and fair consumer regulation have to do
| with socialist planning? Sorry maybe I'm missing the point :)
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Socialists think they know how to make better phones than the
| industry, so they mandate industry has to do it their way.
| They are wrong, of course. It is also not "standards and fair
| consumer regulation", as it will only make phones more
| expensive. So if that angle works for you: it will hurt the
| poor the most.
| Tams80 wrote:
| Mate, companies are out to make as much money as possible.
|
| Publicly traded ones are even obliged to by law.
|
| So no, this isn't some hippy=dippy 'socialist' thing. It's
| basic common sense and decency.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Competition between companies is what drives prices down,
| not regulation.
|
| Companies don't make more money if governments force them
| to use technology that is more expensive to build.
| archi42 wrote:
| Obviously I can only guess how often you get a new phone, but
| I'd expect you get a new one every two, maybe three years?
|
| Other data point: I threw away three phones in the same time
| frame. Each and every single of them had to eventually get a
| new battery. The first just became too slow to use (Galaxy S2),
| the second was at some point physically deformed beyond
| repairability (Xperia Z1) and for the last one (HTC 10) it was
| the worst: No repair shop in our city wanted to repair it OR
| quoted insane prices (100 or 150 Euros I think) and I could not
| find a reputable seller offering replacement batteries. After
| two weeks of having the battery die on me on nearly every
| important occasion I gave up and got my current phone.
|
| I hear the same from a lot of friends. While most are
| interested in each others new phones from a nerdy perspective,
| I can only think of one friends still acting as if having the
| newest generation was a necessity or even a status symbol.
|
| So, long story short: My anecdata tells me that having easily
| replaceable batteries is a huge boon to using the phone for a
| longer time.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| My last phone was a Pixel 3 which I had to now replace after
| 3 years because of the ending software support. However, the
| battery is still fine. I actually intend to sell it in the
| hopes somebody can be bothered to run it with LineageOS.
|
| Also while it is cool if somebody has the skills to repair
| their own phones, the reality is that most people do not. And
| then you need an expert and 100EUR to 150EUR is a price you
| can reach quickly with expert hours. That is what fans of the
| "right to repair" don't seem to get: it is just way cheaper
| to produce most products than to repair them, because
| production can be done by mostly unskilled workers.
| Tams80 wrote:
| And none of that is justification for environmental
| pollution, wasting resources, and potentially human
| suffering if the device ends up in an e-waste dump
| somewhere in Africa.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Batteries are not the issue, software support is. And
| even with new batteries, the technology will be outdated
| eventually. My new Pixel 6 has G5, for example, my old
| Pixel 3 doesn't.
|
| A better solution would be to make the phones suitable
| for recycling.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if glue is also better for
| recycling than screws, because you can just resolve it
| with heating or chemicals, no manual labor required.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Are there any exceptions? I generally agree that users should be
| able to fix stuff. The one scenario I have in mind is that smoke
| detectors are supposed to be replaced every ten years and they
| now make some with a 10 year sealed battery. So it's a lifetime
| battery.
| sytelus wrote:
| I have a contrarian view on this. I really don't think
| governments should be making technical decisions for the product
| design unless it directly impacts health issues. If fixed
| batteries makes product smaller or better then it's choice of
| creator, maker and hacker. Consumer should be voting with their
| wallets and they should have a choice. This kind of constant
| interference from EU burocrates without understanding technical
| details is what led to completely pointless "accept cookie"
| disaster all over the Internet that has already cost billions of
| dollars collectively while not benefiting anyone.
| brap wrote:
| Thank you. The number of comments saying "let's have the
| government force people (companies) to do X" is alarming.
| gcthomas wrote:
| "Governments being called on to do something for the people
| they represent, shocker!"
|
| That's what governments are for, to do stuff the people want
| but can't do individually.
| brap wrote:
| People should have rights. Governments should not be
| allowed to tell people what to do, as long as they're not
| harming others.
|
| In my book, allowing you to buy a device without
| replaceable batteries, a choice that you made freely
| yourself, is not causing harm.
|
| Saying that "people want it" is not good enough. The
| majority may also want to silence the minority. That's why
| we have rights.
| buran77 wrote:
| If governments didn't force people or companies to do
| anything then they would be allowed to do everything.
|
| You're welcome to draw up a table which surgically defines
| what should be regulated or legislated, and what shouldn't.
| I'll just drop by later to tell you how alarming your
| assessment was.
|
| After all who's the government to tell companies not to put
| asbestos in your walls or lead in your water. I'll be honest,
| every time someone complains governments shouldn't regulate I
| wonder if they realize they might be alive because of that.
| stuart78 wrote:
| There is a pretty broad spectrum here. Both of the examples
| you cite are clear cases of public health and regulation
| followed discovery of damage. There is no such danger or
| clear public safety case for batteries which is why it
| feels like over-reach: regulation based on preference
| rather than fact.
| naoqj wrote:
| > If governments didn't force people or companies to do
| anything then they would be allowed to do everything.
|
| And that's okay. If consumers didn't like their products
| then they would stop buying them. iphones don't have
| replaceable batteries but people keep buying them because
| they don't see that as important. There are phones with
| replaceable batteries that consumers can buy if they want
| them.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| No, it's not ok, anymore than it's not ok for me to come
| punch you in the face anytime I feel like letting off
| some steam. Things that don't have any negative
| externalities are ok for you to do at any point, but
| quite a large number of things that you may wish to do
| affect other people, and you cannot violate their freedom
| in the process of getting more freedom yourself.
|
| In the case of batteries and other electronic components,
| the amount of e waste is very much becoming a problem
| that other people are being forced to deal with, and
| that's not even considering future generations, whose
| freedoms I very much argue should also be protected.
|
| "Your rights end where mine begin" is very much a
| laudable sentiment, but we need to be honest about when
| things sneak over that line, and not fool ourselves
| because the negative externality isn't blatantly obvious.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > iphones don't have replaceable batteries but people
| keep buying them because they don't see that as
| important.
|
| Primarc clothing sometimes comes with scraps of paper
| 'Help, i am being kept as a slave', but people keep
| buying it. That tells us they don't see slavery as
| important.
|
| On the contrary, the fact that they were willing to die
| to end slavery doesn't tell us anything.
| varajelle wrote:
| > Primarc clothing sometimes comes with scraps of paper
| 'Help, i am being kept as a slave',
|
| I've never heard of that and couldn't find any reference
| to it with a internet search.
|
| Edit: found it: https://metro.co.uk/2015/12/11/girl-
| finds-cry-for-help-note-...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The point is not spesifically about primarc, there are
| many products that awere produced with slave labour, from
| conalt mining to cotton in the 1700s and people keep
| buying them
| buran77 wrote:
| No they wouldn't because of the power dynamic. That's
| _exactly_ where the government comes in. Google (and the
| associated OEMs) and Apple have together far more
| bargaining power than most customers together. Your
| lobbying power is 0 and even with massive coordination
| efforts it 's hard to compound that 0 into something
| measurable without serious help from the government.
|
| You need a mobile phone and you have very few choices.
| How exactly are you protesting? By shooting yourself in
| the foot and not getting a phone? By going to boutique
| manufacturers who can barely supply 1% of the market?
|
| Your reasoning is good on paper but not realistic. I'll
| say it again, the reason you don't have asbestos in your
| walls or lead in the air (from fuel) isn't because you
| voted with your wallet but because governments did their
| part. That should be evidence enough that your assumption
| is wildly idealistic.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It's not a large market because people generally don't
| want one, but it's hardly limited to boutiques either.
| Nokia and Samsung both sell smartphones with replaceable
| batteries.
| Tams80 wrote:
| Not ones anywhere near the 'flagships'. It's a niche, but
| those us who do want hardly have even the option to 'vote
| with our wallets'. Especially for something that has
| become near a necessity.
|
| And you completely avoided their very valid point that
| the likes of asbestos and lead. Perhaps because you have
| no counter to it?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I guess I'm not sure what your standards are here. If
| you're expecting that there should be phones identical in
| every way to flagship models except that the battery is
| removable, I don't think that's reasonable, since the
| entire point is that the design requirement of a
| removable battery requires tradeoffs.
|
| I don't understand the point you're trying to make about
| asbestos and leaded gasoline. I support those regulations
| because they cover much more important issues. As far as
| I know nobody's gotten lung cancer from not being able to
| remove their phone's battery.
| thfuran wrote:
| >There are phones with replaceable batteries that
| consumers can buy if they want them
|
| How are they going to do that when they're paid barely
| subsistence wages in corporate scrip that can't be spent
| on that?
| Tams80 wrote:
| There are almost no recent smartphones with replaceable
| batteries. None of them very good.
|
| And that's because the companies making them have almost
| all the power. The power of the consumers' wallet is
| essentially zero.
| brap wrote:
| Almost as if most people don't care enough about
| replaceable batteries?
| npteljes wrote:
| Why do you think being allowed to do anything is about
| products and choice? If companies are allowed to do
| anything, then you get monopolies, wage slavery, then
| corpocracy. Environmental pollution, human rights
| violations. We don't even have real choices right now,
| and we especially wouldn't have if they were let go any
| further.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I guess I'm not sure why you're invoking such broad,
| general issues here. I see it as an issue of choice
| because I remember when I chose to change from the bulky
| replaceable battery phone I had at the time to a thinner,
| more comfortable one.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Yet on the flip side my current phone is by the the
| largest phone I've ever had, the hardest to hold since
| the one which clipped on my belt and had a pull-up
| aerial, yet it's also one of the smallest phones on the
| market.
| thfuran wrote:
| Because the context was literally someone saying they're
| in favor of a complete lack of legal restraint on the
| actions of companies or individuals.
| npteljes wrote:
| What's actually needed is them both to keep each other in
| check.
| mushyhammer wrote:
| > Consumer should be voting with their wallets
|
| I bet Americans _love_ picking a $80,000 hospital bill over a
| $90,000 one.
|
| Government decisions, done well, go _far_ beyond what _voting
| with one's wallet_ can. Oftentimes the consumer is just
| squeezed out of the equation and everyone's price will follow.
|
| One company decides to do away with replaceable batteries and
| you will say "let the consumer vote with their wallets." Then
| everyone does the same and the user can no longer vote.
|
| What we get is instead a mountain of waste that everyone has to
| pay for, indirectly, forever.
| shafyy wrote:
| GDPR may be one of the best things that has happened to
| internet privacy. If websites wouldn't track your every move,
| they also wouldn't need to put up a cookie banner. In fact, the
| EU is the only power that actually puts up a meaningful fight
| against Facebook, Google and co's rape of the internet.
|
| I think it's extremely arrogant of you to assume that laws like
| GDPR were just made a bunch of bureaucrats without
| "understanding technical details".
| mola wrote:
| I find the "cookie disaster" a great outcome. This little bit
| of friction is great at letting everyone know the price for the
| loss of privacy.
| lotu wrote:
| No it just creates alert blindness. Most people barely
| understand what a cookie is. I was part of a team
| implementing cookie banners, and we were looking really hard
| for the best wording. But it didn't matter because in user
| tests 75% of users were unable to tell us what was in the
| box. Most assumed it was an ad before reflexively closing it.
| mft_ wrote:
| I don't think it achieves that, though. I strongly doubt that
| one in a million people clicking on that button think about
| the privacy implications.
|
| However, the cumulative frustration and time wasted by that
| button is probably quite large, across the world.
| blacklivsmatr wrote:
| You might be right but I have a friend to worked at Apple that
| would claim Apple could only make their phone smaller by
| building in the battery. He didn't seem to notice that Samsung
| built phones with just as many features with a replaceable
| battery.
| manmal wrote:
| > unless it directly impacts health issues
|
| If manufacturers need regulation to correctly protect consumer
| health, what makes you think they will act in favor of the
| environment or repairability?
| lowwave wrote:
| This will only work in an extremely rich and well education
| population like Switzerland or Norway. In many places the
| consumer doesn't have a choice or time to do the research
| against the advertising and PR of a large corporation.
| [deleted]
| titzer wrote:
| I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. Nowadays, I look at
| the planned obsolescence and continent of floating plastic
| garbage in every ocean, washing up on every beach, and choking
| every river, and I'm think "we fucked this planet up and we can
| only fix it if we regulate the _hell_ of this stupid for-profit
| market. "
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Voting with one's wallets is about as helpful as trying to
| boycott a global corporation. If it was any effective the
| cookie banners wouldn't exist anymore.
|
| > If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better
|
| I don't think I've ever used a single product that is better
| for using fixed batteries. Even the size is arguable; if
| hearing aids can have replaceable batteries then so can
| Airpods.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > I really don't think governments should be making technical
| decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts
| health issues.
|
| It directly impacts long term health issues at a global scale,
| through e-waste and carbon footprint. In your book this should
| totally be a governing body decisions.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| What about the health issues that takes decades to unfold, or
| those of future generations?
|
| The german constitutional court (and IIRC the dutch one?) ruled
| that any govt action will also have to account for the "right
| to future" of current and coming generations. Trashing our
| planed (literally, in this case) doesn't square with that.
|
| This kind of "constant interference" from the EU is very
| welcome on my part and on the part of anyone who has spent a
| bit of time thinking about sustainability, pollution, and
| generally the question of "how do we keep a planet worth living
| on?" Your borderline-religious (borderline because it lacks a
| moral backing, it seems to mostly do away with morality
| altogether) dismissal of "interference" is exactly what got us
| into this mess.
| aldebran wrote:
| The disaster is caused by the implementation not the law.
|
| This is needed in the US too. I just bought an electric
| toothbrush to replace a very old one. My old one is 10+ years
| old. Has easily replaceable batteries. New one? Nope! Manual
| says if battery doesn't hold a charge, remove the battery and
| recycle the device. Removing battery literally destroys the
| device.
|
| There are videos on YouTube that show the battery is literally
| a Panasonic generic one. Wanna bet if this new brush can be
| used for 10+ years?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| How would they maintain a water proof seal if they allowed
| for a user replaceable battery? Wireless charging allows the
| battery to be charged without allowing for any gaps in the
| toothbrush, but achieving water proofness disallows letting
| the user take it apart and still have to considered to be in
| working condition.
| aldebran wrote:
| Think about it - my last tooth brush lasted 10+ years.
| Would it have if it wasn't water proof?
| Tams80 wrote:
| Considering their previous one with a replaceable battery
| lasted a decade, something tells me that's a terrible
| excuse you are giving them.
|
| Please don't excuse wanton waste. It's not a good look.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It is quite trivial to make it able to be easily
| disassembled while also making it waterproof. A rubber
| gasket on the bottom with a few screws would work just
| fine.
| userbinator wrote:
| Further up in the thread here, there's a comment that
| people will rabidly defend manufacturer's horrible
| decisions with false arguments. I think your comment is a
| perfect example of that.
|
| A toothbrush is cylindrical, like a pipe. We know gaskets
| exist. A threaded cap on the end with an o-ring would
| suffice to allow easy access to the internals while keeping
| even pressurised water out.
|
| In fact, the majority of electric toothbrushes fail due to
| water entering the _head_ end, and they don 't have a good
| seal there.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Further up in the thread here, there's a comment that
| people will rabidly defend manufacturer's horrible
| decisions with false arguments.
|
| That in itself is an incredibly ideological remark.
| "These arguments are false/invalid/insincere! There is no
| cost/manufacturing/reliability/usage benefit to
| completely sealing a toothrush, gaskets/o-rings/re-
| welding are just as good!"
|
| Ya, I get it: you'll make us buy the toothbrushes that
| became outdated 10 years ago through some sort of top-
| down government regulation, and we will grudgingly like
| it because all of our arguments otherwise for preferring
| the newer things are invalid.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| > How would they maintain a water proof seal if they
| allowed for a user replaceable battery?
|
| So many things are water proof and user serviceable:
| Piping, engines, transmissions, water cooling (for pc or
| car) and those electric toothbrushes that have replaceable
| batteries.
|
| This isn't a technical problem. We figured out how to make
| things water tight a long time ago.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| None of those things are consumer products the size of an
| electric toothbrush. The old electric toothbrushes simply
| couldn't be submerged or used in the shower at all, they
| were just water resistant.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Waterproof mechanical watches have been a thing for over a
| century now. They are small, serviceable and have no glued
| parts. It unfortunately seems the knowledge of watchmakers
| past hasn't made it into the phone industry yet (same for
| smartwatches, sadly).
| simion314 wrote:
| How do submarines work if you put some door for people to
| enter in, or how do submarines can fire torpedo without
| getting flooded? The answer is some engineers found a way
| to do it, there are videos and articles that will explain
| it if you are really curious and not trying to find the
| most stupid excuse possible (there are many electronics
| with replaceable batteries that work under water)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Aren't you just making my point? If they have to get a
| reactor out of a nuclear submarine, they have to cut the
| whole thing open. Engine work is either done inside shell
| is cut open and they just reweld it back. It isn't cheap
| at all.
|
| > you are really curious and not trying to find the most
| stupid excuse possible
|
| This sounds like you are trying to make a Reddit comment
| rather than an HN one.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Aren't you just making my point? If they have to get a
| reactor out of a nuclear submarine, they have to cut the
| whole thing open. Engine work is either done inside shell
| is cut open and they just reweld it back. It isn't cheap
| at all.
|
| Nope. My point was that you can have things in hyper hard
| conditions, underwater at high pressure and salt and you
| can still say shoot torpedo.
|
| Do I need to send you video proof that tooth brushes with
| replaceable batteries exists or you can google it
| yourself? My son has one that is almost 10 years old too
| , it uses 2 AA batteries , brand is Oral-B .
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's a shower proof seal for a toothbrush, literally just
| need an o-ring, you know like the one that keeps the water
| in the pipes. The parent said the old one had a replaceable
| battery and worked for 10 years, seems like they had
| already solved the water ingress issue.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Yes, but you never used those old style electric
| toothbrushes in the shower right? An O-ring would just
| confer water resistance, not water proofness. You
| couldn't really submerge it and expect it to continue
| working. There is a huge difference between hermetic
| sealing an an O ring or a gasket.
| cywick wrote:
| As a child, I had a $20 plastic submarine that was
| powered by AA batteries. It could sit at the bottom of a
| pool for days on end, without water ever getting into the
| battery compartment of the engine module (which was
| sealed with a rubber o-ring).
|
| I bet there are hundreds of counter-examples to your
| claim that water-proofing with an o-ring is an
| engineering challenge of the utmost difficulty.
| aldebran wrote:
| I washed my old toothbrush. It gathers toothpaste gunk if
| not properly washed. It worked just fine for a decade.
| The motor finally gave up.
|
| No way is this new tooth brush going to last me 10 years.
|
| And people making excuses - do you know that kids
| electric tooth brushes have replaceable batteries?
| Shouldn't that be a bigger problem? Here's the kicker -
| kids electric tooth brushes don't have replaceable brush
| heads.
|
| Yeah - this is nothing but planned obsolescence.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Kids toothbrushes aren't designed to be used in the
| shower.
| sytelus wrote:
| But you have a choice to buy toothbrush from another brand.
| Don't you?
| madsbuch wrote:
| Can you provide an alternative toothbrush with easily
| exchangeable batteries as easily obtainable a the one in
| question?
|
| Markets are _not_ efficient nor complete. And telling
| ourselves that is a lie.
| Bayart wrote:
| Well, it benefits me. I don't want to yield data I don't need
| to and I will _not_ accept any godforsaken cookie.
|
| I'm very happy to be made aware by the sites themselves of
| their degree of sleeziness.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| I worked in ad tech for 6 years, specifically in cross device
| retargeting. I assure you, the loss of privacy direction we
| were heading in was far worse. The cookie banners are annoying
| and broken, but at least they represent a government starting
| to think about privacy.
| jopsen wrote:
| I'll agree it's hard not to have mixed feelings about it.
|
| On the flip side, every charged with a mini-USB or USB-C for a
| reason.
|
| And internally, most electronics use standard battery sizes
| anyways, AA or AAAs.. I'm not a subject matter expert, but
| looks like they are just packaging high quality rechargable
| batteries inside a device.
|
| For innovators they could simply apply a fee, that would allow
| companies like Apple to do whatever they want, so long as they
| (or their customers) pay.
| acrump wrote:
| I believe this is mainly about sustainablity over consumer
| protection
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| The only fault the EU has for the "accept cookie"-disaster is,
| that it didn't make tracking illegal and even bigger fines. It
| is _only_ the fault of the companies that want to track us, not
| of the EU
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It is indirectly due to EU's regulation. Average user doesn't
| care about your nuanced take, people around the world,
| billions of times have been annoyed by the cookie banner. If
| anything, the GDP lost due to this annoyance on a daily basis
| is probably in the millions if not billions of dollars.
| [deleted]
| fragmede wrote:
| And (lacking) a fine multiplier for making the opt-out UI
| confusing.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Indeed. The cookie disaster is because the EU is being too
| nice. Of they actually brought down the hammer we would see a
| much nicer internet landscape.
|
| I'm always all in for government regulation, as long as those
| regulations are in the benefits of the common man.
| boudin wrote:
| Those cookie banners at least force companies to show what they
| were actually doing. What it did is exactly what you suggests,
| giving consumers the choice.
|
| Now, how can a consumer vote with its wallet? Are you able to
| tell the whole environmental, social and impact on wars of any
| device you buy? Personally I can't.
|
| I also think that making the end user the sole responsible for
| the impact of the whole chain action is horrible. This is
| exactly what the ad with the fake native american crying about
| littering in the us was about. Let's company introduce an
| insane amount of plastic in the environment with no idea how to
| re-process it once used, the sole responsibility of the
| pollution will be the last person in the chain: the consumer.
|
| It brings me to the last point, isn't it's the role of a
| government elected by the people? To represent them and balance
| the power?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should
| have a choice.
|
| I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice gets
| us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and brain
| damage.
|
| Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free
| market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic
| pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste
| poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?
| amayne wrote:
| The United States Public Health Service said TEL (leaded
| gasoline) was safe to use in fuel in 1925 as did the US
| Surgeon General 1926.
| drstewart wrote:
| >I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice
| gets us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and
| brain damage.
|
| Nailed it. Meanwhile, there has never been an experiment with
| government intervention that has failed. For example, Agent
| Orange only existed because of consumer choice, as you
| astutely imply. So your point is airtight and not full of
| holes from every angle.
|
| >Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free
| market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic
| pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste
| poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?
|
| What's the ETA on magical government regulation fixing these
| problems?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Agent Orange only existed because of consumer choice
|
| I know how to fix politics using consumer choice - what if
| you could donate money to politicians, and whoever get the
| most money wins? Oh, wait..
| drstewart wrote:
| I know how to fix corruption using government regulation
| - what if you have a dictator that decides who can take
| money out of the country and if they should invade
| Ukraine? Oh, wait..
| bagacrap wrote:
| tbf, gp does explicitly mention "health issues" as the
| exception where regulation is warranted
|
| personally I would add "environmental impact" to the list of
| things that justify regulation which does cover
| battery/electronics reuse, but then making something reusable
| doesn't actually mean most folks will bother
| redleader55 wrote:
| "Environmental impact" is very broad - you can argue it to
| cover almost anything.
|
| I think this the main problem: do you trust a
| bureaucracy(is. non-technical people working in good faith
| to make rules for the society) to understand the
| implications of products or do you trust the manufacturer
| to do the same. In my opinion the bureaucrat can have good
| intentions, but lacks technical knowledge, while the
| manufacturer has the technical knowledge, but has
| incentives to disregard safety.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| In my opinion the manufacturer and the bureaucrat are the
| same thing. The bureaucrat's chief priority is to get re-
| elected, not to make the environment better or cars
| safer. The manufacturers priority is to make a profit.
| Sometimes their goals align with the interests of the
| public but a lot of the time they don't.
|
| Both have incentives to undermine or promote public
| safety and both have different avenues of accountability.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| But big corporate is a bureaucracy, upper-management
| people making decisions are not engineers and it's driven
| by political competition between different bosses
| jokeying for positions
|
| Is there actually any difference?
| svrtknst wrote:
| I'd argue that environmental impact _is_ a health issue.
| martin8412 wrote:
| No. The cookie disaster is because companies are making it a
| disaster. You're not required to ask consent for cookies used
| for technical purposes, such as managing user session.
|
| The consent is only required for tracking cookies used to sell
| your data. So if you don't track your users, then you don't
| have to the pop-up.
|
| I hope the EU comes down really hard on the companies
| deliberately making opting out of tracking difficult. A few
| billion dollar fines and those pop-ups requiring me to manually
| untick 300 different trackers will be a thing of the past.
| raron wrote:
| > I hope the EU comes down really hard on the companies
| deliberately making opting out of tracking difficult.
|
| At least NOYB does: https://noyb.eu/en/more-cookie-banners-
| go-second-wave-compla...
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| Companies have always had to ask for permission to store
| cookies. The user / user's browser decides whether to allow
| them, how long to keep them for, which sites will be allowed
| to access which cookies.
|
| This should have been / should be fixed on the user end.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Data processing consent covers much more than just cookies.
| II2II wrote:
| Fixes were attempted on the user end decades ago. What did
| companies do? They ensured the end user was flooded with
| _browser initiated_ cookie requests. Notice a parallel with
| the current situation?
|
| Browsers now use better approaches, but nothing is
| guaranteed when web developers try to circumvent the
| protections because they cannot accept that no means no.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Malicious compliance in action.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| Browsers rejecting cookies just leads to the website
| displaying a popup to please enable cookies or else you're
| not allowed to see the content. That's actually even less
| user-friendly.
| npteljes wrote:
| What governments need to be concerned about are the things
| where the public good can't be managed by the market forces.
| People can't be expected to look at minute details of every
| single thing that's part of their lives. Also if choice is
| restricted because, for example, every maker does X thing, then
| people can't really vote with their wallet, because there's no
| alternative. I recognize that this kind of control is not
| flawless, but I take it, considering the alternatives we have
| seen so far in history.
| yayr wrote:
| That's the key point. Since earth will not start charging
| directly for any environmental costs occured by its
| exploitation we need other rules for dealing with this.
| Market forces alone do not account for the price generations
| after us will have to pay for it.
| artonge wrote:
| 1. Replacement battery would help with reparability, which is
| one step toward the sobriety needed to fight climate change.
|
| 2. I feel like the customers do not have much of a choice if no
| product allows to replace the battery. So there is no way to
| vote with our wallet.
|
| 3. Which cookie disaster? I only see a directive that enforce
| companies to reveal when they are tracking users.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > Replacement battery would help with reparability, which is
| one step toward the sobriety needed to fight climate change.
|
| I have some bad news for you:
| https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/shipping-
| emiss...
|
| Where is the sense in greenwashing yourself about recycling
| your lightbulb when it was made 6000 miles away, and added
| more CO2 emissions than manufacturing it end-to-end?
| alistairSH wrote:
| _I really don't think governments should be making technical
| decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts
| health issues._
|
| I'll agree, with one caveat - governments MUST price in
| externalities appropriately.
|
| In the case of batteries in things like cell phones, that
| externality is excess waste and more mining of raw materials.
| There should be taxes applied somewhere in the supply chain to
| force manufacturers/consumers to manage that waste and reduce
| mining.
| rg111 wrote:
| > Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should
| have a choice.
|
| This only works when there are no monopolies or oligopolies.
|
| This is an idealistic view that is not worth anything because
| most markets have monopolies and oligopolies.
| tgv wrote:
| 1. Why do you think they are EU bureaucrats who don't
| understand technical details?
|
| 2. Are you sure the others aren't focussing too much on a few
| technical details, losing the global perspective?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm not sure about anything around this story, because in
| good HN tradition, the original link is to some guy's 5
| second summary of an article in a language I can't read. But
| it doesn't seem implausible to me that government regulators
| could have overlooked important technical factors while
| pursuing a politically advantageous agenda.
| Findecanor wrote:
| The original article (linked to in German) pointed out that the
| main problem was that used batteries did not get recycled to an
| enough extent, and therefore battery manufacturers today depend
| too much on imports for their raw materials.
|
| In other words, the new proposed rules were intended to benefit
| primarily _the_ _industry_ in the long term, not necessarily
| the consumer. Product design departments may not think farther
| than the next product, but their higher-ups should be
| concerned.
| sytelus wrote:
| The solution is not replaceable batteries but better way to
| recycle electronics. How about if we have separate bins for
| electronic recycle available to everyone? How about people
| get paid to recycle electronics? The beurocrates are
| generally not good at solutions or ideas which is why they
| make up "accept cookies" laws.
|
| This also reminds me how people are blamed in 3rd world
| countries for throwing the trash on street. The solution is
| to give people garbage bins and have garbage trucks pick them
| up. No one likes to throw trash on street. But no politician
| there has managed to thinks of this as solution yet.
| Burocratic solution is levy taxes, fines and have celebrities
| clean street for a photo in press.
| Bud wrote:
| I agree. And there are lot of products that I don't WANT to
| have a crappy three-cent plastic door on, which will inevitably
| break, just so I can replace a battery that I will _never, ever
| need to replace_ during the normal lifetime of the product in
| question.
| nemo44x wrote:
| The cookie disaster is a constant reminder that these
| government agencies need to be reeled in and limited. It's also
| embarrassing that when I browse the web it's more or less the
| EU's single contribution. Good job!
| simion314 wrote:
| It is embarrassing that probably you are not aware on how
| ironic and stupid your comment is, since the web was started
| at CERN
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#.
| ..
|
| so you might want to update your limited general knowledge or
| comment only on topics you really know what you are talking
| about. You see cookies because
|
| 1 the website wants to track you
|
| 2 the website ad-partners want to track you
|
| 3 the web developers are idiots and don't know that non-
| tracking cookies don't need a NAG popup
|
| BTW GDPR is more then cookies, it is applied in real life
| too. Also it has benefits like forcing websites to implement
| a delete my account functionality too.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Saying the web started at CERN is about as much intelligent
| as saying the internet was originally a US military
| communications network.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| cookie popup is not a disaster, it forced companies to tell
| their users they are tracking them
|
| user replaceable battery is important because what's most
| likely to die 1st in your electronics is the battery, if it
| is soldered, high chance you'll have to replace your whole
| thing, producing useless e-waste
|
| i had to replace my electric toothbrush recently because the
| battery died, but the whole thing was still in perfect
| condition, such a waste
| slig wrote:
| >cookie popup is not a disaster, it forced companies to
| tell their users they are tracking them
|
| Now people know that they're being tracked. Great. They are
| still being tracked and now are being annoyed with the
| modals everywhere. Those of us that get bothered enough can
| install some extension to hide them, but the for most
| people it's just another annoying thing they have to click
| away in order to continue what they were intended to do.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Most of those banners and popups and "consent" dialogs
| are illegal under GDPR. And the parasites behind the
| biggest networks of them are slowly but surely getting
| what they deserve https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/iab-
| europe-tcf-gdpr-breach...
| Karunamon wrote:
| Even fully compliant dialogs are a pain in the ass. It's
| why addons like "I don't care about cookies"[1] exist.
|
| [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-dont-
| care-about-...
| dmitriid wrote:
| 1. You don't need a dialog at all if you only use data
| that's strictly required for the functionality of your
| website.
|
| There. Problem solved. In a different discussion someone
| even linked a great example of a GDPR-compliant site:
| https://github.com
|
| See? Easy
|
| 2. Okay, for some reason you decide to collect more data.
| Just as easy:
|
| You present the user with a simple accept/reject, where
| "reject" is _clearly labeled, is the default selected
| option, and the website continues working when the user
| choses "reject"_
|
| See? Easy.
|
| Those "pain-in-the-ass dialogs"? If they are pain in the
| ass, they are not compliant.
| Karunamon wrote:
| _Any_ popup in my face is a PITA. I don 't care about
| cookies, your newsletters, or coupons. Get out of my way
| and let me browse.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Get out of my way and let me browse.
|
| So, your beef is with people who implement all this.
| Karunamon wrote:
| We had that before the EU stepped in.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Arrive on page, click "reject all", done. That's what
| it's like with fully compliant pages.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I prefer skipping the second step and not having
| government-mandated boilerplate interrupting my browsing
| at all. For something so bloody inconsequential,
| dismissing the warning is of more import than selecting
| an option.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Inconsequential? Without cookies of this nature the
| surveillance economy would have had a harder time getting
| off the ground. We're just numbed to it now because we've
| been continuously assaulted for decades.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Yes, inconsequential. As in, there are no tangible
| consequences to me (or likely anyone else) regardless of
| what option I select.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Now people know that they're being tracked. Great. They
| are still being tracked and now are being annoyed with
| the modals everywhere
|
| And now when I tell people 'companies are tracking you'
| noone calls me a conspiracy theorist any more. They say-
| yes they are.
|
| Mission accomplished, this policy gets my vote
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Reminds me of California's prop 65: everywhere and on
| everything you can buy there is a warning that the
| place/thing could cause cancer. Technically true, but the
| information isn't actionable because it is so broad.
| alexklark wrote:
| all phones and laptops have user replaceable batteries, it
| just some users too stupid to do it properly. i wonder if,
| after some tragic incidents including lithium and
| screwdrivers, the next requirement of the eu bureaucrats
| will be that companies do test that battery can be replaced
| by the handicapped body positive 15 years old trans girl
| with iq no more than 80.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| > It's also embarrassing that when I browse the web it's more
| or less the EU's single contribution.
|
| This just indicate that you are unaware of the requirements
| of GDPR.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'm aware the EU companies can't produce any meaningful web
| tech so their bureaucracies legislate ridiculous things
| like GDPR. I get a little reminder every time I go to a
| website that the EU exists for some reason. They can't
| sanction Russia, expect the USA (while constantly harboring
| anti-Americanism)to "do something" and pollute the web with
| these pop ups everywhere.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| Honestly sounds like you are just being jealous of the
| benefits we get over here. Not sure that's what you
| wanted to achieve.
| tehjoker wrote:
| US companies curb stomped the rest of the world and ate
| up all the market share others needed to survive. The
| only country that has a non-US centric internet ecology
| is China, because they intentionally blocked western
| companies.
| windex wrote:
| Having to throw out completely usable devices because of
| batteries conking out should be a crime and should be classified
| as littering by the manufacturer. I still miss my old Nokia.
| motters wrote:
| I hope that this will also apply to mobile phones.
| Arnt wrote:
| The original source doesn't seem to say "not replaceable", but
| describes batteries that are glued or fixed in place.
|
| So making a watertight phone (or other device) with the battery
| inside the seal seems to still be allowed by the current
| proposal, so long as the seal is the only thing that complicates
| replacing the battery. Bug or feature? You be the judge.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| To save people some time: https://www-faz-
| net.translate.goog/aktuell/wirtschaft/eu-par...
| iliketrains wrote:
| Yes! I wish this was mandatory world-wide!
|
| Just recently my shaver battery got to the point it lasts ~2
| seconds on "full charge" and it is not replaceable. The charging
| adapter does not provide enough power to make it run. So I am
| forced to trash a perfectly working shaver just due to old
| battery. And this is how majority of battery-powered shavers
| work. My next shaver is corded.
| narrator wrote:
| If they wanted to cut down on e-waste, they'd let consumer
| electronics use lead solder again. With the whole tin whiskers
| issue, consumer electronics will regularly have to continue to be
| thrown out regularly.
| taf2 wrote:
| This seems good on the surface... but imagine you are designing a
| new piece of hardware... add this to the list of many "good
| things" that maybe won't be great in 20 years from now when a new
| technology doesn't fit the mold... I'm all for being able to
| repair. I enjoy finding a short and fixing by replacing a blown
| capacitor... I'm just not a fan being forced to build things in a
| specific way that prevents innovation. Maybe in 20 years we have
| amazing new batteries that last 100 years... maybe a device
| doesn't need a battery just a capacitor and exposed to the sun is
| this now not a possibility? Because the capacitor need to be
| replaceable or is this a loop hole in the regulation... time will
| tell but IMO more rules about what and how I can design new
| hardware is bad
| bestouff wrote:
| This is a law for today. When batteries will last 100 years,
| the law will change.
|
| I find this law quite good.
| taf2 wrote:
| How often are laws like this really changed in a time window
| that benefits innovation? A flexible phone that wraps around
| your wrist - how will that battery be feasibly replaced?
| Again I'm all for repairing hardware and replacing batteries
| ... I just don't think it's right to use laws to force a
| design ... for health , for safety sure... but let me sell a
| cheap phone/device and let me sell a longer lasting device
| with replacement parts like frame.work... a market of choice
| is better IMO ... I guess the EU just doesn't think this
| way...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Looking from the other side, it's been decades now and we
| haven't seem much innovation on electric toothbrushes or
| beard trimmers. Except we're still stuck with a non
| replaceable design.
|
| You'll see your flexible phone as the peak device for 5
| years, then again will come the right to repair and battery
| issues.
|
| Perhaps your point could be that there needs to be a
| process to get an exception from this law for a year or two
| if the committee wants to help some technically chalenging
| devices. But expecting all makers to do the right thing by
| themselves is unrealistic (and no, "voting with your
| wallet" doesn't help when a set of brand dominate a market
| and collude on the issue)
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| They use considerably less in terms of raw materials than
| they did 20 years ago. The same is also true even for
| apparently very simple things like soft drink cans!
|
| Changes were driven by market forces.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Wouldn't the amount of raw material be sheer process
| optimization, driven by production costs ?
|
| If they came up with easier to recycle designs I'd hear
| you, but the only industry I see having done real efforts
| is the plastic bottling industry, and it is still hands
| down one of the worse plastic producer, even considering
| recycling.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| The reduction in raw material is from finding
| structurally sound ways of using less, both in the
| product itself and in the packaging. Yes, that's driven
| by production costs.
| technobabbler wrote:
| Eh, if battery tech ever gets there, they can just update the
| law. Big deal?
|
| In the meantime it'd prevent needlessly thin phones and laptops
| designed around planned obsolescence.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| What incentive is there for battery tech to "get there" when
| progress is essentially banned in the name of standard parts?
|
| It's hard not to see this sort of regulation at the very
| least slowing down innovation and causing worse environmental
| outcomes as a side effect over a decades long scale. It won't
| be apparent to most people though, since they won't be able
| to see the counterfactual world where technology improved
| slightly faster.
| technobabbler wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're talking about. Why would allowing
| battery replacement hinder development of battery tech? If
| anything it should spur a battery aftermarket using
| different charge controllers, chemistries, etc. that are
| user-swappable for the OEM ones.
|
| It just sounds like a generic antiregulatory complaint
| ungrounded in reality? It's not like li-ion tech has
| advanced dramatically absent such regulations. The
| bottleneck seems to be chemical, a matter of energy
| density, not a regulatory chokehold on innovation.
|
| It's just part of a bigger right-to-repair war, whether
| it's batteries or cars or operating systems. Manufacturers
| are increasingly moving to rent-seeking behaviors and X as
| a subscription, which is great for their profits but not so
| good for consumers or societies.
|
| Big tech is already on the verge of supplanting governments
| across the world, the last thing they need is more freedom
| to "innovate". They don't do it for the social good, just
| for their profits, and regulation is always playing catch-
| up to try to limit the social and environmental damage from
| their actions. At least the regulations have some measure
| of democratic buy-in, vs the what, 2-4 big tech companies
| that alone determine the future of tech? They don't have
| your interests at heart, at all.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Phones are becoming ever more expensive and at the same time the
| pace of improvement is slowing down. It's making more and more
| sense to buy a top-end phone and keep it a long time. Repair and
| maintainability of phones is thus going to become more important.
| But I don't know if it's necessary that the an ordinary user can
| do it themselves.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Battery and/or display replacement has become almost as
| expensive as a new device starting around 2019. In the iPhone 6
| times, you could have your display replaced for about 50-60
| EUR, and your battery for as low as 30 EUR. Not so with newer
| devices, whether Apple or Android ones.
| thepangolino wrote:
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