Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I always figured that even if the cost to manufacture has gone down for any given piece of electronics that cost to society has actually gone up because instead of repairing things (which also provided jobs) they are now discarded far earlier than they would have been in the past.

Much earlier in my life I earned some money on the side repairing electronics and while it is of course still technically feasible the number of one-off components in any given device is so high and the documentation and repairability so low that it just isn't worth it. This was not a good development, but it seems we're stuck with it. The one big plus from all this integration is that devices consume far less power than they used to.

View on HN

It's like cars. Decades ago you might see your local mechanic once a year (if you're lucky) or multiple times a year to fix issues with the car, nowadays there's a good chance a new car will go 100k miles with only wear-and-tear items needing maintenance done.

Old cars had more maintenance requirements and were far less reliable, but repairs tended to be simpler.

For example, you may need to tune your carburetor seasonally. Old points based distributors needed the points adjusted or replaced. Simple tools like a screwdriver and a matchbook can get those two sorted.

Fuel injection and electronic ignition eliminated a lot of regular maintenance, but they are harder for the average person to troubleshoot, let alone repair.

Gone are the days where a rough idle could be fixed with a screwdriver. But so too are the days where a mountain pass requires that same screwdriver to be pulled out on the way up and the way down to adjust the fuel-air ratio.

I have a car maintenance manual from very early in the 20th century (1910 or something) and the maintenance schedule it describes would be ludicrous nowadays. It talks about changing the oil and greasing all of the joints every couple hundred miles, for example. At the same time, there are some components that are essentially the same now. Based on the diagrams, it looks like the wheel hubs and bearings would be compatible with the ones on my modern boat trailer.

My Dad, born in the early 1930s, said that on any lengthy drive (I'm guessing > 100km), you just assumed that you would have at least one puncture or other minor breakdown.

He and his cousin were given a car with a wooden body; once the engine overheated and it burned to the ground.

Punctures... there is a good point! I haven't had one in years (let's not jinx this...), but in the past, up to the late 80's I would have them with some regularity. I suspect that the improved quality of the roads is also a factor in this.

The bearing might be compatible, but new ones are so much better. The slop (if that’s the right word) in bearings manufactured 50 years ago was more than you get now.

I'm not a serious mechanic, but I suspect one of the reasons the bearings and shaft on the hub are tapered is so you can tighten it down and accommodate for minor variations in the tolerances. That would have been more important before it was all being done with CNC. The material for the bearings was probably not super either.

Things that have changed in bearings: better materials science led to more understanding of how you can harden surfaces and this in turn led to better 'races' in bearings as well as balls and rollers that are harder leaving bearings that last longer in principle. But all that wouldn't matter one bit if the bearings weren't sealed properly and that's the second improvement that led to longer bearing life. Finally, the third factor, improved lubricants, better able to deal with thermal cycling and high heat.

I strongly believe there was a optimal point where it was both relatively straightforward to service vehicles (or possibly easier), and their reliability was much better than what preceded them (and frankly also what came after): probably in the 90s or very early 00s. An example I would kind of think of, was GM's throttle body injection, or some of the simpler port fuel injection systems and the engine and transmission technologies concurrent with these. They have basically all of the advantages of EFI, such as behaving correctly with altitude changes, not rampantly over or under fueling the engine (because of the feedback loop with the O2 sensor, etc.), while retaining the same simplicity (or better) than their predecessors. Ignition was kind of the same way: HEI distributors, and even better, wasted spark systems, are absolutely dirt simpler, and really simpler than points and condensors, while being much more efficient and robust. The electronics on these are relatively simple, well understood (basically anyone and their bother has been able to tune and flash a lot of GM EPROMS/EEPROMS for a long time now), have replacements that are also better and open (Megasquirt and similar), and very robust.

A lot of the newer technologies, like variable valve timing, are cool, but you can still have (and did for a time) a lot of the ease of service, with much better running behavior and reliability. We can have our cake and eat it, manufacturers are just apparently very incentivized against this.

I strongly agree with your assessment. You can have a lot of fun and reliability with circa 1995 technology combined with modern manufacturing techniques.

Much of the newer stuff is about meeting emissions and fuel mileage mandates. There's a reason VVT lockouts are a thing in the aftermarket

But both restricting emissions and improving fuel mileage are good things, right?

But if they break you're in for a world of trouble, and you will in one go end up offsetting a good chunk (or more) of what you saved up to that point. In a way this is the result of designing things to outlast their warranty, once the warranty period is over anything that still works was essentially overdesigned. Fortunately for cars and other high ticket items the secondary market will punish brands that are playing it too loose and too fast but I've seen pricing for for instance headlight or taillight assemblies that make you wonder if there is an error.

My mom's fridge broke exactly one day after the warranty expired.

She was crying on the phone, then they said they would honour the repair anyway.

That made her happy again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com