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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

1st world countries should also push laws that facilitate this. Easily replaceable batteries, better schematics etc

Agreed. The problem is when citizens come forward to push for this, the manufacturer's lobbyist come in say it's too dangerous. Both from a trade secrets and a user injury perspective (battery packs explode dontcha know). And the manufacturers have more money to spend on lobbyist and political campaigns than the citizens. Like anything, it would take average citizens organizing in significant numbers to change anything. And not enough people care enough to actually sacrifice their time and money to make such a stand.

Massive regression on the latter, early computers and '80s stereo amplifiers came with schematics in the manual - what happened?

> Massive regression on the latter, early computers and '80s stereo amplifiers came with schematics in the manual - what happened?

The customer accepted offers that did not include the schematics, and the markets delivered.

I'm absolutely a (paid up even? Maybe lapsed) free-market conservative, but that's not a complete argument really. What motivated dropping it? Save the pages for more langauges and self-certified compliance labelling? As if British customers (say) were demanding manuals with 2 pages of English and 296 of other.

The cost of distributing information is basically free these days, so that's not the motivating factor. All the design information for e.g. a laptop will easily fit on a single DVD. Instead, it's because they simply don't want people to know too much.

You can find leaked laptop schematics. They are almost identical between manufacturers and models because they're based on Intel's reference schematics, and I suspect the latter wants to keep them under NDA (they were freely available on the site up until the ~Pentium 4 era.)

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