SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the Use-it-up.-Wear-it-out.-Make-do.-Do-without. dept.
Fixers Know What 'Repairable' Means—Now There's A Standard For It - Ifixit:
[Earlier this year], three years of arguing with industry finally paid off, as the European standard EN45554 was published. This official document with an unexciting name details "general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products." In plain English, it's a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It's also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.
We want to repair the stuff we own, so we can use it for longer. This is not only important because we want our money's worth out of the things we paid for, but because manufacturing new products is a huge and underestimated driver of climate change. So if we want to avoid cooking our planet, we need to stop churning out disposable electronics and start repairing more. Like, right now.
The problem is, industry won't do this by itself. Managers get ahead by showing quarterly sales growth, not increased product lifespans. Hence we need the government to step in, banning unrepairable products and helping consumers—that's you!—to identify the most durable products out there, so as to empower them to make better purchasing decisions. And in the EU, our political leaders are getting ready to do so.
But here's the rub: those leaders don't know what a repairable product is. If you ask manufacturers, they will all tell you their products are repairable. If you ask us, some devices clearly are more repairable than others, and some are frankly just not repairable at all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Monday July 06 2020, @07:04PM (4 children)
More and more laptop RAM and SSD are soldered onto the motherboard. I hate that maybe slightly more than I hate soldered and glued-in cell phone batteries.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:10PM (3 children)
Exactly what I was referencing. And I agree completely - I absolutely refuse to buy any laptop with a soldered on consumable components. RAM I might tolerate if there's enough of it - RAM generally lasts a long time, and demands have pretty much plateaued. SSD and battery though - you're almost guaranteed to have those fail at least one or twice before the rest of the hardware is obsolete.
What *really* pisses me off are the low end laptops with 4GB of RAM and some tiny SSD soldered on. You *know* that's going to be barely adequate to begin with, and rapidly become completely intolerable. Tiny SSDs in particular are going to wear out incredibly fast. And yet they make a product explicitly targeting poor people that is a complete technological dead-end, rather than raising the price an extra $2 to make the most-inadequate components cheap and easy to upgrade when they can afford it.
I would love to at least see mandatory consumer-information tags on computers that specify how difficult major components (including the fan) are to replace - perhaps on a multi-tier scale ranging from "unscrew a cover and plug in a new module" through "spend an hour dismantling things" all the way to "buy a new motherboard".
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:03PM (2 children)
Yay! Like-minded! Lets get our pitchforks and torches and, oh wait, nevermind. That's being done and we'd be lost in the fray. :)
I guess we need to write letters to congress. That and help them set up better constituent polling systems that can't be poisoned by hired influencers.
RAM has gotten better, but I've replaced quite a few bad RAM modules in fairly recent years, more so in laptops.
My gripe about SSDs, which includes all of your thoughts, is that if an HD gets infected, do NOT boot it, but must REMOVE it and scan it as a secondary drive in a (hopefully) known clean machine. I spoze you could boot from a USB FLASH drive and accomplish the same thing, but it would take more work and time to keep the USB drive updated.
I'm also thinking of phones, where I really wish I could remove the SSD. I have at least 1 phone (I have several) that has no microSD slot.
But otherwise you can use SD / USB FLASH drives to expand the otherwise too small internal SSD.
I spose I'll be changing SSD FLASH chips on someone's laptop MB someday... And really there's probably no point, unless it's otherwise a great machine that the person loves. Kind of like an older car- if the engine dies, and you like the car and it's otherwise great and there's no close replacement, get a good used engine or rebuilt. Unless it's a newer John Deere tractor- then you just decorate it and use it as a plant stand and visual adornment.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)
Heh, yeah, I tend to think that the primary purpose of protests is to give protestors something to do together to blow off steam. Unless the protests pose a threat greater than the lost profits/power from meeting their demands, nothing is likely to happen. (Violent protests seem to have a somewhat better track record, but demand that protestors be willing to risk their lives in the retaliatory strikes. The Civil Rights Act finally being passed in the face of the post-MLK-assassination riots springs to mind)
For infected drives, I've always found the USB stick option to be much more convenient than transferring internal components between machines, even if I have to start by downloading a disk image (it's rare I deal with the situation often enough that updating an old USB stick is even worth considering). It also completely eliminates the risk of a particularly pernicious infection spreading to another machine - internal drives are generally treated by the OS with far less caution than external ones, not to mention you have to make sure your BIOS is set up properly to avoid the risk of booting off the infected drive. Not exactly rocket science, but an added nuisance nonetheless, and enough of an issue that I'd never suggest drive-swapping to someone who isn't already intimately familiar with adjusting the BIOS
I certainly agree on phones - I can understand the hard-wired RAM, since that's generally incorporated into the SoC architecture. SoC storage on the other hand is typically minimal to nonexistent and gets soldered on separately. And while there are some good arguments against having primary storage easily removable (as anyone who ever ran even an ancient primitive OS off a floppy disk can attest), not having any sort of replaceable storage just seems like a raw cash grab to me. Especially in the face of the fact that such phones are often available with two or three different capacities of storage, with the upgrades being sold at several times the value of the larger storage chip being used.
Phones though - really they're a whole new level of planned-obsolesce evil. It's been terribly dismaying to see their strategy being adopted by tablet and even laptop makers.
As for USB storage expansion on soldered-in laptops... I've done it, and with the ultra-compact "dongle drives" available it can work considerably better than a relatively slow SD card - but far too often such laptops also have only one or two USB ports to begin with, and personally I like using a mouse, and use external storage often enough that even a "generous" two ports means giving up the mouse during file transfers, while a single port is just a huge PitA under virtually all circumstances.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:27PM
Like minded we are. Gotta have a mouse, and to be sure that happens, I have some small USB multi-port expanders. Keep one in your wallet. :-}
Re: secondary drive, I meant I use an IDE / SATA to USB adapter.
Besides my many reasons for hating planned obsolescence, my bigger concern is that newer phones contain more built-in tracking / spying software.