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Comment by girvo | Hacker News Reader

Cool article! I've been repairing my own gadgets since my first smartphone in 2005, and have always loved doing it. I even ended up working at a repair shop for 6 months!

It used to be a lot easier than is not, unfortunately. Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair.

The worst repair I ever completed, was replacing the LVDS cable and hinge in a first gen MacBook Air. 60 something screws, and complete disassembly and reassembly. I got it right the first time, through sheer dumb luck rather than skill I believe.

At this point, I don't bother trying to repair anything other than my iMac, and even that is difficult. It's become too difficult, time consuming, and risky for me to try, and I can only see it getting worse.

How do we repair that?

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Very good question. The only thing I can think of, at least in the EU, is get them to consider repairs in electronic waste legislation. If a device is not repairable, it becomes waste. I know people are going to chip in here and crow about Apple's recycling policy for example, but its not the right solution. It takes a lot of energy to extract and recycle materials which could be avoided by not throwing as much stuff away.

If it hurts the manufacturers' bottom line, so be it. They've had a free ride for years.

Also I think that companies should be forced to issue internal service manuals for all out of warranty products.

> Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair.

I think it's more than just a side-effect. For example, consider the iPhone's non-user-replaceable battery; one of the most commonly heard reasons for it is that it makes for a thinner device and a bigger battery. But an interesting device I saw recently made me question that; the Jiayu G5. It's an Android phone that looks almost exactly like the iPhone (only very slightly larger), with a metal casing and a removable battery plus dual SIM and expandable storage. It's only 0.25mm thicker but its battery has 33% more capacity. If a relatively small Chinese company can come up with something that has iPhone aesthetics but also retains a lot of the repairability, why can't Apple?

( http://www.gizchina.com/2013/09/24/jiayu-g5-teardown/ )

There are many other reasons for unibody construction (also on MacBooks): Easier manufacturability, more durable due to less failure points, more structurally sound for drops, less mechanical parts to stock and manufacture, no part tolerances to fit together, and of course aesthetics.

Having been on the other side of product design, it's never as simple as "they should have done that." There's always a good reason.

I have no idea about this phone, but the iPhone is relatively powerful. Is this phone in the same league? If you have a phone that operates at half the speed or lower screen resolution it could easily be responsible for a better battery life, no?

The iPhone 5s certainly has a more powerful processor (the original 5 is around the same as the G5) but the battery in the G5 actually has more capacity: 2000mAh for the G5 vs 1570mAh for the 5s (and 1440mAh for the original 5). The display is also larger: 1280x720 vs 1136x640.

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