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Comment by dare0505 | Hacker News Reader

There was a recent story on HackerNews about the New York Times, which cut off ad exchanges and still kept growing revenue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079

I wonder if it's a similar thing about the supposed benefits companies thought they were going to get about limiting the customers "right" to repair their products.

On one hand, the benefit look "obvious", yet when you take into consideration the second-hand effects (like bad publicity, people getting frustrated by the inability to repair and getting a cheaper alternative) my guess is the costs were bigger than the benefits.

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I've found that equipment that comes with the intention that end users can repair tends to be more robust (if somewhat more expensive) than the inverse.

If you plan not to repair you can skimp on all sorts of things (fasteners that break when you open them, clips that snap off, you can pump glue in etc) that actually lead to complete failure.

It's annoying, it's also hard (though the internet has helped) to get spares for things I can remember my father having no issue getting spares for, cooker elements, washing machine controllers and the like - I can remember when white goods came with a manual that had part codes to order those things in the back and I'm only 38, it's almost a form of learned helplessness.

Someone who can do the work of repairing appliances can make good money doing something else. As the manufacturing cost goes down, it really does make less and less sense to support repair.

It's clearly a local optimum, ideally you'd do the engineering to make repair cheap too, but I don't see how you climb out of it.

Tax the externalities unless we can efficiently recycle everything power efficiently.

I.e. increase the cost of cheap disposable manufacturing so that making things repairable is the better economic decision (and better environmentally).

In modern, highly efficient markets, it's impossible to tell the difference between a great business decision, great luck, a terrible business decision, and terrible luck.

Right to repair is doomed if its proponents make it about the bottom line. You don't really know if this decent thing or another is going to increase or decrease revenue.

Making it about doing what's right for the consumer is great. But better to promote Right to Repair during the boom times, when everyone's making money, and say that it's good for the bottom line, even if you don't really know.

And therein lies the problem. People who are great consumer advocates are terrible liars.

Apple admitted that people changing batteries and continuing using old phones affected their profits, this companies need in a way or other to make more and more profit and this means convincing you to get a new device every year or maximum two.

Apple is telling themselves that at the same time they're saying that the prices are fine. They don't want to admit that they over-reached on the price, especially in countries like China.

And where does it end? When the whole world is buying a new iphone every year what do they do next? Release one every month? Force disable older iphones?

That is true, but the current situation is simpler. Design for disassembly and repair is expensive, time consuming, and difficult. It is far easier to have robots slap components together. That is plenty of explanation for phones now shipping.

Is it really cheaper or is something we were told. There are repairable phones that are not more expensive because of that, if you mean we can make this phone or laptop 2$ cheaper if we use glue instead of a screws then we can agree that we want to pay 2$ more to have the ability to swap the battery or keyboard instead of replacing the entire or half of the device.

I think the problem lies in the idea that publicly traded companies need to do more, more, and more. Stability should be rewarded, too.

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