>Full and complete service manuals to TVs, VCRs and cars. Access to parts etc.
To be fair, most electronics these days are so tightly integrated (literally IC, Integrated Circuits!) that there's not much you can do even with a full on schematic.
Long gone are the days of bigly electronics parts connected by a spaghetti nest of wires and third grade soldering.
Phones, laptops, GPUs and many other modern highly integrated electronic products are repairable. Look it up, there are tons of videos on YouTube of people doing component level repairs. Leaked schematics make a huge difference here.
> Look it up, there are tons of videos on YouTube of people doing component level repairs. Leaked schematics make a huge difference here.
I've watched these videos — and the people you're referencing doing this are rarely using any kind of schematics at all to repair modern digital-logic boards. And not for lack of accessibility!
Modern logic-board designs consist of a few proprietary ICs, plus generic labelled support components (e.g. VRM caps, surface-mount resistors and diodes, etc.)
You can repair these boards, but these repairs fall into three categories:
1. bad solder joints or broken traces — which mostly just requires looking at the board carefully to notice these.
2. bad generic support components — which in theory you can determine the need for by testing with various multimeter modes across the individual component's legs; but more often you just notice that what the component is in line with isn't working, and "swap out to see if that fixes it." And which where such a swap-out can be done by just looking the part to figure out what it identifies itself as; then de-soldering it and soldering on a replacement.
3. bad proprietary ICs — which you determine by tapping the signal lines leading from/to the IC on an oscilloscope; and which you "fix" by buying other for-parts copies of the board, de-soldering those ICs off of the sacrificial parts boards, and soldering them onto the "almost good" board.
In none of these cases would referencing a schematic help! They're all effectively "context free" repairs — see, probe, think, do.
(A schematic can in theory help you to find test points to differentially diagnose 1 vs 2 vs 3 in the case where a board is failing mysteriously... but once you have some experience in board repair, you can get 80% of the same information by just staring at the board for a minute.)
---
Of course, if you're repairing a power supply, or an audio receiver, or some still-half-analogue electronic appliance from the 1970s — then yeah, schematics help. But these types of systems do still come with those schematics! (You just need to buy the thing directly. You aren't getting a schematic for an "embedded" PSU with a computer; but you do get the schematic if you buy that same PSU at retail at a Shenzhen parts-mall. And you get forwarded that same schematic [and more] if you make an industrial order of 10000 of them, too.)
Those ICs have decomentation and i2c pins that allow the vendor to debug them. Providing that documentation to the user (along with any keys needed to make use of it) would be the modern equivalent to electronics service manuals.
I implore you to not trivialise and belittle “humans” for not always prioritising what you personally would like them to. Different people have different preferences, and that can and does can happen intelligently, not just the result being “wooed” by marketing or whatever.
However you call it, it is essentially trading one's freedom for convenience. Yes it is a result of more general social dynamics rather than mere advertising, it even follows the political trends of our times. But it is time to realise the price we pay for this sort of convenience, and that it does not come for free. Advertising does not tell that.
I mean that could be true only if you don’t account for the obvious reality that the lockdown of hackability, serviceability, access to parts is deliberate.
Personal preferences matter little in a duopoly industry. Sure, you could argue that other aspects are more important than serviceability, but it’d be insane to argue that people want less serviceability. So in short, we were better off in this aspect before. 100%.
> the obvious reality that the lockdown of hackability, serviceability, access to parts is deliberate.
I mean yes, it literally is, the law requires that smartphones incorporate a killswitch capable of resisting a device format/reload of the OS. This was seen as a consumer benefit in 2014, and did succeed in bringing muggings and phone theft down by as much as 80%.
This is what the sibling means about tradeoffs: people at the time wanted the tradeoff of fewer muggings. The killswitch was seen as a benefit, and largely Apple is in fact just responding to the legislative requirements pushed upon them.
And if you have to have a killswitch that can resist a OS reformat… there has to be some component pairing mechanism that works underneath the OS layer, naturally. That is the sensible way to implement it, otherwise you'd just swap in a new motherboard and hey, phone's working again. Or strip the phone for parts.
The idea of parts being anti-theft/strip-resistant is pretty much inherently in contradiction to right-to-repair. And again, I think people probably understand that... but never forget that theft-resistance was a legislative initiative pushed over the objections of Apple and other phone vendors at the time, having some unforeseen consequences. People actually did want this, people lobbied for this, as much as modern readers may not believe it.
From the point of view of the consumer, serviceability is negatively unalloyed. That is, it can always be removed without an associated (positive) tradeoff for the consumer.
The topic at hand is not about a preference that most people would not find objectively good or bad. Why is this particular preference bad enough that one should feel bad for having it? Without statements supporting this view your post doesn’t make much sense.
they wouldn't because, like many teenagers smoking their first cigarette, they don't understand the consequences of satisfying that particular preference
people often have preferences that harm them, so the fact that a particular choice is voluntary isn't a very strong argument that it's healthy, even individually, much less collectively
this probably isn't a productive place to try to reason out the societal consequences of people acceding to these particular losses of freedom
This subthread could exist verbatim in any comment thread because it's devoid of substance. "Some positions are better than others", "why?", "because {poignant but vague analogy}".
Why specifically is it bad for people to prefer devices that are small and tightly integrated to devices which are repairable but make trade-offs to get there? I own a Framework laptop for its repairability but would warn anyone interested in it that the battery life won't work for all use cases. It's a trade-off that I've made that doesn't make sense for everyone.
>Why specifically is it bad for people to prefer devices that are small and tightly integrated to devices which are repairable but make trade-offs to get there?
For repairability, upgradability, hackability, the environment, waste, tighter vendor control, and so on...
Reasons is a good start. Explaining and justifying those reasons would be better.
I choose hackability and upgradeability and less vendor lockin because I myself value those things, but I see that as a personal preference and not something I want or need to impose on the industry as a whole. Benefits to the environment and reducing waste are clearly valuable but it's not obvious to me without seeing data that such benefits would be high—many people tend to upgrade phones long before batteries need replacing anyway, so I would need to see data that demonstrates that a substantial number of things would be saved from the landfill by virtue of higher reparability.
>Reasons is a good start. Explaining and justifying those reasons would be better
The question was "Why specifically is it bad", and I gave 6 reasons. Does the "justyfing" demand stop at some point, or we'd get down all the way to justifying why being alive is better than being dead, why anything ever matters, and so on?
I think the reasons are self-evident - i.e. it shouldn't take any argument as to why repairability and upgradability are good, why being more at the mercy of the vendor is bad, or why protecting environment and being less wasteful matters.
I brought up counterpoints to each of your reasons, but if you don't want to have a conversation about them that's fine. I'm not particularly invested in my counter position, I just get very tired of the zeitgeist where people think it's okay to dismiss a popular perspective because it's "obviously" wrong.
And no, flat-earther comparisons aren't going to fly, I'm talking about perspectives held by tens of millions.
Waste and environment are the only reasons you gave that speak to the preference being bad in any sort of objective sense. The status quo ante iPhones was lack of repairability in cheap, small devices. The devices cost little and there was little economic friction to just getting another one. I don’t know for sure but I imagine the average length of use for Nokia devices was less than that of iPhones.
The lives of people with wealth (which by world standards is just about everyone in the U.S.) is enormously wasteful, and unsustainable. Instead of focusing on one aspect of waste in our lives we should take a holistic approach.
>I don’t know for sure but I imagine the average length of use for Nokia devices was less than that of iPhones
Wasn't and didn't have to be. Ancient Nokia mobile phones would still be perfectly usable, protocols aside, for basic phone functions like talking and messaging. And you could even use them to bash on and mend a dent in your anvil.
It’s unclear who the “they” are in your comment and even if you did make it clear your post is less meaningful than the one I responded to. What was the goal with this retort?
this probably isn't a productive place to try to reason out the societal consequences of people acceding to these particular losses of freedom, but i thought it was worth pointing out that people often have preferences that harm them, so the fact that a particular choice is voluntary isn't a very strong argument that it's healthy, even individually, much less collectively
i appreciate your critique of the clarity of my comment and have edited it to clarify
And the fact that your preference is different than someone else's doesn't automatically make yours the better one.
This line is copy/pasted into dozens of comment threads across dozens of topics, and while it's very representative of the zeitgeist it's a dead end for an interesting conversation and frankly it's a toxic, elitist mindset.
Defend the position, don't just assert that some positions are better than others and leave it to the readers to guess which one you're claiming is a priori superior.
Then defend your position. "Not all opinions are equal" is a lazy line that does nothing to further any cause and if anything just makes you and your cause feel dismissive and devoid of critical thinking.
>"Not all opinions are equal" is a lazy line that does nothing to further any cause
My primary wish for this comment about not all positions being equal wasn't to "further a cause", but to stop the bad argument that amounted to "people just have different preferences" as if that made all of them ok.
If we agree that "not all opinions/preferences are equally good" is a better idea than "all preferences are equally ok" my work is done!
As for the specifics, others (and me, elsewhere in this post's threads) have argued several reasons why this tight integration is worse. In fact I gave six of them.
People's different preferences all being equally valid should be the default position, with evidence required to say otherwise. Simply stating that not all preferences are equal does not contribute to the conversation as much as reminding everyone that different preferences exist does.
That there are good ideas and bad ideas, good plans and bad plans, good things and bad things, beneficial things and detrimental things, and if you like the former your preference is a good one, and if you like the latter your preference is a bad one is controversial in 2024, and shouldn't be the default position?
I too like to argue by claiming that my opinion is the default position that doesn't need to be backed up with reason while everyone who thinks otherwise better come up with an irontight proof that theirs is better. Checkmate.
We had all that. It was taken away.