Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right

https://repair.eu/news/the-price-is-not-right/

by acqbu • 2 years ago

172 191 2 years ago

kazinator3• 2 years ago

But these requirements still ignore one of the biggest problems: the price of spare parts.

No, that is short-sighted.

The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.

For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.

Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.

You're not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you're vendor-locked, and there is no competition.

ikesau• 2 years ago

yeah, this logic makes sense to me

i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

but i also have no experience in manufacturing or repair. i'd love to hear if there are any successful case studies on the subject

jfim• 2 years ago

There are definitely some products for which it would be doable, for example Midea makes a lot of the microwave oven models sold in the US.

lelanthran6• 2 years ago

i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

Older cars were.

Manufacturers never designed their own brake pads, they picked a caliper design that closely fit an existing wheel.

Carburetors? Just fit one from a carburetor manufacturer (weber, etc).

Steering racks, balljoints ... many fit multiple brands.

Alternators, radiators, various water tanks ... all from a common parts manufacturer, then used in several brands. Thermostats used to be a common design too.

Hell, they don't even do their own transmissions - just get a ZF-whatever.

When Hyundai launched their gen-1 Elantra ~1990, it came with a Mitsubishi engine.

Wheel bearings, CV joints - one design fit many different brands.

The repairability of older cars was amazing in retrospect.

Today it's different - you are unlikely to find brake pads from a Ford that fits a Toyota.

The companies spent extra money on design, to make that internal part significantly different, then extra money on tooling to actually build it, just so that you cannot buy a replacement unless its from them.

MilStdJunkie• 2 years ago

With international supply chains, labor hours naturally flowed down to those places with cheapest labor, while maintenance hours (performed in higher standard of living countries) were chopped to basically nothing. Maintenance is where standards get enforced. While it might be possible to dictate standards to a factory in Shenzhen, the odds they're going to be built to spec is vanishingly small. So, as we've seen, far easier to just have the overseas factory build the assembly, then you can reject the nonfunctional assembly, or, better yet, have the consumer find the nonfunctional units directly. The upside of this is you can make all the components completely bespoke to the application, tightening tolerances and (with the potential of) increasing overall reliability.

In industries where maintenance still has to happen, you see these general specs still in use. ARINC is one set that I deal with every day - they publish tons - along with many various MIL-STD things.

antisthenes• 2 years ago

i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

As the article points out, sometimes the spare parts are extremely simple things like bolts and screws, which should really be standardized across all industries.

Things like motors/switches and other simple electric components can also be (and should be) mostly standardized. It's only once you get to circuits and complex electronic boards that you will run into issues, because they can be custom.

Most consumer products aren't complicated, and if they are, they are only complicated because the company is trying to create huge markups and prevent people from repairing items.

ErikRogneby• 2 years ago

Exactly right! there are a whole lot of after-market part suppliers for major appliances like dishwashers, laundry washing machines etc. Some of them have a parts list and assembly schematic hidden in the machine.

userbinator7• 2 years ago

Many washing machines are produced by the Whirlpool group under different brands, so it's not surprising that they would have a lot of parts in common and thus also feed a large aftermarket. Import brands like Samsung and LG tend to be much worse on parts availability and service information (and according to some statistics, also reliability.)

ghaff2• 2 years ago

There are often third-party spare parts.

Some of the plastic parts on my decades old Cuisinart food processor have started to go but the motor is still great. But Cuisinart doesn't make the parts for what is almost a 50 year old appliance at this point. I was able to buy 3rd party parts for too much money but they don't fit quite right. I make do as it's not something I use that often and can make it work.

cmiller1• 2 years ago

things have to be made with generic parts

This seems tricky to legislate though. How do regulators decide which parts are like this? How do you deal with "generic parts" holding back innovation in cases where someone has invented an improved version of that part but it's not available as a generic part yet?

isilofi3• 2 years ago

There are standards for sizes of screws, washers, motors, cables, plugs, sockets, ...

Just create a bunch more of those standards, e.g. for batteries, legislate their use, done. As a side effect, products become cheaper because parts will then be available off-the-shelf at economy-of-scale prices, and supply problems also become less likely because there will be numerous vendors for each part.

However, there will be two problems: some things, like cases and special moldings are hard to standardize. So I would suggest legislating that 3D-printing instructions (STL, material, finishing steps) be made available as soon as the part itself is unavailable or too expensive. And very innovative parts should be exempt for the first few years, provided they are measurably and provably better than the standardized equivalents and that a new standard is being created from them.

Aerbil313• 2 years ago

It’s the tension between technological progress and societal inertia at its fundamentals. Exact same argument can be applied to many areas including software. You can’t solve it. It’ll be solved when technological progress stops.

h0l0cube• 2 years ago

Literally a whole section of TFA is devoted to this:

Astute readers may have noticed one typical element missing from the price setting factors listed above: competitiveness.

kazinator3• 2 years ago

It's hard for astute readers to read that far into something that is constantly telling them what they already know.

Rygian2• 2 years ago

The rule should be that the total cumulative cost of all the spare parts for an appliance must be lower than 80% of the price of the appliance brand new.

sokoloff11• 2 years ago

The price of all the spare parts to build an assembly will always be higher than the finished product, absent some crazy imbalance of very high labor and very low parts costs. (Arguably, a block of wood that you can whittle a product out of would sell for less than the finished product, but anything mass-produced will have spare parts priced at some small multiple of the finished good price.)

Why? It's incredibly labor-intensive and logistics-intensive to track and offer one M10x1.25x12mm bolt or one main PCB for a $30 product. When I'm mass producing 5K units, I need 5K PCBs, 15K bolts, 5K upper case halves, 5K lower case halves, 5K displays, 5K buttons, etc. and I can arrange to have them delivered lineside in kits or whatever form I need and I'm pretty much going to use up everything I order in a very predictable way.

When you need 1 display and 2 bolts, I have no guarantee that I can sell all the spare parts I made and stocked, and each little fiddly item I have to have someone inventory, put away, fetch, box, pack, and ship to you. It's going to cost more or you're not going to get it. (Today, you mostly can't get it.)

petsfed3• 2 years ago

This only works if you can only get like half of the assembly in spares. Otherwise, all I have to do to undercut the literal manufacturer is find cheaper labor to assemble the final product.

I like capping the cost of the replacement parts, but you have to factor in the additional labor cost of individually packaging, inventorying, storing, and shipping pieces that are going to go to final assembly either as a kit, or bulked in such a way that a spare-parts shipper cannot just part them out efficiently. So the total cost, before shipping and tax, of a stack of replacement parts to fully rebuild widget X should cost more than the fully assembled thing, but should probably cost less than 2 or 3 widget Xs.

refurb• 2 years ago

The cost of a given part could change over time.

Dalewyn5• 2 years ago

If Right to Repair was about the Right to Save Money rather than guaranteeing basic consumer rights, the advocates should have specified as such.

I have no sympathy for misrepresented idealogies, let alone ones driven by greed (in this case consumer greed). Y'all got your Right to Repair guaranteed, nowhere did it stipulate that had to be below <X> cost.

kayodelycaon4• 2 years ago

Yeah but I don’t think it’s reasonable for replacement parts to cost nearly as much as a new device unless those parts do make up a substantial of the manufacture cost.

Making repair more expensive than buying new defeats the purpose of repair.

Dalewyn5• 2 years ago

The purpose of repair is to reduce waste and guarantee a consumer's right to do with his things as he pleases.

Saving some money by repairing is certainly nice, but that is a side effect and not the primary objective.

trealira2• 2 years ago

It can also just be for preservation purposes. A lot of old game consoles are dying, and so are CRT televisions (which just aren't manufactured anymore). Enthusiasts would want both of these to be repairable so that old games can be played forever (but AFAIK, only CRTs are actually repairable). The supply of both of them are shrinking, so only repairability would help their longevity.

I guess that also ties into how long the guarantee of repairability should last. Nothing lasts forever; at some point, the parts to make the technology may stop being manufactured and sold.

Buttons8403• 2 years ago

Okay, so why not stipulate that parts need to be available at a reasonable price?

Dalewyn5• 2 years ago

Do you mean reasonable as in "Here is cost of manufacture, our margin for selling this to you, plus any other costs incurred." or "We want cheap and we want it now!"?

Personally, as someone who appreciates having the possibility to repair something, I'm happy so long as I can buy first-party parts at all. If I want or need to repair something, the cost is ultimately irrelevant.

a2128• 2 years ago

Right to Repair is about enabling owners of devices to get their devices repaired, instead of being stuck with the choice of throwing it away and buying a new one. If the manufacturers set the price of spare parts so unreasonably high that repairing is more expensive than buying a new one, then in practice people are still stuck with the choice of throwing it away and buying a new one.

I personally had an experience with a device that costed $300 and would often go on sale for as low as $100. It depended on a cable that broke after a few years. They did sell replacement cables on a difficult-to-navigate website that only ships to US(?), except it costed over $100. It's just a bundle of wires with a proprietary connector on one end. Was my right to repair guaranteed? Sure, I could've bought a cable allegedly worth as much as the device. Even if the cable was not sold, I just as well could've hired someone to reverse engineer the connector and assemble a new cable. I fail to see how right to repair is guaranteed in a reasonable manner though.

Dalewyn5• 2 years ago

The fact that a spare or replacement part might be or is expensive does not inhibit my ability to repair something.

Are the parts required to repair something available for me to obtain or purchase? If yes, then my Right to Repair has been assured.

andrewla• 2 years ago

Holy unintended side effects, Batman!

I have to say that I did not see this coming when I heard about right-to-repair legislation.

It seems like there is one workaround for a reseller; I can just buy Bosch washing machines new, and disassemble them for parts. In the worst case, the most commonly failing part will cost as much as one washing machine. Plus the cost of carrying inventory. Or I guess you could try to do it on-demand, but you've still got a bunch of motor-less washing machines in the shed out back.

jjbickerstaffe• 2 years ago

For many products there seems to be a thriving ecosystem on ebay of people taking genuine manufacturer parts, subdividing them, and reselling the smaller individual parts for consumers to use.

kayodelycaon4• 2 years ago

Part of the problem here is we don’t know the margins of this stuff. Just how badly are we being screwed? Probably pretty bad but…

Manufacturing cost for a non-OEM part is not representative of total cost to an OEM to provide quality-assured and warrantied spares of said part to customers.

Some parts are stored as complete assemblies. A unique screw may not be stocked as a separate item. It’s possible replacing a damaged or missing subassembly puts the whole thing out of tolerances.

The majority of these arguments are probably complete bullshit. Repairability is the cost of doing business.

This is going to be a pain to enforce. Hopefully enough companies get painful penalties to deter the rest from playing this game.

roywashere• 2 years ago

And as the article stated: it can differ from vendor to vendor. I used to own an 8 year old Honda Civic and spare parts were difficult to obtain and expensive. Later I owned a 30+ year old Mercedes and parts were relatively cheap and easy to obtain and shipped locally next business day. With electronics it sucks a little that it seems for almost all brands everything is expensive and difficult. It does not really help that many electronics (such as the mentioned grass trimmers) are so extremely cheap to begin with.

sokoloff11• 2 years ago

8 year old Honda Civic and spare parts were difficult to obtain and expensive

What parts did you find difficult or expensive? We've owned a 2005 CR-V (a jacked-up AWD Civic, basically) and I've had no problems or complaints with the few items I've needed to source. RockAuto almost always gets them to me the next day or 2 days in the worst common case. (I agree that parts availability for Mercedes is also good, but I'm a little surprised to hear of parts issues [other than perhaps interior plastic panels] on a Honda Civic.)

Dnguyen• 2 years ago

I try to repair as much as I can because I don't want stuff end up in the trash. If the parts are expensive, we need a way to source the parts from the non-fully functional units out there. From my experience, most people find the repair a daunting task and won't even think about it.

MostlyStable4• 2 years ago

I know that relative to the size of the whole market, the number of consumers interested enough in repairing their stuff to consider it when purchasing is small, but does anyone know of any places that actually include both ease of repair and availability of parts in their review system?

iFixit it does it for a small subset of electronics, but I'd love to be able to find the equivalent for things like power tools, kitchen tools, appliances, etc.

Does Consumer Reports check this? I know they do reliability, but do they include repair? I think I'd be willing to pay if there was a reputable place I could check. Especially if it was possible to see if there are particular brands that are generally good about this (which might help decide in the case that a specific product isn't yet assessed).

Affric• 2 years ago

I found Dyson vacuum cleaners to be harder to get into than an iPhone. Awful plastic that you need to be very careful with.

AshamedCaptain2• 2 years ago

Dyson is just the worst and probably what the author of this article had in mind. A replacement AC adapter for the battery charger is already 1/4 of the price of the entire vacuum cleaner set (which includes vacuum, battery, charger, and AC adapter).

trealira2• 2 years ago

The article mentions the the French indice de réparabilité, but it's not perfect (and you need to speak French).

For some products, the French indice de réparabilité can help you take this into account, in order to choose a washing machine that scores 10/10 for spare parts price instead of one that scores 2,5/10, or a TV that scores 7,5/10 instead of one that scores 0/10.(7) However, you cannot search for or filter products by spare parts score on any website. You have to check them one by one by reviewing the scoring grid, which may not even be available online—although the seller is legally required to provide it upon request.

This is the website: https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/

AshamedCaptain2• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the repair score. Where something practically disposable like a Samsung foldable device (where you just can't do anything without destroying the main screen) scores a whopping 8/10 ( https://cdn.woopic.com/c10f167280f2414abb346a5347e1ecd9/prod... ) , while something like the Fairphone scores just one extra point at 9/10.

For comparison, iFixit gave the Fold a 2/10, and the Fairphone a 10/10.

boatsie2• 2 years ago

I think the best way to find repairable and long lived products is to buy commercial grade when possible or look at what gets used by contractors. The types of things that get used in commercial settings or pro use tend to be a lot more repairable and durable than the consumer equivalents. Definitely more expensive though.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

There are tools I use a lot like my cordless drill and the main thing that goes is the battery which can be easily replaced.

But there are a ton of tools I use once in a blue moon and probably aren't worth spending a premium on.

coderenegade2• 2 years ago

I use a backpack vacuum cleaner for this reason. I did a bit of cleaning work for pocket money when I was in uni, and the backpack vacuums were a revelation. I don't need a cordless vacuum, because it doesn't offer much of an advantage over what I already have, and what I have actually cost substantially less.

TeMPOraL7• 2 years ago

Caveat: contractors are also into disposables in some cases. I had a conversation with our electrician the other day, and he told me there are tools he invests in, and very similar - to a layman like me - tools he buys absolutely the cheapest brand, because he knows the latter are going to get damaged regardless of quality, so he treats them as consumables.

psynister• 2 years ago

I ran into this same thing recently. My dryer needed new electronics, basically the same price as buying a new dryer. My wife had strong opinions about JUST buying a new dryer so guess who has a new washer AND dryer?

nobodyandproud2• 2 years ago

One could say that the choice of buying over repairing was a wash.

MostlyStable4• 2 years ago

My personal experience with this was with a blender. The mount that held the motor went bad (turns out it was due to incredibly spindly supports that had broken. It probably saved a few cents in material costs but resulted in the whole thing failing years earlier than it probably should have), but luckily, the mounting bracket was available, and at an eminently reasonable price. Unfortunately, during this process, the mounting bracket holding the control board in place also broke (they did not use very high quality plastic), and unfortunately that piece was only sold as an assembly with the entire control board which was priced basically identically to the whole blender. It's currently sitting in a cupboard waiting for me to get the energy to get a 3d printed replacement, since I am having trouble throwing away what is otherwise a perfectly serviceable blender except for 1 small broken piece of plastic.

Unfortunately, this particular problem is not one that I think can be legislated away (or at least not without the legistlation causing more problems than it fixes). The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.

It is not technically hard. Just hit new goods with a sufficient tax such that buyers have no choice but to start caring about longevity and repairability.

Of course, it is practically impossible since people like being able to buy more stuff.

pixl972• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax

The political problems section is what to read, in general, no one is going to vote this on themselves.

piskov• 2 years ago

Just hit new goods with a sufficient tax

Inflation has your back :-)

sokoloff11• 2 years ago

Just hit new goods with a sufficient tax such that buyers have no choice

This is a perfect strategy for a politician who is seeking to retire at the next election.

emodendroket• 2 years ago

It's not just that, is it? How do I have any way to know how long a blender will last, besides signals like brand name or price with a rather attenuated relationship to the actual question, before I buy it?

oliwarner2• 2 years ago

Would STLs for parts fix this? We could legislate that buying a product gets you personal access to design files for the purpose of repair or enhancement.

Having full service sheets for electronics, and physical design files would make all but the most compact electronics user-serviceable, at no direct cost to manufacturers.

Buttons8403• 2 years ago

Also, IP laws should only apply when they are of benefit to society as a whole. So if you have a patent on a part you no longer produce, well, that doesn't benefit society so your patent is done.

entangledqubit• 2 years ago

I'm a fan of this mentality. (Though I'd be happier if the government gets a copy of all designs that are mass produced.) I recently had a 10 year old TV die on me and I was 90% sure that I just needed to swap the power supply. If I'd had some more info I could have tested things on my benchtop before trying to track down an identical replacement board. (Though those options were a bit dubious as well.)

userbinator7• 2 years ago

That sounds like the "open source" argument, and I doubt it'll do any good[1]; don't forget that we used to be able to repair all sorts of things without the original design drawings, and we should still be able to for non-software things. The real problem is that the majority of people are gradually losing the skills to do so.

Watch machinist channels on YouTube and you'll see those skills in action.

[1] What open source has done is created a whole generation of developers who have never heard of disassembly or binary patching techniques, which depending on the situation can be much simpler and easier than trying to figure out how to compile the source code (and not change anything else). It has effectively produced learned helplessness in the absence of source code.

treyd• 2 years ago

This is how it used to be. When you bought a computer you got a full circuit diagram with it so you could understand how it works. All appliances were like this, and some still are, but the fancier it is the less likely. My stove has a sticker on the back describing how the coils are wired up so a technician can service it better. There's no reason we can't mandate this even if our circuit boards and physical mechanisms are more complicated. It's clearly a net benefit for society.

samatman• 2 years ago

Kind of a tangent to your point, but this sounds like the sort of thing I fix with Sugru, not a printed part. That stuff has saved me a lot of money over the years.

tussa• 2 years ago

it probably saved a few cents in material costs

Perhaps a few cents for whole batch production. A lot of it is planned obsolescence. I've had countless things break on hinges or other tiny moving parts, because they were made from 3mm plastic instead of 5mm plastic. Every time it's moved it's under way more stress than it should. Therefore it'll break after around 3 years.

anonymous_sorry2• 2 years ago

I don't find planned obsolescence isn't a very convincing theory for something like a blender.

It makes sense for them to cheap out to save money, or to not think too hard about design for reliability beyond any guarantee or statutory warranty period.

But it doesn't make sense for them to deliberately design stuff to fail after 3 years. There is no vendor lock in for a blender. If it fails after three years, the number of people giving more custom to the same manufacturer must be miniscule, surely?

jakogut2• 2 years ago

I have a stainless garbage can from Kohler that has a ten year warranty. Appx. four years into owning it, the plastic lid hinge snapped.

Costco told me take it up with the manufacturer. Kohler had a page buried on their website helpfully detailing a Kafkaesque process to send them an RMA request to a physical mailing address, with no info on what to send, no forms, etc.

Instead, I modeled a replacement in OpenSCAD in ~30 minutes, and printed it in glass filled nylon (PA6). Can is still going strong.

rstupek• 2 years ago

That's weird about Costco because in my experience their return policy is incredibly generous. I had a Vizio TV stop working 2 years after purchase, just outside their warranty and Costco took it back, gave me the money back and a new TV cost less than the return

miki123211• 2 years ago

It can be legislated away by requiring all appliances of certain kinds to have 15 or 20 year warranties, perhaps with some extra safeguards to prevent Hollywood accounting tactics from being used.

This seems like a much neater solution than a right to repair. By making all repairs free for consumers, the repair costs are shifted onto the initial price. This allows for much easier repairability comparisons when shopping (items with high repair costs just become more expensive). It also forces manufacturers to consider product quality much more seriously, as unknowingly releasing a faulty product onto the market, without factoring the repair costs into the price, can significantly affect their profits. It would also significantly help with the "the servers have disappeared and my device is now a brick" issue by forcing manufacturers to keep the appropriate IT infrastructure operational.

Another less radical version of this idea is to force manufacturers to prominently feature a "yearly cost of use", which is basically the price divided by the number of years under warranty (we assume here that the product is designed to be thrown away immediately after the warranty expires). This gives manufacturers an incentive to extend warranties, which also forces more repairability.

The EU kind of sort of does this already, most electronic devices there have a mandatory warranty period, but it's only two years.

paulmd3• 2 years ago

I’m a fan of this too, essentially the idea would front-load the cost of repairs into the product as a consumption tax at the point of sale. This internalizes the externalities of this planned obsolescence.

But of course it’s not really a fixed price and the manufacturer is tacitly encouraged to compete in total lifecycle price rather than to do the “cheap out on a structural part to save 2 cents” thing. Which is the ultimate goal.

If what you want is for products to last a while, thats the way to do it. Legislate the lifecycle you want and let vendors compete on optimizing their products for that lifecycle. The free market will happily give you planned obsolescence, we are already in a market failure, and it’s not going to work itself out by just “making consumers more informed” or whatever pablum - if that worked you wouldn’t be in a market failure to begin with. Staying the course and “spreading awareness” has always been a vote against actual change.

morsch• 2 years ago

I wonder if the result of a twenty year warranty would be sturdier devices that are easier to service, or even flimsier devices that are cheap to replace a couple of times. Resources and manufacturing being cheap, labor costs being high.

I'm all for trying, though, don't get me wrong.

arantius• 2 years ago

Part of me loves this idea. I've had things fail, and would have been happy for warranty coverage. But:

* What about the market for truly inexpensive things? Do I get e.g. my plastic knife replaced every time it gets dull, for 20 years? Does a consumer still have the option to buy a truly inexpensive (and low quality) specialized tool, that they know(/expect) they'll only need once? (Or will they all be expensive, because it's now illegal to make something that won't last for 20 years?) * How does this affect expensive things? What will a car cost, if I have to pay for all the possible issues that will come up with it over 20 years up front? * How will this be enforced? Just form a corporation that "goes out of business" every year or two, and is magically replaced by another distinct corporate entity. Sure the warranty lasts 20 years but if the company servicing the warranty doesn't ... (The even more significant proliferation of e.g. HOOLEEZOO branded items?)

userbinator7• 2 years ago

Plastic welding is a thing. I doubt they used thermosets so you should be able to melt the pieces back together with a soldering iron or similar (and for some other plastics, CA glue and other solvents will work too.) You can even embed wires or other metal pieces for reinforcement.

3D printing is the "trendy maker" thing these days but don't forget that you can make a replacement out of a suitable material in many other ways, and one that may even outlast the official part. I have in the past repaired plastic parts of appliances by making a replacement out of scrap sheet metal.

There's no need for official parts when many people can figure out how to fabricate replacements --- which is one of the reasons why companies are so against right-to-repair.

You can do a lot these days with some basic tools (also quite cheap) and YouTube videos.

TeMPOraL7• 2 years ago

Plastic welding is a thing.

Good to know, I'll research it. In the past, I've attempted fixing plastic items with soldering iron and other sources of heat, up to and including open flame from a lighter - in every case, it resulted in burning and/or smoking and stinking plastic, and at no point the two parts became attached again. Not sure what I was doing wrong.

MostlyStable4• 2 years ago

This is a really good point. It might end up looking janky (I'm bad at the kind of detail level finesse it might take to look good), but slopping a bunch of glue on there would almost certainly hold it in place well enough to work.

Fradow• 2 years ago

Depending on how it's broken, sometime you'll be able to glue plastic parts together (it was recommended to me to use the gel super-glue, not the regular one).

Another interesting material is two part epoxy (like JB Weld). You can even make small parts out of it, for example redo a broken clip on a bigger plastic piece.

Due to owning and repairing a 20yo car with lots of brittle plastics, I've had to expand my plastic-repair skillset, and it's way deeper than you'd initially assume.

rainbowzootsuit• 2 years ago

Along with plastic welding and epoxies (good things to say about JB Weld) also using baking soda infused with cyanoacrylate glue (the very thin kind) can build up material and becomes approximately rock hard. Can be filed. Just be careful around transparent pieces as the fumes can haze them up.

There's also a commercial product called Q Bond that I believe includes a plastic powder as the "host" material but is used in the same way.

mytailorisrich5• 2 years ago

This was expected and foreseen.

Devices and appliances are manufactured with huge economies of scale and are, all in all, cheap.

Spare parts are going to cost and, especially, professional labour is going to cost. It's never going to make much financial sense to repair cheap-ish devices.

pixl972• 2 years ago

Yep, typically all the parts are made in bulk as in...

Company: Build me 1 million washing machines. Of course this is 1 million barrels, controller boards, frames, etc.

The people building the parts are going to build in a little bit of overrun to deal with warranty and factory damage, but there simply isn't enough extra stock laying around to keep them running for decades.

Crosseye_Jack4• 2 years ago

Depends on the device/appliance imo. I've repaired my washer and dryer a couple of times (a pump failed on both, had to strip and clean the washer once after someone used it to clean a old teddy bear and didn't put it in a wash bag(the bear came apart)), the part was manufactured by a number of companies (prob the same OEM suppliers, just without the brand stamped into it) and was pretty quick to replace the part myself.

A couple of years ago my parents dryer packed up (heating element died), I went down to double check the issue, ordered the part (off Amazon of all places, was more expense then some other places, but next day delivery!) and swapped the part the next day (Took the lid off, which gave access to the screws for the front panel, popped that off, unscrewed and disconnected the old heater, reversed the process to put it back together, jobs done!). Rang my step bother to tell him it was fixed and he was in the process of buying them new dryer.

When it comes to most appliances, "professional" labour isn't required, just someone handy with a screwdriver and can follow along to a YouTube video. The thing I've come across with real life friends is that they either just need a small nudge to do it themselves or they value their time more than the cost of hiring someone / buying a new one. (though, me personally, I wouldn't touch gas with a 10 ft pole!)

EDIT: Also repaired a far few TV's for friends & family too, but I also have a decent soldering setup which I don't expect "normies" to have, Always fun when you can fix someones "broken" TV with a few pennies worth of capacitors because its just a bad power supply!

mytailorisrich5• 2 years ago

just someone handy with a screwdriver and can follow along to a YouTube video

The thing is that this isn't available in most households...

boatsie2• 2 years ago

Another issue with this is that the part that fails often is poorly designed or not durable in the first place. So you spend money and time to replace it and then it will just fail again. Zero incentive to improve the part by the manufacturer. I think the solution is requiring manufacturers to sell warranties that cover full labor and materials or replacement. Then at least you could see if a manufacturer selling something cheaply has a very high “full warranty” price, it’s likely because it has a high failure rate. This would be the only way to incentivize fewer failures and repairs.

Rygian2• 2 years ago

2-year seller warranty is already a legal obligation in the EU.

verve_rat• 2 years ago

But 2 years isn't long enough. A washing machine or an oven should last at least a decade.

I'd like to see a legally mandated warranty system where a new appliance should last 5 years with no repairs, and 20 years with repairs that total no more than 25% of the original purchase price.

sebazzz• 2 years ago

It is a regulation, not a directive. For instance, The Netherlands considers a "reasonable lifetime" of the product

sparker726783• 2 years ago

Just about every proposed regulation in this article would dramatically increase the selling price of nearly all goods, and dramatically hinder new entrants from selling new products by increasing the burden to get started.

If that's the set of tradeoffs you want to make, ok, fine. But be up-front about it.

Consumer goods, by and large, are not markets with massive profit margins. They're markets of incredible scale with slim margins that generate large revenue as a result. You're not going to get better, more repairable products out of this. You're going to get fewer, more expensive products.

WWLink2• 2 years ago

dramatically hinder new entrants from selling new products

Armchair product engineering thoughts: A lot of kickstarters seemed to set themselves up for failure by trying to make a hermetically sealed apple-style product and have it produced in china without ever considering if they could build it locally, if they could get it produced in smaller quantities - if at all....

I get the whole "it can't be made at a competitive price if you don't build for an economy of scale" - but what seemed to happen is a startup would attempt to sell a widget with a design that was all hopes and dreams, immediately fly out to china, and spend a whole bunch of time and money coming up with something that looked great on paper.... but then had a fundamental flaw that required them to throw away all of the initial batch of products - maybe even the first few batches, burning up every penny they gathered in their funding campaign.

"Hold on there cowboy" is my take on this - it's easy to throw a design together that looks slick and ends up quickly becoming ewaste... startups (and startup-like projects) are usually some of the worst offenders. Think of things like Ouya or (lol) Google Stadia or any of a plethora of IoT crap that sounded cool, didn't quite achieve the desired results, and ended up in the landfill.

I'd argue that all this "bureaucratic red-tape" would help limit how much ewaste gets produced, at least a little bit.

jkestner• 2 years ago

I’ve made a conscious effort to build our (Kickstarted!) stuff domestically. With the exception of one product in China, which was still an educational PITA. Can’t claim the things are Made in America when a critical component is fabbed overseas, but it’s great to talk with people in my time zone. Going to be even better to drive over to the injection molder to dial in fit and finish.

OTOH, the examples you cite and many more are junked not because they’re made in China but due to a lack of software support/remediation. I’m not sure if there’s a business model that incentivizes this, so I’m rooting for the regulations that are slowing coming along on this.

stavros• 2 years ago

You're going to get fewer, more expensive products.

That last much longer.

financypants2• 2 years ago

Problem is sometimes you can get by with an off-off-brand product (it’s hit and miss). Many folks don’t buy the “spend more and you will get something MUCH better that will last you for years!” sales pitch. Also a lot of people wouldn’t be able to start fronting (or financing) more money for a better, more repairable product.

sparker726783• 2 years ago

Possibly!

I just think we should be clear about what tradeoffs are being proposed. This isn't all fairy dust and magic, and the average person doesn't have the background to understand the impact of proposals like this.

crazygringo2• 2 years ago

But that's not always a good thing.

People's needs for products change, and products themselves improve to gain features, become more energy efficient, etc.

I do not want to be running the air conditioner I had from thirty years ago. It used tons of energy, was noisy as hell, was ugly, didn't have a thermostat or timer or any other features we take for granted today.

Same thing in the way all my lamps have been replaced with LED's, televisions became HD and then large screen and then 4K, office chairs got better ergonomics, and so forth. Making a CD player that lasted 4 decades would have been a total waste of resources.

I honestly think we're at a pretty good balance point today. When something breaks, more often than not it's the case that the new version is a significant upgrade that was worth getting anyways.

pas• 2 years ago

It should be tied to market share or revenue. Apple and Bosch and others are not small sweatshops barely scraping by.

sparker726783• 2 years ago

That's certainly one way to implement it, no doubt.

I have my doubts that unrepairable, failing products are produced by few enough manufacturers that holding a handful of large ones to these rules would make a big dent in waste. But, maybe I'm wrong!

(Also, good luck convincing people to spend 4x on a vacuum because it's "repairable" when the no-name brand is not. Most people will roll the dice and save the money today.)

Aurornis• 2 years ago

The real impact would be that those products wouldn’t be offered in those markets. It’s a big world with a lot of customers out there.

If one region demands a substantially higher bar for entry with only marginal increase in customer base, it gets delayed for a later revision.

We already saw this happen with a lot of GDPR regulations and sites that decided it was easier to block those regions than spend all of the money to confirm their products didn’t put them at risk of violations.

We’re also seeing consumers make these decisions in real-time with things like Amazon knockoffs. I know a lot of people who swear they’re “buy it for life” people but will buy tools from Harbor Freight and get cheap knockoff things from Amazon all the time.

It’s easy for all of us to say we’d gladly pay more for extra quality or upgrade ability, but when it’s time to get the wallet out the decision criteria change.

sokoloff11• 2 years ago

I am “buy it for life -or- buy it for this one job”. I’ve got both SnapOn and Pittsburgh (HF Brand) tools in my tool chest.

“After a year, every Harbor Freight tool is a hammer” is less true than it used to be, but even when it was, there are times you need a tool for one job and if it isn’t in the trash bin afterwards, that’s just a bonus.

shiroiuma• 2 years ago

I know a lot of people who swear they’re “buy it for life” people but will buy tools from Harbor Freight

Have you bought any tools from Harbor Freight in the last 5 years or so? Their hand tools (socket wrenches, etc.) are quite good, and are made in Taiwan. They're actually quite fantastic tools for weekend mechanics and an excellent value. I can't think of anything that's better for a home mechanic if you live in the US.

m463• 2 years ago

market forces can help too.

If the OEM doesn't provide parts, they should provide specifications for aftermarket parts to be created and sold.

I believe I read somewhere that after 13 years car parts become available from third parties.

lnxg33k1• 2 years ago

I mean there has been a new entrant in the past few years, the fairphone, which arrived with a vision and an ethics, and is slowly getting market share, and better products, that are repairable, or new entrant like frame.work, which arrived with a vision, ethics too, and is slowly improving and getting market share. I am not sure why as a society we need to accomodate small vendors who arrive without a plan or anything selling shit shipped from China that is going to last 30 days and just become e-waste, like PinePhone or Librem comes to mind, I am not sure why society needs to accomodate any cowboy who wants to become a manufacturer to sell low effort china phones

AnarchismIsCool• 2 years ago

That's a feature, not a bug. If we build things to last a bit longer at the expense of a slightly higher cost we can save massive amounts of waste from being produced and use fewer materials. We don't need to crater everything but we also don't need as much -stuff- as we currently buy. Yes there are implications for lower income folks but that's a symptom of a problem that cheap plentiful flimsy shit isn't going to fix at the expense of the planet.

herbst3• 2 years ago

You're going to get fewer, more expensive products

At this point researching a single electronic device you never looked into before can easily take hours. For example kitchen electronics was a topic for me recently.

I honestly would be happy to have way less choice, may even pay more in general, but can be sure that these products fullfil all EU standards.

My mini Ofen with crazy good isolation, according to recent EU standards, that preheats in less than a minute, will surely pay for itself in power cost :) that's the hardware I want to choose from, f* those 200+ throwaway, mostly relabelled china brands, products in the same category.

deviantbit• 2 years ago

I've experienced overpriced parts. I've also experienced the inability to acquire parts.

I was able to completely rebuild my Dyson vacuum cleaner, with Dyson parts for a fraction of a new one. My A/C had a control board that went out, and only an authorized dealer could sell a replacement. The catch was, the dealer had to install it. So, since I have the skills, so I thought, I pulled the board, and went to repair it myself. They wanted to charge $1100, when the bad part was $7 dollars including shipping.

But guess what, they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected. Those MFr's. I replaced the entire system after this fiasco. There is an Asian company that made fighter planes that escorted bombers to Pearl Harbor, that now make HVAC systems. I would avoid them.

Making your products proprietary is one thing, but intentionally engineering them this way is criminal.

petsfed3• 2 years ago

That fits in the same zone as DRM for printer cartridges or coffee flavor cups.

That's asshole design.

I absolutely understand the urge to validate the inputs to make sure the thing will keep working, but leveraging that as a competitive moat is just adversarial to customers.

Nick87633• 2 years ago

Is that Mitsubishi? I would be curious to know how the anti-tamper relay setup was engineered. It would be great to have a hacker's guide on how to disable it!

merinofg• 2 years ago

My father owns an electronic repair shop specialized in TV, cameras and Music devices. The company has official agreements with the big brands to offer official technical support for their products, meaning that they have internal access to repair manuals and repair pieces to order from the official brand. Having a spare part more expensive than the product is a usual tactic from the manufacturer to not comply with the current EU law of producing and having stock of that piece for a minimum amount of years.

The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one. The funny part is that some customers still decides to repair them, and if you try to call the manufacturer to order the repair piece, either they delay months the shipment, or they end up sending the full original product from some old stock as replacement to give to the customer (or to disassemble in the repair shop if the customer still wants his one).

If current laws are, how to say this, "creatively (but legally) avoided" by companies, I really doubt that new regulations will help at all.

spaceribs• 2 years ago

It's just a matter of closing the loopholes then? I see law/regulation as a lot like releasing software, you need to iterate towards an ideal. Expecting an MVP to be perfect right out of the gate seems counterintuitive.

ygjb• 2 years ago

Not just closing the loopholes; specifically imposing consumer awardable penalties for failing to support a product - something like treble damages for willful infringement should do the trick.

Can't provide a part within a specific time frame at maximum cost of the appropriate fraction of the price, for a defined period of time after the product is sold? Great, the consumer is awarded an amount equal to 3 times the MSRP at product release to ensure they can acquire a replacement product!

TylerE2• 2 years ago

How long should a manufacturer being required to provide parts support? Building tons of parts and then warehousing them for decades has a very real cost.

mschuster91• 2 years ago

Building tons of parts and then warehousing them for decades has a very real cost

I wonder how the automotive industry has managed to do just that over decades.

The answer is relatively obvious, laws require them to do so, which in turn limits the amount of "SKU churn" to keep the logistics reasonable. Your usual car design holds on for 3 years, after which it gets a tiny rebrush that fixes usability or other issues that cropped up during the first period, and it will not change too much between the lines internally.

In contrast, we have many manufacturers that are as wasteful as to create "Black Friday" SKUs that are deceptively similarly named to "rest of the year" SKUs but built with slightly worse components.

This is utter, utter madness. There is no reason for this to exist at all.

userbinator7• 2 years ago

The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one.

Offer to buy the defective device from the customer, and now you have a source of spare parts to fix others. This was common strategy back then, but of course doesn't help the situation where some parts fail a lot more than others.

fostware• 2 years ago

The "HPE Battery for real-time clock" (otherwise known as CR2032) from the an official Australian HPE spare-parts supplier was listed at $50AUD. Now, those types of listings are behind a "Request Quote" partially, IMHO, because it was shared around a number of VARs as a joke.

Maybe the extra money was for the oversized boxes and packaging HPE spares are sent in...

fdgh5• 2 years ago

Stop regulating the market. You are killing them, not helping.

isilofi3• 2 years ago

Some parts of the market need to be killed, and quickly. Wasteful economy is killing the planet, and we need to dial down the produce-buy-throwaway-buy cycle.

iteratethis• 2 years ago

An additional problem is companies simply going out of business. Happens a lot in the middle-segment of electronics.

It's an unstoppable rat-race of cheap crappy products. The issue is that (too) cheap is the problem but also widely loved.

I would love to pay more for long-lasting products that are repairable and well-recyclable but most people don't.

fn-mote• 2 years ago

The article (and comments) don't seem to make what I think are essential points.

* Free-market competition is essential for price-setting. Aftermarket parts must be allowable. IMO no solution will ever work if the prices are set by a single vendor. People get mad, but

* "Parts pairing" and DRM are a real problem. They prevent the establishment of a market for replacement parts. I would like to see a discussion of banning this practice.

* Patents preventing the manufacture of "clone" replacement parts is another issue, but even that takes a back seat to software lock (or hardware lock, as a comment below mentions [1]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39096846

[...] they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected [...]

nobodyandproud2• 2 years ago

As long as businesses can pass along the cost of disposal to customers or elsewhere, they have every incentive to fight repairs.

Maybe forcing buy-back of broken products at a significant fraction of the original price? Though that'd incentivize "home appliances as a service" or fly-by-night businesses.

bigbabybuckman• 2 years ago

I'll scream into the void on this one. I loved my Pixel 5, it was the best phone I'd ever had. Pulling down with the fingerprint sensor in the back was a revelation.

I fixit wants 200+CAD to send me a replacement screen. I have been desperate for these to go on sale for a while.

It was a hard choice but the pixel 7 I have now, with carrier discounting, will in total cost me 70CAD.

thomasreggi• 2 years ago

Is there any DIY / 3D Printed community-made projects around designing household appliances? I'm mainly thinking about vacuums but even blenders and other things. Im not talking about everything being hand-made but designs can be made with popular motors, blades, and things of that nature. I like the idea of an off-the-shelf vacuum using the most efficient or readily available motors, and bags.

up2isomorphism• 2 years ago

Years of observation tells me that this is not a industry issue rather than consumer issue - We have failed to equip normal people with adequate sense of understanding/appreciation of non-straightforward things. With more and more customers not even wanting to read a user manual, businesses that give customer option to repair, in general, does not survive. Take X230 as an example, I spent $6xx in 2012 to buy it, equiped with 128GB ssd and 4GB memory and I spend around 300$ to upgrade it 1TB SSD/16GB Ram, plus something like $200 over the years for various things like fans, batteries. Even in 2021 I am not feeling it is slow, while I have probably made $1.5M worth of software work with that thing. BTW, none of these repair or upgrades is difficult in any sense. Do I want to buy something like again if it exists, surely I will. But do majority of people care? No. And during 10 years span, an average Apple user likely spent over 10K on laptops, while lenovo gets $600. I just do not know how such business can continue.

DoItToMe81• 2 years ago

Yeah, no. The industry intentionally making repairs impossible or excessively costly is absolutely an industry problem. Apple is especially responsible for this. Replacing parts on various iPhones will disable a whole slew of features depending on the part and model, which has nothing at all to do with "consumers not wanting to repair"

jacknews• 2 years ago

The right to repair laws should extend to modularity and standard interfaces.

I'm not a great fan of legislation, but sometimes it's the only way to align for-profit enterprise's self interest with the common good.

An example is the connection between a blender base and the jar. The manufacturers should be required to declare, and provide documentation for, the standard it adheres to, which would of course be available for 3rd parties to manufacture to.

Ideally manufacturers would converge on a single, or a few shared standards, and I'm sure there are legislative ways to nudge them towards that, and discourage the natural tendency toward fragmentation, proprietary differentiation, etc, aka monopoly power.

The PC world is a stunning example of the power of standard interfaces between components, and USB is a great example of where government can step in to the process; the EU usb-phone-charger mandate immediately solved, or at least vastly improved, the wasteful, expensive and inconvenient cacophony of proprietary phone chargers for consumers.

netfortius• 2 years ago

Is[n't] the choice of language menu also supposed to work on the actual linked article? I think it needs a little repair...

Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right

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