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'Right to repair' gathers force

I'd be interested to canvas other members views on this. My view is "about time" - not for consumers to mend appliances themselves, but for appliances to be designed and manufactured for long service lives. My perspective comes from experience in three different manufacturing industries where longevity was a given, our products were expected to be serviceable for 20 years, and in practice typically lasted considerably more - 30, 40, 50 years. I get very frustrated if a piece of domestic equipment fails in an unserviceable way after, say, 5 years - recently happened with our gas cooker (which was actually pretty naff from day one). Then of course there's the electronic equipment that fails just after the warranty expires - I'd suggest that's completely unacceptable from a resource point of view. We know a huge amount now about design for reliability and design for serviceability, from an ethical point of view shouldn't we be applying this more?

I'm glad to see this article also considers the question of whether we should be encouraged to replace perfectly serviceable equipment in the name of energy efficiency. As it states, this all depends whether the energy expended in producing the equipment and disposing of the old equipment could actually exceeds the potential saving - which I suspect it often does.

Cheers, Andy

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0 Mark Tickner over 5 years ago

To throw a bit of a contrary argument here; how far do you take the right to repair? How much do you want to have to pay (as increased product prices) in order to achieve it?

From a microelectronics point of view, devices have got faster and smaller and more complex. If you had access to the diagnostics and that told you that the one of the memories (or the SoC itself) was showing signs of failure; there are many reasons why you shouldn’t be permitted to attempt repair.

The first is that many SoC’s and associated memories are packaged as BGA’s these days. Those are a complete nightmare to remove from a PCB without some form of specialist equipment. You would need a reflow line in your garden shed to get the new one soldered on as well. Or course we could move back to socket packaged devices and memory, but I doubt it would have the same sort of performance.

The second is the safety and security aspect; if you allow the user to change something how do you ensure that neither of these have been compromised.

Thirdly, what if be self-repairing you cause the performance to be degraded? Do you accept that it's now your responsibility if it no longer works to the optimum. LCD's are very sensitive to the forces and stresses on the screen during assembly. A self-repair of a LCD is fairly likely to result in the colours (particularly black) being somewhat off.

Going to Andy’s comment about smaller processes causing issues on semi-conductor longevity. Yes, this was something one of my semiconductor specialists mentioned to me about 10 years ago. I work in the automotive domain and our products are expected to work for 10 or 15 years (depending on the OEM, not going to divulge who asks for what!). However, the expectation from the end-user of the vehicle is that car systems can provide similar levels of functionality and performance to smart phone devices.

That said, my smart phone works fine but it’s battery is dying. But I can’t replace it because its fixed in place to provide what proofing – not that I intend dropping it in a puddle (although one colleague has the same phone and has accidentally dropped it in water and reports it still works fine).

Mark
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0 Mark Tickner over 5 years ago

To throw a bit of a contrary argument here; how far do you take the right to repair? How much do you want to have to pay (as increased product prices) in order to achieve it?

From a microelectronics point of view, devices have got faster and smaller and more complex. If you had access to the diagnostics and that told you that the one of the memories (or the SoC itself) was showing signs of failure; there are many reasons why you shouldn’t be permitted to attempt repair.

The first is that many SoC’s and associated memories are packaged as BGA’s these days. Those are a complete nightmare to remove from a PCB without some form of specialist equipment. You would need a reflow line in your garden shed to get the new one soldered on as well. Or course we could move back to socket packaged devices and memory, but I doubt it would have the same sort of performance.

The second is the safety and security aspect; if you allow the user to change something how do you ensure that neither of these have been compromised.

Thirdly, what if be self-repairing you cause the performance to be degraded? Do you accept that it's now your responsibility if it no longer works to the optimum. LCD's are very sensitive to the forces and stresses on the screen during assembly. A self-repair of a LCD is fairly likely to result in the colours (particularly black) being somewhat off.

Going to Andy’s comment about smaller processes causing issues on semi-conductor longevity. Yes, this was something one of my semiconductor specialists mentioned to me about 10 years ago. I work in the automotive domain and our products are expected to work for 10 or 15 years (depending on the OEM, not going to divulge who asks for what!). However, the expectation from the end-user of the vehicle is that car systems can provide similar levels of functionality and performance to smart phone devices.

That said, my smart phone works fine but it’s battery is dying. But I can’t replace it because its fixed in place to provide what proofing – not that I intend dropping it in a puddle (although one colleague has the same phone and has accidentally dropped it in water and reports it still works fine).

Mark
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'Right to repair' gathers force

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