That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes with a cost, values are encoded as trade offs between desirable outcomes, rather than the desirable outcomes themselves. When some desirable outcome is not obtained in society, almost always the reason is that there are other tradeoffs being made. So society values affordability, competition, performance, longevity, quality, repairability, customizability -- and that's just on the product side. Then these product trade offs compete against things like labor market protections, use of resources for competing products, etc.
When Apple decides to solder RAM into the motherboard, it is making a trade off between performance and repairability. When Tesla chooses megacasting that might result in a fender bender totaling your car, they are choosing reliability and lower production costs over repairability. Just bemoaning that some product is less repairable and that society values repairability so therefore some dark force must be working to subvert society's values is not a useful or insightful analytical approach. Everything boils down to tradeoffs.
> The whole "this is garbage and this company should make this in a way that we like" is really annoying when it is written in an authoritative tone and rallies a mob.
Don't your whole comment do the same? They are giving their opinion based on their preference. For sure it will be bias toward their goal, just like you want them to stop, so that your goal, keeping the statu quo, win.
I prefer repairability because I want to be able to repair my own things and not depends as much on others. I don't expect them to do it, but I will say it loudly so that people know that my market exist. I also consider that better for the society in general, thus I will also push the government to go toward that too, because I consider the government should work toward the society better. Does it means my position will win? No, but I still have the right to defends it, just like you have the right to defends yours.
> Ecology aside, that's a very selfish way to think.
Saying "ecology aside" brushes off a lot of stuff, and not just the sort of hippy-dippy environmentalist shit that corporate types and pro-growth economists scoff at. It basically assumes extremely cheap raw materials and vast, far-off factories churning out parts. It assumes horrendous waste, both of materials and energy, in most cases.
Disposability almost always carries with it a huge externalization of costs on somebody else. In many cases when the costs of replacement are fully internalized into the part, it's no longer nearly as cheap; repair starts to become a viable option.
There may be situations where it's cheaper to replace than to repair, but in order to find where that's really true, we need to work towards full encapsulation of production costs in end goods, something we do a really shitty job of today. If we work towards that, I suspect the world we'll end up with has a lot more skilled-labor jobs, but won't create them for nonsensical or romantic reasons, where they're clearly unnecessary or wasteful.
> Cars, phones etc all have to do the thing they're designed to do before they're sold to consumers.
Do you mean that someone individually uses each product sold? I don't think so.
Things wear down in use. It's just reality. Not only does the market value drop, but accounting systems recognize it through depreciation. You've tried to redefine 'used' as superior reliability, but that's only in the rhetorical world where 'war is peace', 'freedom is slavery', etc.
There is uncertainty to brand new, untested technology, but that's not what we're talking about. There is uncertainty to a more limited extent in unused individual products, but I've already addressed that.
> It's pretty shocking to me that people in our society build things and then deliberately break them so they can make more money. Is this really the best system we can come up with?
All part of cost tradeoffs. Previously, they'd build the car with the ability to support all those add-ons even if the customer isn't getting them. Turns out it's cheaper not to do that.
> why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it,
I would argue that a lot of consumers _do_ value it, but they don't know enough to ask about that up front.
Most people want to buy a thing, then use that thing, and when it breaks they reasonably assume that they should be able to get it fixed if they'd like. Cars work this way, appliances work this way, etc.
I think the reason why people don't ask for this up front is that
(1) most people would assume they have the right to repair (and thus don't think to ask) and/or
(2) life is short, and we shouldn't need an advanced degree specializing in a particular category of products in order to know all the ins and outs of buying one :)
> If there was a market demand for repairable products, companies would make them.
That sounds very nice, but I see a few practical implementation problems that reinforce each other:
1) Market demand for a product that doesn't exist is an undefined value, and estimating its hypothetical value ranges in reliability from back-of-the-envelope to astrology
2) Economies of scale often require that total demand reach a threshold for a product to even have a chance to be profitable/competitive, i.e. there is some demand below which vendors are effectively forced to round it down to zero.
3) For high-tech products especially, a handful of big vendors agreeing on the way things are done can create massive network effects among suppliers that make it unduly expensive or outright infeasible for an erstwhile competitor to do things any other way. For example, good luck building a smartphone with leaded chip packages instead of leadless (a decision having a great deal to do with concerns about reliability, repairability, and component reuse).
> The mechanism I described isn't one to disagree or agree with.
And yet you failed to account for the embodied energy in building the product and the fact that maintaining any appliance or equipment requires repairs. So there is quite a bit to disagree with.
It is much more wasteful to build a product with no methods of repair, noting that a large number of components will statistically fail due to variability of tolerances or usage patterns.
A 50 yr product requires maintenance, replaceable parts and access to documentation. All of these are lacking in our modern consumer environment. You can blame this on complexity, or designs towards sleekness or what not but the truth is that product failure after a short amount of time (planned obsolescence) creates a reoccurring customer base, and the ability to pass off cheaper parts that don't need to be able to handle removal (glue vs. screws, etc.).
> am, however, against the idea of companies being forced to design products around being easily repairable. If a company wants to make a super thin device with basically no easy way to take it apart, that's their prerogative. If a company wants to solder on components to the device like RAM or the storage or the cpu or gpu, that's their prerogative.
Totally agree. But they should be publicly labeled as extreme polluters whose devices aren't repairable and who design devices that way intentionally.
They should be free to do it, and then free to be denounced for it.
>The government doesn't need to be involved in this respect.
The environmental aspect of unrepairable devices should probably be regulated like any other industry who makes the decisions to pollute because they want to.
> Shipping a car with heated seats but only enabling them if they are paid for is very annoying.
I get this kind of thinking and also realize that it prevents stupid greed from companies.
But at the same time it makes me think that this is why we can't have nice things. We're not just paying for the materials but also the business costs that go into making a product. If they can optimize by including something and enabling it by software then is that really so wrong?
> Wouldn't you want to be in control of the decision? If your air conditioning cools you and you are okay with it's current efficiency, you should be able to repair it.
The point is, I don't want the things I buy to be 1.5x or 2x the price to ensure greater repairability than they have now. That's the conversation we're having.
> It also reduces competition and innovation in my view. Why try hard to R&D products people want to upgrade to
All available evidence points to the contrary. That might be true if there were only one manufacturer of an item, but competition ensures a constant stream of R&D and improvements. Which is precisely why I don't want to use my AC from 30 years ago -- the improvements since then have been massive.
> > I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
> Why not?
Because,
1) I personally don't care about this.
2) More important than 1, I don't think the law/government has any business deciding this. The market can decide (spoiler: it already has).
> A product is always a combination of features. That’s kind of the definition of a product.
So if your product is flour or plate glass... ?
Many products are combinations of things. A simple bench is lumber and screws and paint. But lumber and screws and paint are all widely available commodities. Someone who sells benches doesn't have to sell screws for them to be available in the market. They may not even manufacture the screws, so anyone who wants them can buy them from the same place they did.
When it becomes tying is when there is any part of your product that customers might want to buy separately, but nobody else makes it, so it isn't available separately, from anyone. You can only get it tied to the other parts. That's tying.
> Do you also think Tesla should sell its battery to Ford?
I think Telsa would be happy to sell batteries to Ford. They'd build another battery factory and make a lot of money.
Do you think Tesla should be able to prohibit anyone from taking the battery out of a Tesla and using it in some other car or for some other purpose?
> Is it “tying” when Nintendo doesn’t let you run “PlaystationOS” on a Nintendo Switch?
Obviously. What makes you think that is some kind of controversial result? Anybody who wants to should be able to install iOS on their XBOX.
> When Jobs came back and introduced the iMac, Apple wasn’t exactly a behemoth in 1997. Enough users chose using their own free will to buy an integrated product (with a shitty operating system) to get Apple back to profitability.
Buying an integrated product isn't the same thing as buying a product because it's integrated. By definition if they want any of the parts that isn't available separately, they have to buy the whole thing.
And as shitty as MacOS Classic was, it wasn't as shitty as Windows ME.
> ios would be a worse user experience (on worse hardware) if it was running on Samsung phones.
Not compared to the same Samsung phone running Android, presumably.
> Wow, all they have to do is getter better, I’m sure they never thought about that...
You asked what their competitive advantage would be. For years it was superior process. It's not physically impossible for them to do that again. We just don't know if they will yet.
> And the third party they are fabbing for is MediaTek and it’s based on a 22nm process - which was stated of the art in 2012.
Because their problem was caused by their existing process being a mess. They have to be able to do state of the art in volume before they can sell it to somebody else.
The more significant development was Arc on TSMC.
> By 2011, if Apple had completely killed the Mac, it would have still been more profitable than any computer company. Fast forward to today, and the Mac only makes up about 10% of their revenue.
How does that affect the state of their integrated product just before the Intel switch when they didn't have a competitive PowerPC processor?
>>while actual useful products by comparison are worth exactly nothing?
You already see the results of this don't you. If people were half serious about something like medical electronics the way they are about Facebook. The cost of diagnosis and testing etc would be way lesser.
>>So do you deny that the entire concept of planned obsolescence exists at all
Moving the goalposts. I said that planned obsolescence is not, as you originally alleged, a general property of a market-driven economy.
>If so, why wouldn't more profits as an incentive not be pursued using planned obsolescence?
Because like I already explained, product and brand reputation are extremely important for market success. The example that I gave was how Apple's hard-earned excellent reputation for product quality played a massive role in the growth of its sales and it becoming the most valuable company in the world.
>>Why would I stop at a more narrow definition when criticizing the incentives of the free market, when all types all grounded in that same incentives?
Again with the bad faith disingenuity. The so-called narrow definition is the only one economically harmful or involving deceit and consumers being worse off. It's the one almost universally referred to when activists use the term.
If you're now going to try to claim you were talking about the looser definition all along, then I'll respond that the type of activity under this looser definition, like consumers consciously choosing more disposable products over longer-lasting ones because they judge the up-front cost-savings to be worth the more frequent replacement costs, is not economically harmful. It's what people want for themselves, and their judgment on what is in their own interests is more credible than yours.
>>You have posted a single link that show, allegedly, that specifically cars are more durable nowadays.
It demolishes this idea that the market has a general incentive to reduce product longevity. If that were the case, every major product class would see a trend toward shorter lifespans. There certainly wouldn't be a major product class not only maintaining product lifespans, but increasing them.
Any way, the burden of proof was always on you. I just provided that link to show that these angsty lift-wing comments about the world are often not corroborated by what you actually see in the world when you take a closer look.
>>hide behind telling me what I actually meant with planned obsolescence
Again with the blatant lies. When people are complaining about how capitalism allegedly produces planned obsolescence, they are not talking about a general consumer preference for disposable products.
Read any of your own links and you'll see what kind of behavior they are referring to when they use the term.
They are talking about the phenomenon where, unbeknownst to consumers, companies are reducing product lifespans to get more reorders.
You can pretend otherwise to try to avoid admitting you were wrong, but any reasonable person who read your original comment would agree that the latter was what you were originally referring to.
Of course we're dealing with natural language with a lot of the meaning of statements extrapolated from the wider context of where they appear, so there's no formal proof you are lying now. Only reasonable conjecture that you're free to dismiss as part of your culture war against the people you imagine to be your enemies.
>>But instead you go on the defensive, dismiss the links as left-wing
A lot of your links were from left-wing sources and were not scientific sources or even primary evidence showing declining product lifespans.
Googling to find a bunch of articles about planned obsolescence and then listing them without checking first to see if they are credible sources or even providing a summary of the evidence they contain to accompany them is completely inconducive to constructive discussion.
>What that really means is less opportunity to fix individual components
That has been the trend in the PC and electronics industry for a century though. Notice how people don't fix their TVs/Radios/etc. anymore? Heck, even in the car industry.
>Cutting off third party repair and secondary used markets.
Well, and somehow these machines get high "consumer satisfaction" ratings, and have high use periods, and retain a lot of resale value.
> Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead.
A skilled technician replacing a 2¢ part on a $10 board costs more than a new $10 board. Just disassembling that board to recycle parts off of it will cost more than the board originally cost to manufacture.
You also run into the same argument against landfill airbag controllers. A factory that produces a million boards can have very good reliability metrics. A skilled technician not only has more variable output but less accurate quality metrics unless they put a lot of extra effort into process controls.
A recycled board will cost more and be statistically less reliable from a brand new board. It would be more efficient to just mechanically separate them to extract raw materials.
That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes with a cost, values are encoded as trade offs between desirable outcomes, rather than the desirable outcomes themselves. When some desirable outcome is not obtained in society, almost always the reason is that there are other tradeoffs being made. So society values affordability, competition, performance, longevity, quality, repairability, customizability -- and that's just on the product side. Then these product trade offs compete against things like labor market protections, use of resources for competing products, etc.
When Apple decides to solder RAM into the motherboard, it is making a trade off between performance and repairability. When Tesla chooses megacasting that might result in a fender bender totaling your car, they are choosing reliability and lower production costs over repairability. Just bemoaning that some product is less repairable and that society values repairability so therefore some dark force must be working to subvert society's values is not a useful or insightful analytical approach. Everything boils down to tradeoffs.
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