After school, I used to spend a lot of time just hanging out around some TV and radio repair shops and just watched them work. They used to be friendly and gave me parts like spare motors, lights that were lying around from broken Walkmans they wouldn't repair. I took those motors and added to my bicycle as a "dynamo light" , built "wired RC car" etc ...
Fast forward to a few years ago when i got into building racing drones, soldering certain tiny wires was difficult for me. I went to a nearby mobile repair shop to get that done and he was happy to help me out.
I owe a lot of my curiosity and my knowledge today to these repair shops.
It's not a good thing that our electronics are becoming less and less repairable these days. No wonder these repair shops are vanishing as the time progresses.
The closest thing to that we have these days are makerspaces. At our local makerspace we encourage people try to fix their broken electronics instead of throwing them away. But I feel like there should be more.
Tinkering with physical stuff is also good and should be encouraged / supported, but let's also be careful not to loose the software tinkering (for example by not permitting in any shape rooting mobile devices).
Lots of tech we currently rely on is built under FOSS model (thinking web stuff, mobile stuff, os stuff, data center stuff). Of course you must choose to use it, but I find nowadays using Linux daily on desktop as easy as using Windows or MacOS. 20 years ago you had to fight drivers, file formats, browser issues, media formats, lack of software (I mean we run many Windows video-games on Linux without issues, how cool is that?!)
I did not check piracy lately because I find FOSS alternatives (or I can afford to buy some stuff).
This is a very weird baseline to use for qualifying a programmer. Firewall configuration is completely irrelevant for most programmers and has been for decades. It is objectively not a programming task, it's just something that might get foisted upon a programmer if there is nobody else to do it.
Not sure that this is the case now, nonetheless it can be a good thing that people are specializing and concerned just on the frameworks or design patterns.
Drones are just an example, there are plenty of other areas where people might get sucked into DIY electroncisbuilding. E-skateboard/bike/scooter modification and fixing, keyboard hobbyists, cosplay, 3d printing, home automation etc...
I have built them for dozens of non technical friends too. And then they themselves got into fixing them once they broke. Solder the wires. Get parts 3d printed etc..
Eg. Home Automation with custom LED strips + an ESP32 (via. tasmota, esphome etc...), Wireless sensors using the same, FPV Drones and RC toys/cars in general, 3D printers, Custom keyboards are the usual gateway hobbies in my experience. I haven't seen anyone who is into one of these and hasn't explored the others.
The subtle reference to systemd has not escaped our notice; and it is truly a shame.
The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run, but to make a living out of anything you need to charge an X amount per hour, and if the repair is more expensive than a replacement it's simply not worth it.
All the e-waste going to e.g. India like in the article is stuff where repairing it where it comes from is not worth it.
This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour.
We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something.
As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't.
People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).
There is cost, and there's also the companies/devices themselves. We are losing modularity. With almost no benefit to the user.
I mean companies have the audacity to solder an SSD to the motherboards of laptops. And make the batteries - one of the biggest points of failure - non user replaceable. We had all that. It was cheap. It was user friendly. When one failed, you were able to replace it yourself.
Once there is enough momentum on letting users fix these failing parts themselves, the ecosystems would automatically fix themselves imo. That's one of the things that companies like Framework, Valve etc.. seem to do really well with their hardware endeavors.
The laptop refused to start.
I took it to the Lenovo center and they said about 7-10 days and a minimum of Rs 10,000 (about $150 in those days).
Since this was too much for an old laptop, I looked for alternatives. Someone suggested a repair shop in Nehru Place, New Delhi
This was tucked into the back of the basement of a big tower. A tiny 10x10 room filled with laptop parts
The guy at the counter looked at the laptop, opened it up, twisted some wires around, added another few wires, and the thing was working again
Total time: under 10 minutes.
Total cost: Rs 200 - just about $2.5 today
>The laptop refused to start.
>I took it to the Lenovo center [...]
This makes no sense. Why didn't you just replace the RAM? I seriously doubt starting the laptop without RAM bricks the laptop.
Why it refused to start after that is something that's beyond my expertise
Boy have I got a WEEE for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...
More broadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
(however, both of those schemes don't put everything back directly - which would be inefficient. They allow delegation by paying recyclers. This can result in "carbon offset" like shenanigans.)
Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.
Incidentally you should also be able to modify the laptop as you want, or if you lack the skills, pay said 3rd party repair shops to do it for you.
You already can, it's just often not economically viable in high-income countries. Lenovo have a very comprehensive parts service and provide useful service manuals.
Ironically, Apple devices are the most widely repaired by third-party specialists despite Apple's strenuous efforts to make that difficult, because they're expensive and depreciate slowly.
> You already can, it's just often not economically viable in high-income countries.
But are we sure it's only because of high labor costs?
People used to darn holes in their socks, but that's an eccentric hobby in a world where you can buy perfectly good socks for less than $1 a pair.
It's still a factor in the developing world. Those awful scenes of e-waste being melted down for scrap in open pits are symptomatic of the fact that a lot of devices just aren't worth fixing or dismantling for spare parts, even at third-world labour rates.
Manufacturing is heavily automated, which is the reason why you can buy a toaster or a clock radio for less than $10; without massive advances in robotics and AI, the only similarly automated end-of-life solution for those items involves a shredder and a furnace. Here in the EU, the manufacturer is responsible for bearing the end-of-life costs for electronic devices, but it doesn't really change the economics.
The other difference between "renting" from the producer is that the producer isn't collecting any rent, only initial purchase.. and that producer cannot claim the item back whenever they please.
Why does Toyota need to get involved if there is already a multi-billion dollar salvage industry doing what you already propose with no obligation?
My last car I was paid ~$200 and that was low because I had them tow it from my home.
The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation.
One way to approach this would be to put more responsibilities on large established companies and less on smaller companies. But then the problem is that larger companies will want to arbitrage this somehow by indirectly "owning" these smaller companies with less environmental responsibilities.
This area is far more complex than we think it is.
Also what do we do about totally new materials that are thought to be benign when introduced but then are proved to have harmful effects many years later. Does the company that introduced them now have huge open ended costs and now go bankrupt ?
The solution is as always in the middle ground. Society as a whole bears some cost of cleanup (a kind of insurance policy for all companies) and companies bear some of costs.
Importers and producers are required to be a member of a approved company handling returns, like RENAS[2].
Shops selling EE goods are required to accept returned EE goods from individuals of the type they sell. So if you sell fridges you have to take my old fridge and handle it in accordance with the rules.
Seems to work better than nothing, though how well I don't know. As with all such regulations there's money to be made by skipping steps, and some do[3].
[1]: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/ansvarsomrader/avfall/Retur...
[2]: https://renas.no/
[3]: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/2022/februar/...
Also, what happens if you order a product online from another company in a different country ? Does Norway still get to add tax for cleanup on these imported goods ? I would guess that this would be a powerful incentive for customers to skirt these regulations for lower prices.
If you import as a private person AFAIK no. Consumers have very good consumer protection on goods bought from domestic shops, so there's a strong incentive to do that rather than import.
Though all that Temu junk is another story...
But companies importing EE goods have to report to the return company they're a member of, and pay them accordingly.
Can't recall offhand if there's special "flag" on the import declaration or if they just go by HS code. And presumably they get audited on this.
IIRC it used to be more directly linked to the import declaration but they streamlined it.
You must be joking.
"Fifteen major car manufacturers have been fined almost €600 million by the European Commission and the British government after Mercedes-Benz blew the whistle on a cartel that fixed car recycling costs and processes." https://www.dw.com/en/eu-and-uk-fine-carmakers-millions-over...
Well that's what the European way is lol. Tax and regulate instead of focusing on the crux of the problem, which is overproduction and planned obsolescence. Any solution that uses taxes and extra charges will simply pass the costs onto the consumer.
I like the idea of putting the onus on companies to get rid of the product, but there should be a consumer onus too. Consumers should be discouraged from tossing everything to the landfill, and companies should be forced to collect the stuff they product after the lifecycle is complete. This might even drive the companies to revise their designs to use more recyclable materials.
Maybe instead of a charge this could be a credit. If the recycling happens after a long time the company gets a bigger payback than if it happens before. The money is collected on checkout so the company can't claim bankruptcy or low profits to make the payment.
Here in Norway consumers enjoy a 5 year warranty on products that are meant to last, and 2 years on other non-consumables.
So if my fridge dies due to a manufacturing flaw within 5 years, the store I purchased it on has to repair free of charge, replace it with an equal or better product, or give a full refund. If the product keeps breaking in the same way, the customer can demand a full refund.
And it's up to the store to convincingly argue it's not a manufacturing flaw if they don't want to do that.
This provides similar disincentive to import crappy goods.
Sure, you're disincentivizing crappy goods, but then you'd also barr a strata of society who can only afford those crappy goods. While it's not as much of a problem in Norway I suppose, it is a problem in the majority of the world.
1. employment-rate for Americans. 2. bringing back industrial capacity in US.
If large companies are forced to recycle/repair INSIDE USA, that ultimately means employment for Americans, and bringing back industrial capacity back to US.
(which could mean forcing Chinese manufacturers settings up whole industrial complexes in US...)
btw, this would be a much easier/lesser-side-effect measure than "tariff on everyone" situation
Where I live, you pay a "removal fee" when buying electronics or appliances for just that. If you're buying a new washing machine for example, the party delivering your device is obligated to take the old one with them.
Of course, that's only part of it, your country also needs to have good waste processing and ideally not export it.
Basically you just drop them off at your local recycling center, and they have a program that ensures they go to an audited recycler. There is a small fee when you buy electronics that pays for the program.
https://www.recyclemy-assets.com/1738262511-epra_bc_obligate...
Something somewhat similar is already law in germany and works rather well. There is no reason society should have to pay for expected costs for disposing a company's products - as this would only incentivize companies to care even less about the difficulty of recycling/disposal.
And for disposal modern landfills in rich countries are very good at avoiding environmental problems.
For example? What products do you mean?
Plastics recycling is a scam.
Glass recycles well, if colours are kept separated.
Aluminium and iron and most pure or semi-pure metals too.
Far better to wash and reuse, of course, as was still the rule when I was a child, and in some of Scandinavia even 25Y ago.
So the end users, got it.
Of all the laptops I’ve owned my 2020 MacBook Air is still my personal daily driver, my 2010 Mac mini still works fine for running my 3d printer, my 2014 Mac mini works great for crafting and my 2020 iPhone SE2 is still getting OS updates and is sending this message. Are they repairable? Not easily. Do they still work, absolutely. Having used a bunch of non apple laptops and devices at home and work I would say the Apple products last at least 2x as long before breaking or hitting enforced obsolescence.
Aside from the Surface tablet they're all very repairable.
I disagree that Mac things tend to last longer. There might be trash out there, but there's tons of stuff that's just fine and lasts a long time. You don't even need to always spend a lot on it; that Motile was like $300 for a 14" 1080p laptop.
Only downsides are it has only 2GB of RAM and about 0.1 seconds of battery life.
When I bought a new one, I made sure to get 32GB of RAM. That way I'll still be able to browse the web in twenty years, although I'm sure it'll be very slow because of the CPU.
Stop encouraging companies who lock you out, stop renting products you should fully own!
Locking things down is simply a hidden subscription in the shape of repairs and replacements. When you stop paying the subscription (stop repairing, stop upgrading), that's also approximately when the rental stops working (car, iphone, etc).
I'm sure the percentage of broken to working devices is a carefully monitored R&D output, to maximise profit and retain customer trust from renters such as yourself.
I have two 2013 MacBooks - an Air with 8GB of RAM and a Pro with 16GB. I use them daily. Both work way smoother (with outdated software even) than my friends' few years old Windows 11 laptops. You'd be surprised how much you can get done on that 8GB when the OS isn't using half of it for the News Sidebar Webview and Windows Update/Telemetry services.
Also, the keyboards are both fully functional -- that is, after 12 years of daily coding on them. I didn't buy extended warranty, and the laptops have survived some wild stuff. Where I do agree with you is that the newer ones seem to be of worse build quality. But overall? Pretty damn decent devices.
Now in a throw away society with planned obsolence devices, most of those shops are gone and the repair knowledge gone with them.
Unless goverments fix the planned obsolence culture it is almost impossible to have the repair culture back.
I've fixed old electronics myself sometimes and quite often it's doable and the spare parts usually cost approximately nothing. However, paying someone 50 euros for half an hour worth of work to fix a thirty euro Christmas decoration doesn't feel like a good deal. Maybe for 10 or even 15 euros it would be.
Even if a laptop were built to last 20 years, who would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better?
Doesn't mean you dump it after 2-3 years because a new fancy models comes along or the battery is not repairable because it's welded shut.
There was nothing in 2025 laptops that I would have replaced it for, the use cases haven't changed from my 2009 requirements in computing on the go with a cheap laptop like device.
Its replacement is now Samsung tablet with DEX capabilities, which I will likewise use until it dies.
I have a Centrino laptop from 2004, and it's single core, with 1.5GB RAM and, of course, spinning rust.
It works, but even playing a video on youtube can be taxing. I'm not arguing for "performance" tasks here, just sitting on the couch and surfing, and clicking random links.
Then again my home server is a 2013 i5 that does everything it needs to do (except be super power efficient). So I'd say ~10-14 years is the sweet spot, but 20 is historic and mostly useless, sadly
We have one refrigerator that's still going strong after 50 years whereas one of our 'newer' air-conditioners had to be replaced after 6 years.
In that particular case, it might not meet energy efficiency standards anymore.
But I agree appliances breaking the day after the warranty expires is evil. Depending on the country, warranty may be meaningless, or close to that
It's not, you're just ignoring two obvious points:
1. a person with no laptop would prefer it
2. a repairable laptop can also have its parts upgraded, so a 20 year laptop could have 1-year old parts
Nowadays I can only replace m.2 stick to get more storage. Everything is soldered.
I do agree having back user upgradable ram, disk and GPUs on laptops would be much better alternatives.
Someone living in poverty whose life may be markedly improved by having one?
It makes it more expensive to be on the cutting edge and turning over your laptop once every couple of years, but it makes the used purchases cheaper.
In fact, no, because they will also become less accessible to the less poor, and less poor will start using them longer and will also buy used ones.
I repair my own stuff for fun, but there's absolutely no way I could make a living from fixing other people's stuff. The phone repair business in my area is dominated by illegal immigrants, because fixing iPhones is only marginally more lucrative than delivering pizzas.
Yeah Portugal is a great experience when visiting with tier 1 country salary.
But for a hardware / gaming junkie this was the place to be. Not to mention (pirated / photocopied) books. Almost any book / media you could dream of. The lanes are buzzing with scamsters / pirates and geniuses who can build / repair anything - phones, TVs, PCs, laptops, watches etc. At one time Nehru Place was the "IT" hub of New Delhi. The street food was not half bad as well. I was just happy watching the men at work in dinky shops fixing anything, built a few PCs there (a tradition which continues to this day).
Some happy memories (but you have to be careful or you will need to walk back home without your wallet and your shirt).
Edit: 2 movies to understand this culture (a bit more) -
- Rocket Singh (salesman of the year)
- Mickey Virus
The neighboring areas also had electronics importers that proved super helpful. You could find some of the most "lethal" tech with their help. I got myself some powerful FPGA kits that are normally not accessible outside defense, academia, and select licensed labs. I have great admiration for those folks who let me lay my hands over the most powerful technology of that time.
Local shops were quoting ₹25,000–₹30,000 (roughly $300–$360), which he just couldn’t afford. Then a friend told him about Nehru Place. He sent the laptop there through someone he knew, and the repair only cost him around ₹5,000–₹10,000 ($60–$120). Way more reasonable.
He was glad to get it fixed without spending a lot but it does make you wonder how reliable those reused parts are. Like, how long is it gonna hold up before something else goes wrong?
At some point he kind of disappeared and rumors appeared that he is now in mandatory military service, but will come back afterwards. Well, that was pre-COVID.
He also knows a friend that backports coreboot to the new mainboards. No idea how they manage to do that in a 2 person project like this. So yeah, all of the laptops they sell run coreboot in it (including the Thunderbolt EC, which is insane amount of work to implement).
Nonetheless the build quality was insanely good, and lots of folks were amazed by what they essentially bet blindly on when they ordered it. The X2100 would be my dream laptop, but I didn't manage to get one in time.
Anyone got one of these already or are they still in pre-production?
I spoke with a chap called Franck Deng and he seems to be taking orders right now.
We repaired anything: worn out shoes, distressed socks and clothes. Even cooking pots were patched when they developed holes. Everything had very long lifetimes and those lifetimes were extended with periodic repairs.
Cars were rare and using parts of low quality made the break often. People repaired their cars in front of their houses or apartment buildings. Or on the side of the road if it broke there. Everyone carried big toolkits in their trunks and and almost any car owner or driver knew how to fix the car. If a tire ran flat, they had the tools to fix it on spot.
There were electronic repair shops everywhere. There were also other kind of repair shops.
If someone looked in the trash cans at the time, most of it was vegetable waste resulting from people cooking their meals.
It wasn't unusual to own a 30 years old car, a 20 years washing machine, a 30 year radio or a 15 year black and white TV, all being repaired lots of times.
Some mass market goods, or most of them, were handed down to the next generation as priced possessions.
Now, we repair next to nothing. We still repair cars, although many people sell their old car if it breaks and buy a new one.
PC, TV, washing machines, fridges, furniture get replaced in a few years even if it's in perfectly good condition.
Good got cheaper, although of uncertain quality and the wages got high so it's expensive to repair something even if you find a place to do it. If you buy a new bicycle and go to the repair shop two or three times it will cost you the price of a new one.
I am not nostalgic about it, and I don't think people should stick with old junk. But I do believe we need an equilibrium, goods should be of higher quality, easier and cheaper to repair. I dislike being forced to throw something away because it can't be repaired, even if such a repair should be simple and cheap in theory.
We pay less for good and we don't spend for the wages of repair technicians (almost none left) but since the goods are of low quality, have planned obsolescence built in and can't be repaired, we end up buying the same good two or three times so we spend more. While that might create jobs in China or other remote country, I as a consumer, care more about my budget and my quality of life.
It is so widespread that even a special sort of frauds have been invented. First, a fake "repair shop" where you can lose money on paid "diagnosis" of broken parts or on extremely high cost of "repair". Which is just an installation of less broken parts or non-original and cheap parts ordered in China.
Second is a fake repairman, who comes to fix someone's PC and charges unreasonably high price for simple things, like cleaning the case from the dust or changing the thermal paste. Or even installs viruses to convince the user of the "real problems" and takes the computer to the "repair shop" where the obviously working parts will be stolen (swapped to smth cheap chinese parts) and the user ofc gets the unreasonably large paycheck for these operations.
Usually the technically illiterate people are the main target of such scammers.
---
I'm still using the PC from 2013 year and the heavily modified Thinkpad X220. Yes, maybe some operations (mostly the modern Web-related operations) take more time than on the modern computer (mostly because of JavaScript). But editing text, programming, watching videos and listening to audio still works pretty well.
Maybe, some day some time, the battery will be a problem. But it is detachable, so the main problem is the BMS (Battery Management System), which prevents me from just swapping the old battery cells for the new ones.
But for now it has 2K screen (installed it because photo editing with 1366x768 isn't easy), new WiFi card with new WiFi revisions support and so on. Can say what this laptop have enormous repairability compared to the new laptops. One flaw — the CPU is soldered to the board, so I can't change it to something newer, like I can do with much older laptops.
This part is pretty surprising (maybe it's only a single source saying this so it could be non-truthful), because given China's electronics ecosystem that I would expect the repair ecosystem to be the most efficient and best there. But then maybe because the standard-of-living is higher in China that it would be cheaper to ship unrepaired electronics to India and the repair being done here, as repaired old electronics would have less value in the market in China.
Of course gluing or taping are also viable options ?
1.Yihua combined hot air rework station + soldering station.
2.Pro's Kit multimeter, tweezers, and wire snips.
3.Uni-T hand-held oscillosope (quite optional).
4.Mechanic brand solder paste. Get the one in a plastic syringe. The tubs dry out.
5.TS100 soldering iron as a spare. Heats up so fast at 24V!
I use them mainly for prototyping, but they are equally handy for repair. I don't re-ball BGA though. I've seen vendors do it with a machine that's mostly just a holder for the chip, and the hot air gun. Plus some templates and the solder balls.
I personally wouldn't recommend this.
I have one, it cost just short of £100. But I much prefer my T12 based 'KSGER' soldering station that was $30 from banggood and has far better features, plus I don't have to worry about the heating element dying (since with T12 the element is part of the tip).
One day when I need hot air again, I'll probably think hard about finding a stand alone hot air station from banggood or aliexpress. I see they have some for $30.
Since the hot-air has all the critical parts in the hand unit, and the heating and fan often die randomly, having a 2-in-1 is just too much liability.
Btw, I recommend a butane soldering iron as a true 'backup' that doesn't even need a charged powertool battery.
the reduce re-use re-cycle part here is nicely inserting itself into the recycle tail side.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1dh04ud/how_do_ge...
Firstly, upgrade from HDD to SSD. For random access, these are commonly 100–500× as fast, and even for block I/O 10–30×, and that will concretely speed up startup by a large fraction of that ratio, quite apart from speeding up other things later.
Once you get used to modern SSDs, as almost everyone on this site will be, I think you lose track of just how bad HDDs are, to run the OS from. My wife’s ten-year-old work laptop takes well over five minutes to boot up, log in, start a browser, load something like Gmail, and settle down so the disk is idle and it’s running as smoothly as it ever will; and sure, the aging i5-4300M CPU doesn’t help¹; but I suspect spending less than a thousand rupees replacing its HDD with even the cheapest and smallest SSD (acceptable capacity, in this case) might cut that to a minute, and spending a few thousand for a faster one would speed it up to below a minute.
(One fun thing about SSDs is that, overall, bigger is faster. At some points in history, for some makes, it’s been almost as simple as “twice as large, twice as fast”. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think not too far off.)
Secondly, if you have less than 8GB of RAM, get more. Beyond that it varies depending on what you’re using it for, but up to at least that point, it’s just an unconditional improvement.
—⁂—
¹ PassMark lists single/multi scores for the Intel Core i5-4300M of around 1,700/3,000. Some units in recent generations from approximately the same segment: the Intel Core i5-1334U scoring 3,350/13,400, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H scoring 3,450/21,500. This basically means an absolute minimum of 2× speedup on any workload, and for most it’s more like 3–4×. There’s a lot of difference in ten years of CPU.
If you are in India (or more specifically Bangalore), check out his team https://spurge.rentals
I remember advising him to protect his domains with a .com while using an interesting but .com domain.
A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints births sustainability and how we all can learn from it (including India) and in fact foster it in a positive way :)
Isn't this the degrowth ideology expressed in a slightly obfuscated way? Being poor is more "sustainable", because you don't have as much resources to consume.
Except the context of this thread is talking about tariffs on laptops, not random trinkets from aliexpress. If someone is willing to part ways with $1000+ to get a laptop/phone, I think that's a pretty good sign the goal is "better living".
Tells me how little you know about the country. And that's okay. There are several "rich" countries that are also plagued by graft and bureaucracy. And no, they aren't as happy as Economist indices would tell you.
Latest Indus valley report[1] states that about 1Bn people (India3) are in economic condition equal to sub-saharan countries condition. In that sense large part of the country is still poor.
In response to minister Piyush Goel's rant in the latest startup event, a startup founder posted this on reddit which details how the country is plagued by graft & bureaucracy [2] . This is just one rant. Twitter is flooded with actual experience of many.
[1]: https://blume.vc/reports/indus-valley-annual-report-2024 [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/StartUpIndia/comments/1js2y1s/piyus...
This highlights the problem of parts availability, especially for older laptops (10 years old or even older). Since no one, the original manufacturer as well as the "dup(licat)ors", is going to make parts for laptops that old.
During my own attempt to revive my old laptops, I had to buy three different keyboards, each costs around $8, from 2 different recycling shop, to "Frankenstein" a working and fairly new-looking one. And then the screen bezel and palm rest is another struggle. One total revival ended up costed me around $50 and 2 weeks, and give up on another one.
I imagine in order for laptop/electronic repairing to work reliably, manufactures needs to create standardized parts, like what happened to desktop PCs. But that hasn't happened since ...ever?
What I'd like to see is for society to embrace repair culture because that feels the right thing to do. A culture where it should feel immoral to chuck something out when there's still life left on the product. A culture where repairing makes economic sense--i.e., the cost of repair doesn't surpass that of a new, comparable, product by a wide margin.
When deprecation is the norm and fashion, when companies are incentivized to "innovate" (read: planned obsolescence) and flood the market with cheap products, there won't be a repair culture.
While I might buy now a laptop such as a MacBook without being able to replace major components, I will never buy a desktop such as a Mac Studio and accept the same shortcomings. And it's not only that I want to tinker with hardware, but buying parts and assembling the desktop myself has a much better price/performance ratio than buying of the shelf parts. Being able to upgrade is a bonus and that allows me to have cheaper upgrades than selling it and buying another one.
How much more would Apple tax me for a Mac with the equivalent performance of i9 14900K, Nvidia 4090, 128 GB RAM and 8 GB SSD I assembled in a few hours.
If I were much richer so the few hours spent on assembling the thing were more valuable than the price difference, I might have thought differently.
This is mind-boggling, the CPU alone almost basically makes the full price. In what world is this an efficient allocation of resources?
The world in which diagnosis (plus risk of incorrect diagnosis) is done at $200/hour. Obviously a corporate sale, where they cannot be bothered to check it out because that's not their core business.
An ugly pattern emerges. In my country, there is mandatory 2year warranty on bought electronics - if it breaks before 24 months, the retailer owes you a working specimen. Well, what do you know.. I see a pattern of a lot of these items breaking before 3 years have passed. It is almost as if some hierarchy of managers have dictated "can you make this thing last for 25 months, but no further than that?"
- 1 the non-replacable battery will die, leaving the device a brick.
- 2 the power management IC will die, so the system refuses to light up or receive electrical current.
- 3 often, when (2) happens, the motherboard will be toasted as a by-product, leaving you to pay 600 DKK to have the retailer inform you "we have looked at your device, unfortunately the motherboard died, so repairing it will cost you same price as brand new. Thank you for the 600 you paid to have us tell you that".
Within the last year, I have had two separate Asus VivoBooks die on me, both after about 24 months of use - but critically, ">24", so no repair/warranty. One of them a DKK-10.000 purchase, the other a DKK-6.500 purchase. Neither of them have seen particular abuse, they were used by me, as "household pets" - so laptops that never left the couch.
I have taken a long time to learn this, but my learned lesson is that I have stopped buying these "10k DKK for 24 months of laptop" devices.
I am a pathological computer hoarder, and I have plenty of desktop PCs that are still alive and kicking after 10+ years (in which I may understandably have to replace PSUs).
The scam/grift that suppliers like Asus are operating on comsumer devices, is that the PMIC is designed to fail, is soldered into the motherboard, and that they love whenever the failing PMIC kills the motherboard during its death throes.
https://www.hwcooling.net/en/recycling-in-china-laptop-cpus-...
https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/980618/parts4.ht... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BB%84%E9%87%91%E6%88%A6%E5...
BTW, speaking of repair culture, I love this idea of repurposed headless MacBooks.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Screenless-MacBooks-masqueradi...
I know someone who exports automobile tires from the US to India to be retreaded.
The EU should mandate 10-year warranties for higher-end consumer electronics and durable goods.
This could work on a sliding scale: less expensive items get shorter warranties (but never below the current 2-year minimum), while pricier products require longer coverage periods.
Such legislation would:
1. End the exploitation of workers in sweatshops producing deliberately short-lived products
2. Discourage planned obsolescence and reduce manufacturing waste
3. Significantly decrease the climate impact of consumer electronics
4. Create genuine incentives for a Circular Economy where durable products like quality ThinkPads become standard rather than exceptions
By requiring products to last, we'd not only protect consumers and the Environment, but also the vulnerable workers currently trapped and exploited in sweatshops designed to produce disposable goods.
EDIT: Are they salvaging components from e-waste, or diving in dumpsters with non-computer waste as well?