>Maintenance is the work of the caring

Agreed - which is why building mass market convinience stuff that require it is a bad idea - I have limited hours in a day - I do not want to spend any of them doing chores such as maintenence - I'd rather just buy a new working thing every x years and not care. Paying someone else to do the maintenence is nice in theory but finding someone reliable who won't ripp you off is too much hassle.

You know, there are reviews - on the internet - for mechanics and dealer service departments. And really, anyone able bodied can change oil.

In college I changed my oil and filters. It was a pain getting under a car a few inches off the ground, disposal was tricky, and I had to spend time cleaning up nasty gunk. I also could only do it when the car had not been driven recently.

The fundamental problem with changing your oil is that it involves oil. I saved $30, at the cost of an hour of my labor. As soon as I had a job, that equation didn't make sense.

I did the same thing on a late 90's 3 series throughout college. A pair of car jacks or rhino ramps makes the job way easier. Also if you take your oil to pep boys they'll dispose of it for free. Either way I'd still do it if I didn't live in a city. There's something nice about maintaining your things, it brings pride in ownership.

I now have a much newer car (that I probably don't need since I don't need to drive to work and live in a city) and no garage so I pay for oil changes. On the college car I knew how everything fit together, I took everything apart to fix it multiple times, I changed/ upgraded/ retrofitted things in their to make it more enjoyable. On my new car I can't really do those things without more complicated tech. It definitely changes how you view the object. Both are fun "tools" but one was my fun tool the other isn't

Not even $30 as the cost of the filter and oil (not to mention tools and ideally things to make it safer like ramps or jackstands)...

I think his point is that the goal is to make equipment that minimizes having to make "small, cheap, tweaks to complex parts that can fail due to wear and tear".

That's not how it works though. Manufacturers realized they want to force you to buy again so they just made it unmaintainable with the same lifespan. iPhones are unmaintainable and they still become useless after 5 years or so.

5 years is a long time for a smart phone! And remember that a longer lifespan costs more money. I doubt many customers (myself included) would be willing to pay more money for an iPhone for it to last more than 5 years.

You don't maintain CPU's. 1,000,000,000+ parts and it just works.

Except for when you have to update the microcode due to bugs that freeze your system under certain loads. Or when certain calculations are incorrect and you could NOT maintain it and the whole CPU range had to be recalled

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/intel-skylake-bug-cau... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

CPUs don't have a billion parts. The unpackaged die is one carefully crafted solid.

Oceans have different parts and are far more homogeneous than CPU's. Further individual transistors can break making parts a meaningful distinction.

PS: We call them silicon chips, but there are several tiny blobs of different chemicals involved. The process is closer to 3D printing than you might think.

I am aware of how chips are constructed. They are not built of discrete parts even though they are composed of multiple chemical elements. They are assembled through chemical processes that create a unified product through a few hundred steps. They are not an assembly of billions of parts and it is misleading to describe them as such.

Part does not just mean discrete object. The lower part of that beam is damaged.

pärt/Submit noun 1. "a piece or segment of something such as an object, activity, or period of time, which combined with other pieces makes up the whole."

2. some but not all of something. "the painting tells only part of the story"

You might be thinking of Component, but even that's arguable. CPU's often contain nonfunctional parts so each transistor is actually a meaningful distinction.

This discussion isn't about parts, components, or any other pedantic segmentation of matter; it's about the consumer's ability to perform maintenance.

The need to preform maintenance during the useful life of an object is a defect. The ability to extend the life of an object through maintenance is useful. These statements are not in conflict.

Early CPU's where built to be maintained, modern CPU's are not. That in no way makes modern CPU's worse. The Hubble cost more to maintain than it would have been to replace with something better. From a utilitarian standpoint the ability to maintain it was useless, from a political standpoint NASA loved being able to pretend those missions where useful.

At a deeper level maintenance generally means some parts break down before others. So, an ax becomes less sharp over time. Meanwhile the head also loses strength which limits how long that head can reasonably be maintained.

QED: Maintenance is all about having different parts that ware out a different times.

I'm not taking sides in this debate, but I am surprised that we haven't yet seen a product which is a car lease for 3 years where the hood doesn't even open. The car ships with synthetic oil and high mileage tires and literally the only thing you do is put gas in it. The high end version of the lease involves someone driving to your place of work and filling up your car with gas, so that for three years you literally just get in and drive.

I think there is enough of a luxury market for that to be a thing, and I am surprised we haven't seen it yet.

At first I was a little surprised that we were comparing smartphones to cars to CPUs to...oceans. But then I remembered I'm on Hacker News.

But they do degrade over time (slowly).

Yes, slowly. For almost everything I buy, I want it to last as long as possible without maintenance, instead of longer, but with regular maintenance.

Expensive items are an exception - I want my car to last long, not to avoid maintaining it. But there is space for very few exceptions.