I'm not necessarily a fan of the complicated design but I accept that it might've been necessary for miniaturisation.
Other than that, to me the message of this video is that if anything goes people will have replacement parts available and a repair shop can take care of it. Assuming that's the intention it's still pretty good.
Sure, I understand and appreciate the resourcefulness of the repair as much as anyone.
I just wanted to let people know that making a new one is a viable option both in repair and new hobby designs. It hasn't been that long that it's been fairly easy to do.
I think they're expecting for it to easily be taken apart but a lot of things they mentioned would require special tools and risk damaging the parts. Honestly, though, that's part of engineering, you're going to break things to figure out what works and doesn't work.
> The company cautions that they are completely custom, but says that it will offer a source for “replacement parts, thumbsticks, SSDs, and possibly more” in the coming months.
There you go. that's how you do right to repair.
Of course in an ideal world they'd also design the device to be easy to repair, but this is a massive leap in the right direction IMO.
I don't agree with the author here. The ARM replacing the chips is not bad, just the nature of what technical possibilities we have now. And having some funky chips in an old design does not help with repairing it.
I think OP has some sort of nostalgia that is not always well placed for old electronics.
> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everything on chip combined with economics of scale.
That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon.
Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace.
"Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved.
Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.
Well, the video does mention that you should "stay tuned" for official vendors for replacement parts for the SSD and thumbsticks.
I think I disagree that this is gaslighting. It's kind of cheeky, in a way, but maybe I'm missing something. There's an inherent tension between "design something that is easy to repair" and "give me a form factor that I actually like for hours of hand held gaming".
Or it might not and we are talking about a very concrete case.
The point is that everything is "large", low-tech and lots of stuff works the same. So replacement parts are fairly easy to get and easy to install. No soldering, no dexterity, no "exact design of every piece" required.
Compare that to fixing a smartphone, where you might need special tools to even open the device.
Yea, I getcha. I wonder how much repair-ability limited the design. Chunkier components is probably much easier for the common person to repair. I wouldn't want to open up my iPhone or Switch as an example, but feel like I'd be super comfortable taking apart the Deck.
I agree with you. In the case of this article the original parts were too far gone.
I do appreciate the physical aesthetics of older devices and would not vandalize functional and maintainable internals unless they caused extreme hardship.
> The manufacturer can and will make the device more and more difficult to tear apart
The company built the thing. There are tools, parts, and instructions that tell someone how to put it together. There are also tools, parts, and instructions that tell someone how to take it apart.
It may require special tools and parts, but for any mass-market item it won't be difficult with the right tools and the knowledge of how to do it.
The reason for this is that the company will lose more money by making it difficult to repair for themselves than they will ever lose to a DIY repairman.
My solution for DIY repairs:
- Official, real service manual made available. If you allow the company to provide a "monkey" version they certainly will.
- All neccesary parts and tools available at cost, or the cost of their generic equivalent in case of things like proprietary screwdrivers etc.
> at some point finding parts and people able to repair those will be hard or impossible.
Maybe, maybe not. If the machine uses the right "legacy" parts (a Z80 is a great example, but so is anything belt- or gear-driven, etc.), then it's a very good bet those parts and the people who are familiar with them will remain available for much longer than you or I will be alive.
I don't see why something can't be repairable and have good ergonomics/aesthetics. Just because something is repairable doesn't mean it needs to be made of cheap plastic or pops off easily.
The bigger issue here is (1) e-waste, (2) critical infrastructure.
> I think it's worth considering that most people aren't able to properly diagnose or troubleshoot something that's broken; especially electronics or mechanical things.
This is quite sad to consider. For a device like a telephone or laptop it’s quite understandable: adding the affordance for many (though not all) repairs would add cost and decrease reliability.
But there’s a kind of learned helplessness in not being able to dismantle and consider something manufactured. I’m a backpacker and the lines between make/modify/improvise/repair are often hard to find. And I think it’s also a kind of stance: the same self confidence and debugging perspective are required to fix a tent and figure out who should be president.
Factories are especially better at outputing when the market asks for that. Designing for repairability adds complexity.
After repairing a few appliances and laptops I think there's potential for less difficult products to repair. But it requires cultural shift (very difficult) into crowds that like poking into things. It's not all good, it kills some of the magic of buying a box. But it's not devoid of pleasure either, there's beauty in how minute things are done and done well; it's just a different kind of pleasure.
>Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability.
If it was a planned safety features then spare gears could be included or easy to find and buy for cheap(a device I bought had a safety fuse and it comed with 3 extra ones , also it was designed to be simple to replace it, no screws or "genius" needed. On the other hand a laptop of mine got destroyed by a high power voltage, but not destroyed at once, made me spent some more money on repairs until it finally died, all because some cheap safety feature was not included (even if hard to replace))
In fact I watched that video 3 months ago when it first came out because I follow the movement quite closely.
The machine creator claims that "it is economically superior to just replacing the display" but those are just random claims anyone can make. Especially when only a couple copies of that machine actually exist right now.
> Nope, it’s just not repairing. Call it right to swap modules at home and you will have correctly named movement.
Look, your argument about repair being economically infeasible has at least some level of merit. But your argument about "replacing a part is not actually repair" shows a complete misunderstanding of English.
Just look at any dictionary:
- Merriam-Webster: "to restore by replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken"
- WordsAPI: "the act of putting something in working order again"
- Google: "the action of fixing or mending something" (fix is defined as "a measure taken to resolve a problem or correct a mistake")
- Cambridge Dictionary: "to put something that is damaged, broken, or not working correctly, back into good condition or make it work again"
- Dictionary.com: "to restore to a good or sound condition after decay or damage"
Part replacement IS repair in ALL of these definitions because part replacement "restores the machine to working condition".
> 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.
Other than that, to me the message of this video is that if anything goes people will have replacement parts available and a repair shop can take care of it. Assuming that's the intention it's still pretty good.
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