I wish companies would be forced to do that same for everything, and at a reasonable cost.
It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
And don't get me started on cars!
If we as species cared about sustainability (we don't), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it's highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.
While I'm not defending the fact that many companies do rip people off in their spare parts prices,
> Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.
The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is.
Their original cost for that part is miniscule. BUT! That's the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier, over an unchanging delivery route, with minimal inventory kept on hand. Essentially, everything they can do to reduce the cost.
None of those things are true for a replacement part you order. It's an entirely different logistics chain, with entirely different costs.
The heating element of my Miele washing machine broke after about 4 years, and a genuine spare part would have cost 100€. I got a 3rd party replacement part that looks completely identical for 20€. I'm pretty sure there's still a healthy profit margin on that, since they cost half of that on Ali Express. And if the original part breaks after 4 years, the aftermarket part can't be much worse.
The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking expensive is because they make a lot of money with service. They don't want people fixing their own machines for 20€, they want to have a Miele service person come and swap the part for 250€.
EDIT: And don't tell me that logistics for a heating element are hard. All Miele washers have been using the same heating element for 15 years or so, it's a drop in replacement for the previous version of the part, and it's probably also the single part that breaks most often. That part should be easy to stock and the cost to do so should be trivial.
Looks identical and is identical are two different concerns though. I bought a (used) dryer from a small appliance vendor that looked identical to the new one right next to it for half as much. It was only a year later when it stopped working and I opened it up that I discovered where a thermal fuse should be there was just a straight piece of non high temp wire that had melted and thankfully not burned my house down when it failed. Which isn't to say that first party parts may not be marked up for profit, just that external looks of things don't tell you anything about the actual internal construction.
I agree with your point in general. I have bought spare parts from sketchy websites in the past and sometimes they are not as good as the original. You can usually tell the difference if you look at them closely.
But heating elements are very simple parts, and I bought it from a reputable local store, so I don't really worry that I'm getting an unsafe part. It's probably going to fail in a few years due to corrosion just like the original part (we have very hard water), and then I'll swap it again.
This was responding to a comment saying that the cost was justified by logistics issues even if the part itself was dirt cheap. The fact that you can in fact find way cheaper parts shows that the logistic argument is BS.
It's typical to have a markup goal of at least 10x going from place of origin to destination market. It is a scam. Source: involved in electronic design and manufacture.
It's not a scam - they just don't particularly want to be in the business of supplying parts, so they charge a premium. You can buy an alternative if you like.
AFAICS making a profit without providing an equitably commensurate value in return, as consideration for the payment the profit comes from, is the very definition of a scam.
Trying to make the math easy, if official parts cost $80 to produce due to licensing or whatever, and are sold for $100, is it necessarily a scam if you can produce functionally similar parts without the licensing concerns for, say, $10, but charge $90 for them?
Huge profit margin, but you're able to produce much more cheaply than a competitor. Some would say you earned that margin, and in a fair and open market if someone else can also produce them for $10 you'll see prices start falling quickly. If they can't, I don't see how it's a "scam" for you to make money in that scenario.
Again the same strawman. There is nothing "fair and open" in price gauging replacement parts in a market where buyers cannot compare quality, reliability, durability and TCO across products, replacement parts, repair services and guarantees.
Read my message again and read your reply again then.
Selling replacement parts with an unreasonable markup is a form of bait and switch: the customer buys the product thinking that it will have a given TCO over its lifetime. Only after some time the customer learns that the TCO is much higher when a replacement is needed.
You twisted my words by claiming that making a profit is not a scam.
> The only reason that Miele spare parts are so fucking expensive is because they make a lot of money with service. They don't want people fixing their own machines for 20€, they want to have a Miele service person come and swap the part for 250€.
Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
I have some Miele kit, and I have an insurance policy.
If something breaks, I call the insurance company, get a code. Then I call Miele and book a service appointment using the code. As a result, I have never paid a thing to Miele, not parts, not labour. But I still get official Miele engineer and official Miele parts.
And for some of my older Miele kit (10+ years), they've been out a lot, because the insurance company still deems it more economical to repair than to get Miele to ship me a new one.
> Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
If the goal is convenience, then definitely. Home insurance policies are quite a lot more expensive than actual repair costs are likely to be. Which of course is expected, the product being sold is peace of mind and convenience -- both of which people happily pay a premium for.
> Home insurance policies are quite a lot more expensive than actual repair costs are likely to be.
Hahaha that's a good one... especially as we're talking about Miele here. ;-)
And you're factually wrong anyway.
I didn't say "home insurance", I said "household appliance insurance". Different thing, unless your home insurance happens to cover appliances.
My household appliances insurance is not expensive. It covers 5 appliances, unlimited call-outs, and you don't get screwed at renewal time if you've claimed on the insurance.
As I said, I've had Miele out A LOT over the years and I've never paid them a penny, and trust me on some of my older large appliances they've pretty much replaced 100% of the internal parts.
Insurance companies operate at about 17% over premiums. Which means, for every dollar someone spends on insurance the company pays $0.83 in claims. This happens at a population level. Maybe you individually have a statistically above average amount of claims and collected more money than you spent. In which case congratulations. Maybe you are in a subpopulation (5x Miele owners) that the company is not accurately accounting for in their actuary tables. In which case the more this subpopulation signs up for insurance the higher premiums will increase, and perhaps if large enough the actuaries will catch on and raise your premiums as a subgroup.
Either way, the insurance company will turn a profit from premiums. I'm glad this policy has paid off for you, but "reducing costs" is not a good reason to purchase insurance. Insurance reduces risk and makes expenses more predictable.
The math isn’t as simple as you make it out to be. See insurance companies have volume and can negotiate better rates and policies. For example they can get 30-50%labor rate discounts or negotiate lower costs for recurring visits and discounted parts costs. As such is perfectly possible for insurance to be cheaper than uninsured services.
Exactly a lot of These companies are like hmos of appliances. Health insurance in the us isn’t really insurance either. If it was pure insurance most people would only by catastrophic
In sum, insurance companies are not selling their product at a loss, and if they are operating efficiently, they aren't selling their product to you at a loss either.
As always the adage "if you can afford to self-insure, you should" applies. There are two reasons you should buy insurance: because you are required to by law, or because the cost of covering replacement or repair would be problematic (either financially or logistically).
The other issue with appliance insurance or extended warranty and the like, it dilutes the obligation of companies to honour consumer guarantees. Certainly in Australia companies have been fined and otherwise penalised for promoting paid extended warranties when they should have been instead offering to make sure they meet the "fit for purpose" obligations
There is one additional reason: if your circumstances make it likely that you will claim more than others, due to a cause that is not accounted for in the fee calculation.
The insurance company may have a deal with the repairers, so they're able to get repairs done cheaper than you can. If that's the case, it may be cheaper (on average) to have insurance than not to.
In fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the people who have these insurance policies fail to claim on them or decide to replace their item when it breaks regardless of the insurance policy. A bit like the gym membership model, 90% of people don't use it at all.
e.g. I have a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD drive that has just failed, and lost some of my important data. Its got a 5 year warranty and is only a year old. I doubt I will bother to go through the warranty claims hassle, because the end result is not worth it.
I would have to send it back to Samsung, with my commercially important data on it locked in the chips, and get back another drive which it seems is not particularly trustworthy to rely on again. I've had 2/5 Samsung SSD drives fail and won't be using them for anything important again, I've just ordered a Hynix to replace it.
Another case, I have had a washing machine fail under warranty recently, again about 1 year into a 5 year warranty. It took 7 weeks and many frustrating phone calls before someone came around to actually fix it. Next time I won't bother to get a new washing machine, I will get a second hand one, and when it breaks I will get another second hand one immediately so I don't have the problem of not having a washing machine for sooo long.
If you're at all handy with tools, fixing appliances is normally pretty simple. The parts are readily available and often you don't need more than a few screwdrivers and wrenches to do the job. I've saved thousands of dollars fixing appliances myself vs. discarding them and buying new.
The door hinge on our refrigerator started cracking after about 1.5 years. It was covered by the credit card warranty, so I tried working with a repair company. They charged $150 to show up and say they couldn't do anything, then quoted $900 to replace the whole door. It was a $1200 refrigerator. I spent an hour and fixed it myself with some aluminum extrusion and a few rivets, then got reimbursed $700 by the credit card company.
My sister in law's oven failed with the self cleaning lock activated. It's an in-wall unit so the repair tech could only think to start cutting apart the wall. Instead, I took a hacksaw blade and painstakingly sawed off the lock. Since I was already committed, we then pulled out the unit and bypassed the failed thermal switch long enough to "unlock" the mechanism. That probably saved at least $1200...
Yeah my father is a handyman and I did lots of house and other maintenance for quite a few year, in balance to the very mental aspects of software! However for now I'm focusing my creative energy on higher value economic activities and spending spare time on the beach yoga or music instead. Someone else can fix that stuff for now :)
>Just get a household appliances insurance policy.
Any insurance is a conflict of interest. The entity responsible for paying out is the same entity responsible for if/how much you get paid out. Any for-profit insurance company is incentivized to pay out as little as possible, if any. Any litigation is likely to cost way more than the payout.
Ultimately, it's a math problem that must have a positive answer for the insurance company. If 100% of policyholders make claims, you generally pay that profit yourself.
However, in group catastrophic policy, the numbers add up. Substantially <100% of people file claims, so premiums can be set much lower, effectively giving you protection against an unlikely scenario at reasonable cost.
My grandfather was an actuary, and constantly griped that low-deductible policies shouldn't even be called "insurance."
If you want to create something like a national health benefit, do so. But don't confuse people by mislabeling it.
Group catastrophic, like all other insurance, is negative expected value in first-order effects, but improves predictability.
This is not fundamentally different from low-deductible policies. (Which may do more, proportionately to cost, to improve predictability if most variance is the number of frequency of low-cost events)
For those who use them. I avoid doctors as much as possible, so if I see one it is likely closer to a catastrophic situation than routine. I would much rather have cheap catastrophic insurance than more expensive low-deductible, because I am unlikely to use the latter.
>Ultimately, it's a math problem that must have a positive answer for the insurance company. If 100% of policyholders make claims, you generally pay that profit yourself.
Not necessarily. Simply holding onto large piles of other people's money can he profitable - eg banks.
> Any insurance is a conflict of interest. The entity responsible for paying out is the same entity responsible for if/how much you get paid out.
What are you on about ?
Let me spell out how my appliances insurance policy works:
1. I call $insurance_company and say "my appliance is broken"
2. $insurance_company says "Ok, here's a code, call Miele, give them the code"
3. Miele sends out engineer with parts who fixes the appliance
4. I sign engineer's job sheet.
5. The end.
To reiterate:
- At no point have I given Miele my credit card.
- At no point have I given the Miele engineer my credit card.
- At no point have I received a bill from Miele.
- At no point have I paid Miele in any way shape or form
- $insurance_company has taken care of everything, 100% of everything, every single time.
Mine is about 350 a year, but they work out a rate per-appliance and then give a discount on the total, so you can pay more (or less) depending on how many appliances you cover.
> Are you positive this insurance, over the years, is cheaper than what you would have paid Miele directly?
Absolutely.
A Miele call-out will set you back 150 call-out + 100/hour, plus parts on top.
Or (if Miele agree) you can pay a "fixed-price" 300 which covers parts and labour (but again, this is subject to Miele's agreement and that agreement is given on a per call-out evaluation).
And as I said, one of my Miele appliances is 10+ years old, they've been back a good few times replacing increasingly major parts each time, so now the only thing 10+ years old about it is the external casing !
Even if I bought the "official" Miele parts myself, I value my time at greater than zero ! So its still cheaper than me buying the parts and spending a half a day pulling out appliances and fitting parts.
And given the price of new Miele appliances, its not exactly like after 5 years I could afford to replace everything with brand new appliances, since that would cost A LOT more than 350x5.
And yet, on average, the insurance company must be making a profit on their Miele policies otherwise they would not sell them or would not stay in business.
It sounds like you have a lemon appliance and were fortunate that you had the insurance.
You must not live in the US. I see it's a German company, they have much stronger laws governing how they operate. In the US, there are laws, but they are scantly enforced. "Buyer beware." Corruption is gonna crash the insurance industry before too long.
It seems to me insurance companies must break into two categories. The first are honest agents operating on a house-always-wins model. Meaning, over a sufficiently large time and sufficiently large customer base they pay out less than they receive, but only a normal cost + profit margin amount less. Pay out more than that and they go out of business.
The second category would be dishonest agents, which try to avoid payout and have windfall profits and basically skirt the line where lawsuits and reputational damage make that kind of profit impossible. Long term operation as such a business is challenging due to word of mouth, so they must often rebrand or change business names, or just make their products too confusing to understand.
Aliexpress vendors operate on very low margin. Compared to Miele, considering Washing Machines are such low volume products, and their brand commands premium, selling it at 80% margin gross doesn't sound too ridiculous.
To make it clear, I didn't buy the spare part from Ali Express. The spare part would have cost around 10€ on Ali Express.
I bought it for 20€ from a reputable local electronics parts dealer. The part I got for 20€ was a high quality 3rd party heating element compatible with Miele washers.
Other manufacturers manage to sell spare parts at more reasonable prices. I just checked a random washing machine from Siemens, and they sell the heating element for 28€. Not quite as affordable as the aftermarket part I got, and they'll probably charge 5-10€ for shipping, but it's a lot more reasonable than the Miele part.
> The seeming ridiculousness of the price difference is another way of looking at how hyper-efficient modern mass manufacturing is.
Reminds me of the Planet Money multipart story where they made a tshirt, from scratch. Bought cotton from a farmer, shipped it to a textile industry, contacted a tshirt making company, shipped it to the US.
The bulk of the cost in the end came from transporting the tshirt from the harbor to the store where it was sold.
And it also pretty much sums up how most people in Tech have minimal understanding of Supply Chains and logistics works. Even distribution alone, within a single country ( ignoring the cross border logistics ) is complex enough.
Just my 2 cents, but worth noting I do run a retail business and about 20% of our revenue comes from old electronics we refurb in-house.
The reason that spare parts are so expensive has nothing to do with the cost of logistics or the scale of mass-production. The warehouse can simply order an extra pallet of parts and leave it on a rack as spares. Hell, this is probably what all of these businesses do.
The real reason the pump costs 100 pounds is because the customer has no reasonable alternative, so they will (begrudgingly) accept that before spending 400 pounds on a brand new machine.
If they found out the specific part number of the pump and ordered something compatible from an alternative supplier (I used to go to this effort when younger), it generally ends up costing around 1/5 of the price of an official one.
I don't buy that as a factor. Given that the OEMs overprice the parts that they have to compete with aftermarket suppliers for, why would they NOT overprice the parts for which they have no such competition?
Note that being unable to profitably replicate the part does not necessarily mean that the part is naturally expensive, or that the OEM already sells it at a reasonable price. The part could just as well be hard to reverse engineer and QA for a third party, or the effort to do that might not be worth it given unknown level of demand, etc. OEM can actually have a natural price advantage over third parties in such complex parts.
As was just pointed out, making the part isn’t a large fraction of the cost of a replacement part. So, they need to both make the part and handle the full logistics chain to undercut prices.
Aftermarket suppliers have even more of a logistical burden than the OEM. They cater to a smaller market, and need to set up manufacturing for the part (which the OEM already has). Yet they still can sell the parts for substantially less.
We have many industries of examples where this solved also by market forces as well
Cars as an example, the key here is to allow the market to MAKE replacement parts, and compete to selling them. Stop vendor lock-in
If I want to buy replacement part for my car I often have a selection of 3-5 different vendors making the replacement in addition to the OEM.
You can not tell me that appliances, electronics, etc are that much different from cars that similar solutions can not be found. Especially given that most of these things are just off the shelf parts that the OEM combines into a product anyway
Yeah - and the problem here is that there are many parts.
Getting a plastic wheel for my dishwasher's lower roller shelf is $12 from a third-party source (it's $16 from the manufacturer). It's like four grams of plastic. But the rarity of demand just doesn't make it make sense to keep in stock.
(That sort of thing has me halfway convinced to buy a 3D printer. I just don't have anywhere to put it yet.)
Good shout! The wheels are largely interchangeable but the wheel mounts on the basket aren't (and one of them popped free and melted on the heating element just this week!).
true, however the current trend is to lock down the parts and prevent companies from making replacement parts via the use of DRM, serialization, and other controls that have nothing to do with security, usability, or anything other than preventing repair
Hell even Paper has DRM now, see the Latest Dymo label printers
> That's the cost of that part, being delivered to the assembly line, in bulk quantities, at a regular, predictable order cadence from the upstream supplier
I am not buting this reasoning - the assebly line costs money to run, worker's time and salaries need to be paid, quality control and warranty to be done. A part sold by itself needs none of those things.
While you are taling to me about how difficult logistics of a $200 part justifies a 500% markup, i can buy a $3 led from China with free shipping. This doesnt add up
That assembly line's costs are amortized over the rate of production (high): that's the essence of mass manufacturing.
> A part sold by itself needs none of those things.
A part sold by itself needs so many more things!
Where do you store it? How do you organize it there? How do you keep track of your inventory? How do you re-order new inventory? How much do you re-order? How long do you typically have to store? How do you source substitute suppliers when your original goes out of business? How do you QC stock? Etc. Etc.
All of that for multiples of the part count that goes into a single model, because you sell more than one model.
You can buy a $3 LED from China (see sibling comment for economics on free shipping) because you're buying the current model / whatever version they feel like giving you.
"Part specs may be subject to variation" doesn't work so well with more complex systems.
"Where do you store it? How do you organize it there? How do you keep track of your inventory?"
I am sorry but these questions come across as extremely silly - this is not rocket science, even manufacturers of beer have to figure out these things, if you can't manage a warehouse, you would not be able to be any kind of serious manufacturer in the first place.
It is not as silly as it sounds. I am working for a big manufacturer (of products that don't require any spare parts) and the warehouse space is minimal, sometimes raw materials from the suppliers are unpacked and weighted directly on the production line, not going through any warehouse; the finished products are wrapped at the end of the line and loaded directly in the trucks, not going in a local warehouse.
That means if a new requirement appears to add something in the warehouse, space needs to be added. In some cases space does not exist around the plant, so you need to get some space in a warehouse somewhere else, most probably managed by a third party with higher costs, then integrate an inventory management software with that third party warehouse. This is already very complex for a manufacturing plant with zero budget for IT projects and the cheapest IT people needed to keep the lights on.
Wow, no one says you have to get a spare part to a customer tomorrow morning. Just grab one before it goes to assembly line, ship it with the actual completed machines to a distribution center where it will go to the customer from there. There's nothing "new," except at the beginning/end of the chain, just add a few more of those parts to the next order of them. If it will impact operations to take a few from the beginning, some of those spares will have to be delayed. That's ok, tell the customer 6-8 weeks to deliver a spare part. That was pretty standard shipping times when I was younger.
If you just "grab one before it goes to assembly line" this will likely have a huge impact on the assembly line. Factories put a lot of effort into managing inventory of material. Lead times on parts can often be in the months if not years. If there are unexpected shortages of parts and subassemblies, the hourly or daily costs of a line down can be enormous. Shipping one of something to an end consumer is usually a completely different supply chain than shipping containers full of finished goods to distribution centers which then go to retail. Taxes, tariffs, shipping methods, etc are all completely different. You can't just commingle things like this easily.
We once had to drive special parts for one car by taxi cab to the factory, in single figure quantities, to not let the line stop and pay the fine... "just in time" production can be hell...
This is generally because USPS effectively subsidizes international shipment. The same $2 LED shipment might be $10 DHL (and free shipping isn’t free, the seller is making their margins with shipping costs included).
So you allow the manufacturer to charge for delivery (based, on, say, some average delivery cost for the weight, rather then allowing inflated S&H costs to be a new profit centre rewarding unreliable items).
Or, if you really want to stamp down about it, you do not allow them to recoup delivery costs and that's their punishment for making an unreliable machine in the first place.
Yes, and in your perfect world - manufacturers know full in advance about part life? There are hundreds of parts that make up the build of material of an appliance.
This means simply that parts won't ship and service is only done at approved manufacturer facilities. OH wait...
> i can buy a $3 led from China with free shipping
International shipping is not even close to being a level playing field:
"Arcane rules established by the 144-year-old Universal Postal Union make it possible for a Chinese e-retailer to send a package across the Pacific to a customer in the U.S. at a cost lower than what an American competitor would spend to ship the same item to a neighboring state"[0]
If that's true, the weight of a spare part should correlate closely with its price, yet spark plugs are an order of magnitude cheaper than oxygen sensors.
There are a lot of factors in supply chain costs aside from weight. Order volume is a huge factor. If two parts have identical component costs and weights, but one is ordered in the UK say in the thousands per year, the end purchaser cost will be a lot lower than for a part where only a few people order one each year. In fact for the latter, it might not be possible to order it directly in the UK at all.
Right, and those aspects are expensive because they don't have economies of scale because they either don't really want people to use them too much, and if people do want to use them they'll squeeze them. They'd rather people scrap machines and get new ones. And even if I then swear off "unreliable" Hotpoint machines and go for Siemens, some Siemens customer will make the reverse trip, so they all profit together.
If they all had to provide all the parts at a reasonable cost, they'd figure out a way to get it done. I'm sure Siemens, say, can figure out a way to ship a part by part number efficiently, considering its already on a shelf somewhere.
And if you a company don't want to pay for that? Use a standard part. Now it's not your problem.
It'll never happen, but it's nice to think about as the world drowns in piles of ruined single-use equipment, while the money spent on replacing them flows endlessly corporate pockets.
That’s the thing: they’re already selling the service parts at a reasonable cost.
What’s “too cheap” in your situation is the highly automated, continuous conveyance, mass production line that can take in parts by the container load and pump out fully-functioning dishwashers for less than a week’s wages.
That there are a variety of OEM and third-party parts suppliers to choose from and when I buy appliance parts, I frequently find them to be “pretty what I expect them to cost as compared to automobile service parts”. This is not a monopolized supply chain.
The last appliance part I bought was the motor for my gas dryer. Several parts places had it. Amazon had the best price by a small amount and I got an exact fit OE motor in 2 days for $114. A year later, that price has soared to $109 and is now available for next-day delivery.
How much less do you think it should possibly cost to be able to order an exact fit ~10 pound, ~1/3 HP dryer motor on a Sunday for Monday delivery? $109 seems like an incredible bargain to me, even if Amazon and Frigidaire pocketed $20 each of pure, obscene profit.
Bosch/Siemens actually have really good website for buying spare parts and they sell them at reasonable prices even to consumers, and even for things that cost <50€.
Yes, and we all could understand say a 200 percent markup plus international shipping. And even more for a cheap part.
But they make it really hard to get the parts.
In 2010 my Fisher-Paykel dishwasher broke. I called the repair service.
They charged a little over $100 to tell me that it would cost DKK 6500 ($950) to replace the two broken water softener modules. I spent a long time time searching for a place to buy those modules. Eventually I found a place called Leeds Applicances (closed now) that would sell it to me for £68 + VAT + £20 shipping. I took me maybe 30 minutes to replace the modules, just a lot of connectors and tubes that had to be connected the same way.
Before that I had a dryer that started to make a horrible rattling sound. I refused to just replace the dryer and took it apart. I was some nylon wheel on the belt drive that was worn out. But no one was selling a replacement. I spent about a month complaining to the importer and in the end I went on my bicycle to the Zanussi importer in an industrial area outside Copenhagen and after waiting in their office for a long time I was allowed to buy this piece of nylon for $50. It probably cost less than $1 to produce and they had newer sold one to a consumer before.
A spare part does not need similar logistics or shipping - in the case of a dishwasher for instance the delivery of a dishwasher requires a 2-person delivery which likely costs c£60-£70 in the UK, while a motor would be sent through a parcel carrier for c£3.50-£5.
Sure, ordering and delivering all the parts separately and individually would be more expensive, but let’s also not pretend that selling and shipping spare parts is prohibitively difficult and costly.
> Why would a dishwasher need two people to deliver it in UK? Just one dude and a couple wheels is all I’ve seen needed in US.
Usually retailers will offer "room of choice" delivery in the UK for these sort of appliances, which means that the dishwasher will be delivered into the house which often requires a 2-person delivery. If you required an item such as a dishwasher to be delivered to a flat for instance, rather than just dropped off curbside outside a block of flats, that would typically require a 2-person delivery in the UK (See services such as DX 2-Man as an example of this type of operation).
Secondly, there is often a requirement for light assembly (i.e. simple installation, removal of packaging, plug in the appliance) which is usually a paid addition by the customer. As soon as you do this, it's often more effective to have all deliveries be 2-person rather than split up the delivery territories (although if you are going through a pallet network, depending on the item and service required, you may be able to split these).
If you don't need this and just want it dropping off outside the customers home (curbside delivery), the cost would usually be c£40 via a pallet network.
In the UK from most retailers this would be a 2 person delivery (and typically white goods form a large part of the volume of 2-man delivery networks).
A man with a van is £90 for a half a day. Loading up a hackney with 15 dishwashers from a warehou seee on the outskirts of a city is also probably £90.
To clarify, my costs are from a central distribution center to home (not some sort of local washing machine shop delivering to your house).
The prices I've given are pretty normal commercial prices for a large item delivery to anywhere in the UK (excl. some parts of Scotland).
I gave a 2-person price because I was assuming some sort of 'white glove' service would be required for this, i.e. not just a curbside delivery but there would be an expectation to deliver the item to the kitchen, including if the person lives in a flat for instance. If a 2 person delivery wasn't required, the price would be closer to £40 for a curbside palletised delivery these days.
You might be able to get 15 dishwashers in a van, but delivering to 15 customers in 4 hours is way beyond what is realistic for this type of delivery (you simply won't get the delivery density required). A typical van delivery cost from a regional hub would be c£25-£30, but then you also have to consider the trunking cost from the NDC.
(Logistics is my day job, which is why I have a good idea on the costs of pallet networks, van networks and 2-person delivery networks, all of which I have received recent quotations for or calculated the costs of)
With spare parts, you have to keep the machinery and the knowledge to produce spare parts around for a X years, or make sure your parts won’t degrade for X years, predict how many you’ll need, produce them up-front, and pay for storage.
That worked reasonably well when machines had fairly standard replacement parts. If your part doesn’t change for years, keeping manufacturing knowledge is almost free, and predicting the number of parts needed easier because of the law of large numbers (if you sell ten variants of a design, you may know you’ll need 100,000 ± 10,000 replacement widgets, but for each part that may mean 10,000 ± 5,000, so you’d have to stock 10 × 15,000, knowing you likely won’t need 40,000 of them)
However, current hardware production is very flexible. Making a part slightly different to slightly improve a design is doable (examples in electronics: ASICS, custom battery sizes, custom LCD panels). Do that ten times in a single design, and the resulting device is significantly better.
I think this kind of regulation will trigger a lot of innovation in hardware manufacturing, and may still lead to products that are (slightly) worse if you ignore repairability.
> Do that ten times in a single design, and the resulting device is significantly better.
Honestly, I would be very tempted by appliances/cars that said "we've been using these parts for 20 years, and expect to do so forever so replacement parts won't be an issue". I believe some European car makers did that very thing.
Yes, it won't have certain definitions of "better", but repairability is a feature.
New cars are bigger, uglier, use more fuel (due to size and excessive power), and are more expensive. New appliances do nothing other than have more cumbersome interfaces and spy on you. There's argument for heat pumps in things, but just have a standard chassis or 3 variants with enough space.
Give me a datsun sunny with standardized injerctors and a catalytic converter, then keep making the same thing with the same frame with a drop in standard 100hp electric motor and however many 12V 200Ah drop in lithium batteries I want to carry. If it's unsafe, add a roll cage, and a 5 point harness. If it's still unsafe lower speed limits, design better roads, and only let people who are highly trained drive.
Or a 250cc twin motorbike with 15 hp that weighs 110kg
Or a raileigh pusbike with a 3 speed sun gearbox, drum brakes and a brazed chromolly frame that will still be working after a carbon frame has turned to shards from UV or an alu or hi ten frame is cracked due to corrosion and work hardening and on its 10th drivetrain.
Or the same kettle or toaster or microwave that's been made for decades with simple dials and switches but without changing the shape for no reason or a byzantine menu to reverse engineer back to power and time (the only things that mattere and the interface often used in the 50s).
Make TVs a simple display with a standard mounting point for a standard power supply and a general purpose computer.
There are a ton of third-party parts companies--which do tend to be somewhat cheaper, albeit of probably more variable quality. So unless you assume there's some global conspiracy of spare parts pricing, you're probably seeing a reflection of a bunch of piece parts actually costing more than the assembled appliance/car/etc.
True, Sears had a great traditional operation with full pricing, well trained and paid employees, good service and sensible follow up support. However most people seem to want cheap appliances they can throw out and replace which is why Sears went bankrupt.
> You're forgetting that the spare part also needs similar logistics, shipping, support, etc. around it, so you would expect ordering one of every part separately to cost far more than ordering a single machine even before they put any further markup on it.
This seems like a problem that could be solved by standardizing the parts among multiple models (possibly between different brands), so if legally mandating availability of replacement parts encourages that, it might not be a bad thing.
Why even have multiple brands? Why not just have the government enforce a single manufacturer for each type of item and standardize everything? They could plan if all centrally and… oh wait.
Why have any rules about what the manufacturers must do at all?
Let them sell us autonomous cars for $1,000 which need a $5,000 subscribtion to drive. Oh, you want to put child i a car, the car won't start unless you add a child add-on.
Oh, you need to go to the hospital, because your wife is giving birth, that will be extra $5,000 one-time fee.
Ask any Detroit auto design shop and they’ll tell you an auto maker’s parts bin (parts they can throw into every new vehicle to avoid needing to set up more logistics pipelines) often hurts more than it helps in terms of improving on pain points in building and using cars; Tesla’s octovalve is the testament to what can be improved when you don’t have to use existing parts to fulfill a function with headroom for improvement in terms of weight and efficiency.
This makes total sense. Rewriting code is often easier than reuse. The purpose written code doesn't have to fulfill use cases that don't apply to it, it can make optimizations because of that. The old code doesn't have to start supporting use cases it was never designed for too, so it can stay simpler. Don't repeat yourself, but its ok to speak in original sentences rather than use somewhat applicable quotes for everything you want to convey. For physical parts the number of ways an old part might fail to meet new use cases seems vastly larger than in software, so I'd guess its even more applicable.
If you search appliance parts you’ll discover that’s already being done - the part for your dishwasher will fit fifty other dishwashers from a very surprising cross section of brands.
This is one of the reasons I still buy dumb appliances. I recently just more or less rebuilt my cloths dryer for less than $75, New element, new belts, new sensors, etc...
Of course the sheet metal frame, motor, and controls are the same but on a dumb appliance those rarely fail. on a "Smart" appliance those the replacement "smart" controls can be more costly than the entire replacement unit
3 years ago I was tasked with buying a cheap TV for an older relative. After spending an afternoon checking what's available, I realized virtually all low end models look the same and have the exact same menus.
Not terribly surprising but I didn't expect everything to be exactly the same across that many know and unknown brands
Not entirely true. Some manufacturers / more expensive product lines have access to higher quality panels. Furthermore anti-reflective coatings, backlights, and wide angle view coatings can all vary widely.
Yes, but the company that assembles the (eg., in my case) an oven is 30minutes away from my home, and the company that makes the railings for the trays is 5 minutes away, but the railing mechanism still costs 100eur.
Lets be real here, the companies want you to buy a new product, and expensive parts are just one of the parts of planned obsolescence.
There are also perverse subsidies at play. My dad is in manufacturing, and realized that he could buy a complete, assembled part from his Chinese competitor for less than he could get the raw steel involved in manufacturing it. I imagine similar skewing is part of the story for the dishwasher.
I have a two year old Bauknecht machine. Sadly realized too late the brand had been bought by the consumer-hating Whirlpool group. 600€ for a machine, that breaks exactly 25 months after we started using it. Lots of small plastic parts already broke in this time period as well, e.g. the basket.
It would be 180€ to get it repaired, spare parts are not available even aftermarket/Ali baba/... But then I know I'm going to need to call them once a year or so - so instead we buy a miele which is a higher initial price but longer lifetime in every test a d at least decent reparability.
If you bought a dishwasher one part at a time, how much more is it reasonable to expect for it to cost?
I think a $500 dishwasher costing $2500 if ordered one part at a time is reasonable. Your car is likely well over $100K if you ordered it one part at a time.
If you want to insist that the sum of the parts costs no more than the MSRP of the dishwasher, you won’t find the parts falling to 1/5 their current cost, but rather the dishwasher now listing for $2500 (and likely having frequent deep-discount sales).
That was maybe once true. If you're literally starting from zero today and buying new parts? I sort of doubt it.
(Though I don't really disagree that it's generally easier to swap out parts on a (home-built) tower computer than it is with most things because of standards.)
It's perfectly true today if you ignore the recent price hikes which happen under different forces (silicon shortage, crypto stuff). An OEM might be cheaper because they will put in lower quality stuff you'd never buy yourself (the absolute cheapest part that fits the bill, the cheapest motherboard, the worst thermal paste), and they have to cover extra services, warranty, building and distributing the systems, etc. I think you can still get cheaper and/or better systems by yourself.
Comparisons are a bit hard because (perhaps outside of some specialty--and more expensive--gaming systems) what you build yourself is arguably "better"/more optimized than a random HP or Dell box. At the same time, the percentage of people who care about optimization at that level is pretty small. I built/upgraded PCs for years and now I pretty much have zero interest.
But again to the basic point, it's certainly close to a wash which wouldn't be true with most things.
Admittedly it’s been a while, but the last I checked crypto-driven GPU scarcity made it much harder and more expensive to build a gaming PC than to buy premade.
Realistically, you can't even really build your own laptop from scratch in the sense of buying a case, motherboard, etc. OK--maybe someone offers this--but it's hardly mainstream. And you can buy a Dell desktop for ~$800 and I'm sure I could find cheaper deals elsewhere. No, it's not an optimized gaming machine but most people don't have any use for that.
There is value in building with a combination of new and used parts. Why do you need a new case each time you build a new PC. There may be cosmetic benefits, but an old case will rarely affect anything else. Likewise, I have a couple if bike frames laying around. I could pretty much build a bike to my spec and not bother with the expense of a frame.
Though bikes are another good example of something with a lot of standardization/interchangeability of parts. Most mechanical/electronic things around the house aren't like that to the same degree.
ADDED: I suspect people who say that it's cheaper to build your own PC are mostly thinking in terms of it can certainly be cheaper to upgrade a DIY system than to buy a new one off the shelf.
There are a couple of scenarios where you can possibly build cheaper. Consider when the purchaser is looking for certain components or to meet a particular specification. In those situations they would have to pay someone to build a custom system or pay the vendor to customize the system (in those cases the vendor frequently charges a premium).
Of course the big question is, why aren't household devices/appliances using standardized and interchangeable components? In many cases, it could probably be done. I suspect the main differentiator is consumer expectation. A significant number of consumers of bikes and desktop computers will repair, upgrade, and accessorize their purchase. Very few people will expect to do the same with their blender or television.
Many years ago, I believe late eighties, a documentary was made in Italy, sponsored by FIAT (basically to show how good was their new automated warehouse) when a group of people, members of an automobile club, built a Fiat 131 completely from the body buying everything through the "normal" spare parts channels, ordering parts as the rebuilding went on.
It came out that the built car costed more than 500% without counting any of the man work/hours.
And FIAT (at least here in Italy) was famous for having rather cheap spare parts (when compared to - say - Volkswagen).
Most probably the 500% is nowadays not enough, at least for cars.
You could probably build a decent chair with a saw and an axe and a tree if you had to. It may not be very comfortable or sturdy and if you didn't allow the wood to dry first it would probably break in a matter of months just from the wood shrinking as it dried, but if you had to you could do it.
I wouldn't need to build furniture with an axe because I have a decent woodworking shop in my garage.
However, what I'm saying is that your cost for just the tree (for the raw material) is greater than the cost of pre-made manufactured and even imported-from-Europe furniture. So you can't save money with DIY furniture building.
My father built a large sturdy shelf unit from reclaimed planks he sourced from left over ammo crates after the war. It can be done cheaply if you are concerned about functionality more than looks. Get some lumber and wood paint. First, you don't care about weight, easy assembly process and shipping costs, so you can use heavier materials, proper metal screws, profiles, brackets, etc. But you do need some tools, like a drill, jigsaw/circular, etc.
That's just bad accounting. "Reclaimed planks" aren't free materials any more than something I bought last week for $100 is free today. There's something called "opportunity cost." Someone who uses up $100 worth of reclaimed planks is spending $100.
Under the Iron Curtain it was quite popular to build whole car out of spare parts in the seventies up to early eighties due to rationing. It was significantly cheaper too.
How can it be a cash cow when everyone comes to the conclusion that it's not worth buying?
In any case, you've neglected logistics, which is at least complicated enough that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been stalling out on multiple fronts against a much smaller force (this not to denigrate the bravery or capabilities of the Ukranians.)
I'm coming to appreciate how far the devastation and misery of Ukraine are from most Americans' minds. It's probably the first news story I've followed closely since last year's attack on the Colonial Pipeline, but I've been completely absorbed by it since December. I don't understand how the story of the global American military presence can be obtained coherently through the national embarrassment that is leaving Ukraine to stand up, alone, for Western civilization. But it is hardly the first empire to be shown as hollow, and the collapse is all the cleaner (for the US) because the foreign military presence doesn't accompany foreign territories that will need to be shed.
Offering low cost parts cannibalises new sales. Over-charging on parts is a cash cow as you now sell more full price machines, the only cost is the decimation of the environment and waste of limited planetary resources .. but shareholders make even more money, so who cares /s.
I'm actually open to this argument for larger things that last longer and are less internalize-able, because the friction in the market starts to overwhelm its efficiency.
But dishwashers are not that expensive that you're stuck with them. Buying new, cost is less than most new appliances and similar to a phone, less than a laptop. The used market is so soft that, even in my LCOL area (with consequently tighter Craigslist market), I bought my 3 year old stainless steel dishwasher for $150. All this to say, you can bail on your dishwasher if someone starts selling one that is extraordinarily better than everything on the market.
As another thought exercise, you have apartment complexes or apartment buildings (working in hand with national or regional builders). These parties have the time horizon, large sample sizes, accounting capacity, and concern for costs to know the absolute best option for appliances in terms of how often maintenance is required and how much it costs. They're a large enough buyer, at least collectively, to constitute a market. Despite all this, the dishwashers in apartments where I've lived or visited seem exactly the same as the ones in friends homes. Why don't apartment complexes use low maintenance dishwashers? My suspicion is that they're complex machines with heaters (highest wear), pumps (high wear), and pressurized water in close proximity to electronics, built to a standard so they can be affordable in every US home.
But please, make it better. I like paying extra money for things built with engineer driven design.
It seems like your thesis is we can make them cheap, let's just throw them out?
What is it about sustainability that is wrong to you, why is pollution and resource wasting better?
Dishwashers to me seem quite simple (compared to say washing machines; just based on having repaired all my home appliances). No reason a dishwasher can't last a lifetime.
My mother's first microwave is still going, about 40 years old, meanwhile newer appliances last the mandated 2y warranty period then break very soon after.
We've been seduced by shiny new things and it's pathological for our species. Companies have played to it because those interested in only money have taken them over.
We're in for a World of hurt this Century as energy and resources shortages hit, I wonder if we'll learn.
The benefit of the assembly line, robots, consolidation into a factory, and salaries of people dedicated to the assembly process is obviously easily enough to account for this difference. That's why factories exist.
If you don't believe that mass production has benefits, you have to come up with some alternative explanation for the 20th century.
Maybe you should go into business to undercut this obvious cash-cow? I bet if you start with $10M and undercut the current suppliers, you could become a millionaire.
Do you think you can start a dishwasher business for $10M?
My preferred modus would be to buy a current manufacturer, then strip out the high paid execs and minimise the profits in the form of very cheap repairs.
Your whole attitude indicates that you are largely unaware of the shenanigans manufacturers have been pulling to cutoff supply of repair parts.
our taxes pay for customs to seize components of iPhones and file charges on behalf of apple for counterfeit goods. If you take your iphone, travel to china, take it apart there, and send to to the US by post, the customs will seize it as counterfeit.
Honest people are going to jail to preserve Apple's profits.
You also probably don't know about part serialisation and other efforts that mean that even if you product a compatiable part, the device will reject it.
This is the case with tractors and phones. I am not 100% up to date with dishwashers.
Your attitude indicates that you think dishwasher parts manufacturers are making excessive profits on repair parts somehow, since at least this post of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30662019
Why not go disrupt them and put some of those cash cows into your barn instead?
On phones, last weekend I replaced my wife's iPhone X battery with one from Amazon for $18.99 + $1.19 in tax and 45 minutes of very straightforward work. If that $20.18 repair to get an extra 2 years out of the phone is the result of excessive profiteering or protectionism on the part of Apple, I'm pretty sure I'm OK with it and don't need/want government intervention to "fix" it.
I could have sent taken it to Apple and gotten it replaced for $70, which also seems totally reasonable to me for a parts-and-labor repair to get 2 more years of service.
Yeah motors are expensive, but I have saved so many large appliances needing a minor component from the trash with a little basic troubleshooting and a site like appliancepartspros. So often, it's a sensor, a pawl, heating element, belt, or roller that's 1% of the machine's price. This is in reach of anyone with a few hand tools and the internet.
A repair company (always 3rd party now) will charge %50 of the machine's price for a trip charge, marked up parts, and labor.
Oooh yes, don't get me started on inaccessible little plastic sacrificial parts. Yes, having one part be sacrificial to protect the others is good engineering, but only if it's also easily replaced and inexpensive. If you can't get replacements or they're 3 hours of disassembly away, that's just planned obsolesce in a dress.
And the number of times I've broken a little plastic tab! How much can it cost to put a extra 0.5mm of plastic in the mould just there? What fraction of a penny was saved and now requires a whole new part, comprising probably at least thousands of times more material plus shipping energy?
Re: sacrificial parts, I recently had to rebuild a two-car wood (read: heavy) torsion spring garage door system.
The cleverest part was the plastic coupler [0] between the door-connected shaft and motor.
When the system originally locked up, the coupler broke. Consequently after restoring the system, I needed a $9 piece of plastic, rather than a $xxx new motor.
Made me sad that more modern things aren't designed with such value-protective degradation modes.
FYI motor couplings are not typically designed to fail as a method of protecting the motor. Overload protection is usually handled electrically, with fuses/circuit breaker which will remove power when too much load is applied to the motor (stuck door) or via controller board and load sensing.
Even better - just ship with a few extra parts slipped in. I’ve actually seen this - extra screws and clips right inside the cover just like extra buttons sewed into the corner of a shirt.
A lot of those plastic tabs work just fine when something is just made because the plasticizer is still present abundantly, then later, when it has evaporated the parts become brittle.
There is no cost savings associated with the size of tabs, for example. It's an assembly thing. Usually you want the easiest to assemble as labor and QA is expensive. Ease of disassembly has by comparison very little upfront value.
I had a motor go out on my dishwasher. When looking online it seemed common - apparently a shaft or ball bearing somewhere in it wears out in 2-3 years which makes it so it can't spin anymore. There were full instructions on how to replace this piece of the motor that costs a few cents.
That said, I noticed LG offered a 10 year warranty on the same motor, so I decided to buy a new dishwasher instead.
My friend bought a smart fridge from Samsung with 2 years warranty. After 26 months of usage thermostat failed. This fridge is purely electronic, without old-type thermostat that "clicks". Seller shop refused fixing it, Samsung quoted fix for more than the fridge cost 2 years ago. There it goes £1800 "worth" of more electronic waste.
My coworker damaged dishwasher seal, no way to buy new seal at all, could only be acquired from another dishwasher of this model. Had to give it for recycling and buy another one.
I just hope this doesn't happen to me, so I always do days of research online before buying a hairdryer...
Well,... "Samsung". There's the problem, right there.
I wanted to buy a new fridge a couple of years ago, my emphasis/overriding criterion being energy efficiency. I could get actual energy use stats (not mere "A*" or other bullshit "ratings", based on standard models of use) from every manufacturer I looked at, except Samsung. Noooo, Mr Customer, the best we can tell you is "A*". Well fuck that. Guess what make of fridge I didn't buy...
At least in Europe, all manufacturers have to produce a standardised format document specifying things like energy usage. This is how I worked out that a particular Neff model washing machine is the same as a Bosch one, just with a different fascia. Pricing difference at local stores was about 100 EUR between the two, but identical specs and identical "responsible company".
What is a bit of a pain is the standard changed in the last few years, so trying to compare an old energy efficiency label that specifies kwh/year and litres/year against one that's per-cycle is .. hard. They also changed the rating system, so what used to be an A-rated TV is now about a D or E rated one.
>They also changed the rating system, so what used to be an A-rated TV is now about a D or E rated one.
And what is also introducing confusion is that they are allowed to sell old models under the old energy label but new models have to apply the new label.
So you can have a 2020 model fridge labelled "A+++" but the more energy efficient model 2022 model that replaced it is labeled "D".
I do think the change was necessary because with every device being A++ at minimum, the rating system was largely worthless. Though since the label also includes power usage per year, that is a good guiding line for comparing across the rating change.
Stop shopping on Amazon or Consumer store. Go to a Kitchen Supply store, or for scissors look outside kitchen branded ones, nothing about scissors need to be "kitchen"
a Kitchen supply shop will have more than 2 models, some will have plastic but they will be over molded full-tang metal under them, then you can just get scissors designed for something other than kitchen use, lots are out there
Kitchen/carving scissors are a specific design with features (curved notch, semi-serrated, steep blade angle) for cutting up ie. a chicken not found on other scissors.
Funnily enough, choice was so limited specifically because I didn't want any plastic and I refused to consider the ones on Amazon on general principle, which ruled out the Newness ones and I didn't like the Grunwerg ones because I suspect those over-handles are sintered crap that's barely better than plastic.
So now it's a choice between the ones on Sinplastico, a Chinese brand and a handful of artisan "best of British" brands that were very expensive (and also generally have ostentatiously old-fashioned styling).
You could probably mod the fridge with a traditional mechanical thermostat. There are plenty of cheap ones available on the aftermarket. Ranco is a common brand, at least in the US..
That's what I said and did, put BLE temperature monitor inside with silica gels packed. Power fridge from TPLINK HS110 (smart power switch) and automate it using HASS.
I've seen an even more brutal approach at a friend - he shorted the thermostat and put a mechanical socket timer set to approximately 25% duty cycle - works good enough for a fridge, no one cares if it is 2 degrees off.
>Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
Obviously not, but that's how economies of scale, combined with planned obsolescence and rent seeking works.
That's how Apple who makes disposable earphones that last two years is worth trillions and Sennheiser who makes headphones lasting 20+ years is going bust.
It's not profitable making fair priced products that last forever or are cheap and easy to repair.
That’s why Apple gets to be worth $3T, but that’s not why people buy AirPods over Sennheiser. If they can make longer lasting fully wireless ANC headphones for not much more on the price, they’d be good competition for AirPods customers.
Which is why it should be required (if sustainable manufacture was deemed a bugger social benefit to profit).
If Apple had to make headphones that were either robust or repairable (or both, can you imagine), they'd find a way, if only to avoid losing money on replacing broken ones.
Yes, because if it wasn’t required, companies like Apple could make products that people wanted beyond the robustness and repairable aspects. By keeping all companies hobbled by the same regulatory requirements, Apple can no longer cheat with better functionality and aesthetics.
I think that back in the day before Sennheiser become the last man standing to produce robust and repairable headphones, they competed with other manufacturers of robust and repairable headphones on factors like functionality and aesthetics.
TL;DR: Nice strawman ya got there. Would be a shame if it burned down.
Could we at least make this comparison in good faith?
Apple is not a company that "makes disposable earphones". AirPods are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of its business. The vast majority of its products can easily last a decade or more and are recyclable after that.
Saying that Apple is worth trillions because of a side product like AirPods is ludicrous. Make your argument without this sloppy, inaccurate Apple-blaming.
Ohh come on... Apple requires them to be shredded, after which some of the base metals can be recovered but there is still a ton of waste in that.
> products can easily last a decade
As long as you are fine with them reducing your battery life to get you to upgrade.
Apple, and the carriers have lots of incentive programs design to get people to "upgrade" the phones and when using those programs those phones go strait to recycle (i.e shredder)
Recycle is the LAST RESORT for sustainability, remember the triad is "REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE" Apple only even plays lip service to the Recycle part, and want to prevent the Reduce and Reuse part by preventing / disincentivizing repair and resell.
You can look at the figures. Their most recent earnings statement[1] has “wearables, home and accessories” at 11.9% of their revenue. We don’t know how much of that is AirPods but I’d be surprised if it’s less that 50% given Watch and HomePod sales.
In my mind, if everything was open source or there were no IP restrictions, a lot of this stuff would happen automatically. Companies would tend to standardize on parts after a while as everyone would clone the good parts of everyone else. Open source 3D printers always have cheap replacement parts widely available.
These regulations are trying to use the state to correct for problems that in some cases occur because the state granted them monopoly protections for their IP. The state could simply not offer those protections to prevent a lot of these issues.
Wouldn't the manufacturers just take over, and only survive in the lowest cost place for manufacturing? The inventors/designers would get nothing and no one would want to do that anymore. What would be the incentive to share your open sourced designs?
Like it'd be pretty easy for one state-supported giant manufacturer to just build every single open sourced product, and sell it direct. The whole world would buy from this cheapest producer. No one else would get anything, and supply chains would become even more brittle.
Another way to think about it is if knockoffs were guaranteed identical to the originals, but at a lower price. Everyone would just buy the knockoffs. No one would want to make anything new anymore.
> As well as this on the ground report of a culture without IP restrictions:
The Chitubox people are the counterexample.
Because they exist in a situation without IP restrictions, they are trying to tie everything to subscription and add encryption to the harwdare in order to extract money.
And, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. My personal opinion is that you should be able to get paid for developing good software. However, without IP protections, people can just scarf up your work.
I see this from both the perspective of machine tools and electronic test equipment. Anything under $5K has shit customer support--deal with it. Anything above $25K generally has ok customer support. Anything in between gets crushed out of the market.
> It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400.
The heater pump when originally manufacturer costs £20 because it is done in lots of (tens of?) thousands and assembled in bulk by cheap labour, and shipped in a large container that costs not-a-lot of to move over an ocean.
The replacement part is stored by (potentially) a third-party company that ordered it for £30, by an employee who is paid £40,000 per year, in a warehouse that costs >£100 per square metre to rent (potentially for years), and when requested then has to be delivered by someone paid £20/hour, to be installed by someone paid >£50/hour (with a three hour minimum). And don't forget the VAT.
Perhaps some rental model could work, where appliances are not owned but rented. Although the renter would probably still be on the hook for breakdown due to mis-use and once mis-use is an excuse, there is no incentive to make things last.
What this could be saying is that it’s very inefficient to buy the parts in units. If you were to buy a thousand of these parts, as a manufacturer might, I doubt they’d each cost £100.
Sustainability-wise, parts need to have a significant mark-up. Otherwise:
1. People will either themselves bodge devices together, or get someone else to do so.
2. Companies will find it hard to sell new products if they can all be fixed easily. If the parts have a mark-up, they can be a good revenue stream.
Unfortunately, companies are greedy and still make stuff hard/impossible to repair while charging high mark-ups for what can be.
It's expensive because they have to manufacture that part specifically as a replacement and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it.
I can understand that some businesses overcharge for replacement parts, but otherwise it's also just as understandable that the price is a little bit higher for a part in a model they no longer actively manufacture for sale.
> It's expensive because they have to manufacture that part specifically as a replacement
Eh, what? No, they're manufacturing a lot of them to put in the machines already. They only have to manufacture a few more of them, not set up anything specifically at all.
> and then store it for x years sitting in a box until someone needs it.
That can't be all that expensive, considering the Ali Baba guys can sell a corresponding part for ten bucks.
You forget that car models change over time. People don't buy new cars every year. My car is from 2009, I doubt that all the parts on it are the same in a brand new model today.
I wouldn't trust an Alibaba/Aliexpress part when it comes to the mechanical bits of the car, myself. Not sure if you're American and without WoF/MoT but I'd only go with that stuff for unimportant stuff like trim.
You are free to open a company that operates to your standards and serve customers with similar demands. But why do you need to force your ideals on other customers?! There is only one answer to that: You think you know better what they want than they themselves which is a very sad world view imo.
Comments in the linked thread are spot on. Manufacturers would do anything to avoid abiding spirit of that law to keep their bottom line.
What's more depressing is "tech enthusiast" circle (eg. in reddit or hardware forums) will be more than eager to rationalize, defend and disseminate any weak technical excuse made up by manufacturers for keeping their anti consumer practices.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but have you ever worked for a company where you were involved with making physical things?
Making things is an incredibly difficult dance between electrical engineers, purchasers, manufacturers, sales and product managers, and logistics teams. I think that people who work exclusively in software often trivialize how difficult it is to choose how many of something to produce, how many extra pieces to keep around for repairs, etc., because they took some EE classes in school and they think that they basically understand the process of making boards.
The reality is the actual engineering is usually the easy part. The hard part is logistics, and it's not something that you can just outsource to a dedicated purchaser and be done with. Software people don't actually have something analogous.
For everyone that works in hardware, the last 2 years has been hell in terms of quickly redesigning things around parts availability, often stripping functionality entirely and reevaluating how it can be done generically in software without a certain chip. We make PoE devices and we can't get validated ethernet PHYs.
Basically, what I'm saying is this: as someone who sees how things are made, the idea that there's some guiding principle of being evil or some principle of maximizing overall bottom line at all costs and making shit products is just so far from the truth that it makes my head spin. Things suck because it's hard.
>The reality is the actual engineering is usually the easy part. The hard part is logistics
I disagree. It's the opposite. If you have a hard logistic problem to solve, there is a very large number of companies who can solve all your issue very quickly. Moving cargo around the globe, renting buildings, buying off-the-self industrial equipment, etc.. that's a problem that has been solved a long time ago. All you need is money and a few phone calls.
Designing a good product on the other hand is not something that gets a lot more complicated and most companies can't do it even with best efforts, good talents, and lots of cash.
Comments in the linked thread are what is annoying about nerd fights.
This is a good and necessary first step. Focusing on all the ways it could be circumvented isn't a rationale for not doing it, they are all just rationales for strengthening it.
Yeah, but tech enthusiasts typically prefer to stay in their comfy chairs, and in their favorite echo chambers, so they don't have any real world impact.
speaking for myself, not the OP - I am sitting on the ground, my armchair manufacturer went out of business and the padding turned into a brick when their license server went offline.
Anything that justifies it. You still see people claim that losing the headphone jack on the iPhone was "worth it" so it could be waterproof without port covers despite the fact phones with both already existed before it. So expect a lot of claims about how people NEED their laptop to be 1 cm thick, that by not having a removable battery it can have more battery, etc.
I still look to the Galaxy S5 Active[1] for a phone that puts to the lie the claims that smart devices need to entirely lose ports and functionality in order to be water resistant. Tidily enough it had all 3 of the so-called 'must go' features and was still water resistant.
1. MicroSD card
1. Headphone Jack
1. Removable battery
If it was possible in 2014 and the days of Micro USB, it's possible today.
IP67 is as "waterproof" / "immersion proof" as IP68. Both must withstand 1 meter immersion depth up to 30 minutes. The only advantage as far as I can tell is up to the manufaturer "The test depth and duration is expected to be greater than the requirements for IPx7": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code
Yeah. Bluetooth sound quality is perfect. Never ever drops out, has static, never sounds compressed either and you certainly don't have to consider what codecs and versions both devices support to get the best listening experience.
Is your MacBook battery easily replaceable or is glued in making it a danger to be removed by an amateur at home? And even if you never swap batteries how does having it removable effect you really?
Bluetooth sounds fine, but it can introduce latency that you wouldn’t experience with a direct connection. Which is fine for listening to music and even video calls are ok, but a minor proportion of the population working on music production will experience that latency. On a smartphone that’s a pretty rare use case, so it’s fine.
Batteries: I extended the life of my 2010 MacBook by swapping the battery and it was very easy. Apple is going to come out with kits for amateurs to do part changes themselves for the iPhone, where that part change will be harder (broken screen swap) than swapping out a MB battery.
Latency is extremely noticeable with some headphones for videos/games. My Bose QC buds are just completely useless for them. Other pairs I have are better but the Bose are music/call only headphones. Thanks for reminding me of that extra problem.
2010 MBP were far more repairable than the modern stuff. After that Apple started gluing down the batteries which required prying to remove.
Bluetooth is absolutely atrocious, every 2-way call over bluetooth is sampled down to absolute garbage because the meager bandwidth is halved and the codec in prehistoric
And I've never had crackly ass headphone jacks. Just works here.
Pull tabs are only slightly better. If the tabs break you're just back to prying off adhesive and the tabs do break if you're not careful.
And what are you going to do in 7 years when you're trying to get it working as a laptop for your kid or something and Apple tells you they no longer service that model as it's "vintage"?
Apple's vintage clock starts when they stop selling something. They sold the 6s until 2018. They rarely sell MBPs for more than a year so usually in 7 years they're done.
I'm glad you're currently well to do and can afford all new shit for your kids. Some people can't and sometimes a repair is the only option. Is it worth making repair considerably harder for a few extra mm of thinness and less than a hundred grams of weight? I'd argue no. Compare the repair of a 2010 MBP with one from 2016 and then tell me the 2016 one is easy.
On the flip side, headphone jacks can wear out entirely. And one of the advances bluetooth has over normal jacks is that it's now possible for headphones to have mics on them capable of answering calls. Sort of similar to wireless charging, its possible to wear out ports from overuse.
one of the advances bluetooth has over normal jacks is that it's now possible for headphones to have mics on them capable of answering calls
Headsets with mics on them did exist before bluetooth, and so did headsets with control buttons (source: my early-2000s portable mp3 player). The only thing bluetooth added to the mix is cross-device compatibility.
- Notebooks would become thicker and clunkier. They don't want that.
- Same for cellphones, added with things like less waterproof/humid resistance.
With that said - many of the most vocal "tech enthusiasts" consume a lot. These are the people that are passionate about consumer electronics, and will purchase new phones/laptops/TVs/etc. every 1-2 years. So I'm not really sure why they'd care too much about phones etc. potentially not living their maximum lifespan.
There are “tech users”, like myself, who buy a quality product and run it until it becomes unsupported. I keep iPhones about five years, which requires a battery replacement.
I’ve replaced several iPhone batteries myself - I have the necessary tools, including the opening tool. Outside of it being a fiddly job involving miniature connectors, I find that the replacement batteries don’t last as long as the OEM ones, even when bought from iFixit.
Also, the battery is glued to the back shell, and the release tapes usually break, because the hot rice bag isn’t as hot as the heated vacuum stage that Apple uses. Then you have to work a monofilament under the battery, which is an annoying three hand job, if you don’t have the stage.
Apple gets $69 to replace the battery. Given the above, that’s reasonable. But, the nearest service is an hour away. The real decision is the personal time and delay to get to and from the service place (twice, or wait around for a couple of hours) vs spend an hour to do it myself.
If the battery was OEM and came out easily, I’d do it myself, every time.
There was no glue, you just popped out the back panel and took the battery out with your fingers in 5 seconds.
On the other hand, it did have a plastic cap on the micro USB port which you had to open every time in order to charge it. I'm not sure if this was a limitation of micro USB (or whatever the Samsung-specific extension next to it was) - modern phones with open USB C ports seem to have no problem being waterproof.
IP67 is as "waterproof" / "immersion proof" as IP68. Both must withstand 1 meter immersion depth up to 30 minutes. The only advantage as far as I can tell is up to the manufaturer "The test depth and duration is expected to be greater than the requirements for IPx7": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Code
Phone replaceable battery; a rubber gasket and 3-4 screws - waterproof up to 5-6ft.
Though I guess you could get away with a cheaper clip based approach... Like some cheap Chinese ham radios. I had a friend drop one in a lake, then pull it out (maybe 3ft deep). You wanna know what part broke? The speaker - it was a bit muffled, but that's due to probably water penetration and pressure on that membrane.
It really is shocking how many people think it's "hard" to waterproof a small battery if it can be removed. Tupperware is water proof, doesn't cost a lot to make. Why would a battery encased in plastic be any harder? Especially for multi-billion dollar companies who can afford to scoop up some of the best engineers and have them work on consumer devices.
As someone who bought a Framework to try to support a better model, my #1 complaint about it by far is that the battery is essentially worthless. It maybe gets 3 hours of use on a full charge, and 9 hours while closed and hibernated.
I returned a M1 Macbook Air to get the Framework instead, so essentially, I've now paid 50% more to get a laptop with almost infinitely worse battery life when idle and 3-4x worse battery life in use. It's also slower, heavier, thicker, and has a screen resolution that a lot of apps don't know how to use well.
At this rate, I better be able to replace the battery because I'm having to do a full charge/discharge cycle multiple times a day if I'm not just constantly leaving it plugged in.
I love the idea of it in theory, but it's essentially a worse laptop than even the decade-old Apple laptops that did have replaceable batteries.
I don't know, but whatever they did has made for a decidedly worse laptop, and I assume they didn't set out to make a laptop that had an essentially unusable battery. I'm assuming good intent on their part that this is the best laptop they could make with the parts/design constraints. I'll be happy if the v2 of it is better though.
Is it the battery, or the power usage of the laptop? The battery is a pretty physical thing, storing that many Watt-hours. If you have a 100 Wh battery, Apple uses 10 W and Framework 50 W, then you’ll get a 5x difference on the same battery.
Does it matter? It's not as if I designed this laptop myself. I had 2 options. If you can only put a battery in your laptop that holds X W/hrs of power and you sell it with a CPU and other components that demand enough power to drain it in 3 hours, then that's a design flaw.
At least unless you put a big glaring "This laptop has 3 hours battery life" on the purchase page. Instead, they just repeatedly say how many Watts the battery holds and leaves you to assume that it's such a big number that it'll have great battery life.
The Framework and M1 Macbook Air weight the same at 1.3 kg, and are both 16 mm thick, according to the specs that I can find. Did it really _seem_ thicker and heavier to you?
I'm a little surprised, but the weight being roughly the same makes sense. The thickness is a little deceptive. I think they're both measured from their thickest point, but the Framework is essentially a solid brick with only a slight taper on the front and back edge, while the Air tapers to nearly a point on a number of sides. For reference, Apple lists the Air at:
Height: 0.16–0.63 inch (0.41–1.61 cm)
So they're the same thickness at their thickest point, but I'd guess that the Air has much less of the laptop at that thickness. I'd be curious about a volumetric comparison.
It's not the battery size which is the issue here, but how much power the hardware uses. The capacity of the battery of the Framework is 55W, while the capacity of the battery of the M1 MacBook Air is 49,9Wh. So apparently Framework managed to fit a larger battery in a equally large case, without the need to glue it in.
To my point above, I'm pretty sure the Framework case is quite a bit larger in volume than the MBA case, so it's not really apples to apples there. Perhaps it's just that the Intel processor in the Framework is a massive energy hog (likely), but even my old Intel Macbook had easily 2x the battery life.
In the end, I wasn't even trying to say that the battery size mattered. If anything, the fact that it's a bigger battery almost makes it worse. They crammed more battery in and it's still a drastically worse user experience when it comes to everything about the battery.
Some of this is definitely because they're having to buy worse parts to try to make sure they're replaceable, and maybe that would improve if more places made parts for it. Maybe I could upgrade to a more efficient CPU/Mobo in the future, or a better battery, but then what do I do with the old one? I'm still contributing to e-waste.
I'm using Linux and Windows. I regret to inform you that neither helps all that much. I've even spent a decent amount of time shoving values into config files to try to improve things on Linux.
I like that everyone just assumes I'm using Linux. But even my 2017 Macbook on Intel was doing better than this, and the issues I'm seeing with Framework occur on Fedora and Windows essentially equally.
The 2017 MacBook MacBook with just 1 port and a battery 8/10ths the size of Framework but with a CPU that is under a quarter the wattage in TDP? (7 vs. 28W?). And has a lower screen resolution (yes it matters) and has a manufacturer custom tweaked OS?
Correct? And yet, with all of that, that old Macbook was a more capable laptop in almost every way than the Framework I have now. It doesn't matter that the Framework has a better CPU or monitor if it dies halfway through even a short flight. And all the extra resolution only helps so much if both Linux and Windows barely handle the resolution/aspect ratio well.
The ports are great - I love that about the Framework, but having an HDMI port only matters so much if the battery is so bad you can't even show a fully movie on a TV with it not plugged in to power (and with a fairly beefy power transformer at that.)
I'm not arguing the Framework isn't more powerful on paper, but functionally, I just can barely use it. I was on a trip the other month and walked to a coffee shop in the morning to do some work and lost 20% of my battery charge on the way to the shop with it just in my backpack. Every minute using it I'm aware of how fast it's discharging in a way that literally no other electronic device I've owned in a decade has made me think about it.
Just ask for someone else to replace your battery, these laws wouldn’t prevent that.
Making better designs to allow for easier to replace batteries isn’t crazy hard either, current designs already tend toward that. This proposal seem to only mandate that “users should be able to exchange them with commercially available tools.” so it leaves a pretty wide array of options for the manufacturers. They could probably even make their own custom tools available if this is what it takes yo keep phones thin and sturdy as you want them.
Is 0.9mm really worth throwing away so many phones?
It's important to remind ourselves that the metals in these phones are mined in part by people with very difficult life conditions, often so bad that they die on the job. We ought to be able to repair what they contributed to build instead of asking them to mine yet another pound of metal just so we can save 0.9mm. This will also reduce need for mining, which creates all sorts of pollution.
> Is 0.9mm really worth throwing away so many phones?
Quite the opposite. I want larger/heavier devices. Make my phone a bit thicker and heavier and sturdier, please. I feel the same about a laptop. I recently got a new laptop, and the flimsiness of high-end machines was a turnoff. The salesman kept saying "but it's only X lbs, so much lighter" as though that was a selling point. But I want strong hinges, large replaceable batteries, etc. I could care less about 3 vs 7 lbs.
You don't have to throw those phones away right now. Apple can easily replace batteries for you. The consumer doesn't need to be able to do this with a bigass Philips-head screwdriver in order to accomplish this goal.
If any third party repair shop can replace it, that'd already quite good. But manufacturers have been known to make it impossible even for 3rd party repair shops to do anything, or at least to make their lifes as hard as possible. That's a no-no.
You could do this #2 screws which are tiny, use 3-6 of them around the edge. Add a rubber gasket. And you have a water proof battery that is replaceable in under 5 minutes with a precision Philips head (aka those little screwdriver heads you get with the multi-head screwdriver kits)
This is one of the central supporting arguments for government regulation: customers won't pick what's better for society, but rather according to their own short-term needs. Since customers don't care, companies don't either (save those that use their environmental concern as part of their marketing...I suspect most of those measures don't really move the needle, though). That leaves only government. I wish it weren't this way, but I can't argue with the evidence.
I guess cars would be slightly lighter and faster without seatbelts or airbags.
Or planes would cost slightly less to fly if they were not required to carry safety equipment.
That’s exactly because people like you don’t give a shit and corporations will do anything to save/make a buck that laws and regulations like this have to be made and enforced.
I interpreted OPs sentiment to be an example of consumerism. Individually, sure, “some degree” could be considered meaningless, but collectively, the sentiment drives supply and production decisions, so no, I don’t think it’s a spurious or meaningless assertion to make.
His point was very clearly about each individual and not cooperative behavior. And I deny that "each individual" doesn't care unless "to some degree" is used to support degrees so small they are approximately nonexistant
I have never seen appealing to personal responsibility drive change at a large scale. Like all creatures, humans are driven by a balance of incentives and disincentives. If you want to drive change, systemically alter the balance. I think the approach of the policy discussed in TFA is aligned with this view.
I’m not sure exactly where we our disagreement lies, but I think it’s a mistake to dismiss small degrees of sentiment as those small degrees manifest as purchase decisions, which collectively manifest as multimillion dollar industries that are supported by those individual actions. Additionally, asserting that someone either cares or doesn’t care and that there’s not some continuum is a false dichotomy.
I agree that systemic changes are important. However, I disagree that personal responsibility cannot drive sufficient behavior. Look at individuals recycling.
But we're talking about this line of discussion. Which was sparked by someday saying they didn't care and no one did. I objected to the latter part of that. It's bullshit that no one cares. There are ethical vegans and people who do all kinds of things because of personal responsibility.
That makes no sense because people won't buy cars without seatbelts or airbags - and if they do, it's them dying, which they should have the freedom to do.
It’s not only the owner of the car dying. It’s also the passengers who may or may not have had a say in the decision. Never mind the cost to society as a whole from medical bills resulting in these preventable injuries, the psychological trauma for survivors/witnesses, or the effect of orphaned children growing up without parents.
I'd say you're dead wrong here - just look at the pushback against seatbelts when the laws were introduced. Look at the devices on sale, today, to defeat seat belt alarms.
Regarding your second point, that's also objectively incorrect. When accidents happen, passengers, especially backseat passengers, become projectiles that cause additional injuries or excess deaths for other occupants. It's not just the dude not wearing a seatbelt dying, it's also the people around them.
Don't you worry, if we keep using the planet like we currently do, and like you do by saying you don't give a shit, then we'll all die soon enough because of our lack of respect for our environment — lack of access to clean water will hit loads of people in the coming decades.
Either that or we come up with laws that keep us competitive without destroying everything around us. I hope that's what Europe will do and I will support regulation that takes a tiny bit of comfort away if it makes us more resilient in the face of climate change and geopolitical difficulties.
Whether you give a shit or not isn't important. Regardless what you personally think, a law is accepted if it's acceptable. And most people will think "OK, I get that we can't continue to throw away phones and keep using some countries as slaves just because we want the latest iPhone now". Just like people in Europe accept to pay more taxes than in other places of the world because we get that solidarity is important.
I don't understand. Are you saying that the government should do whatever they want even if it goes against what the majority of the population wants? That is everything but democratic.
And you do realise that no countries have complete democracy? Even Switzerland with their many referendums doesn't put every decision to a democratic vote. Partly for practical and pragmatic reasons, but also because some things are best not decided by the masses.
The government frequently makes everyone do things they would rather not do because the aggregate result is good. And the results of the collective action make everyone happy to the point that the law is supported. That's the basis of all tragedy of the commons based laws.
The clear point is people that don't "give a shit" about the environment or their fellow people are not the majority and so the government should continue to make environmentally lead decisions regardless of the existence of sociopaths.
You can have both thin, sturdy, and replaceable batteries.
It really isn't that hard. Maybe a few extra days of design and development by a team of engineers. If that... Once you come up with your preferred design, it more or less can be replicated to every other similar device.
> I agree with your sentiment overall, but “a few extra days” is pretty unrealistic. Probably a few extra weeks at best.
Still not a problem: The examples upthread of phones from many different manufacturers that had replaceable batteries, headphone jacks, and card readers and were watertight a decade or more ago show that those weeks have already been invested and paid for.
I have a contrarian view on this. I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues. If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better then it’s choice of creator, maker and hacker. Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should have a choice. This kind of constant interference from EU burocrates without understanding technical details is what led to completely pointless “accept cookie” disaster all over the Internet that has already cost billions of dollars collectively while not benefiting anyone.
> Consumer should be voting with their wallets and they should have a choice.
I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice gets us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and brain damage.
Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?
tbf, gp does explicitly mention "health issues" as the exception where regulation is warranted
personally I would add "environmental impact" to the list of things that justify regulation which does cover battery/electronics reuse, but then making something reusable doesn't actually mean most folks will bother
"Environmental impact" is very broad - you can argue it to cover almost anything.
I think this the main problem: do you trust a bureaucracy(is. non-technical people working in good faith to make rules for the society) to understand the implications of products or do you trust the manufacturer to do the same. In my opinion the bureaucrat can have good intentions, but lacks technical knowledge, while the manufacturer has the technical knowledge, but has incentives to disregard safety.
In my opinion the manufacturer and the bureaucrat are the same thing. The bureaucrat’s chief priority is to get re-elected, not to make the environment better or cars safer. The manufacturers priority is to make a profit. Sometimes their goals align with the interests of the public but a lot of the time they don’t.
Both have incentives to undermine or promote public safety and both have different avenues of accountability.
But big corporate is a bureaucracy, upper-management people making decisions are not engineers and it's driven by political competition between different bosses jokeying for positions
>I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice gets us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and brain damage.
Nailed it. Meanwhile, there has never been an experiment with government intervention that has failed. For example, Agent Orange only existed because of consumer choice, as you astutely imply. So your point is airtight and not full of holes from every angle.
>Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?
What's the ETA on magical government regulation fixing these problems?
I know how to fix corruption using government regulation - what if you have a dictator that decides who can take money out of the country and if they should invade Ukraine? Oh, wait..
No. The cookie disaster is because companies are making it a disaster. You're not required to ask consent for cookies used for technical purposes, such as managing user session.
The consent is only required for tracking cookies used to sell your data. So if you don't track your users, then you don't have to the pop-up.
I hope the EU comes down really hard on the companies deliberately making opting out of tracking difficult. A few billion dollar fines and those pop-ups requiring me to manually untick 300 different trackers will be a thing of the past.
Companies have always had to ask for permission to store cookies. The user / user’s browser decides whether to allow them, how long to keep them for, which sites will be allowed to access which cookies.
This should have been / should be fixed on the user end.
Fixes were attempted on the user end decades ago. What did companies do? They ensured the end user was flooded with browser initiated cookie requests. Notice a parallel with the current situation?
Browsers now use better approaches, but nothing is guaranteed when web developers try to circumvent the protections because they cannot accept that no means no.
Browsers rejecting cookies just leads to the website displaying a popup to please enable cookies or else you’re not allowed to see the content. That’s actually even less user-friendly.
I bet Americans love picking a $80,000 hospital bill over a $90,000 one.
Government decisions, done well, go far beyond what voting with one’s wallet can. Oftentimes the consumer is just squeezed out of the equation and everyone’s price will follow.
One company decides to do away with replaceable batteries and you will say "let the consumer vote with their wallets." Then everyone does the same and the user can no longer vote.
What we get is instead a mountain of waste that everyone has to pay for, indirectly, forever.
What governments need to be concerned about are the things where the public good can't be managed by the market forces. People can't be expected to look at minute details of every single thing that's part of their lives. Also if choice is restricted because, for example, every maker does X thing, then people can't really vote with their wallet, because there's no alternative. I recognize that this kind of control is not flawless, but I take it, considering the alternatives we have seen so far in history.
That's the key point. Since earth will not start charging directly for any environmental costs occured by its exploitation we need other rules for dealing with this. Market forces alone do not account for the price generations after us will have to pay for it.
The only fault the EU has for the "accept cookie"-disaster is, that it didn't make tracking illegal and even bigger fines. It is only the fault of the companies that want to track us, not of the EU
Indeed. The cookie disaster is because the EU is being too nice. Of they actually brought down the hammer we would see a much nicer internet landscape.
I'm always all in for government regulation, as long as those regulations are in the benefits of the common man.
It is indirectly due to EU's regulation. Average user doesn't care about your nuanced take, people around the world, billions of times have been annoyed by the cookie banner. If anything, the GDP lost due to this annoyance on a daily basis is probably in the millions if not billions of dollars.
I worked in ad tech for 6 years, specifically in cross device retargeting. I assure you, the loss of privacy direction we were heading in was far worse. The cookie banners are annoying and broken, but at least they represent a government starting to think about privacy.
I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues.
I’ll agree, with one caveat - governments MUST price in externalities appropriately.
In the case of batteries in things like cell phones, that externality is excess waste and more mining of raw materials. There should be taxes applied somewhere in the supply chain to force manufacturers/consumers to manage that waste and reduce mining.
The disaster is caused by the implementation not the law.
This is needed in the US too. I just bought an electric toothbrush to replace a very old one. My old one is 10+ years old. Has easily replaceable batteries. New one? Nope! Manual says if battery doesn’t hold a charge, remove the battery and recycle the device. Removing battery literally destroys the device.
There are videos on YouTube that show the battery is literally a Panasonic generic one. Wanna bet if this new brush can be used for 10+ years?
How would they maintain a water proof seal if they allowed for a user replaceable battery? Wireless charging allows the battery to be charged without allowing for any gaps in the toothbrush, but achieving water proofness disallows letting the user take it apart and still have to considered to be in working condition.
It's a shower proof seal for a toothbrush, literally just need an o-ring, you know like the one that keeps the water in the pipes. The parent said the old one had a replaceable battery and worked for 10 years, seems like they had already solved the water ingress issue.
Yes, but you never used those old style electric toothbrushes in the shower right? An O-ring would just confer water resistance, not water proofness. You couldn’t really submerge it and expect it to continue working. There is a huge difference between hermetic sealing an an O ring or a gasket.
As a child, I had a $20 plastic submarine that was powered by AA batteries. It could sit at the bottom of a pool for days on end, without water ever getting into the battery compartment of the engine module (which was sealed with a rubber o-ring).
I bet there are hundreds of counter-examples to your claim that water-proofing with an o-ring is an engineering challenge of the utmost difficulty.
I washed my old toothbrush. It gathers toothpaste gunk if not properly washed. It worked just fine for a decade. The motor finally gave up.
No way is this new tooth brush going to last me 10 years.
And people making excuses - do you know that kids electric tooth brushes have replaceable batteries? Shouldn’t that be a bigger problem? Here’s the kicker - kids electric tooth brushes don’t have replaceable brush heads.
> How would they maintain a water proof seal if they allowed for a user replaceable battery?
So many things are water proof and user serviceable: Piping, engines, transmissions, water cooling (for pc or car) and those electric toothbrushes that have replaceable batteries.
This isn't a technical problem. We figured out how to make things water tight a long time ago.
None of those things are consumer products the size of an electric toothbrush. The old electric toothbrushes simply couldn’t be submerged or used in the shower at all, they were just water resistant.
GoPro has replaceable battery, sd-card, charge-port, hdmi-port, 3x microphones and a replaceable lens. It is smaller than a toothbrush and can be submerged.
Further up in the thread here, there's a comment that people will rabidly defend manufacturer's horrible decisions with false arguments. I think your comment is a perfect example of that.
A toothbrush is cylindrical, like a pipe. We know gaskets exist. A threaded cap on the end with an o-ring would suffice to allow easy access to the internals while keeping even pressurised water out.
In fact, the majority of electric toothbrushes fail due to water entering the head end, and they don't have a good seal there.
> Further up in the thread here, there's a comment that people will rabidly defend manufacturer's horrible decisions with false arguments.
That in itself is an incredibly ideological remark. "These arguments are false/invalid/insincere! There is no cost/manufacturing/reliability/usage benefit to completely sealing a toothrush, gaskets/o-rings/re-welding are just as good!"
Ya, I get it: you'll make us buy the toothbrushes that became outdated 10 years ago through some sort of top-down government regulation, and we will grudgingly like it because all of our arguments otherwise for preferring the newer things are invalid.
You seem to be totally stuck on insisting, against incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that waterproofing small electric gadgets while still retaining repairability and user-maintainability is some huge insurmountable problem. Even in the face of myriad examples of cheap, reliable, long-existing solutions.
Why is that; where does it come from? Is it some weird fetish you have, or what?
How do submarines work if you put some door for people to enter in, or how do submarines can fire torpedo without getting flooded? The answer is some engineers found a way to do it, there are videos and articles that will explain it if you are really curious and not trying to find the most stupid excuse possible (there are many electronics with replaceable batteries that work under water)
Aren’t you just making my point? If they have to get a reactor out of a nuclear submarine, they have to cut the whole thing open. Engine work is either done inside shell is cut open and they just reweld it back. It isn’t cheap at all.
> you are really curious and not trying to find the most stupid excuse possible
This sounds like you are trying to make a Reddit comment rather than an HN one.
>Aren’t you just making my point? If they have to get a reactor out of a nuclear submarine, they have to cut the whole thing open. Engine work is either done inside shell is cut open and they just reweld it back. It isn’t cheap at all.
Nope. My point was that you can have things in hyper hard conditions, underwater at high pressure and salt and you can still say shoot torpedo.
Do I need to send you video proof that tooth brushes with replaceable batteries exists or you can google it yourself? My son has one that is almost 10 years old too , it uses 2 AA batteries , brand is Oral-B .
It is quite trivial to make it able to be easily disassembled while also making it waterproof. A rubber gasket on the bottom with a few screws would work just fine.
Waterproof mechanical watches have been a thing for over a century now. They are small, serviceable and have no glued parts. It unfortunately seems the knowledge of watchmakers past hasn't made it into the phone industry yet (same for smartwatches, sadly).
Such knowledge had made it there: waterproof phones with headphone jacks and replaceable batteries did exist; examples are mentioned in the thread. People are just pretending it has been forgotten while in actuality deliberately ignoring it.
No it just creates alert blindness. Most people barely understand what a cookie is. I was part of a team implementing cookie banners, and we were looking really hard for the best wording. But it didn’t matter because in user tests 75% of users were unable to tell us what was in the box. Most assumed it was an ad before reflexively closing it.
> I really don’t think governments should be making technical decisions for the product design unless it directly impacts health issues.
It directly impacts long term health issues at a global scale, through e-waste and carbon footprint. In your book this should totally be a governing body decisions.
Where is the sense in greenwashing yourself about recycling your lightbulb when it was made 6000 miles away, and added more CO2 emissions than manufacturing it end-to-end?
The original article (linked to in German) pointed out that the main problem was that used batteries did not get recycled to an enough extent, and therefore battery manufacturers today depend too much on imports for their raw materials.
In other words, the new proposed rules were intended to benefit primarily theindustry in the long term, not necessarily the consumer.
Product design departments may not think farther than the next product, but their higher-ups should be concerned.
The solution is not replaceable batteries but better way to recycle electronics. How about if we have separate bins for electronic recycle available to everyone? How about people get paid to recycle electronics? The beurocrates are generally not good at solutions or ideas which is why they make up “accept cookies” laws.
This also reminds me how people are blamed in 3rd world countries for throwing the trash on street. The solution is to give people garbage bins and have garbage trucks pick them up. No one likes to throw trash on street. But no politician there has managed to thinks of this as solution yet. Burocratic solution is levy taxes, fines and have celebrities clean street for a photo in press.
Voting with one's wallets is about as helpful as trying to boycott a global corporation. If it was any effective the cookie banners wouldn't exist anymore.
> If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better
I don't think I've ever used a single product that is better for using fixed batteries. Even the size is arguable; if hearing aids can have replaceable batteries then so can Airpods.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. Nowadays, I look at the planned obsolescence and continent of floating plastic garbage in every ocean, washing up on every beach, and choking every river, and I'm think "we fucked this planet up and we can only fix it if we regulate the hell of this stupid for-profit market."
What about the health issues that takes decades to unfold, or those of future generations?
The german constitutional court (and IIRC the dutch one?) ruled that any govt action will also have to account for the "right to future" of current and coming generations. Trashing our planed (literally, in this case) doesn't square with that.
This kind of "constant interference" from the EU is very welcome on my part and on the part of anyone who has spent a bit of time thinking about sustainability, pollution, and generally the question of "how do we keep a planet worth living on?" Your borderline-religious (borderline because it lacks a moral backing, it seems to mostly do away with morality altogether) dismissal of "interference" is exactly what got us into this mess.
If manufacturers need regulation to correctly protect consumer health, what makes you think they will act in favor of the environment or repairability?
GDPR may be one of the best things that has happened to internet privacy. If websites wouldn't track your every move, they also wouldn't need to put up a cookie banner. In fact, the EU is the only power that actually puts up a meaningful fight against Facebook, Google and co's rape of the internet.
I think it's extremely arrogant of you to assume that laws like GDPR were just made a bunch of bureaucrats without "understanding technical details".
You might be right but I have a friend to worked at Apple that would claim Apple could only make their phone smaller by building in the battery. He didn't seem to notice that Samsung built phones with just as many features with a replaceable battery.
This will only work in an extremely rich and well education population like Switzerland or Norway. In many places the consumer doesn't have a choice or time to do the research against the advertising and PR of a large corporation.
I’m not sure about anything around this story, because in good HN tradition, the original link is to some guy’s 5 second summary of an article in a language I can’t read. But it doesn’t seem implausible to me that government regulators could have overlooked important technical factors while pursuing a politically advantageous agenda.
> I’m not sure about anything around this story, because in good HN tradition, the original link is to some guy’s 5 second summary of an article in a language I can’t read.
So widen your fucking horizons and learn a few languages. Being uneducated to start with is one thing, but staying uneducated is a choice. (At least in most places; it's mandatory only in very few jurisdictions.)
> But it doesn’t seem implausible to me that government regulators could have overlooked important technical factors while pursuing a politically advantageous agenda.
Oh, yadda yadda. You had proven your parochialism already.
I'll agree it's hard not to have mixed feelings about it.
On the flip side, every charged with a mini-USB or USB-C for a reason.
And internally, most electronics use standard battery sizes anyways, AA or AAAs.. I'm not a subject matter expert, but looks like they are just packaging high quality rechargable batteries inside a device.
For innovators they could simply apply a fee, that would allow companies like Apple to do whatever they want, so long as they (or their customers) pay.
I agree. And there are lot of products that I don't WANT to have a crappy three-cent plastic door on, which will inevitably break, just so I can replace a battery that I will never, ever need to replace during the normal lifetime of the product in question.
Those cookie banners at least force companies to show what they were actually doing.
What it did is exactly what you suggests, giving consumers the choice.
Now, how can a consumer vote with its wallet?
Are you able to tell the whole environmental, social and impact on wars of any device you buy? Personally I can't.
I also think that making the end user the sole responsible for the impact of the whole chain action is horrible. This is exactly what the ad with the fake native american crying about littering in the us was about. Let's company introduce an insane amount of plastic in the environment with no idea how to re-process it once used, the sole responsibility of the pollution will be the last person in the chain: the consumer.
It brings me to the last point, isn't it's the role of a government elected by the people? To represent them and balance the power?
If governments didn't force people or companies to do anything then they would be allowed to do everything.
You're welcome to draw up a table which surgically defines what should be regulated or legislated, and what shouldn't. I'll just drop by later to tell you how alarming your assessment was.
After all who's the government to tell companies not to put asbestos in your walls or lead in your water. I'll be honest, every time someone complains governments shouldn't regulate I wonder if they realize they might be alive because of that.
There is a pretty broad spectrum here. Both of the examples you cite are clear cases of public health and regulation followed discovery of damage. There is no such danger or clear public safety case for batteries which is why it feels like over-reach: regulation based on preference rather than fact.
> If governments didn't force people or companies to do anything then they would be allowed to do everything.
And that's okay. If consumers didn't like their products then they would stop buying them. iphones don't have replaceable batteries but people keep buying them because they don't see that as important. There are phones with replaceable batteries that consumers can buy if they want them.
Why do you think being allowed to do anything is about products and choice? If companies are allowed to do anything, then you get monopolies, wage slavery, then corpocracy. Environmental pollution, human rights violations. We don't even have real choices right now, and we especially wouldn't have if they were let go any further.
I guess I’m not sure why you’re invoking such broad, general issues here. I see it as an issue of choice because I remember when I chose to change from the bulky replaceable battery phone I had at the time to a thinner, more comfortable one.
Yet on the flip side my current phone is by the the largest phone I've ever had, the hardest to hold since the one which clipped on my belt and had a pull-up aerial, yet it's also one of the smallest phones on the market.
No they wouldn't because of the power dynamic. That's exactly where the government comes in. Google (and the associated OEMs) and Apple have together far more bargaining power than most customers together. Your lobbying power is 0 and even with massive coordination efforts it's hard to compound that 0 into something measurable without serious help from the government.
You need a mobile phone and you have very few choices. How exactly are you protesting? By shooting yourself in the foot and not getting a phone? By going to boutique manufacturers who can barely supply 1% of the market?
Your reasoning is good on paper but not realistic. I'll say it again, the reason you don't have asbestos in your walls or lead in the air (from fuel) isn't because you voted with your wallet but because governments did their part. That should be evidence enough that your assumption is wildly idealistic.
It’s not a large market because people generally don’t want one, but it’s hardly limited to boutiques either. Nokia and Samsung both sell smartphones with replaceable batteries.
Not ones anywhere near the 'flagships'. It's a niche, but those us who do want hardly have even the option to 'vote with our wallets'. Especially for something that has become near a necessity.
And you completely avoided their very valid point that the likes of asbestos and lead. Perhaps because you have no counter to it?
I guess I'm not sure what your standards are here. If you're expecting that there should be phones identical in every way to flagship models except that the battery is removable, I don't think that's reasonable, since the entire point is that the design requirement of a removable battery requires tradeoffs.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make about asbestos and leaded gasoline. I support those regulations because they cover much more important issues. As far as I know nobody's gotten lung cancer from not being able to remove their phone's battery.
No, it’s not ok, anymore than it’s not ok for me to come punch you in the face anytime I feel like letting off some steam. Things that don’t have any negative externalities are ok for you to do at any point, but quite a large number of things that you may wish to do affect other people, and you cannot violate their freedom in the process of getting more freedom yourself.
In the case of batteries and other electronic components, the amount of e waste is very much becoming a problem that other people are being forced to deal with, and that’s not even considering future generations, whose freedoms I very much argue should also be protected.
“Your rights end where mine begin” is very much a laudable sentiment, but we need to be honest about when things sneak over that line, and not fool ourselves because the negative externality isn’t blatantly obvious.
> iphones don't have replaceable batteries but people keep buying them because they don't see that as important.
Primarc clothing sometimes comes with scraps of paper 'Help, i am being kept as a slave', but people keep buying it. That tells us they don't see slavery as important.
On the contrary, the fact that they were willing to die to end slavery doesn't tell us anything.
The point is not spesifically about primarc, there are many products that awere produced with slave labour, from conalt mining to cotton in the 1700s and people keep buying them
The cookie disaster is a constant reminder that these government agencies need to be reeled in and limited. It’s also embarrassing that when I browse the web it’s more or less the EU’s single contribution. Good job!
cookie popup is not a disaster, it forced companies to tell their users they are tracking them
user replaceable battery is important because what's most likely to die 1st in your electronics is the battery, if it is soldered, high chance you'll have to replace your whole thing, producing useless e-waste
i had to replace my electric toothbrush recently because the battery died, but the whole thing was still in perfect condition, such a waste
>cookie popup is not a disaster, it forced companies to tell their users they are tracking them
Now people know that they're being tracked. Great. They are still being tracked and now are being annoyed with the modals everywhere. Those of us that get bothered enough can install some extension to hide them, but the for most people it's just another annoying thing they have to click away in order to continue what they were intended to do.
Reminds me of California’s prop 65: everywhere and on everything you can buy there is a warning that the place/thing could cause cancer. Technically true, but the information isn’t actionable because it is so broad.
I prefer skipping the second step and not having government-mandated boilerplate interrupting my browsing at all. For something so bloody inconsequential, dismissing the warning is of more import than selecting an option.
Inconsequential? Without cookies of this nature the surveillance economy would have had a harder time getting off the ground. We're just numbed to it now because we've been continuously assaulted for decades.
1. You don't need a dialog at all if you only use data that's strictly required for the functionality of your website.
There. Problem solved. In a different discussion someone even linked a great example of a GDPR-compliant site: https://github.com
See? Easy
2. Okay, for some reason you decide to collect more data. Just as easy:
You present the user with a simple accept/reject, where "reject" is clearly labeled, is the default selected option, and the website continues working when the user choses "reject"
See? Easy.
Those "pain-in-the-ass dialogs"? If they are pain in the ass, they are not compliant.
Ah yes, it's the EU that makes the web sites pester you with newsletters and coupons. It's the Eu that makes the web sites sell you data to literally hundreds of advertisers and trackers. Bad, bad EU.
all phones and laptops have user replaceable batteries, it just some users too stupid to do it properly.
i wonder if, after some tragic incidents including lithium and screwdrivers, the next requirement of the eu bureaucrats will be that companies do test that battery can be replaced by the handicapped body positive 15 years old trans girl with iq no more than 80.
so you might want to update your limited general knowledge or comment only on topics you really know what you are talking about. You see cookies because
1 the website wants to track you
2 the website ad-partners want to track you
3 the web developers are idiots and don't know that non-tracking cookies don't need a NAG popup
BTW GDPR is more then cookies, it is applied in real life too. Also it has benefits like forcing websites to implement a delete my account functionality too.
But nobody here denied that the US military has contributed to the Internet we're using for this very discussion. Someone did, however, claim that "GDPR cookies are the EU's only contribution to the WWW!", either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that the Web was invented at the EU-funded (and -founded?) CERN.
I’m aware the EU companies can’t produce any meaningful web tech so their bureaucracies legislate ridiculous things like GDPR. I get a little reminder every time I go to a website that the EU exists for some reason. They can’t sanction Russia, expect the USA (while constantly harboring anti-Americanism)to “do something” and pollute the web with these pop ups everywhere.
US companies curb stomped the rest of the world and ate up all the market share others needed to survive. The only country that has a non-US centric internet ecology is China, because they intentionally blocked western companies.
It seems a big problem that 50%+ of the cost/value of a vehicle is a battery pack that will inevitably degrade over time, and that usually needs replacing in it's entirity in the event of a fault or damage.
We need some sort of standardised 'battery modules' that can be shared between vehicles, replaced/upgraded, salvaged from crash-damaged vehicles, etc. Instead of one single battery pack, there'd be a bank of maybe a dozen modules. They don't need to be user-replacable, but should be replacable by any competent mechanic.
Some vehicles could come with unpopulated battery module slots, for optional range upgrades. Maybe others would be sold 'batteries not included', and you could buy or lease batteries from a choice of providers.
You can get replacement packs for most common EVs from either the manufacturer or third parties. They are on the expensive side. But they last quite long and tend to come with pretty decent warranty of e.g. eight years or 150 k miles, which means they are very unlikely to fail before that (because that would be expensive for the manufacturer) and very likely to last a lot longer than that. E.g. Tesla seems to design for half a million miles.
Two challenges with standardizing battery packs:
- There is a lot of innovation in this space. A standardized battery would be obsolete by the time it would get widely used. The whole point of buying a premium model EV is getting good range and performance. So, manufacturers work hard on improving their battery packs and are competing on how well they work.
- Battery packs and cars are designed together to make best use of space, manage center of gravity, re-enforce the structure of the car, etc. Inevitably, you are going to end up with different shapes of battery packs. Better designs here maximize cabin space, minimize manufacturing cost, etc. Most car manufacturers buy battery cells and design their own battery packs for this reason: they need to customize their packs.
That makes workable standards in this space unlikely. But of course most bigger manufacturers do standardize components internally exactly so they can minimize their cost for servicing vehicles and leverage some economies of scale. No doubt over time, third parties will emerge that are able to service popular EV models with aftermarket battery replacements. Right now that's a tiny market because most EVs sold ever (i.e. produced in the last ten or so years) are still completely fine and not actually in need of new batteries.
Probably in a decade or so this market will get a lot bigger and by that time battery replacement might also be a lot cheaper. For the same reason, battery recycling companies are not yet able to scale their business because there simply is not a lot of supply of badly degraded batteries. Actually, most batteries coming out of EVs end up having a second life in e.g. power storage solutions because even in a degraded state they still can hold some power.
> E.g. Tesla seems to design for half a million miles.
Tesla supposedly only warranties for 150k on the S[0], although they have been known to last longer (194k then 324k miles [1] on a 2014 model year car).
They design to much higher specs than what they give warranty on. They've been talking about half million mile batteries and even a million mile batteries. In practical terms that means the battery might outlive the car for most average drivers.
My LEAF had an individual battery module replaced (under warranty) and I’ve heard anecdotes of several other EV owners online with a similar repair story. They’re not “all or nothing” already.
If I understand the new Tesla structural battery pack thing right, it seems the direction for EVs will inevitably be to build batteries in the chassis of the car for lower weight and higher capacity and thus range. If this technique delivers on its promises, there will be no convincing automakers _or_ consumers to prefer swappable batteries, because those will not be able to compete with the specs of the structural battery. And I think to replace that one, you'll have to basically take the whole car apart. I'm interested to see how this is going to develop.
I don't know if the EU law referenced in the forum thread is supposed to apply to mobile phones (are mobile phones household items?), but we can see this already happening there - in order for phones to be thin and slick, they no longer have user-swappable batteries, unless that user happens to be handy with a screw driver and owns the special bits you need to get into the phone. If a ban on hot-gluing batteries is going to be a thing, great, I think adding pull tabs doesn't increase the thickness or the weight of the phone significantly, so that makes sense.
But how is this going to work out with cars with batteries built into their chassis?
Hilarious how Tesla was the one showing of how great their replacement charging is compared to filling an Audi with the largest gas tank on the market and now did a 180 to fuse the battery in such a way that you can throw out the while car when the battery dies.
It's not standard, but this basically already exists. It just makes sense for the car makers themselves to build batteries from modular components at various levels.
e.g. VW group uses one MEB 'platform' across it's different brand's EVs cars/vans, and the different models with different battery sizes, have different amounts of modules like these in them:
The next thing I'd like to see is a rule on maintaining security updates for devices beyond 3-4 years. I'm going to have to give up my perfectly operating 4/5 year old Samsung phone shortly because it'll be falling into the "no support" bracket.
I would be much happier with a law requiring this, or a tax if this doesn't happen.
Windows, MacOS, Linux, and other systems receive updates nearly forever even on ancient hardware. The choice to not do this with Android or ChromeOS is one Google made pretty deliberately.
Keeping hardware abstracted from higher layers has been a solved problem for at least a half-century now.
It's an economic inefficiency that's exploiting information asymmetry between Google and consumers.
No one will pay for this. The point of a more efficient economic system is that everyone is better off.
Capitalism assumes perfect information and transparency. When this doesn't happen, you have inefficiencies, and those require regulation to address.
Throwing away my phone before it's broken is extremely inefficient economics. If you address that through regulation, those same resources will get reallocated elsewhere. Google might be an epsilon smaller, but that will be more than compensated for with more gainful employment elsewhere.
Same thing with regulations to prevent polluting a commons, to prevent monopolistic trusts, truth-in-advertising laws, and otherwise.
Indeed, in many of these places, without regulation, *everyone* is worse off. For example, if you can lie in advertising, and my business does and yours doesn't, mine will win in the free market system. As an executive, you don't have the choice to be honest. With truth-in-advertising laws, everyone is required to be honest, and that's better for the executives, businesses, and consumers.
You said that you'd be happy to get security updates beyond 3-4 years, this is what I was referring to. This is HN, so I assume you're involved in tech, so surely you understand that releasing security patches for legacy devices requires more engineers and therefore more money. Who's paying?
I don't think maintaining security beyond 3-4 years involves more money. It just involves having a clean abstraction between lower layers and higher layers, much as we have in any desktop OS. At this point, cell phone hardware is generations ahead of the 80386, where this model worked just fine.
This might involve fewer synergies occasionally and more standardization, as we have in x86 computers. This might slow progress a little bit or lead to a slight decrease in performance. Or it might not. If my device is 10% slower, I'm fine with it; I don't think I'd notice.
The primary "cost" is in number of units sold. If phones don't obsolete, you'll sell less phones. This means Apple/Samsung/Sony/... make lower revenues selling phones. R&D costs are roughly fixed, while economies-of-scale are reduced, so per-unit costs are a little bit higher. I do pay a little bit more for my phone, which I'm glad to do, since I'm doing it less often.
On the whole though, society is more efficient, and so an average, everyone is better off.
It does not have to cost more, if it results in greater commonality between different generations of a device and allows backporting without significant overhead.
In the UK and the EU at least, there's not much of a tie anymore, and the market probably has enough choice; not sure how much things have improved in the USA or elsewhere.
I suspect the increasing discussion of longer support periods does suggest my Darwinian scenario is changing. A bit.
So would you be happy to pay this “baked in” cost (which will cost you the same as paying for a subscription)?
And should all buyers be forced to pay this cost as well, even those who can’t afford it? Should we not allow any alternatives?
> So would you be happy to pay this “baked in” cost (which will cost you the same as paying for a subscription)? And should all buyers be forced to pay this cost as well, even those who can’t afford it? Should we not allow any alternatives?
An alternative would be to require that all products with an "expiration date" list it prominently on the packaging and marketing materials. Make it very clear that the device will no longer be receiving security fixes and will be increasingly likely to be dangerous to use after that date.
Then you still have the option to produce and purchase devices that won't be supported a reasonable time, but the consumer is aware of exactly what those limits are before purchasing so they can compare prices accurately.
What you seem to be suggesting is that it should be OK to sell people products that NEED to be supported to not be dangerous, with the knowledge that they will be used beyond their support period, just to save money. Sometimes there is a minimum cost a thing has to be to be done right, and anything cheaper than that is cutting corners somewhere.
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If it's connected to the internet it needs to be receiving security updates, period. No exceptions. If you can't update for whatever reason (crappy software, ancient but irreplaceable hardware, production requirements), it shouldn't be connected to the internet.
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edit: Another point to make, specifically when referring to cell phones and similar systems, is that in a lot of cases the vendors making these devices are themselves at fault for them being hard to support long term. They're the ones who choose to hack up the Linux kernel in their own weird ways, with no common base. A phone vendor should be able to update their entire line more or less one-shot for the majority of fixes, but they usually cant due to bad decisions made in-house or by their SoC vendor.
And all of those bad decisions are things these vendors have been getting yelled at about for well over a decade now, so they know they're doing it wrong and choose to continue.
How is this different than a warranty, which already comes with every device? I agree with you that this should be very explicit, although it’s the consumer’s responsibility as well to understand what they’re purchasing.
Not sure I understand the 2nd part. If Apple or Google don’t want to issue security fixes after N years, should they remotely disable the device? How many of us are currently using devices beyond their warranty period? How many of us will appreciate it if our devices got disabled “for our own good”?
> How is this different than a warranty, which already comes with every device? I agree with you that this should be very explicit, although it’s the consumer’s responsibility as well to understand what they’re purchasing.
People generally understand the concepts of a warranty and the need for maintenance for something to last in the physical realm.
For the most part though in the software world people believe that it's good forever as long as it does what you want it to do. The point is to make that explicit.
> Not sure I understand the 2nd part. If Apple or Google don’t want to issue security fixes after N years, should they remotely disable the device? How many of us are currently using devices beyond their warranty period? How many of us will appreciate it if our devices got disabled “for our own good”?
I did not say anything should be remotely disabled, I said "shouldn't be connected to the internet". It's not about your own good, it's about the rest of us users of a shared network. Think about it like the road. Vehicle safety inspections aren't for you, they're for the rest of us who don't want to be in the way when your 15 year old tires that "still have plenty of tread" give out.
Use outdated and unsupported devices all you want in air-gapped applications, but don't connect it to a public network without extreme restrictions through external firewalls. Since the majority of people don't have the ability nor interest to actually do that, I simplify the recommendation to just "don't connect it to the internet".
the lifecycle of the unit, or the lifecycle of the model? Because there's already an issue with both Android phones and iPhones where you might buy a phone whose near the end of its production run, and that can mean you only get 1 year of updates on it if that.
Either people who care more pay a subscription for longer security update coverage or the cost of producing more security updates is baked in to the cost of the phone. Either way if people in poverty want security they're gonna have to pay for it.
Microsoft Linux on Azure Sphere devices come with 10 years of security updates. If an Azure Sphere network router gains traction, it could influence the policy of competitors.
I agree in that it’s not Purism’s fault.
On the other hand, I feel that people who are not from the US and believe a Librem 5 to be a sustainable investment should be made aware of this issue.
And it’s not worse for other modern phones. On the contrary: if I wanted my iPhone battery replaced, I’d have a choice between a nearby Apple Store and countless independent repair shops, all of whom would be able to source and replace the battery in no time.
But with the Librem, I’ll be out of luck. Nobody in Europe would be able and willing to source that battery for me if I needed one. Few potential buyers aren’t aware of that; Purism understandably doesn’t advertise it.
I remember that upright vacuum cleaner (it's a vacuum cleaner without a long flexible pipe, it's just a long arm with wheels). I did not buy this.
The head was pivoting and had a small part of a flexible pipe.
After 6 months or so, that flexible pipe broke, it was impossible to fix it properly even with a strong duct tape. They asked about 100 euros to remplace the ENTIRE head part. The seller said "normal wear".
It's impossible to find a solution for this, unless you create some "durable design" label, which would essentially be an independent company testing every devices and items out there, and certifying those object as being "durable enough". The brand would just use those certifications.
Same thing for right to repair.
There are durable brands (Miele for example), but they are so much of a niche that they overprice their articles. Consumers are never aware because it's difficult to know what part will break and when.
Oddly, there are almost no brand that advertise the durability of their product. It's very easy to suspect all those brands agree with each other to not make durable items. Such anti competitive practices are often quite difficult to prove.
Look at how Louis Rossman spent YEARS making video for people to hear about just Apple. The electrical appliance is also a huge market, and electrical appliances will break more often, so without doubt it makes it much much harder to fight.
In the UK the manufacture couldn't get away with that. Goods are expected to "last a reasonable length of time", that includes even after the warranty has expired.
I once contacted Apple about a blown 4 year old MacBook Pro PSU. The Apple support guy told me I'd have to buy a replacement as it had reached the end of its life. At the time they were really expensive.
I asked him how long exactly Apple PSUs were expected to last and he went silent for a moment and then said he'd ask his manager.
His manager came back to me with the offer of a new PSU no questions asked, which I gratefully accepted.
One of the those questions not to be asked was what the lifetime of an Apple PSU was. :P
Miele are ace. Lovely designs. We bought a built-in fridge freezer from them recently. i.e. hidden behind a cupboard door.
The sales guy couldn't understand why we would pay extra for an appliance that no one would see the name on. He was all about impressing any visitors to the house.
It was the most energy efficient unit I could find according to Which magazine.
Should recover the difference in price to the no-name unit they were offering with 2 years. (Actually probably quicker now given changes in the energy market).
I expect to keep it for at least 10 years and as well as better performance it has other useful features not on a bottom of the range unit.
E.g. It's really quiet and if you go away on holiday you can switch the fridge part separately to the freezer to save more energy.
we have a miele fridge, dishwasher, and oven (and vacuum).
Compared to the US high end competition they are vastly superior. It's a shame really. There are two reasons I suspect: 1) not available in big box stores where most people make appliance purchases, 2) simply name recognition
I understand the lure to link to forums, but this one is particularly light on details; the only hard info about the law(s) is a link to the text itself. This is pretty important since the carve-outs will make or break this bill, because I doubt user replaceable batteries will be mandated for a pacemaker, electric vehicle, or high-volume home energy storage equipment like RESU battery.
I watched the EP parliament press release on Wednesday and the actual proposal is nowhere near what these headlines are saying. It has more to do about tracking components during battery manufacturing to ensure that the ecological cost is appropriately reported, that they do not come from conflict regions, promote alternatives to rare earths, etc.
I don't like the link either. But a quick Google search didn't bring up a good English speaking source (yesterday), so I can understand tomte linking to the eevblog forums.
This was published yesterday by Golem [1] (German tech news) and two days ago by the FAZ [2] (respectable German news outlet). While both might be better links, they're in German. You can try Google Translate or DeepL, which usually work pretty well.
Since this is happening on the EU level there will eventually be official translations of their plans; as well as international coverage.
EU directives can be relatively light on details, at times, because they are meant to be made more explicit at the national level; the ECJ will eventually rule on the spirit of the law anyway, as soon as somebody appeals a judgement to them.
Obviously a degree of common sense will be applied (i.e. peacemakers), but EV should definitely be a target - you can replace a car battery today, why should it not be possible tomorrow?
Do you know of any toothbrush with an easily replaceable battery? I'm in the need for a new one as my battery slowly dies and I don't want to solder my toothbrush.
Unfortunately no. ^That’s the one I have. OralB and Phillips are the good ones and both do this battery not replaceable nonsense.
My 10+ year old OralB had a replaceable battery and it worked fine and had no issues with water safety even though I washed the entire unit under water.
We need a podswap like thing for electric tooth brushes.
The whole trend toward custom Lithium-ion battery packs seems to be driven by making devices thinner--not just phones, tablets, and laptops, but everything. They then integrate a USB, micro-USB, or even USB-C charger.
Rechargeable is nice...replaceable is nice. But rechargeable and replaceable?
I hope that we get back on a trend to use standard batteries, like AAAs, which have many excellent rechargeable Lithium-ion options now. I have plenty of AA/AAA-powered devices and about a dozen or so rechargeable AAA's cycling in and out. For some reason rechargeable 9-volt batteries haven't really caught on. They seem to have weak capacity and are expensive.
Phones are becoming ever more expensive and at the same time the pace of improvement is slowing down. It's making more and more sense to buy a top-end phone and keep it a long time. Repair and maintainability of phones is thus going to become more important. But I don't know if it's necessary that the an ordinary user can do it themselves.
Battery and/or display replacement has become almost as expensive as a new device starting around 2019. In the iPhone 6 times, you could have your display replaced for about 50-60 EUR, and your battery for as low as 30 EUR. Not so with newer devices, whether Apple or Android ones.
I really hope a law like this actually affects something.
I know it isn't a thing most people think about, but after loosing so many things to just passive battery degradation because I forgot to keep them charged, I would just really want batteries to be easier to swap.
And I really cannot understand the people that want their device to be unusable if they forget to charge it. The dumbest one being VR controllers, since you quite simply cannot comfortably/usably charge them with a wire while playing, but people want integrated batteries still.
I agree with that and welcome it but still I think they should make distinction between device types! For example smartphones are often very tiny, technology advances a not and we often also want waterproofness to some degree. It is a bit sensible that there may be a glue desired and it is not that problematic.
But the current state of macbook and mac repairability is pretty bad! Macbook is not a 2-year smartphone consumable, yet it is quite common that LCD breaks or LCD flex breaks from just daily use, or keyboard wears out, battery used to be glued. And only apple can fix a broken display flex and they do that but replacing the whole assembly which costs half of the device cost. And that is an example of the issue which this bill should fix and which we need! This probably applies for other bugger devices with planned longer-term use.
Without any distinction, it may not work very well. We don't really need ALL smartphones to have easily replaceable batteries and be bulky, non-waterproof, heavy, etc.
Having to throw out completely usable devices because of batteries conking out should be a crime and should be classified as littering by the manufacturer. I still miss my old Nokia.
IMVHO the main point is "circularity vs linearity" of anything: if something can be recycled ad infinitum like a glass bottle there is no much need for "repair", we can keep rebuilding at best quality, for things can't be that "circular" instead repairing is a must.
Batteries themselves are kind-of modular, in the sense that most tools batteries so far are made of standard elements soldered together, they tend to be easy to replace, that's not the case for mobile phones, laptop etc but for that electronic there are many more problems, starting from the design for planned obsolescence, IMVHO the real solution is making mandatory open hardware and free software, this way certain bad design can't simply survive because someone who know denounce defects, some propose corrections and OEM who refuse them get a bed reputation so quickly they can't recovery.
The actual norms have failed to be effective, for instance recently the EU mandate the availability of spare parts for various home appliance, BUT they mandate only for "official repair center", so OEMs decide that to be an "official repair center" someone need to pay a non marginal annual fee for training, updates etc and the resulting costs are so high that's still convenient drop a damaged appliance instead of repairing it. Being open in hw terms by design and free in software terms prevent that effectively: if you try to circumvent norms that clearly appear and you end up quickly under fire. Even competitors are pushed to act one against another.
Again to make that work we need public research, made for the sake of humanity not for profit, doing so ensure a real constant innovation that the market can't ignore and can't hijack for business reasons. And again that's not that hard to accomplish, we have had more or less in the past, at least in EU countries, with public universities and big research labs not entirely public, unfortunately, but publicly founded enough that the private part have to obey, can't lead the public one.
I think batteries should be replaceable, but not necessarily customer replaceable.
When I got a new battery for my iPhone SE I spent €30 on it (in total: battery + labour costs). I think that's a reasonable amount for a repair/replacement. It's not even super-hard to do and could have done it myself, but I don't have the right tools and didn't feel like buying them as I'm unlikely to use them for other things.
There are real advantages to "battery packs" like this too: it makes the devices smaller, cheaper, sturdier, and overall just better, with the downside that replacing the battery is more difficult. But as long as it can be done in ~20 minutes by a technician it seems an acceptable trade-off to me.
If this happens, we're probably going to need more "standard" battery sizes.
I've noticed Chinese manufacturers using the Nokia BL-5C as a de facto standard for portable electronics (bluetooth speakers, radios, game consoles, etc.), but that's a bit small for a modern smartphone.
Perhaps one of the widely cloned Samsung Galaxy models which still had a removable battery? Seems to be around the right dimensions and intended application, in any case.
This is a great first step but this needs to go further..
Case in point- I just replaced a 2018 Macbook pro 15 (i9/32g/1t - top model) with a new Macbook pro 16, the reason? it just died (apparently due to connecting a bad USB-C cable), this is the second time this happened to this laptop, the first time was under warranty and they had the motherboard replaced. Actually, when I say "motherboard replaced" I mean motherboard+memory+CPU+HDD !!!! because it's all soldered on-top of the motherboard, so I have to pay as much as a new laptop to replace it if either one of these component dies.....
This is getting pretty common with new Macbooks. Stop buying this proprietary piece of junk. It can stop working randomly for no reason (literaly; one day it won't start and won't charge, not a single beep). There are lots of proprietary chips with their custom firmware and any of those can go bad or decide to dislike your usb-c charger and only apple or those with years of experience with behaviour of each model and access to stolen schematics and spare chips desoldered from doner boards can diagnose and fix it. The display flex cable can break by just opening and closing the lid every day and you lose video or backlight, fixing just the flex is so tedious that they often replace the whole display assembly which is custom made by apple and costs half the price of the laptop. Same if LCD cracks. If keyboard wears down you need to replace the whole keyboard assembly. And the battery is glued and difficult to replace. If you compare that with a HP Elitebook laptop, it is a completely different universe.
It is not uglier or bulkier and yet the keyboard is replaceable in minutes, held by screws, flash is in the slot, power rails are nicely visible, chips often with publicly available datasheets, battery easy to replace or measure, LCD panel has a standard size and eDP connector and you can even pick a different brand and it will work just fine.
Oh no, please don't! The thickness of a ~square-foot slab of metal growing from 0.5 inch to 0.6 would be suuuch a horrible imposition! Isn't this thing supposed to be portable?!?
Seems to be putting the cart before the horse as long as batteries are allowed to have DRM that hinders third-party replacements, but a good step nevertheless.
If they did the same for screens, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone sales dropped to half or even less.
There is no way companies like Apple and Samsung will be OK with this. I expect big pushback from them.
If these steps go through, it will be interesting to see what other planned obsolescence [1] methods will these companies go for.
The one big tool Apple has is the full control of the software ecosystem. They can simply make newer apps unavailable for old phones for example. That will need to be tackled at some point.
You’re picking on apple but they’re the best when it comes to this… I don’t know a single android phone that’s still usable after five years and still gets software updates. At a certain point the old hardware just can’t handle the new OS as new features get added. Planned obsolescence is certainly a thing but you’d be wise to lobby Samsung to add updates past two years before focusing your wrath on apple.
Edit: looks like Samsung bumped it up to 4 years of updates in 2019
Apple gets the stick because they effectively invented the model and pushed hard for it. Nokia-era batteries were replaceable, the the iPhone showed up and it all went to hell.
Exactly, and it wasn't just phones. It was pretty standard to be able to upgrade a ton of parts (memory, disk, boards) in a desktop PC until Apple taught the industry how to solder everything in place.
You can still upgrade a number of parts on desktop PCs (including the disks and memory). Do you mean laptops or am I unaware that desktop PCs could be upgraded even more in the past?
To be clear, yes, on most PCs you can still upgrade RAM and disks, but on, for example, a Mac Mini you cannot, and other PC makers have been coming out with more "all-in-one" or "mini" designs that mimic Apple's lack of upgradability.
When all other electronics companies always had user replaceable batteries, Apple was the company that decided to not do it. Because the regulatory bodies did nothing to fix this, other companies copied Apple because that was profitable for them. Apple is not only not the best, it is THE worst. In fact, it wouldn't have come to regulatory intervention if Apple had done the right thing in the first place.
> At a certain point the old hardware just can’t handle the new OS as new features get added
It doesn't necessarily need a "new OS". My fridge has the same OS it came with 8 years ago and it works fine, my raspberry pi 2 model b from 7 years ago works just as well as it did when I got it, with essentially the same OS. Even the first gen Raspberry Pis from 10 years ago work just as well. Most people don't necessarily need "new features". And if they do, they can make that choice and get a new device that does those features better.
> Samsung to add updates past two years before focusing your wrath on apple.
Samsung provides official updates for less time as Apple (4 vs roughly 7 years) but they provide an official way to unlock your bootloader and install other operating systems, so you can go with community supported ones. If phones themselves start lasting longer, there will be bigger demand for these operating systems and maybe even third party commercial ones which are easy to install, maybe with a subscription even.
BUT, just because Samsung does this NOW does not mean they will continue to do so. They have demonstrated that if some shitty company comes along and abuses their position for profits, Samsung is happy to copy the strategy.
I understand that this forum has people who work for Apple or some other company or have investments in them or have positioned themselves to benefit from their success... and have incentives to defend them for short term profits for themselves... and those ideas are also picked up by even those who have nothing to do with it... and I believe that is the biggest group of people. Which is why I think brining this out and discussing it is important.
Anyways, there are a lot of possibilities if we are to focus on quality long-term sustainable products. Just because the current market is filled with disposable short-term products designed to be replaced all the time, doesn't mean this is the only way.
If they wanted to cut down on e-waste, they'd let consumer electronics use lead solder again. With the whole tin whiskers issue, consumer electronics will regularly have to continue to be thrown out regularly.
Now could you please do the same with the chargers, should be easier. In The last five years Ive bought maybe 5 different electric trimmers/shavers from Philips and they all have different charger-connectors. Even the two small green blade ONE are only two years appart and I specifically asked in the store if it was the same charger but it's not. They make ever so small changes in the plastic and voltages to make every new trimmer charger incompatible with another model. So if you the charger brakes or you loose it somehow you might as well buy a new. Terrible!
Just two weeks ago I found out, that the Sennheiser headphones (RS180) I believed to be dead, just didn't work anymore, because the rechargeable batteries were broken. After replacing the batteries, I went on and replaced the ear cushions and now they are as good as new, despite being 10 years old or so.
I am so happy to have bought a product that allowed me to easily replace both parts.
> Guess there will be some more lawmaking involved, to define these expected lifetimes.
There are expected lifetimes established as part of the track record of consumer cases about laws implementing EU directive 1999/44/EC. While some countries go further (e.g. the UK's 6 years for manufacturer defects was in place even while they were in the EU), for electronics that's usually held at 2 years for the EU minimum.
Just recently my shaver battery got to the point it lasts ~2 seconds on "full charge" and it is not replaceable. The charging adapter does not provide enough power to make it run. So I am forced to trash a perfectly working shaver just due to old battery. And this is how majority of battery-powered shavers work. My next shaver is corded.
The original source doesn't seem to say "not replaceable", but describes batteries that are glued or fixed in place.
So making a watertight phone (or other device) with the battery inside the seal seems to still be allowed by the current proposal, so long as the seal is the only thing that complicates replacing the battery. Bug or feature? You be the judge.
The global tech giants are not happy as it currently helps to consolidate their monopolies in various country's.
There is also a security & privacy benefit with removeable batteries as you can be sure a device hasnt just gone into a sleep mode whilst still logging meta data, except where its not.
Are there any exceptions? I generally agree that users should be able to fix stuff. The one scenario I have in mind is that smoke detectors are supposed to be replaced every ten years and they now make some with a 10 year sealed battery. So it's a lifetime battery.
This will make various compact designs difficult/impossible (such as airpods or other small wireless earbuds).
This will make waterproofing difficult/impossible/lower quality for many device classes (phones, earbuds, etc). Waterproofing on these devices requires adhesive (not easily replaceable) or ultrasonic welding (not user serviceable at all).
Depending on what it actually does, we can predict side effects by imagining it was in place 10 years ago. What if the Apple Watch required a user-replaceable battery? Would the design have changed demonstrably to accommodate this design restriction?
Water resistance was my first thought as well, however I suspect a company with the R&D budget of Apple could likely find a way. The small dimensions of the watch might be a problem, but for phones I'm fairly certain it can be done.
For a while companies like Motorola were selling nano-repellent (essentially hydrophobic) coating phones and calling them splash proof. You could easily design a gasket or something, existing waterproof phones already have parts that open for eg the sim card or microsd slot (which are gasketed).
I've got an IP-68 (or whatever is waterproof) phone with a user-replaceable batter. It effectively has weather stripping along the battery door, and uses a screw to keep it tight. It's cheap, simple, and effective. (and no, it's not a smart phone)
Important to note here is that when it comes to household gadgets and personal electronics, not everything needs to be engineered to have water resistance like a diver's watch.
Making sure something survives splashes or a minute at the bottom of the swimming pool will be enough to keep most of these things working.
My water-resistant watches with user replaceable batteries beg to differ. I bet the margin wouldn't be as high but it would certainly be doable from an engineering point of view.
I don't know about OP, but as far is I know every "non-smart" watch that is waterproof has a replaceable and standard sized battery. Normally, you also have to replace the o-ring, which are also pretty standard.
But on the flip side, phones can last twice as long (or longer, assuming the software and other hardware doesn't crap out instead) and the total materials in that time are one phone plus two batteries, not two phones and two batteries.
The choice should be up to the consumer, not the EU. We had phones with removable batteries co-exist with phones with non-removable batteries. Most people preferred a slimmer, more attractive device and chose that over a removable battery. Ditto with keyboards.
I would have preferred a phone with a hardware keyboard and a removable battery, but my tastes are niche. That doesn't mean I want a regulator to force the issue.
Except it's never a straight choice to a consumer.
If a company asked me do I want 50% more battery life or 1mm thinner, I'm going for the battery. And lots of people would. How many people moan about their battery, and how many say "ooo, I with this phone was just a hair thinner"?
But you don't get a choice, because it's all bundled up with other features to make it for you. Want NFC? Ok, you have to have the flagship model with the thinner case.
Oh, you want the bigger battery, sorry we don't actually do one because we only had one model called the FailChungus 0.1 with a big battery and no one bought it (never mind that it came only in brown and had a 480x480 screen).
Same for the 3.5mm jacks: no one has ever gone out and deliberately bought a phone without them. You just don't get a choice if you want everything else. I specifically got a non-flagship phone to keep that port, but I missed out on a lot of other stuff.
While it's nice to think that consumers lead these choices, I don't think that's actually what's happening: the illusion of choice is given but the companies gradually do what they wanted to do anyway.
Thanks, I wanted to say something very similar. "Choice by wallet" is a nice theory and even in practice it can work (e.g. buying fairtrade, organic meat alternatives IF you can afford it). But in that case it failed. And the manufacturers have little incentives to make it succeed - after all, buying these high margin products more often is in their shared interest. So even a first mover to offer flagship phones with removable batteries (again) would just cut their profits a little less than the competition.
Proof for claim: If phones with replaceable batteries were competitive in the current market, they would be offered.
I think it can not be denied that the current smartphone business has a negative ecological impact (waste during the whole life cycle except during usage) and additionally also a negative social impact (manufacturing conditions as well as rare material extraction; not sure if broken phones are shipped to Africa like other e-trash, but would expect that as well). These long-term impacts are not in our interest, but no individual alone can change that in the current market. But that's often the case: If we are not strong enough alone, we work together and bundle our power. Like in a state or even above the state level.
The more variables any one product as, the less 'choice by wallet' works.
Choosing between a battery-farm chicken and a free-range chicken has one variable - the provenance. But then let's say you like KFC for their 'secret' spice blend. But KFC don't care for offering free-range chicken. If you want that spicy chicken: you can sacrifice your preference for free-range chicken, get spicy chicken from somewhere else (not what you wanted), or go without.
Smart devices have many more variables. So the likelihood of something you want not being there is much greater.
And once a feature has been removed from such products, it partly becomes self-fulfilling.
That comparison is complete nonsense, as presumably the specs of those phones are completely different. You can now get cheap phones that perform better than a 2014 S5.
Modern electric tools are the new Ink printers. Parkside, Makita, Milwaukee, DeWalt, Ryobi - they all build huge ecosystems around selling cheap tools with ridiculously expensive proprietary batteries. This needs to die.
It’s unfortunate because while I want replaceable batteries I don’t think it is the government’s place to mandate it.
I want a lot of things but it would be wrong to mandate them. I’d like iPhones to have headphone ports, I want my laptop to support Linux, and all USB-C cables to be interoperable. But the problem is that the government shouldn’t be picking winning and losing technology. What if a company comes out with a battery that lasts 15-20 years (Which is already the case with some newer chemistries)? Maybe I, as a consumer, don’t want the government making my phone thicker or increasing the cost of a product because of an obsolete regulation.
The point of the law is not to please those who would like to exchange batteries, but to have 90% of the batteries actually recycled, and reduce dependency on raw materials.
The government isn't picking winners or losers, it's regulating the waste of scarce raw materials (those present in the battery, and to a lesser degree, those present in the rest of the device).
The first company to come up with a battery that lasts 15–20 years will of course have to wait for regulations to adapt, like every other advance in technology in the history of mankind.
Your position seems to be that you'd like the government to keep turning a blind eye on companies' wasteful strategies, just in case someone in the future might do something less wasteful.
And I've replaced batteries in 4 phones in 3 years (not all mine, after seeing my phone come back to life, everyone else around me wanted the same service). So I see your anecdote and raise you my anecdote.
It's not easy to replace, since the batteries are glued in and cases are hard to open, but my £10 kit of opening tools has paid for itself about 50 times over already.
How will this make things more wasteful? If anything it should cut down on waste by allowing people to replace just a battery rather than throwing the whole phone away
I can easily see more replaceable systems being less waterproof, leading to more water-damaged units, which means more trash and higher replacement rates. Also, nooks and crannies on stuff tends to get broken and lost (just remember how your TV remote looks after a few years), something a monoblock-style phone doesn't have. Sure, we know you can build consumer electronics to be virtually indestructible - but few people wantt to walk around with a Nokia 3310 these days.
To add insult to injury, this ruling will be quoted to justify price increases.
Replaceability exists on the market already, but it does not seem to be competitive outside of very niche (very ecologically-conscious folks for the fairphone, outdoor enthusiasts for ruggedized phones) customer groups.
You need more resources to construct one phone with a replaceable battery than 2,3,4 or however many phones without a replaceable battery? I'm not well versed in hardware but that sounds like bullshit.
Most people don't have to replace their phones because of the battery. Your assumption that people would buy only one fourth the amount of phones if they could exchange the battery is wrong.
Obviously I can only guess how often you get a new phone, but I'd expect you get a new one every two, maybe three years?
Other data point: I threw away three phones in the same time frame. Each and every single of them had to eventually get a new battery. The first just became too slow to use (Galaxy S2), the second was at some point physically deformed beyond repairability (Xperia Z1) and for the last one (HTC 10) it was the worst: No repair shop in our city wanted to repair it OR quoted insane prices (100 or 150 Euros I think) and I could not find a reputable seller offering replacement batteries. After two weeks of having the battery die on me on nearly every important occasion I gave up and got my current phone.
I hear the same from a lot of friends. While most are interested in each others new phones from a nerdy perspective, I can only think of one friends still acting as if having the newest generation was a necessity or even a status symbol.
So, long story short: My anecdata tells me that having easily replaceable batteries is a huge boon to using the phone for a longer time.
My last phone was a Pixel 3 which I had to now replace after 3 years because of the ending software support. However, the battery is still fine. I actually intend to sell it in the hopes somebody can be bothered to run it with LineageOS.
Also while it is cool if somebody has the skills to repair their own phones, the reality is that most people do not. And then you need an expert and 100€ to 150€ is a price you can reach quickly with expert hours. That is what fans of the "right to repair" don't seem to get: it is just way cheaper to produce most products than to repair them, because production can be done by mostly unskilled workers.
And none of that is justification for environmental pollution, wasting resources, and potentially human suffering if the device ends up in an e-waste dump somewhere in Africa.
Batteries are not the issue, software support is. And even with new batteries, the technology will be outdated eventually. My new Pixel 6 has G5, for example, my old Pixel 3 doesn't.
A better solution would be to make the phones suitable for recycling.
I wouldn't be surprised if glue is also better for recycling than screws, because you can just resolve it with heating or chemicals, no manual labor required.
Yes upgradeable software could be enforced - it would just make phones more expensive, stiffle competition, and waste resources. But the politicians deciding it of course get their phones for free, so they wouldn't care much.
No I don't know folks that have done that - not for many years.
Sure replacing a battery is less waste than replacing an entire device. But what percentage of devices needs replacing? That has to related to the extra cost for every device, not just the ones that break.
Ehhhh there's a middle ground solution that will almost certainly be lost on all the Eurocrats, largely going by the previous prescriptive attempts with micro-usb for all phones etc:
Instead of mandating user-replacable whatever parts, go with right-to-repair type of legislature, where the manufacturer cannot try to lock you out from being able to replace what you need. We've already seen Lexmark and Apple lead the way with this BS in the consumer device space (crypto-pairing the parts and not letting anyone have the private keys), so right to repair would be of far more benefit that mandating that the next phone should have functionally have the form factor of 2000s Palm pilot.
Socialists think they know how to make better phones than the industry, so they mandate industry has to do it their way. They are wrong, of course. It is also not "standards and fair consumer regulation", as it will only make phones more expensive. So if that angle works for you: it will hurt the poor the most.
Then, by the same token, why did we end up with a near-monopoly in search and highly concentrated duopoly in mobile devices where Apple can charge 30% of revenues made? It’s hardly competition. These adverse effects happened due to lack of regulation. It’s called the real world, not socialism :)
There are like a zillion different phones available, so I am not sure what your argument is supposed to be.
There are also alternatives in search. However, search engines and smartphones are complicated enterprises, so it is not too surprising that their number is also temporarily limited (both have only been around for a very short amount of time).
Regulation to take care of externalities is OK. "Regulation" in the form of telling businesses how to build their products is not. Politicians are not experts in making smartphones consume less resources, so they are unlikely to make the right calls.
I suspect replacement batteries are going to become very expensive in the EU. The laws that the EU try to bring in always sound so good in practice - but they are very surface level and the implementation never accounts for second order effects.
A daily reminder that cookie popups have very little to do with GDPR and cookie laws. If a site doesn't track you (w/ 3rd parties) and uses its own session cookies to provide service, it'd need no banners.
Case in point - look at github.com - they did the right thing. Or look at apple.com... or even gs.com.
Lost faith in this whole idea of EU trying to force companies to do better after the cookie law.
Now every single website I have to dismiss a pop up before I visit. Yet once dismissed the site functions completely fine so really the law should have just made whatever happens when I click accept illegal because you clearly don’t need it for any of these services to function.
But no, now I have to dismiss a pop up every time instead.
> Yet once dismissed the site functions completely fine
This is one of the intended outcomes of the law, because it prevents companies denying service to those who do not wish to be tracked on an all-or-nothing basis. Which is something that was beginning to happen.
It may seem like there was no outcome from the legislation, but this is partly because it outlaws some outcomes. It's like the Y2K thing, when people tell you that it was all a fuss over nothing.
What cookie law? The cookie banner was never mandated, except in cases where you're trying to set cookies which are not legitimately necessary for your business but are for surveillance purposes. The trouble is businesses either don't understand this or pretend not to.
My company doesn't understand it, and shows a banner because you never know. However, I've turned it into a simple thing that tells you we're not tracking you (it's only a session cookie, after all), and after clicking goes away for a year (plus a cookie to track consent, of course).
In fact, most of the problems stem from the fact, that the EU did not agree on a new cookie law (ePrivacy directive), which promised that you can set your preferences once (e.g. in the browser) and make sites agree to them. But no, lobbying was big and the law was delayed indefinitely.
GDPR was never(and never intended to be) a technical law, it is by name "general"! You get the same "notification" if you walk into a public space where security cameras are installed.
But you still need to call a 95 euro/hour certified battery changer professional licensed by the EC battery changing association or pay fines and all your appliances battery licenses will be revoked and issued for a mandatory inspection of certified battery EC inspection professional (169 euro/ hour).
This seems good on the surface… but imagine you are designing a new piece of hardware… add this to the list of many “good things” that maybe won’t be great in 20 years from now when a new technology doesn’t fit the mold… I’m all for being able to repair. I enjoy finding a short and fixing by replacing a blown capacitor… I’m just not a fan being forced to build things in a specific way that prevents innovation. Maybe in 20 years we have amazing new batteries that last 100 years… maybe a device doesn’t need a battery just a capacitor and exposed to the sun is this now not a possibility? Because the capacitor need to be replaceable or is this a loop hole in the regulation… time will tell but IMO more rules about what and how I can design new hardware is bad
How often are laws like this really changed in a time window that benefits innovation? A flexible phone that wraps around your wrist - how will that battery be feasibly replaced? Again I’m all for repairing hardware and replacing batteries … I just don’t think it’s right to use laws to force a design … for health , for safety sure… but let me sell a cheap phone/device and let me sell a longer lasting device with replacement parts like frame.work… a market of choice is better IMO … I guess the EU just doesn’t think this way…
Looking from the other side, it's been decades now and we haven't seem much innovation on electric toothbrushes or beard trimmers. Except we're still stuck with a non replaceable design.
You'll see your flexible phone as the peak device for 5 years, then again will come the right to repair and battery issues.
Perhaps your point could be that there needs to be a process to get an exception from this law for a year or two if the committee wants to help some technically chalenging devices. But expecting all makers to do the right thing by themselves is unrealistic (and no, "voting with your wallet" doesn't help when a set of brand dominate a market and collude on the issue)
They use considerably less in terms of raw materials than they did 20 years ago. The same is also true even for apparently very simple things like soft drink cans!
Wouldn't the amount of raw material be sheer process optimization, driven by production costs ?
If they came up with easier to recycle designs I'd hear you, but the only industry I see having done real efforts is the plastic bottling industry, and it is still hands down one of the worse plastic producer, even considering recycling.
The reduction in raw material is from finding structurally sound ways of using less, both in the product itself and in the packaging. Yes, that's driven by production costs.
What incentive is there for battery tech to "get there" when progress is essentially banned in the name of standard parts?
It's hard not to see this sort of regulation at the very least slowing down innovation and causing worse environmental outcomes as a side effect over a decades long scale. It won't be apparent to most people though, since they won't be able to see the counterfactual world where technology improved slightly faster.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Why would allowing battery replacement hinder development of battery tech? If anything it should spur a battery aftermarket using different charge controllers, chemistries, etc. that are user-swappable for the OEM ones.
It just sounds like a generic antiregulatory complaint ungrounded in reality? It's not like li-ion tech has advanced dramatically absent such regulations. The bottleneck seems to be chemical, a matter of energy density, not a regulatory chokehold on innovation.
It's just part of a bigger right-to-repair war, whether it's batteries or cars or operating systems. Manufacturers are increasingly moving to rent-seeking behaviors and X as a subscription, which is great for their profits but not so good for consumers or societies.
Big tech is already on the verge of supplanting governments across the world, the last thing they need is more freedom to "innovate". They don't do it for the social good, just for their profits, and regulation is always playing catch-up to try to limit the social and environmental damage from their actions. At least the regulations have some measure of democratic buy-in, vs the what, 2-4 big tech companies that alone determine the future of tech? They don't have your interests at heart, at all.
Specifically on development of battery tech development portion of your question, requiring any given characteristic in an appliance tends to halt innovation on the axis of that characteristic. For example, if an exact size of a part is specified, there's dramatically less incentive to innovate smaller versions of the same part.
One place this is seen is building regulations. It's not uncommon for an exact door or frame thickness to be legislated, and the required thickness is based on fire risks. This was a very good thing in the short term, but in the longer term, it removed any economic incentive for innovating new materials that require less thickness to provide the same level of protection.
Since it's been many decades since regulations were created in most places, there's often quite a bit of low hanging fruit, from a materials technology standpoint. There would be even more if the rules had targeted objectives (e.g. fire resistance), as opposed to methods (e.g., a set material thickness).
In the big scheme of things, technological progress has been strongly correlated with social good. We live longer, healthier lives and have more amenities than any time in history. It's much nicer to be living in the 2020s than I would be in the 1970s, 1920s or the 1820s. People living in each of those earlier eras saw the benefits they had from electricity, antibiotics, rail transportation, etc that those before them lacked and it's not hard to imagine people in the 2070s will be happy not to be saddled with our current level of technology.
It's easy to devalue what we don't yet have, but it's a fallacy.
So going off that logic, wouldn't mandating end user/consumer serviceability be an objective (repairability) and not a method? People are still free to innovate battery materials how they want, they just can't be locked into the device with no easy way to replace them when they're dead. I still don't see how that hinders innovation.
Sure, a lot of technology has proven socially useful, but usually with regulation (of natural monopolies, for example) and subsidies and such. It's not an either or situation. Companies can and do profit alongside mandatory social contributions that they otherwise would not have done if it meant more profit.
In the electronics space, things like safety regulations, charging standards, warranty protections, etc. have hurt profits but been good for the consumer. There's a balance.
That's fair. I definitely see a lot more harm in specifying "everything has to use USB-C" than in requiring that something is relatively easy to service.
Still, there are valid reasons to make more integrated devices and it's not reasonable to expect everything to be as easy to service as it becomes more advanced. My father could take apart and rebuild all kinds of car engines in the 80s and 90s, but would never be able to do that with a Tesla. It was still a great thing for Tesla to drag the auto market kicking and screaming into an age of electronic vehicles, though.
I couldn't read the original source (foreign language) but I thought the OP was just about mandating replaceable batteries. If it's mandating a particular connector instead, yeah, I get how that would be bad. USB C is a total shitshow that not even the manufacturers and standards bodies can get right. I wouldn't trust any government with that sort of fine grained oversight. Even the cookie law was a disaster.
About electric cars though, case in point, they are a market that people have been clamoring for right to repair on. Not necessarily so they can hack the firmware themselves, but so that they can take it to their local mechanic for repairs instead of the dealership. I understand there is something of a cottage industry of places that can service some Priuses and Leafs etc but some newer cars are too locked down for third parties. That's essentially a DRM thing and hampers innovation in the post sale services sector, anticompetitive OEMs who want to prevent cheaper third party components.
Whilst the EU's war on waste and reparability legislation may be looked at through rose tinted glasses I think it has a number of negative side effects.
1) cost: The reason goods are cheap is that companies can rely on you needing to replace them ever [3] years. If you start to make it such that they only need to be replaced every [9] years then a manufacturer may only be able to rely on one third of the revenue. This has two effects - less money to go around for innovation / development (resulting in less good technology), and higher cost of goods (impacting the poorest the most).
2) livelihoods: The higher level thing going on here is that consumption of goods has raised living standards for many people around the world. On the other side of every good purchased are the livelihoods of people working in whole supply chains to produce that good. Reducing consumption will mean that those making all the things we consume will have less take home income for themselves (again, probably impacting the poor the most). It is a bit of a sad fact that the best way we have of organising society where people may gain a sense of dignity and meaning in their lives is through pushing consumption.
3) cost of business: all these rules and regulations are expensive to comply with. The EU will legislate itself to a bureaucratic death.
My view in general of regulation is that it is designed to protect the interests of the wealthy, or those most willing to make a cost versus quality of life / fuzzy feel goods trade off. If replacing the battery was really that big a deal to consumers then people would buy a phone that had a hot-swappable battery - i.e. no need for regulation!
Having said all that, I find the EU legislation mandating vampire power drain from not-in-use chargers is probably something i'd be on board with. This has the somewhat unique property that literally no one cares about something costs 0.1EUR a year, but it adds up at a country scale. I'm not entirely sure why i'm on board with this though.
Well, that's where it comes down to who you are. It is worth it to some, but not to everyone. The problem is that blanket rules are applied to everyone, without compensation. Even those that claim the are doing it to prevent environmental damage are damaging the environment in some way unless they live off the land in a hut. So it's just a matter of where the line is drawn, and almost all cases it's unfair in some way.
It's infuriating how if I buy, say, a dishwasher, and the heater pump goes, it's around £100 for a new one, but the whole machine costs maybe £400. Are you telling me that all that steel and plastic and motors and controllers and labor and profit and shipping and everything is actually 75% of the cost, and 25% of the entire value of my dishwasher is tied up in the value of that one part, the one that happened to need replacement?
And don't get me started on cars!
If we as species cared about sustainability (we don't), companies would have to sell their parts for little enough that you could buy all the parts for a whole new machine for no more than the cost of the new machine. That would focus their minds on using interchangeable, standard, COTS parts to avoid having to maintain SKUs and also avoid having the parts fail in the first place. Rather, now, it's highly profitable to make parts fail: you either get to ding the customer for a replacement part at 500% markup, or they give in and buy a whole new machine, and the old one goes to scrap.