Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

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This is the fundamental issue, yes. Some thoughts:

A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality.

Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.

It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?

Answer: the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost. The switch in your toaster breaks - you buy a new one for a fiver instead of repairing the switch. The old one goes in a landfill. A quantity of non-renewable resources like oil and metal are used up; a the increased demand for these things contributes to the deaths of miners, and people who live near the factories and refineries. Fuel is burned to deliver the new toaster to you, and the Earth's temperature goes up a teeny-tiny fraction. None of these things are included in the price. Regulation can help that too.

> Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.

Which can increase the original cost of the good.

> Which can increase the original cost of the good.

... to better reflect it's real cost by including all the otherwise externalized costs.

To cross subsidize some kind of use, raising the cost for people that won't have the product broken.

I'm not saying that it's a net loss, nor that even if a net loss that it isn't worth it. But there is a cost there, and you are shoving it away on your quest to regulation instead of looking at it and deciding its worth.

No, you're assuming the regulation is an end in itself and coming to a tautological. Regulation is essentially saying 'wait, let's factor in these unaccounted-for-but-predictable costs (like repairability)' and you're saying 'but what about the costs of assessing the costs?!'.

Yeah, incorporating some product standards is going to raise the cost of all units sold, which represents a loss to the buyer who hoped to get the product at the cheapest possible price and was either willing to take perfect care of it or tolerate it not being fully repairable if it were broken. But that's OK, because when regulating something the most important person to consider is the median user, noth the clumsiest/unluckiest nor the most skilled/luckiest.

If the median user buys a car expecting to drive it for 5 years, and there's a >50% chance that it will suffer some damage to some major functional component during that time, it would be pretty inefficient for said damage to cost more to fix than the cost of replacing the whole car, unless cars were to become so cheap that it was actually cheaper and better to scrap them - perhaps thanks to some breakthrough in large-scale 3d printing technology or so.

That's what happened with computer keyboards; it used to be that they were fairly expensive and if someone spilled coffee into one it was worth dismantling, cleaning, and re-assembling, but then cheap membrane keyboards assembled with increasing levels of automation brought the price down faster and faster, and today you can get a PC keyboard for something ridiculous like $10. A few fetishists still pay out for old-style IBM Model M, but most people will just replace a damaged keyboard.

But while cars remain relatively expensive and hard to dispose of, it makes sense to minimize the economic losses stemming for a lack of modularity and repairability across the market as a whole, rather than seeking to minimize the costs for the stingiest buyer.

> and there's a >50% chance that it will suffer some damage to some major functional component

What if the chance is actually 1%? What if the cost of repairing it is bigger than a new car? What if, as you said, cars got cheaper, but not so cheap to be disposable? What if making if repairable has the side effect of making it less durable?

Just nobody upthread is asking any of those questions. It's not circular, it's a plain old and boring cost vs. benefit assessment to be done over government intervention.

Why don't you make a positive claim of your own in competition with the existing regulatory one? Obviously I'm using simple numbers to sketch a simple conceptual example. If you consider the burden if regulation to be so onerous, quantify that.

A lot of people use their computer keyboard more than any other single object they don't sleep on. There's finally (thank you Cherry MX) a supply meeting the presumably pent-up demand for decent keyboards. I hated those membrane things, and you could get them for under $10 as far back as 2003. These days you can get a perfectly good _repairable_ mechanical switch keyboard for about $35.

Still though, if you pour orange juice into your keyboard and don't have the time/ability to repair it yourself, who's going to do it for under $35? I seem to remember that fixing a messed up one took 1-2 hours, but that was like >25 years ago when I was an eager whizkid and a new keyboard ran for $120 or something.

Don't give Cherry switches that much credit - they have been on the market for a very long time. They kept their keyswitches expensive to reap healthy margins, albeit from a limited market and thus they had limited economies of scale.

Competition from non-Cherry keyswitches have forced Cherry to drop prices, such that nearly identical keyboards from 2008 now cost a quarter as much. Cherry was valuable for proving the technology in the premium market, and Cherry's competitors were valuable in bringing the prices down and driving economies of scale to make mechanical keyboards basically a "no brainer" purchase now.

Or, maybe we are looking at it and deciding it is worth it.

> all the otherwise externalized costs.

What is the externality here? Trash left over when the product is discarded?

Regulating the manufacturer is a classic progressive roundabout way of not regulating the externality directly. Instead, perhaps a better solution would be regulating the amount of wasted resources / complexity to recycling, such that the consumer is made very aware of the environmental impact of a product that is no longer in use.

And if the consumer was truly bearing a non-environmental burden for cheap stuff that is hard to fix and breaks easily, they would keep name-brand businesses with durable products in business (and indeed, they do).

As does any regulation. That does not mean the regulation is bad. I wouldn't regulate this issue with specific rules, just put a cost on waste. Each company would need to deal with the product waste in an environmetally safe way. If they can essentially recycle the replaced products into new ones, then I have no problem with that. But if it ends up as waste, then there should be a price on that. I wonder how much would this motivate companies to make repairable products.

Isn't that how RoHS already works?

RoHS is a limit on toxic chemical concentrations in materials used for electrical equipment to limit environmental and public exposure to a few egregiously toxic compounds (i.e., the solder in a radio can have a maximum of 1000 ppm of lead, but no more). You're probably thinking of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive which is the one that set recycling goals for electronic waste.

The cost will go up only a little. The price though...

When the original cost of the good is so expensive as to significantly prohibit replacement of broken/defective parts, is the good really all that... good?

Watch this video of a crash test between a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g

The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2]

Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain.

1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si...

2) https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/25483.shtml

The argument is more like 'soldered RAM' versus 'user replaceable RAM'.

Which is done because solder is thinner/lighter than sockets, and therefore you can get a thinner/lighter laptop. There are real engineering tradeoffs all over the place here that are being elided over in order to make "things should be easier/cheaper to repair" seem obvious rather than a complicated set of tradeoffs.

You shifted the argument (which nobody was making) to being "modern is better" using your car example. I'm bringing it back to user-serviceable is _better_.

>Which is done because solder is thinner/lighter than sockets, and therefore you can get a thinner/lighter laptop.

So let them figure out another way to make it thinner/lighter. I don't want them to do it at the expense of upgrading common parts. We're not asking for every single chip to be replaceable. Just the obvious parts that have an established 10+ year history of being serviceable. I bet welding every single part on a car makes it lighter too, but I don't think people want to replace the entire car if their fuel pump breaks.

>There are real engineering tradeoffs all over the place here that are being elided

Huh? You switched from purely cosmetic factors - thinner/lighter, to engineering. You will have to explain that one to me...

Thinner and lighter are not purely cosmetic (although I think Apple overvalues them) -- laptops are meant to be carried and therefore being smaller/lighter are actual benefits. Even if they were purely cosmetic, however, there is actual engineering required to do them. The laws of the universe don't go, oh, you only want to make a cosmetic change, therefore you can get X into this space/thermal profile without any other tradeoffs.

User-serviceable parts are better, all things being equal. But all things aren't equal. You're trying to mandate tradeoffs for everyone else, and I don't think you understand everyone else's tradeoffs well enough to do that.

I think at some point you're going to have to present an argument that user-serviceable RAM makes a perceptible difference in making the laptop thin/light going forward. Several assumptions - The RAM itself can't shrink or be made to be more energy efficient, or socket design is static, can be challenged. However a manufacturer without a mandate/incentive will probably never invest their efforts to making that happen. They're going to optimize for the commercial aspect of selling the product in a way that maximizes their bottom line via market segmentation and price gouging on storage. Obviously, making money is not something that I'm against, but I simply would like to see an acceptable compromise made between making money and making it repair-friendly. Like you said, everything is a trade-off.

You want me to present an argument that stuff that doesn't exist isn't better than stuff that exists?

And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who? Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM. And it's not acceptable to those who buy other laptops that don't have soldered RAM. The compromise has been accepted by the market. "Well, the market got it wrong and should do it better," you might think. Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better, and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.

Because you're the one dismissing user serviceability as an impeding factor to reducing the overall package size?

>And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who?

To me, and anyone else who shares my values.

>Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM.

Seems like you can layer-on any argument you want simply by citing sales. I suppose people think Windows security is the best since they overwhelmingly choose to buy Windows machines over Apple or Linux desktops. But that is a false statement, because not everyone is aware of the intricacies of operating system design or that different options exist, or how they differ etc etc. Extrapolating _just_ from commercial success to use as data in an argument is a fools errand because of the thousands of variables involved in a large diverse group making a purchasing decision.

>Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better,

Hmm I'm curious.. can you provide a sampling of those incidents that apply to our discussion here?

>and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.

They almost never do. Systems typically evolve to coalesce around a local maxima. All around the world (in democracies anyway), citizens have always installed regulations to make the market serve us, rather than the other way around. For e.g. in the US - child labor, minimum wage, consumer product safety, etc, antitrust laws, etc etc. Before each of those laws got passed, I'm sure people made arguments against it with "well the market has accepted it". (You seem like a decent bloke, so I'm not suggesting that you personally would be against those regulations, just making a general point)

Introducing a constraint like this, however, motivates the manufacturers to innovate making user-replaceable parts better instead of discarding the entire concept just because they can.

Re-soldering a chip is pretty easy. Being able to buy that chip in one-off quantities is sometimes next to impossible.

You've made some thoughtful points, but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion.

In short, repairability is too nebulous of a target for effective regulation. I think the appropriate angle for government intervention is to protect a "right to repair".

> A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality...Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.

There are a number of ways to tackle this issue:

* reduce the regulatory and tax burden faced by small repair shops. Increased competition and lower overhead costs will drive down prices.

* reduce the regulations that impact the product design. Engineering is the result of navigating difficult trade-offs; the more aspects of a design we try to "fix", especially through political processes, the more complex the end result will be.

* broaden access to repair knowledge and tools. You don't even need regulatory changes for this one; It's an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs. Part of the reason older cars are so easy to repair is that the tools and knowledge have become widespread thanks to third-party businesses that have found a way to supply those things cheaply and profitably. YouTube is a DIYer's dream.

> It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?

Sometimes it's not a problem. Is it better to use a paper towel is biodegradable and produced through sustainable tree-farming, or use a reusable cloth towel that increases demand for environmentally unfriendly washing machines and laundry detergent (and spend money on sewing machines and thread to repair holes)?

> the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost

Nor would they with heavy regulation, because the "full environmental and social cost" is incalculable. Furthermore, there is no attempt to measure the costs imposed by the regulations and the net benefits provided (if any).

> Is it better to use a paper towel is biodegradable and produced through sustainable tree-farming, or use a reusable cloth towel that increases demand for environmentally unfriendly washing machines and laundry detergent (and spend money on sewing machines and thread to repair holes)?

If someone has gone to the effort to buy responsibly sourced paper towels, I think they would also own responsibly sourcfed and environmentally friendly detergent. And of course the cloth would usually be washed with other items, and so not that much more water would be used. And, is thread really a cost here for home repairs?

I think the more realistic version of your scenario is:

"Is it better to use a non-biodegradable paper towel which was not sustainably produced, or to use a resusable cloth which needs to be thrown in with the other laundry occasionally, and which after many months of use may be relegated to a toolkit grease-towel, or thrown out and replaced?"

Lastly -- the OP may have been over-specific in talking about "full environmental and social cost", but there is plenty of room to move from where we are now to "enough social costs so that poor people don't leave near factories which give them asthma and lower their life expectancy, and to mitigate the effects of human-caused global warming."

> If someone has gone to the effort to buy responsibly sourced paper towels

All paper is sustainably harvested from tree-farms where the trees are grown specifically for making paper, rather than e.g. old-growth forests. It's also all (to my knowledge) biodegradable.

I'm not saying that paper towels are always the better choice. You can also look at other factors such as manufacturing costs, etc. My point was that disposability can be a positive trait.

With regard to externalities, my point is that regulations have them too. Yes, you can impose (costly) requirements on industry, but do we ask what the cost is in terms of economic growth (which is lifting many third-world people out of extreme poverty) and technological innovation (which creates greater efficiency)?

I don't wish to sound partisan. I think that dealing with externalities is tricky, and it's worth having a discussion about. However, I think regulations to deal with them are often zero-sum solutions. It's worth asking whether:

a) there is a positive-sum (generally market-based) solution

b) the conditions that created the externality are transient and will resolve in time

reduce the regulatory and tax burden faced by small repair shops. Increased competition and lower overhead costs will drive down prices.

I think manufacturer hostility to third party repairers is a much bigger burden than state-imposed overhead. It's not like all manufacturers are super-open and eager to share the schematics of their products with hackers, is it?

Whether manufacturer hostility is in fact bigger than state-imposed burdens, I agree it is a significant factor. I thought about elaborating this point with my comment about "right to repair" but left it out for the sake of brevity.

I think an aspect of this "right to repair" would be the ability to seek legal action against manufacturers who deliberately interfere with this right.

However, the relationship between repair shops and manufacturers need not be hostile. I don't know the stats for this, but would it not be reasonable to think that many people purchase cars based on the recommendation of a trusted mechanic? I certainly do. Mechanics are generally going to recommend vehicles that are either easy to work on or aren't in the shop often (or both).

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