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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011·

Hopefully they will be easy to re purpose. This of course means that they will have to general enough to support more than one use case and also unlocked in such a way that reflashing the firmware is trivial.

Maybe like some service you link devices to and it gives you a list of all the various gadgets that it can turn a piece of hardware into.

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I think it's going to take real design effort if we expect people to reuse these devices. I like your idea of the service helping you repurpose gadgets, or maybe even a deposit on your gadget -- send it in when you are done with it to recycle its rare components.

If a digital device only costs a couple of bucks, and a better/faster/cheaper one comes available a year later, the old one is going to get tossed. How many people repurposed their 2005 iPods, and those cost real money?

Culturally we are accustomed to just tossing aside the old, particularly with electronics. We're going to need significant cultural/technical/legal/design shifts to keep up with these changes. And quickly!

A large factor in this is the "lock-down" culture that has sprung up, and people buying into the bullshit that it's necessary for devices to be "secured" to be user friendly. I know it won't solve the cultural problems, but it's a complete non-starter if you can't even legally re-purpose your own hardware, or if it takes too much effort.

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