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.

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.

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.

Even better, most of the plastic housings on things (think plasticky old dell desktop housings or lego bricks) are made of ABS. This stuff you can buy plastic weld that dissolves the outside of the pieces you want stuck back together. This stuff works well for that: https://www.amazon.com/Plastruct-Plastic-Weld-applicator-Bot...

Thank you, this is the core insight I was missing!

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.

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.

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.

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

* 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?)

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.

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.

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.

And I think the same is true in software development. The languages and performance we have allow the majority of developers to focus on bigger problems. That wasn't the case 30 years ago. It's just following the money. Source availability and APIs do mean we have to hack less interop but that came because that's what the market demanded.

If it was the power supply and there was no burnt smell, you should have spent 30m replacing all the caps on it. There is very little else in a power supply that dies.

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.

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?

I'd guess blenders are a commodity at this point - for most of the market, customers are very price sensitive, so since repairability ain't gonna win you any points, you may just as well assume that you get a fraction of the market share, and if your product breaks early, you'll capture that fraction of repeat purchases. Small profit, but if your competition does the same, then it's just pure profit for all of you.

I think I'd call cars a commodity too. I used to avoid buying cars with auto transmissions or turbos. The auto transmission will need a rebuild[1] around 200000km, and the turbo is just an extra thing that could break, and yet new-car buyers vastly prefer to buy autoboxes with turbos.

Some manufacturers (Audi) stopped making manual transmission NA cars back in 2010, without even seeing a dip in sales.

If buyers cared about repair costs, auto transmissions and turbos wouldn't be anywhere near as common as we see.

[1] All cars have clutches. In a traditional auto the clutch plates are inside the box and requires many dozens more hours of billable labour than the clutch plate in a manual transmission.

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.

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

Is taxing consumption better or worse than taxing earned income?

The total level of taxation is a different question.

Consumption taxes start out heavily regressive, and require modifications to make them neutral or progressive. These might be excluding clothing and staple foods from sales tax or other tweaks to exclude the necessities of life, which lower-income people necessarily spend a greater portion of their income on. (Income taxes are quite easy to make progressive.)

Taxation of wages is evil, and they get around it by pretending wages are income, as opposed to a trade of time for money.

The IRS pretends there isn't a cost to wages - that they are profit. You can't deduct any expense accrued to make or keep yourself able to work, nor can you deduct the time lost to make a wage.

In other words, if there is no gain, there is no income, and since wages is a compensation for a person's expense (aka their time and effort of being able to work), it's not income.

The act of charging income tax on W-2 employees is a travesty we let upon ourselves. The sad thing is if most w-2 employees just re-orged as contractors, many of their expenses could at least be considered for deductions.

You generally can't deduct more than your basis for something you sold. Your basis in an hour of your labor is $0. That's true whether you're paid W-2 or 1099.

The various US government entities (DOT, EPA, HHS) uses a statistical life value of around $10 million (probably higher now due to inflation).

The average American works ~1800 hours a year, and, if counting from 18 to 68, can work 50 years, or 90000 hours in an average working life.

If you think solely economically, then the statistical hourly value is $111/hour ($10,000,000 / 90,000). That's your cost-basis for an average human's work-hour, per the statistic value of a human life. Of course, the $10 million isn't solely an economic number, since human life is technically priceless and has a moral value, which then brings the argument back to morality.

If I buy an item that's "theoretically worth $10M" for $N, my basis in it is $N, not $10M.

The rules are wrong, but you are correct on how they currently work.

The fact that tax basis doesn't account for inflation is an intentional hidden tax and another example of evil against the population.

You're leaving it sort of implicit though that personal tax should be treated the same as corporate, which isn't clear to me?

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

Instead, a pigouvian tax would be on something like, say, me offering you to punch an uninvolved third-party that you don't like in exchange for money. I may be happy because I made money, and you may be happy because you wanted to see someone punch said third-party, but overall it would still be negative sum because the third-party would obviously not be happier. So one way to fix that is by taxing it. (A less extreme example is environmental pollution.)

Taxing unrepairable products would be much more like taxing addictive drugs that pose no danger to other people, where the legislation protects people from their own bad decisions.

I think you are implying that we should socialise losses - informing ourselves is not free. We don't want to become specialists in understanding paperwork. Expecting individuals to invest time to learn how to make the perfect consumer decision is just unworkable. Making complex tradeoffs between conflicting requirements is an expensive and time-consuming process.

A11y: informing ourselves is not accessible. Not everyone is an engineer/economist type that is good at making complex tradeoffs.

I know that I use some gross heuristics and simplifications when making significant purchases (even though I have some training and natural bent towards product analysis).

I'm not implying or taking a stance on anything political here — I don't have an opinion either way nor do I want to get into right-to-repair arguments — I'm just saying it's not pigouvian tax.

I was trying to say that "informing" oneself is a very expensive hidden cost.

I felt your phrase "people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves" nonchalantly implies consumers should bear an unmeasurable hidden cost. We have a variety of solutions to help consumers avoid such unfair and wasteful costs (including Fair Use legislation).

As I said elsewhere, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a tax, I'm just saying it wouldn't be a pigouvian tax.

Well, there are but they are small and better targeted upstream/downstream as either a carbon tax or a waste disposal tax (both things that can, to at least some degree, affect other people). But I agree that appropriately sized taxes relative to the actual externalities seem unlikely to change behavior in this case.

This could only be the case if everyone had infinite money.

If the tax is not changing behavior, then it is not appropriate size.

It is entirely possible that the overall social optimum is that the very cheapest tier of product needs to not exist in order to get the volume for decent models to have good economies of scale etc.

Inflation has your back :-)

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

Looking at my iFixit screwdriver bit set for electronics, which sports some 60+ bits and still doesn't cover everything I happen upon, I'm thinking the standards are being less than helpful here. I mean, it's good to have them, but it would be better to have way fewer equivalent options.

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.)

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.

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

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.

> 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.

Note that none of those were branded as Toyota/Lexus original parts, nor sold by them. If they did all that design work in order to capture spare parts sales, they forgot to do the second part of that strategy.

My point isn't that aftermarket manufacturers stepped in, my point is that, with old cars, the design was close to, if not identical to, an existing caliper, even if that was from a different manufacturer.

Maybe it was because many manufacturers didn't design or manufacture their own calipers - it was done by bendix, et al. Now they spend extra money designing their own, often with no obvious benefit.

> Note that none of those were branded as Toyota/Lexus original parts, nor sold by them. If they did all that design work in order to capture spare parts sales, they forgot to do the second part of that strategy.

That's only the brake pads bit. I mentioned quite a few other components, too.

Steering tie rod ends (the part that tends to wear), balljoints, radiators*, coolant expansion tank*, washer fluid reservoir*, thermostats, Wheel bearings, CV joints (sold as full axles)

https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/toyota,2020,camry,2.5l+l...

* Part not from RockAuto, but available from several other aftermarket suppliers

I couldn't find an alternator for the hybrid, but I'm not sure if it has one, or if charging is part of the HSD. It's available for the non-hybrid, of course.

I turn all the wrenches on our family cars. It's extremely rare that I have to go to a dealer for a part. Like once a decade rare.

My point is not that aftermarket parts are made to match the original, it's that in older cars the original itself was made to match something that existed.

The fact that you can get Mazda brake pads from Bendix is completely irrelevant to the fact that you now can't get Mazda brake pads from a Ford parts bin, whilst on older cars you could!

I couldn't quickly find other examples of Mazda/Ford crossover brake pads other than the badge-engineered vehicles.

That said, many components of newer cars are still largely supplied by the same companies across brands.

Why is that?

Conspiracy theories aside, the reason is more likely that by designing the part themselves, for a common set of applications at that manufacturer the cost is far lower than designing the rest of the car around the part.

IOW: I have 1 cubic foot available for an assembly. I can custom design an assembly for the best performance I can get in that space, or I can redesign the engine compartment to get more than 1 ft^3 of space to fit the off the shelf part into.

One could argue that Lamborghini could just drop a Ford Triton V10 into the Huracan and call it a day (it would save tens of thousands of dollars per car), but would that allow the rest of the car to still look like it does? Perform like it does?

Enshrining right-to-repair into law is, in my opinion, a pretty good way to make sure that field-repairability is factored into the design. But I don't think its productive to force manufacturers to use a particular design technique to achieve that requirement. That hobbles their ability to actually deliver on their design.

Well, they did drop an Audi engine in one of their cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Urus#Powertrain

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In some cases they actually shipped the defective product out, because hey, getting something is better than nothing. But it fell pretty far short of what people were hoping they'd get lol.

Edit: But I do commend your efforts! Great job!

That last much longer.

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.

Wouldn't you want to be in control of the decision? If your air conditioning cools you and you are okay with it's current efficiency, you should be able to repair it. It's not like corporations are building short lived products out of environmental concerns about efficiency. If you leave it in their hands, then the consumer loses control, and companies do the obvious.

It also reduces competition and innovation in my view. Why try hard to R&D products people want to upgrade to, when you can just wait for their unit to break and sell them a mediocre upgrade.

In the last 3 years, I’ve repaired 1 window AC (bad bearings on the motor shaft), 1 free-standing AC (bad bearings on the motor leading to motor failure), and 2 portable dehumidifiers (low refrigerant charge).

None were particularly difficult and I could source a used motor ($18.50 shipped from eBay), source the bearings by measurement (under $16 shipped for 8 bearings though I needed only 2), and R410a is a commodity ($300 for a 20# tank, used about 1.5 pounds total).

Would it be easier if Fuji and Samsung and LG and others ran a parts depot that I could buy from? Maybe, but I’m probably not going to buy new parts from them anyway.

I don't think manufacturers should have to offer support in perpetuity though so it becomes an interesting problem. Like samsung shouldn't need to stock the front face of a washing machine for 15 years. Perhaps a better approach is making items that aren't possible to stock long term be made out of repairable materials so at least it can be repaired by a repairman.

Repairmen are expensive now because the skillset disappeared, when everything became so cheap that it was easier to buy new. But I think we can and should bring local repair services back.

Perhaps requiring the manufacturers to provide either spare parts or if they are out of stock and no intent to sell them anymore, then requiring to provide STLs to 3D-print them could be a reasonable option. It still would be an order of magnitude (or two) more expensive compared to making the original parts (due to the immense economies of scale for plastic manufacturing), but it would still be cheaper than custom repairs locally.

The point is, I don't want the things I buy to be 1.5x or 2x the price to ensure greater repairability than they have now. That's the conversation we're having.

> It also reduces competition and innovation in my view. Why try hard to R&D products people want to upgrade to

All available evidence points to the contrary. That might be true if there were only one manufacturer of an item, but competition ensures a constant stream of R&D and improvements. Which is precisely why I don't want to use my AC from 30 years ago -- the improvements since then have been massive.

30 years for sure, that is a totally reasonable amount of time for an appliance to last. If it genuinely lasted that long I bet you actually did a few repairs in there too. Living the dream, actually even 10 years would be amazing. We could cherry pick examples of long lived products but the point for me is that people don't pay for longevity like you said, but we need it for other reasons. Reduce waste, improve consumer choice and power over their own objects.

In regards to efficiency, it's definitely more efficient not to produce a society worth of new appliances ever 5 years or so. Improved repairability aldo means improved recycling of the components too.

I still replace some older lamps with LEDs when they die. TVs just go on a rotation, replace your bedroom TV, make your grandmum happy, it is going to make someone else happy. People still look for quality CD players (especially AMP combis) in second hand shops around here.

Someone must be buying new devices so the second hand market can work. Without well working second hand market you need cheap china devices so people get access to technology. It's no problem for this approach if YOU want to buy new things.

Another example might be cars. Someone must have the need/enjoyment to drive a fully new car so I can buy that same car a year later at a much more reasonable price.

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.

yes agree - so there must be manufacturing standards and product testing. Similarly it is established law that some products are inherently unsafe. The law must always adapt to new techniques, materials and chains of distribution.

Adjacent to this issue is the broader issue that rampant capitalism encourages rampant buying of stuff - often stuff that we don't need, and surprisingly often stuff we don't even want. Think Gift Giving culture nowadays. With fewer things to purchase, more effort could go into the important purchases, I would think.

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.)

People will happily roll the dice on dangerous products if they’re only slightly cheaper. That’s why we have regulations, to stop bad products using price to drive good products out of the market.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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!

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

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.

* 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 [...]

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.

The bigger concern is probably smaller electronics as plastic parts are easily replaced and found on marketplaces.

I watched the whole processes, and while it isn't all that complicated, I'm left skeptical that I could have successfully performed the repair myself.

In particular I don't have the fancy crimping tool (probably the wrong name for it) that the repair person had. I didn't have the inflatable little pillow thing that helped cushion the tipped over dishwasher. I didn't know which screws to unscrew to remove the top and panelling. I didn't know the top slides backwards to remove. I'm not sure what the lubricant he used when slipping on the drain hose. At one point there was a cable tie that I probably would have cut, but now I understand it was tying down a different hose than the ones being removed. Even the repair person had trouble assembling lining up the two screws in the back with the frame (again using the little inflatable pillow to help lift the machine just a little bit). Assuming I could even complete it, it probably would have taken me at least 4.5 hours instead of 1.5 hours. Probably more.

I don't know. It's a bit weird since I'm pretty comfortable opening my tower PC, and replacing the hard drive or installing a new heat sink. I even opened up my mom's doorbell and managed to fix the micro-switch inside (cracking it a little bit in the process), which I'm a bit proud of. So it's not like I'm entirely inept.

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.

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.

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).

> 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/

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

The HN community is massively biased.

Case in point, when my friend Sam first moved into her first home she said over a pint that she needed an electrician and asked if I know any. Sure I do, but asked her what she needed one for, was a simple case of changing a light fixture, told her I would come and show her how simple it is to do (esp with things like wago connectors), Now she has changed pretty much every light fixture in her own home herself. And the other month she rang me up because she was proud of herself and needed someone to tell and knew I would be proud of her too, the thumbsticks on her steamdeck stopped working (I think it took a knock and the part of the plastic thumb stick drove itself into the casing of the deck, she took the thing apartn sanded down the plastic parts in question so they would move smoothly again and put it back together), all by following a YT video on the subject. And yeah she was right, I was proud of her! (She is a customs enforcement officer, not exactly NH crowd.)

That being said, this probably borderline falls into what I mentioned. Not uncommon for people to manage themselves as it's just a light screwdriver job. But that's very different from the point, which is opening devices and appliances...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v-qtH18fiM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.