What we really need is more standardized swappable modules.
The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive, my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot, etc.
But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it.
The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer goods really sucks.
I've been lamenting the increasing difficulty of fixing phones, tablets and ultrathin laptops, and I just concluded that since I can't change anything, I might as well get more advanced tools.
It used to take a few screwdrivers and a soldering iron... well, newer tech is much more complex, so you just need better tools. A heat gun, thermal glue, prying tools, magnifier, a rework station, and you're good to go.
Everything being soldered on one board is a real travesty - a failed system board on a new laptop means you throw away the CPU, GPU, RAM and even the SSD.
That just seems insane to me, a laptop that's a few mm thinner is not worth it, I'd rather have the CPU socketed, GPU, RAM and storage slotted.
People with laptops that use MXM slots are upgrading from Kepler GPUs to Maxwell, Pascal and newer, everyone else is buying whole new machines. What a waste.
But that might actually make it cheaper to fix or upgrade BGA chips since you can buy the whole failed system board pretty cheap. Just gotta have the right tools.
Straw man. No right to repair movement is arguing for making bulkier devices using older technology. I have zero problem with underfilled BGA _as long as I can buy replacement chip from legitimate source_.
Exactly. The problem currently is proprietary components (and interfaces between them), and tight integration. When almost anything breaks, you need a proprietary part, or even an entire subsystem, which is very often more expensive than junking the entire appliance and buying a new one, and often parts are not even available.
We need modularity, more like a desktop PC or 3d printers, standard parts and interfaces. You don't have to throw that away (including screen, keyboard) when a stick of RAM breaks, for example.
It'd be nice if someone would create modular appliances so that as efficiencies are achieved the inefficient part could be replaced. It'd be even nicer if mfgs had standards so that many parts could be interchanged without any work or adjustments.
I've had to replace switches, as well as some cheap plastic parts which should sell for a couple of dollars at most, but they go for $20-40, and that's if you know how to buy them, if you get a repair person to replace the part, not counting the labor, those parts are going to run some multiple of the Amazon prices.
Repairability is a pointless standard for hardware device innovation. If we had to design modern devices to be easily repairable then they would be so bulky, heavy, and expensive as to be pointless. Plus designing for repairability with more modular components would actually make devices less reliable, and more likely to need to be repaired in the first place.
A better goal is to design for easy deconstruction and recycling so that broken equipment doesn't end up in landfills.
The problem isn't just for tinkerers who want to upgrade. It's also about repairs and recycling. We're voting with our wallets for hardware that can't be easily or cheaply repaired and is impossible to be recycled.
In fact, this being repairable in the field by a person with a soldering iron and a bag of parts is a consideration.
Sometimes you cannot just get a full module to swap.
Unsoldering a module would be much simpler, if the connection were designed for rework, and modules would be more commoditized.
A simple example is my washing machine that recently died. A mosfet blew on the motor inverter/controller, and obviously took out some other components too. It's silicone-encased, making it infeasible to diagnose and fix compoonent by component. The entire electronics, including psu, mcu, display, buttons, and motor controller are a single unit, and has to be replaced. Since it's specific to the model, it is rare and expensive, and not economical to replace, so the entire machine is now junk, or at best spare parts.
In my fantasy ideal, the motor controller would be a separate board, and fairly standardized to the motor size/design, just like stepper driver boards. The display/ui would be a separate board, since that is a common point of failure. The psu should certainly be a standard board. And the the main control board running the valves etc would again be it's own board. Interfaces and protocols between boards should be standard or at least documented.
Yes, multiple, simpler mcu's. And slightly more material, etc, as you say, though for a washing machine, the added weight of a few electronics hardly matters. But much less custom design, inventory, much more repairable, reusable, upgradeable, hackable, etc.
The washing-machine of Theseus, as it were.
Another example is a toaster oven that recently broke. One of the elements shorted or burned out, it is one of a handful of standard sizes/resistances etc, rather than some custom proprietary design. Nice and modular, just as I want. BUT, the elements are riveted to the rest of the oven, rather than screwed, making a replacement significantly harder, to the point I haven't yet bothered (eg I don't have a metal drill-bit), and I bought a replacement oven (with screwed elements - the search was not trivial). A saving of a couple of cents (riveting vs screwing) for the manufacturer has actually cost me, and the world, much much more. IMHO the repairability of this stuff should be mandated, or at least documented right on the front alongside the energy-efficiency ratings and purchase price, etc.
We have also seen multiple failed attempts at modular phones.
Ultimately, the problem with repair is not about making it easy enough for grandma to swap out a part. Its about making sure repair stores have the ability to source replacement parts.
Its pretty easy to do almost any repair if you have the tools and parts but there is no way you are finding a new IC that fried on your 5 year old laptop.
The problem isn't just with poor quality, but with integration or lack of modularity/standardization.
I've had exactly the same problem with blenders, several times, where for example a small plastic tab that secures the blender bowl to the motor base snaps off, making the whole thing useless.
It would not be such an issue if these couplings were standardized in some way, so that you could buy a replacement, other than the manufacturer's hugely price inflated spare part.
Contrast the situation with when your PC graphics card or memory stick fails, you can just buy a commodity replacement, rather than junking the whole PC, screen, keyboard.
The more philosophical problem of course is that market capitalism's one incentive is to make profit. Making good products is only incidental to that imperative, and clearly not always a requirement.
So if our goal is to prolong the lifecycle of consumer electronics, then repairability isn’t a necessary metric.
If regulators instead went after service pricing abuse, that would force companies like Apple to drive down their repair prices—which might force them to design their hardware in a more modular manner, but not necessarily, so that if it becomes negligibly cheap to manufacture and replace the entire part of a less modular architecture, then they still have the freedom to design electronics in a less modular architecture. Repairability, considering the arbitrariness of the level of modularity that it stops, really does seem like a constraint on innovation.
User-serviceability is another unnecessary requirement, in my opinion, and in this regard, regulators can go after service availability. Electronics manufacturers who insist on tight integration of their products should make their repair services highly available, which seems like a fair trade-off.
The market largely self-regulates this. If you want systems with replaceable components built to high quality standards, they exist, but there are costs. They might costs more, not be cutting edge, not have the nice integrated form factors. But plenty of third-party-reviewers, brand reputation from customers, and fierce competition reigns in much of the worst practices of industry. But things move fast enough that it requires either relying on a reputation for quality or detailed review to get what you want. And the mainstream buyers don't care about soldered components (at point of purchase). They might care about resale value, but really doesn't hinder the current market too much, given how fast things deprecate relative to repairability. All of this is basically self-regulated by a highly competitive global market.
I'm not sure the repairability of many types of electronic devices will be able to meaningfully survive into the future. The general trend in computing is to bring all the components together into a single module, as this improves power efficiency, latency, and bandwidth (e.g. going from DDR memory chips to stacked HBM chiplets connected to the processor by an interposer). Portability, and the aesthetics of thinner / lighter devices also creates a push towards more extensive integration. Repair increasingly means replacement.
Maybe the legislative solution we should be pursuing is longer mandatory warranties.
That said, in many cases a device fails due to a low value discrete component -- a resistor; a capacitor. This repair legislation would help here.
I always wonder this, and especially now as I am again told I need to throw out a dishwasher due to a faulty logic-board, which costs more to purchase than a new machine.
Being a programmer, I am used to many open standards that allow easy replacement of failing hardware in relation to computers. This is possible due to open-standards around physical card sizes, IO buses, ports, and otherwise.
In an ideal world I could replace the logic-board of my dishwasher with a compliant board from any manufacturer. In my head I have a fantasy (a sad one maybe) where I create a business such as this for all consumer electronics, and reduce landfill by a large percent. As I know nothing about electronics and manufacturing this is highly unlikely!
Any info on this would be great, if not just to satisfy my curiosity.
maybe you can’t do it at home but people with the correct instruments can do pretty much anyrhing. Replacing a broken component with a new one is not repairing. Fixing the broken component is repairing.
See, that’s why I said people who advocate for the right to repair are actually advocating for modules devices. Devices are already repairable If you can go beyond a modules swap.
>But why should I not be able to remove the display and swap it for a new one?
Many of us are? And we can replace parts from third parties.
It is getting more and more integrated though which makes it hard to replace parts. But that has more to do with greed and size requirements than vertical integration, a soldering iron can amend some of that. Driver situation isn't by any means something new or necessarily an indication of vertical integration either.
I'm not talking about replacing a memory module. I'm talking about replacing a defective 4Kb memory chip on a $1000+, 384Kb ISA card.
When I built PCs in the late 90s, the BOM included motherboard, cpu, graphics card, sound card, nic, sometimes a parallel port board, memory, hard disk, etc. At this point, it was only really feasible to repair modules that failed, few humans with the skill to replace a component would do so due to the economies of scale and cheap price.
Now, it's motherboard, cpu, memory, disk. The cost is much less, but most repairs are replacements of the mainboard or disk.
For most laptops, there's a tiny motherboard with most of the functionality integrated into a few modules. The only things that get repaired are memory and battery.
For the M1 Macbook, you have one of the highest performance devices on the market selling for $899 at 40-50% margin. I just bought similar Dell and HP units in quantities over 50,000 last fall for $100-150 less (probably 6-8% margin to the OEM), with inferior battery life, disk and cpu.
The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive, my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot, etc.
But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it.
The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer goods really sucks.
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