this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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The service and maintenance model is largely "replace it".
Everyone looks to a desktop computer where you swap out a stick of ram or whatever. But the real key is to look at laptops. Yes, a LOT of vendors solder the god damned ram in place and so forth which is bullshit. But repairs are generally less "okay, let me re-solder this one connection" since that connection is a via that is embedded in a circuitboard. So it becomes "let's replace that board". And yes, efforts can be made to split up the board more but you lose latency savings and increase the complexity of the boards because you now need to add connection points and so forth.
And then you look at earbuds where... do you even have room for connectors like that? Near as I can tell, Fairbuds let you replace a few pieces of plastic, the rubber earplugs, the in-bud battery, and the charger (possibly just the battery?). That is definitely a step in the right direction but it also becomes a question of how much that even matters. In particular, I am wary of the value-add of the internal batteries since charging a lithium battery is largely "solved" and these have an external controller (the case) that can preserve the battery.
While I think we can do better in some spaces, the reality is that a lot of modern tech is fundamentally un-repairable. Not because of evil conspiracies but just because it is a lot easier to print a PCB and slot in some components than it is to connect vacuum tube diodes. And when so many of those components are fairly complex chips and the damage is less "oh, the metal prong on this chip broke" and more "oh, the via shorted out"?
Stuff like the fairbuds just seem... real stupid to me. Fairphone level "replace and repair" is kind of borderline but I think is generally good. And while I have series issues with how Framework does it and the resulting e-waste, I love the ethos of their laptops.
But We need to pick and choose our battles to be ones that make sense. Will Smith's Tested's Adam Savage just uploaded a video where he gushed about how easy it was to repair a kitchenaid mixer and that is an AWESOME video. That is the kind of repairs that people can meaningfully make. Using an x-ray machine to detect a possible short in a chip and hoping that was the only short... is not.
And in those cases? We need strong warranties AND strong e-waste recycling programs and incentives. Electronics are increasingly disposable for good and bad reasons. The junk drawer full of old phones and swelling batteries is bad.
Li-ion batteries wear out with normal use, or even sitting on a shelf fully charged. I suspect the battery is the primary reason most devices with onboard charging become unusable over time, and ensuring that it is user-replaceable will greatly increase average service life.
The wear and tear is greatly exaggerated (more specifically, it is based on older tech and before we had chargers that cycled correctly) and the technology (bluetooth has made leaps and bounds the past few years) is likely to be outdated long before the battery fails.
It is one of those things that I want on principle but very much question the value of. And considering that this is a zero sum game where the time and cost of the replaceable battery comes from somewhere else (in the case of cost: the consumer's pocket because holy crap these are expensive...).
My Sony linkbuds S only last two hours now. It's a product from 2022. When did they solve batteries? Because it wasn't in 2022
The product in question is not outdated because they rolled out updates for the new features, like Bluetooth LE audio
Honestly? it sounds like you bought a stinker then. Because I have some (I forget if they are anker or jabra) earbuds that are MAYBE a few minutes off of what they were when I got them before the pandemic (so 2019/2020).
It depends on how many hours a day you use them, not comparable between people
Could you please elaborate on these improvements to Lithium battery chemistry that have alleviated the problem with battery wear?
To my understanding, the underlying chemistry/material science has not made significant advancements.
But all the stuff we used to have to do to avoid damaging said batteries (e.g. Never fully charging it, discharging it a bit periodically, etc) is now more or less automated by controllers. Which goes a long way to reduce the impact of "wear" and stretch out the lifespan of a battery.
That's the thing about capitalism, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy to be evil. Capitalism will optimize for the cheapest option to acquire the most profit, and generally the cheapest option is also the one that's the worst for the workers/environment/consumers.
In capitalistic societies like the USA, for-profit companies are mandated to serve the interest of their shareholders, which is usually to make as much money as they can. If there was some kind of incentive to do the right thing, that makes the "right thing" more profitable than the rest, maybe companies would do the right thing. Maybe make companies pay for the amount of ewaste (or any kind of waste) they generate?
Is this a fundamental piece of tech as it exist now, or is this just kind of the way that tech has manifested after 50 years of development inside of a profit driven system which incentivizes unrepairable and disposable products over things which can be sustained for a long time?
I'd also like to posit that we've experienced a relatively rapid growth in the last 50 years, and that possibly has also affected design. In a rapidly changing market, you'd be a fool not to design everything as disposable, since next year's thing is going to be so different and so much better that it's kind of ridiculous to expect as much backwards compatibility or to expect repairability since people won't be sticking with stuff for as long. Now, whether or not that growth is actually slowing down intrinsically, or if that growth is just slowing down as a result of the current structure of the market, who can really say.
But largely I would posit that, don't mistake the fundamental nature of a thing as being the same as said thing in relation to a much larger and broader system. We could frame infotainment systems and the increasing digitization of cars as an inevitability, but in a radically different context, like southeasy asia or africa, we might see cars that are prized for their ease of maintenance and utility value, fuel efficiency being a lower concern, and luxuries like infotainment being much, much lower.
It is obviously both.
But you cannot have earbuds without microchips. Those things are often smaller than a single vacuum based transistor. Same with cell phones. Brick Phones weren't giant (just) because people wanted things to be bigger. They were giant and worthless for anyone other than Zach Morris because technology did not allow otherwise. And that is why basically every year (up until maybe a decade ago?) it was "And this is smaller and lighter because who wants a giant ass phone".
But... there are trade offs to that. When all the meaningful logic in a device is on a single board/chip, it can be REALLY small and you get a lot of inherent shock protection (nothing to get dislodged when it hits the concrete). But that also means that diagnoses increasingly involve x-ray machines and repairs are largely "replace the chip".
And, like I said, that is why the fairbuds are still full of glue for the actual internals and they don't sell the actual chips. ifixit commented on this on how it is likely for waterproofing reasons but... that still means you can't actually "repair" anything but surface damage and swapping out a battery (And while I am not convinced that is a meaningful value add, I still like it). That is the fundamental limit to when you aren't even dealing with chips with the spider leg prongs and are instead dealing with significant amounts of logic in the substrate of the board itself.
So if you want something that "values repairability"? You aren't getting earbuds. You probably aren't even getting headphones that (sane) people can just pop in their bag and go. You are looking at the bigass cans targeted at people who have Thoughts on psychoacoustics. Or, to put it in computing terms, you aren't buying a cellphone. You are buying a desktop. (... also, good luck fixing your motherboard. Because even if you identify the short and bypass it... do you really want to put an 800 dollar GPU in there?).
Which gets back to understanding what does and does not make sense to focus on "repairability".