I'm not sure consumers per se want it, but that companies think it's what consumers want, and only make things like that.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy that customers will buy it. I dont have another choice

Manufacturers want planned obsolesce more than anyone. The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant. Recycling should be the first goal then repair ability. I think we can do this without the manufacturers drawing the proverbial short straw. Maybe we should get a partial refund when returning expired devices. Maybe we should rent them rather than buy them.

> The problem in my view is that we take limited resources and combine it with slave labor to create landfill. Those few years of usage are not even that relevant.

That's an important insight.

I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline:

     RAW    >   PRODUCT  > FINISHED >  A BIT > WASTE
  MATERIALS > COMPONENTS >  GOODS   > OF USE > MATTER

Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too! The economy, as it is today, is essentially a rapidly growing system for turning usable resources into useless waste.

Here's the bad part though: adding recycling to any stage of this pipeline doesn't alter the overall behavior. It only recirculates some of the matter - recycling is never perfect. But as we know, if you recycle less than 100%, and then re-recycle that, and then re-recycle again, it still converges to zero. With an exponentially growing pipeline, recycling is only delaying the crisis a little bit.

Ultimately, we need to remove the exponent (or at least couple it to population growth, in the scenario where humanity expands into space). For now, we need to reduce it. And one of the best ways of doing that is... reducing use. Buying less. The less matter flows through the pipeline, the longer we have before it runs out.

While I agree that minimizing waste is important, I do have an objection to part of your description of economic growth.

>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!

The relationship between economic growth and environmental damage is more complicated than this. Something like transitioning from fossil fuels to cheap renewables is both a case of economic growth, and a reduction waste matter. Similar principles might apply to everyone having an iPod instead of buying new CDs, miniaturization in computing, productive uses of what used to be considered waste, building mass transit infrastructure over cars, etc.

If you want to slow damage to the natural environment, I'm all for it, but if you aim to do that by slowing economic growth, rather than accepting slowed economic growth as a potential side-effect, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Economic growth often means more people can have better lives using fewer resources.

Bear in mind matter isn't the only component. Energy is another huge input to the system. E.g. blockchain and its derivatives use tiny amounts of matter to use enormous amounts of energy.

We can and must develop more environmentally responsible sources of matter and energy. Trying to change human behavior with our current regulatory controls have been demonstrably inadequate. There are sources of matter and energy that do not run out, I believe them to be in space.

> That's an important insight.

Say the world (after some unfortunate incident) turns into [say] something like Cuba? In just a few years no one will have a phone.

>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!

If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials.

I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you needed a computer, maybe a calculator, a form of MP3 player, a camera, maybe some DVDs to watch in the back of the car along with a DVD player to watch them on.

Today you have all of that in a phone.

> Today you have all of that in a phone.

But you replace them every two years. And the market for them is still growing. And there's now a resurgence of a market for single-purpose appliances that happens on top of the smartphone market - not replacing it.

(It's also possible more matter goes into making a modern smartphone than a bunch of devices it replaced, because of the demand for more exotic and more pure materials in the processes along the way. But maybe it doesn't, maybe an individual smartphone is a net matter and energy saver. I can totally buy that, we've made a lot of efficiency improvements in manufacturing in the past decades. But there are limits to such improvements, and in the meantime, manufacturing as a whole keeps growing.)

Perhaps I've simplified my diagram too much - I should've drawn an additional "bypass" into "WASTE MATTER" from every other node, because every step in the pipeline loses some of its input as waste.

I was merely making the observation that the growth of the value of something is not necessary a linear function of the amount of materials used. I am not convinced, as an example, that the first iPhone caused drastically more waste to produce (or drastically less) than the last one. Yet the last one is clearly much better.

I'm not saying it's a linear function either. I think it varies. But I also don't think the value added per unit of resources used is growing exponentially. So the problem still remains, because anything short of exponential function isn't going to impact the overall trend long-term.

>value added per unit of resources used is growing exponentially

I would love to see the amount of resources that are used to produced each iPhone, because I don't have a big issue assuming that each phone brings, say 3 or 4 percent more utility to its user than the previous model would have.

So, assuming the battery is the most dirty part of the phone, I found the battery size for all the iphone models[0] and even if we exclude the the large ones, the iPhone 11 has a 54 percent larger battery.

The phones were released in 2007 and 2019, 12 years and 3 months apart[1]. That works out to a growth of approximately 3.3%.

So my original assumption was wrong, there has been an exponential growth in materials that nearly matches GDP growth.

[0]: https://itigic.com/how-much-battery-does-an-iphone-have-capa...

[1]: https://www.knowyourmobile.com/phones/every-single-iphone-re...

Apple maintains devices for more than five years, the devices themselves keep on working for far longer than that.

It’s got nothing to do with planned obsolescence, new devices get new features because technology makes those features possible.

You get non-serviceable devices because users want smaller, faster, better hardware. Any latches, connectors, or sockets are purely subtracting from battery life as that’s the only part of a phone that can be resized, and even that is subject to constraints.

Repairable/serviceable means by definition more expensive and worse feature set.

I understand this thread is about "repairability" of different product designs, and there are definitely arguments on both sides of that issue that are valid...

I just want to make sure you're not confusing "repairability" with Right to Repair... R2R is not asking for changes to product design - only that replacement parts and documentation are made available in a compulsory way.

How long should a company like apple that designs its own SoCs have to continue manufacturing replacement ones? That's not cheap - remember phones are only at the prices they are because they're manufactured in millions - how big do you think the market would be?

How long should production lines be kept producing out of date products?

Lots of open ended questions here that I'm not sure how to interpret the motivation for...

How long should a company like GM that designs its own engines have to continue manufacturing replacement ones? That's not cheap... (etc.)

Thinking about a mature market where we do have right to repair is a good test of these questions and helps reveal the hidden complexities. GM makes replacement parts for a while. A thriving non-OEM market persists long after the manufacturer ceases making more.

This is distinctly different from the status quo in Apple-land, where they prohibit partners like Texas Instruments from manufacturing or selling units to anyone but Apple.

Note also that there is no legislation in front of us with explicit terms set in stone here, so while your questions are good ones to consider when drafting such legislation, they should preclude a right to repair bill passing into law.

Automobile service uses non-OEM parts and recycled (junkyard) parts.

I have a 1965 and 1966 Mustangs. Original body panels are difficult to find, but I’ve not found any mechanical part that was the least bit difficult (aided by high-volume production and a lot of parts crossover up through the early 90s Fox body Mustangs).

> A big reason that stuff isn't replaceable anymore is because consumers wants some of the benefits that come w/ non-replaceable parts.

This may be true, but we shouldn't confuse 'a decision made by a product manager' with 'the customers want this'.

Some design decisions succeed because of the other strengths of a product (and the competition cargo-cult copies them), not because they are good design decisions. Some design decisions are made because they are more convenient for the vendor, not better for the customer. Some design decisions are made because of inertia. Pointing to any particular design trade-off in a successful product, and saying that 'Well, this is obviously what the market wants' is not always a correct conclusion to draw.

USB is unarguably the most successful mechanism for two hardware devices to communicate with each-other in history, and yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in. Should we conclude that customers want to play the cable fandango every time they plug one device into another?

>yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in

I used to know one of the folks involved with the USB standard pretty well professionally. At one point, he told me that this aspect of USB is one thing he wished they could have dealt with differently.

(That said, the fact that the mini and micro versions are more explicitly keyed doesn't make that much of a different and I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs.)

> I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs

Interestingly, reversible USB-A cables are readily available (at least here in Japan). They just have a too-thin "lip" in the middle which is prone to breaking. https://www.sanwa.co.jp/product/syohin.asp?code=KU-RMCB2W

I think it's just that nobody thought of it when the plug was designed, because this wasn't a problem that serial cables etc before USB-A had (and even USB-B is keyed!)

If Apple would publish schematic, diagnostic software and allow refurbishing and selling of parts to third party - it will keep your iPhone water proof still.

The reality is this, when your device gets old or your screen cracks , Apple will offer to fix it for 70% of a new device price, so you are pushed to buy a new device. I hope this is not controversial and has nothing to do with the water proof preference you have.

You can already buy some replacement parts, like screens and backs. It doesn't seem like you can replace the motherboard, so that would be a fair point. I wouldn't objecting to coding this into law, but I'm not sure why your comment is implying this is not currently possible.

Apple has explicitly made replacement parts non-user-servicable at this point. It's called "serialization" and prevents even OEM parts (like a screen from a different iPhone) from being recognized by the phone. [1] This is the type of consumer un-friendly behavior that R2R seeks to defend against.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...

>some parts

Maybe things changed a bit but you could not buy screens or use refurbished ones. But all parts should be available for phones and laptops, including screens,batteries, chips, ports. Also there should be a way where parts from broken phones could be reused (I know the argument about stolen phones but competent Apple people can find a way to make it possible so we can reuse components from borken devices and not send them some far away to be "recycled" instead of reuse.

Except for the battery I don’t think those things have ever really been user swappable though. The issue with water protection on phones I have worked on is that its hard to maintain when removing the screen because it tends to stick. I guess you could always buy a new gasket which is probably what the Apple store does.

You can have a replacable battery and be waterproof.