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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: 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.