This. There are also clients that with a little config will let cache the support level per-host, and even provide a list of hosts that the initial request should race TCP and QUIC to.
My theory is that, as an industry, we have almost completely lost (or maybe dilluted?) the ability to architect complex systems. Everything is 90% third-party libraries and microservices duct-taped together without much thought.
Virtually every project I joined was missing an overarching design document. Where it existed, it was usually not updated in the entire lifespan of a system. Asks to estabilish a domain or a versioned API boundary around something particularly gnarly are usually met with blank stares or violent opposition.
It's weird because I'm not even that old, and this kind of planning or refactoring was definitely a part of the curriculum at my definitely-not-Ivy-League uni.
There seems to be almost like a fear of original thought in some shops. It is humility but taken to the absurd. It's one thing to admit you may be wrong, it's another entirely to refuse to consider the idea you might be able to do something correctly.
Even though NIH is a pretty toxic attitude, the opposite can be as well. You don't have to stray that far past hello world CRUD apps to find an areas where the available libraries are poorly suited, and the superior option is to roll something on your own.
You might like Withings Steel HR. It easily lasts a month on a single charge.
Conversly, I now have their more premium Scanwatch, and I feel the UX regressed, while the added functions are not for me.
I had a basic Withings, not the Steel, and there was a lot I liked about it, particularly getting many months out of each battery, and the step counter being a dial from 0 to 50 to 100% of whatever target number of steps one set in the companion app.
But, for me, the lack of a second hand and backlighting or glow-in-the-dark hands & numbers, combined with the strong potential that my health data was being snooped on, convinced me to return to a traditional analog face wristwatch.
But I may look into the OP's original Casio - a sturdy watch with a barometer and compass built in, that would be handy.
FWIW this is what Audi's MMI does. (Or used to do? My car is old.)
The control panel has:
* 6-8 buttons for switching between different MMI modes, labeled
* 4 universal buttons, function contextual to the current screen
* 1 return button
* Turn/press controller
I can navigate 90% of the menus blindfolded. Despite my older MMI not being a marvel of UX, I can access functions 5 actions deep, while driving, from pure muscle memory.
Audi's phased out the entirely physical-button driven interface in favor of touchscreen and trackpad-based inputs. There was a generation in between that also had an odd and extremely large implementation of the legacy combination dial/joystick/button thing.
That sucks. Touchscreens have become so cheap (because economies of scale), Audi is probably saving manufacturing cost by not having physical buttons, simply because of the custom design cost of integrating buttons into a PCB and then programming it[1]. Touchscreens might even be cheaper than non-touch screens. They often have higher resolution. Audi is probably transitioning to using software stacks designed to build touch-screen apps instead of buttons and don't want their software devs to even think in that outdated mode of "buttons". It's completely self-serving and chasing the design trends, tripping after Tesla tech woo, not consumer demand.
[1] Which is totally ridiculous IMHO, because even with my completely amateur skills, wiring up a few buttons to an embedded chip is NBD.
I f'in hate this thing. I've used it on my partner's car, and it doesn't compare to a few real purpose driven buttons. Try adjusting which vents are blowing, or something like that. Total PITA!
Germany has about 1000 railway locomotives operating 40k runs a day. A conductor job pays on average 50k€/yr. Most trains I've seen have more than one conductor, and you need to plan for weekends, shifts, time off, etc. but the lower bound should be easy to agree on 50M€/yr or 12.5M€ for the duration of the program? Then there is the entire infra to sell tickets online, in machines and in person.
At the same time there are about 2 million rail customers a day, so the 9€ ticket will bring 18M€. I'd say they probably break even.
Math is fun, but the entire point is a bit moot. Germany is a civilised country and if you laid off the entire staff for three summer months with no pay, the union would eat you for breakfast.
Most trains still need conductors even if they're not checking tickets. Having them check tickets when they're already there won't cost anything extra.
>Most trains I've seen have more than one conductor
At least in Berlin which this covers most trains/buses/trams have 0 people checking and there's a few people going on random ones to occasionally check so the ratio here is probably 1 worker to 50+ vehicles.
That was my first thought, I'm worried it will not use the full potential of the source material. In the world of Dune wars were won by intrique more than with troops and this feels like a mobile game.
I wish we had a cRPG placed in the Dune's universe, with visuals to match Villeneuve's Dune or Jodorowsky's wonderfull hallucinations.
Interesting analysis. It has some signs of the author introducing variables until the ranking looks "right" though. I also disagree with some of the conclusions, based on my moderate experience with the site and its users.
A few suggestions to improve:
* Consider that most users rank 1-10 to stack rank their own games. BGG explicilty encourages this, insisting it's YOUR rating and there is no wrong way of arriving at it. I'd try to normalize for this (i.e. convert user collections from ratings into stack rank percentiles, see where games end up on average).
* Board games objectively got better over the years. There is more material on mechanics, it's easier to publish than ever, simulating and playtesting games is easier, etc. When I look at some (not all!) old games on top 100 I always think "come on, it's a good game but has no place here". It would be interesting to see rankings based on ratings assigned in a specific year.
* Drop the notion of complexity as something to correct for. As others mentioned this is a very inconsistent data point. Personally I'd rather play two 8.5 games in an evening than one 9. Perhaps fun per hour would be better, but this is personal bias, no matter how you assign the weight you will get complaints :)
* Kids and party non-gamer games are almost a distinct universe from gamers games. There is no way to fix or account for that. It has nothing to do with compexity or play time. I think this is more down to a combination of how well the game was playtested combined with the distribution channels available to the publisher. Gamers will happily play 15 minutes gimmick games, non-gamers will pull out Monopoly in a pub and go throught this monstrous waste of cardboard while downing pints.
> * Drop the notion of complexity as something to correct for.
This correction is necessary. What appears to be a complexity bonus is really a selectivity effect. Everybody plays simple games, but only people who like complex games will play complex games.
Gloomhaven has long been the highest-rated game on BGG, but that doesn't mean it's the best game ever. That means the audience who chooses to rate it is selectively filtered. The only people who are playing and rating Gloomhaven are the people who are already eager to play a campaign-based dungeon-crawler.
The secret to a high average ranking isn't to get top ratings from your target audience; every game does that. The secret is to avoid exposure to a less-favorable audience that would drag down your average. Gloomhaven players will occasionally play Cards Against Humanity and rate it 1/10. CAH players won't ever play and rate Gloomhaven.
My gamer friends love monopoly as a light warm up! A game with adults who know how to play takes ~45 minutes. Auctions are taught affairs, which is really the only decision point, but that’s why it’s such a fast play-through.
No one I know that enjoys Monopoly (I don't know anyone who loves it) has significant house rules. It's a mediocre game by almost any metric but house rules almost universally make it worse, not better.
Maybe that's because everyone that's played any other boardgame made the last 10 years has abandoned monopoly completely since it's not a great game.
I also disagree that one cannot fix some of its many, many flaws with house rules. Remember that the spirit of the original rules was a game made as an anti-capitalist statement, not to be a fun experience.
Most of the popular house rules make it worse like $50 on Free Parking or allowing people to build houses when the supply is empty and not having auctions. It certainly has a big luck component compared to more modern games but it's really not that bad.
The rank percentile is a great suggestion and after that take the average rank I guess?
Ratings per year is a possibility.
Complexity: Indeed I wanted to remove some of the more complex games because I don't have time for them. Although on reddit there was a nice discussion that the weight is composed of complexity & depth
An second thought the rank percentile would be heavily influenced by the amount of ratings given per user.
If you rate only 3 games you think are great with high ratings, then one of them is going to recieve an awful percentile.
The same 3 great games rated by someone with 5000 ratings will have much 'better' percentiles, just because all the crap games.
I can't stop thinking that content moderation is a lost battle at this point.
Roblox seems to be at the deep end with "F moderation, squeeze the profits" approach, but it feels like the only safe way would be to simply avoid business models that engage with any community content whatsoever.
That's really diminishing the moral culpability that Roblox has. It's less about 'content moderation' (e.g. CSAM) and more about economic exploitation. Roblox structure inherently exploits children. Even if the content moderation was perfect, Roblox would still be exploitative because it is designed to be.
Roblox creates an in-game stock market (with robinhood-esque charts!) for cosmetic doodads which they release for up to $10,000 USD "MSRP". Except that MSRP is in-game money so it doesn't seem real. Every time in-game money changes hands, they take 30%...so even if the cosmetic doodad appreciated 15% on the fun-looking chart, the child still loses money on their "investment" after fees. If you cash out your in-game money, their exchange rate again takes 30% vs buying-in.
By the time children are successfully creating games on Roblox, assuming they didn't get sucked into the ubiquitous child-labor scam "companies" that hire these children...they've been lusting over those $5,000 cosmetic items for so long that they spend the money they made on the platform, on the platform.
It's a roach motel for child labor. You can put your labor in, but you can never cash out. The shame spiral is real.
Oh no, 100% there is a list long as an arm of things Roblox is doing which are completely immoral. The whole thing sounds terrible in my book even if you did it to a consenting adult - and these are children.
At entry level you typically manage a two-pizzas sized team in one fairly limited domain. "Have this desk and a bunch of people, figure out how to run a worldwide wiki" would be a typical senior manager/director assignment (a.k.a. middle management).
If we set aside an argument about IT salaries fairness, I think people at Wikimedia deserve some thanks for taking a salary cut to undeniably make a difference on the world.
I can't describe how much I hope something comes out of it. Not because I have some illusion of this tackling corporate greed, or helping the environment - devices will likely become more expensive and bulkier as a result, supply chain of replacement parts is generating heaps of waste too.
I simply am surrounded by tens and hundreds of sort-of-broken devices that don't force me to replace yet, but are not fixable either. The laptop overheats, phone compass never works properly, one port in the TV is dead, there is no light in the fridge (but it still works). The list goes on. I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.
Phone unlocking doesn't get much attention, but it is an integral part that no one wants to address or get their hands dirty with.
There are many more locked phones in drawers or acting as mere paperweights than people actually care to disclose.
Several years back we ran a poll to understand lifetime recycling habits.
People aren't proud of dropping a phone and shattering the screen, but they are less proud of having thrown a phone into a drawer because they couldn't be bothered to run the obstacle course set up by their telco to keep them in check.
Phone right-to-repair should be EXPLICITLY INCLUSIVE of unlocking, otherwise it is only solving a part of the problem.
Carrier locks are an absolute scam. The argument is that it allows carriers to offer subsidised phones and “repossess” them if the customer defaults on their bill by making it unusable.
However, in reality, not only does the carrier not mind if the phone keeps being used (as long as it’s on the carrier’s network) but the lock doesn’t expire once the customer pays off their plan.
Furthermore the process for unlocking a phone is intentionally made convoluted. Until recently, you couldn’t even figure out which carrier an Apple device was locked to without playing brute-force with all the carrier’s SIMs in the entire world and even Apple support couldn’t be of any help. And when you finally figure out which carrier it is, getting in touch with them is a pain and some have stupid policies like keeping the device on their network for 30 days before being able to request an unlock (a scummy attempt at getting some people to give up and just keep using their network past the deadline, or revenge against someone who doesn’t intend to do so by essentially making their device unusable for 30 days).
Absolutely. Remember the "2014 Obama Unlocking Law" [1] ? It was supposed to not only not make it ilegal to carrier unlock a phone, but also forced all carriers to adopt a specific code of conduct to assist users with unlocking.
Fast forward 6 years, and it is much harder to unlock a phone than it was then. The whole thing backfired for consumers. It was actually easier to unlock a phone in a "non-legal" way before the law than it was right after.
This whole new code of conduct for carriers actually made them convert their SIMlock departments to be more like a customer retention lifecycle.
This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.
> This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.
I had no idea this was still a thing, it’s horrible. What mechanism is creating the current situation?
Phones are all unlocked here in New Zealand.
> What mechanism is creating the current situation?
Lack of general consumer protection regulation (or their enforcement), and specifically with regards to telecommunications the regulator who's supposed to oversee the field (the FCC in the US, or OFCOM in the UK for example) is often in bed with the companies it's supposed to regulate.
It's not usually like that - and I've had a few locked phones.
Usually the deal is that a network, say Vodafone, subsidises the handset by £50 of some such in return for you being forced to use Vodafone services for a couple of years, unless you arrange to unlock it.
It's sort of ok as a deal but a pain in many ways if you want to travel and use a local SIM or sell the phone for example.
> However, in reality, not only does the carrier not mind if the phone keeps being used (as long as it’s on the carrier’s network) but the lock doesn’t expire once the customer pays off their plan.
I recently paid off my AT&T iPhone X and the process to unlock it couldn't have been easier.
Notably, you have to have been paid up (somewhat understandable), active for 60 days if postpaid (not really reasonable at all), or if prepaid, active for 6 months (absolutely not reasonable). This basically precludes someone selling a phone secondhand entirely if they haven't unlocked it first by holding the value of the phone hostage (phones are worth less when locked). Completely anti-consumer. And AT&T isn't even the worst about this. I once tried to unlock a phone through Rogers and they wanted $120 to do it! This was back around 2011 so their policy might have changed but given Canada's terrible telco situation I doubt it has changed much.
SIM/operator locks have been already rare (in Europe) for a while, and that's great!
But there are Android phones that come with bootloader/OS lock, which often means old device is stuck with some ancient OS version (and some bundled bloatware), instead of being able to be reflashed to a recent LineageOS.
The new phone lock du jour is the manufacturer's anti theft mechanism.
I recently got two iphones from their owners, pulled out of the drawer to monetize them on classifieds. Both locked and unresettable without the previous owners help (one could be unlocked because I got her account password over the phone, huge nogo but she trusts me to not screw with her account). The other not, account was lost.
Apple also now tags and ties both battery and camera to the logicboard. Shame.
This one is a pretty obvious trade off, does anyone know of good data on the impact of Apples policy on iphone theft rates and/or sales rate of stolen phones?
I live in the EU and have never encountered a carrier locked phone. It's quite an amusing concept, and the first carrier to come up with it must truly have been evil.
I live in the EU too (France), and any phone you buy directly from a carrier (generally heavily discounted, but tied to a more expensive plan) is carrier-locked, and can only be unlocked after a set amount of time has passed, or earlier by paying a fee (regulated by the EU if my memory serves me well).
Perhaps it's because I was less financially literate in the past, but I remember that as being the only way in the 2000s. There might have been laws passed to limit that practice and its abuses.
The smart solution, provided you have enough money, is to buy the phone elsewhere, and take a plan without a phone. It's always less expensive in the long term.
in Germany, the Telco's gave up locking the phones in 2017. Because it was to expensive. I can not remember if it was a hard lock - as in any other sim card is blocked or just their additions to the OS. bought a phone in 2017/early 2018 - Xperia 10, where on the boot screen a Deutsche Telekom logo appears but otherwise the OS unaffected by vendor edits/additions. But updates are really slow since they go through Telekom instead of directly from sony which is already slow.
Funny. As I remember from the times of early GSM, that carrier lock was the default, because subsidized by them in exchange for long term contracts like 2 years. Otherwise you had to pay much more intitially, but it could make sense to calculate this, instead of blindly trusting the advertisements.
Isn't it about trade-offs? As long as my carrier provides my family with free iPhones, I will bear the inconvenience of requesting device unlock every few years. It takes 2 minutes to unlock it. If I am to pay full price for the device I will not get a locked one.
Mobiles in Europe are generally unlockable by calling the network supplier after the contract expires. In Norway, in my experience at least, this is free.
But the reason I have a handful of paperweight mobiles is not that they are locked but that they are no longer useful. They have low resolution cameras, little memory, small screens, obsolete operating systems, etc. I sometimes try to sell them but no one wants them even free.
Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years like refrigerators, coffee machines, dishwashers, washers, and dryers, often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases, and could be repaired. We have witnessed the steep decline of device reliability in my lifetime, and our expectations are so low that the latest appliance we buy we consider lucky if no problems develop in 2-3 years. Anything serious requires you to usually toss it out and buy a new one.
>Common things that existed 20, 30, or even 40 years [...] often lasted 10 or 20 years in some cases
It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.
Miele appliances (for example) still last decades and all efforts are made by the manufacturer to find you spare parts if you need. But they cost 3-4x more than a budget appliance.
That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances...
The market tends to give consumers what they want.
It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.
> The market tends to give consumers what they want.
The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
And on the producer side, what they market as is distinct from what they make, what they try to make is distinct from what gets shipped, etc.
A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
Perhaps but that should be an unstable equilibrium, i.e. temporary.
As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die.
It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us.
Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
It should be in theory, but in practice it's pretty stable on relevant time horizons. There are many factors fixing such equilibria. For instance, most consumers aren't rational actors carefully evaluating purchasing decisions. Or, when they pick, they may optimize for multiple targets simultaneously. There are economies of scale that create barriers to entry for new competitors. Trust takes time to develop. Etc.
To use two relevant examples:
Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack.
Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it.
Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends.
--
[0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
Perhaps they cannot price in reliability? How many people know that Miele offers long lasting and repairable appliances, instead of just expensive ones?
I for one "know" this by weighing HN anecdotes I've seen over the years - couple dozen saying that they sell solid stuff, and one or two saying that they used to sell solid stuff, but are now following the trend of replacing metal components with cheap plastics. How do I evaluate that? Brand trust isn't that strong a signal.
The abstract problem is that the market is imperfect due to insufficient customer knowledge. I know my last washing machine lasted X years, but how that will compare to the new one from the same manufacturer, I don't know. The manufacturer also won't (really) tell me, just the usual fluff about quality.
So as a consumer, I am unable to decide objectively, just using rumours if there isn't a hard guarantee or a trustworthy evaluation of the quality of all products I could pick. In that situation, I will price in the uncertainty, I will evaluate the rumours and the tendency to produce crappier stuff over time. And when in doubt, buy 4 cheap short-lived washing machines instead of 1 for 4 times the price.
Not so simple. Many manufacturers advertise a long warranty and then, when things break, drag their feet, blame improper use or wear and tear, offer workarounds instead of repairs, etc.
A long warranty is only good if the manufacturer is trustworthy. But untrustworthy manufacturers are one of the causes of the whole problem.
A fix might be warranty terms defined by law, where the manufacturer can pick the duration and nothing else. Disputes should be settled in court or by a neutral board of experts.
I have not found it to be the case, one of my displays lasted 7 years and still works, the other gave out in 3, both had 1 year warfanty. Dell and asus respectively.
Think of it the other way round. Long warranties are indicative of a durable, long lasting product. A short warranty, however, does not necessarily indicate a crap product.
Of course this is not a perfect measure, but I do think that a correlation would exist here.
Or, they may also be indicative of the company making its money elsewhere, and thus willing to eat the cost of regular warranty replacement just to keep you tied to their hardware, so that they can exploit you elsewhere.
Have you tried asking pe— sorry, “market research”? If you can make something that people want to pay for, that goes down a lot better than trying to make them buy what you're selling via an elaborate multi-agent optimisation algorithm.
What I really hate about Miele is their stupid will to push their stupid branding on the retailers (online), it always feels broken and its absolutely a pain to try to navigate any sites that integrates with them.
Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands.
The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.
We’ve had declines in some areas - IoT being an obvious culprit - but there are two major confounds belying that anecdotal belief:
1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it.
2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better.
Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently?
It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.
The situation is not so clear-cut with domestic appliances. Modern fridges are much more energy-efficient. So there is a tradeoff: either you buy a new fridge, thus polluting the environment with the old fridge, but saving energy. Or you let your good old 30 year old fridge run, saving the resources needed for a new fridge, but burning a lot more energy in the process.
It's a simple calculation. How much energy costs do I save compared to keeping the old one. Also I wouldn't expect any "modern" appliance to last more than 5 years.
I bought an apartment nearly 5 years ago, and so shortly after that went on the appliance shopping trip. I tried to get what I thought were good quality appliances, and everything is still mostly working ok, but there have been teething problems with everything:
- Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements.
- Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins.
- Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller.
- Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason.
- Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new.
- Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.
About any fridge you buy now would last a decade easily. Several decades even, if you bother to invest into its maintenance and repair like people did 40 years ago.
Getting appliances repaired is harder than it once was. Disposability culture drove many repair shops out of business. Many repair shops I and my family used to are now gone or dying. The guy who used to do sewing machine repairs for my mother is gone. The cobbler that used to repair my boots is gone. Furthermore, appliances that used to come with repair manuals no longer do, and finding the manual online is often a real chore. Fewer people will repair things on their own when manufacturers make it difficult to find even basic documentation.
It's a good point, but it's not really a failure of product design. Appliances themselves now are not any less reliable than they were in mid-century. There is no grand conspiracy of manufacturers filing down screw threads to make them fail.
I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
I don't think manufacturers are conspiring. I think this widespread behavior emerges from market circumstances and is not evidence of any sort of collusion between manufacturers. You don't need grand conspiracies to explain things like this, nor have I proposed one!
True, except there are manufacturers like Apple or Sony which won't provide genuine spare parta to retail people (tried that). Then you have to buy parts from "for parts" eBay auctions or counterfait/bad quality batteries from random Chinese seller...
Back in the day it was routine to change the compressor, or even repair the failed one piecewise (bearings, manifolds). Refill the leaked coolant and braze the leaks.
You can still do that on most modern fridges, but it's not worth the effort with appliance prices now. They also don't fail often these days.
This is true, but it seems to be mostly consumer preference. That 30 year old refrigerator cost more (normalized) and does less than most of the ones you can buy today. When people offer longer lived, better built versions for more money, most people don't buy them.
Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everything on chip combined with economics of scale.
Still it’s a worthwhile pursuit. At some point pocket PCs/phones will be good enough, just as for many a 2014 laptop is still good enough.
Youtube on my mother in laws Samsung tablet from 2013 has stopped working. It has stopped because it has android 4 and you can't update chrome past V42 and youtube won't load without a later version of chrome. I installed firefox and she has access to youtube through the web for now. The tablet is in immaculate condition physically. if it played youtube in 2013 it should be able to play it now, it cost over €500 at the time. How is this anything else except planned obsolescence. I know there will be comments about security etc but she only needs it for youtube and solitaire.
That is not planned obsolence. Nobody said this tablet should stop working by 2021. It's simply the result of limiting cost of software development. If you are creating a new version of android, you cant affort to support all devices. If you create a new version of chrome, you cant affort to support all version of android. If you create a new version of youtube, you cant afford to support all versions of chrome, etc, etc.
Agreed. I think there needs to be a better term for the reality of the situation, something like "negligent obsolescence". There's no technological limitation preventing Samsung from updating those for a decade or more, they just don't care. A battery degrading over time isn't planned obsolescence, and while not being able to easily replace the battery might be, more likely it's that they just don't bother to put in the slightly extra effort to make the batteries easier to replace. Right to Repair mandates would be a good start in ensuring manufacturers are properly motivated.
> If you create a new version of chrome, you cant affort to support all version of android. If you create a new version of youtube, you cant afford to support all versions of chrome, etc, etc.
Google is making billions per year, they can certainly afford to support all versions of Android. They just choose to pocket the money and screw their customers instead.
I sympathize with your (mother-in-law's) situation! I, too, own a Samsung tablet from that period.
Have you checked whether you could install LineageOS or some other custom ROM on the tablet? That way, you might be able to extend its lifetime by another couple years.
If you go through the lineageos device list there's literally no samsung tablets from 2013 that's currently supported. If you count the devices that had builds but aren't currently supported you get more devices, but I suspect your odds are still not good considering there's several unsupported models for every supported model.
> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everything on chip combined with economics of scale.
That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon.
Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace.
"Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved.
Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.
I agree with you; however making things discreet and replaceable will increase costs significantly and slow progress —however, if we consider phones to have reached “good enough” status then that makes sense. Double the price but make it easy to repair or replace components.
> making things discreet and replaceable will increase costs significantly and slow progress
Nobody is asking to split the current, high pin-density SoC into eighty chips with DIP sockets, they're mostly asking for things like:
* Publishing service manuals and schematics
* Making replacement parts available (replacing the SoC isn't that big a deal, the problem is that you often can't get that SoC anywhere)
* Not selling things with an EULA that explicitly prohibits "unauthorized" repairs
"Making things discreet" is pretty much a red herring. Sure, making everything discreet would result in bulkier, pricier, and probably worse phones, but you can massively improve the general public's access to repairs without doing that.
> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part
This is only partially true. The true cost is hidden and at least by average people like me immeasurable. We are putting a lot of cost out of sight if you consider the environmental impact of e-waste.
They already are. Phones from 2016 for example feel completely usable today. That goes for the repairable ones at least, like the LG G5, but even the older LG G3 holds up well.
If all modern phones were as repairable as those we could eliminate so much garbage!
My old phones are often usable, which is why I only upgrade every three years or so. However, when I do upgrade after waiting so long, it's like I've traveled through time with the improvements.
It seems that most people want more than just usable. They may not want to pay more for a device up front, knowing they will be missing out on the latest technology down the road.
They do not need to pay more. The equation that repairable means more expensive for the customer is propaganda. It assumes that every cent companies save by making devices worse lowers the price. That's trickle down economics and has never been true.
People can still buy new stuff earlier if they want. But their old stuff can be reused by those that do not need, want or can afford the new devices. There are many categories of devices where that's a good option for many, not only phones. Besides, it's always good to have the option to repair that thing you have when it breaks even if initially you did not think you would need that. You might have grown to like it.
I've had an iPhone since 2009 and I'm definitely familiar with the "time traveling" effect of upgrading phones, but I think it has diminished a lot as the technology has matured.
I've been using a 6S since 2015 (this thread caught my interest because it's now somewhat of a Ship of Theseus as I've replaced so many parts over the years), but the 11 Pro I bought last year was the first time a multi-year-gap upgrade felt rather incremental, especially for $1100. I returned it and expect to continue to use and repair the 6S until they drop iOS support for it.
A large part of that is simply that smartphones entered the market very recently and started out computationally weak compared to existing computers - the first iphone was released less than 14 years ago and had a CPU running at 412MHz!
Smartphones have largely caught up to traditional computers in terms of the time it takes for upgrade-worthy advancements in hardware. I expect we'll see smartphone upgrade cycles continue to lengthen until they mirror desktop/laptop upgrade cycles.
The processors have changed significantly. I had a OnePlus 3T which I really liked, and recently pulled it out of a box because my daily driver phone broke. The 3T struggled to load modern, bloated apps like Google Maps. The device would chug at most tasks more intensive than scrolling a webpage (and sometimes even then... what a sad state the web is in these days)
By contrast the processor in my work phone (an Iphone) is faster than my laptop.
Right. Repairable hardware is just the one side, security updates needs to be available as well. We need mandated open sourcing of device software (including firmware and drivers + unlocking of the bootloader) after the support timerange, or at the very least alternatively the obligation to continue security updates for decades.
Who is actually going to update this even if it is open source though? There are so many drivers and firmware in a smartphone, nevermind the tens of thousands of models of smartphones out there. It would require an army of people to patch, test and distribute everything. That's even if you can figure out all this code.
I agree that the manufacturer or carrier doesn't owe you updates indefinitely, but they definitely should give you all the resources you need to develop these updates yourself if you wanted to.
The landscape can change. Maybe there's going to be a huge open-source project that will make these updates. Maybe someone will figure out a way to automatically handle a large number of hardware configurations at scale (a powerful enough hardware abstraction layer should be able to deal with it). Maybe someone will make a business out of it, providing security updates at a reasonable cost. Either way, there shouldn't be any artificial hurdles against the customer developing and running their own firmware on hardware they paid money for.
It's not about 'who's going to do it' but about 'if I want to do it, I can'.
I would really like to hack on a tablet I have that's 5 years old, but I can't because the firmware and drivers are both closed source.
I think when I buy a device, I should get the source code to it once the manufacturer decides it's not worth it for them to continue patching the software for the device I've bought.
We see that happening all the times with devices that are open and popular enough, as much as is possible now. Have a look at the xda forum to see how it is done today.
OTOH, you can wind up with stuff like installing an OS that requires more than the device has to offer- like installing the most recent version of Ubuntu Desktop on a Intel Core2 Duo isn't going to go well, nor did installing iOS 7 on iPhone 4's- which I remember eagerly installing without realizing the major slowdown all the new features added that I couldn't undo.
Linux usually works perfectly fine with old hardware, a Intel Core2 Duo should be completely enough. That's even 64 bit hardware. Worst case you have to swap out Gnome with something more minimal, but that's unlikely.
I'm currently running Manjaro with i3wm on a laptop with a core 2 duo. It came with a couple of simple conky widgets enabled by default and those probably took 5-10 seconds to load. Just boxes, one with static text and the other with load statistics. Resizing windows is a little painful, as is opening them.
I3 runs reasonably well, but Gnome would probably be too heavy to make for an enjoyable experience.
Creating those updates costs money. At what point is the cost no longer worth it? It is not realistic for companies to support every phone forever; I think that's something we can all agree on.
Would you be willing to pay whatever your share is of how much generating the update would cost, in order to get it? With a clear indicator when you buy the phone that you automatically get a subscription to 3 years worth of security updates; past that, you pay whatever amount is needed to keep it up to date.
In my opinion, manufacturers who cannot be bothered to provide updates to their software should not be allowed to claim intellectual property rights on the hardware. When support ends, drivers and documentation should be made open source, enforceable by law if need be.
I think that the problem is central to how phones are developed and constructed. Dell doesn't determine how long my XPS 13 gets updated; they provided the hardware, and I can put any software I want on it. It can keep running a secure, up-to-date OS as long as I want it to, until the hardware truly can't keep up (which, based on computer lifetimes these days, is a long time).
Conceptually, I dislike that mobile development hasn't followed a similar path. Samsung should not dictate how many updates my phone gets and for how many years. Practically, I realize that this is a consequence of how we've built SOCs and mobile hardware and there's no incentive for companies to change. That doesn't make it less problematic.
In my case the Manufacturer (LG) already did the updates, the phone was offered on 2 of 3 carriers, of the 2 one of those carriers are still offering updates for it, but because it was a less popular model on the 2nd carrier it is not longer getting updates
I tend to agree if we consider current use cases. Issue comes when we add new use cases which require more processing power or new components.
Also, we’ll have to figure out how to manage with a sort of stagnation.
Essentially this entails curbing change. Curbing change means slowing progress (initially in this niche), but if we extend this into other areas it can mean significant stagnation because since things are good enough we don’t need to improve and progress (ie. we’re at equilibrium )
Sometimes it's more a question of software. On older phones badly made sites like the new reddit for example were unuseable in all browsers - until the new Firefox came along.
But sure. Repairability is one thing, it just means that devices can continue the things they were made for. For new workloads they would need upgradeability, which is a completely different beast.
I don't think having repairability will slow things at all. It will simply prune some behaviors corporations engage in that destroy the planet, like glueing in batteries. Stopping such practices will not even make new devices more expensive - we have old designs that did it right. Falling back to them and innovating there could even save money.
If we properly accounted for environmental externalities, and frankly, the rat race of labor arbitrage (is a good use of people's time in the 2nd world to work 9 days a week to crank out replacements for this shit?), I think we would get there faster.
Though yes, thank goodness the end of Moore's law is here to help.
> there is no light in the fridge (but it still works)
I normally find these types of appliances make parts readily available. I just replaced the locking mechanism on my washing machine for example, it was cheap and easy to order the parts I needed.
YouTube has been a game changer for me. I’ve repaired my dishwasher, shower handle valve, refrigerator drain, replaced thermal paste in my laptop, all kinds of things. It seems like there’s a decent video for everything, and some random website (or eBay) selling parts.
- no service/troubleshooting manual/videos available online
- no way to identify what replacement part to buy unless you're in the know already
- getting access to locking mechanism looked like it would lead to washing machine completely falling apart structurally (there was a somewhat hidden "safety" screw that looked like a last defense against people removing the front panel just by removing the apparent screws and hurting themselves)
So I bailed on this without a proper guide on safe disassembly procedure.
Thankfully wiggling the connector to the locking switch made the lock and thus the washing machine work again, after a first failure since 15 years ago or whatever. It looked just fine inside (surprisingly). Vibrations probably don't allow much dirt to accumulate. No obvious rusting/leakage. I was surprised.
Sometimes the manufacturer makes it difficult. Replaced the light bulb in my parents' oven last week. The manufacturer only sold the bulb with the entire (expensive) housing as well. A bulb! We managed to find a supplier with a compatible bulb (which meant a quick swap).
I'd like to think there was a reason the manufacturer wanted the entire housing replaced?
My guess is that some product manager somewhere realized that if they only offered the bulb housing assembly they could make a bit higher profit margins
It depends. A lot of modern fridges use LEDs and have control boards driving them that cost hundreds of dollars. If the LEDs are out, the likelihood is not that the LEDs are dead, but that something much more expensive failed.
They do the slow fade-in effect when you open the door. That's got to cost something.
I, mistakenly, bought the refrigerator with LED lighting because I hated how old-style bulbs would turn on slowly in the cold. LED lighting should be instant I thought. Oh no, totally on purpose it was made slow.
PWM is trivial to implement, but you can sell it for real money as a feature. Or, in this case, a "feature". Not that it wouldn't be easier to just wire the door switch into the power rail for the internal lighting, but then it wouldn't also be able to play a cute jingle and tweet Elon Musk when the door opens.
Regarding slow starts - not that it's terribly useful to mention now, I grant, but most incandescent appliance bulbs can be replaced with compatible and much less temperature-sensitive LED ones these days.
My guess is that the LEDs are in series on a strip, and one burnt out.
The fridge manufacturer probably assumed it’ll always run cold (it’s a fridge right?) and overdrove them too hard to get just as much light out of 20 LEDs instead of 24.
Could bridge the faulty LED with solder to buy some time, and find a donor LED from a “burnt out” LED light bulb or whatevs and solder it in.
Trust me I'm an engineer? But always happy to have HN debug my fridge, so here we go: turns out the light bulb, when replaced, keeps overheating and even metled the surrounding casing. Some electrical issue I'd have to take the fridge apart to debug. I might be unfair with this one though, it's a 20 year old fridge and is probably serviceable.
That trend has become ubiquitous: cars, laptops, phones...
Nothing is designed to be fixed at home anymore. If there were regulations that required it, we'd still have the same advanced tech, but it'd be repair friendly.
For example HP Elitebooks ond Dell business class laptops have most parts replaceable and the keyboard is secured by screws.
HP Pavilion gaming, ASUS ROG Strix and newer Macbooks have keyboards secured by melting topcase plastic pins or bolts so you can't easily replace keyboard, you need to replace the whole topcase.
And the keyboard is something which degrades by use and can easily be damaged by liquid...
I sincerely hope that providing upgrades to software is also included as part of this. The only device I have which I dont actively use or give away is a Samsung galaxy tab which never received a single Android OS upgrade. I think it is reasonable for a consumer of a software+hardware integrated device to expect upgrades of software for say 3-5 years.
I think a better approach would be to force manufacturers to provide everything necessary for someone (the user or a third-party company) to develop alternative firmware. This means source code, datasheets of the hardware, and a way to bypass locked bootloaders or other code signature checks. Essentially, if you can't provide updates yourself, you should be giving away everything that's necessary for someone else to do it.
Guaranteed upgrade cadence is not enough. I think what would be regulated is that they MUST open source afther that 3-5 years.
Just as we have with pharma patents, after a protection period it should be free game, and they should open-source if they don't intend to continue pushing updates, say evety 6 months or so.
But it exists - it's not that stuff is worse now than it was before, you just have to spend the value (not amount) of money you spent back in the 60's. Our family houses are full of stuff that lasts a lifetime and/or can be easily fixed - you just can't buy the first thing the ad in TV suggests.
Disagree. I'm willing to throw heaps of hard earned money to recover my time spent being bothered by such problems. I researched and tried many "premium" brands, with minor exceptions they proved to be planned for obsolence too. I had good experience with small companies/kickstarters. Once they grow to the point of being "popular", economies of scale and CFOs show up to the table and eat your cake.
In all of the following I got a new thing looking for some new feature or because I could I guess, and had the older device outlasted the newer one: Bose headphones, any mobile phone really, Thinkpad laptops, Audi cars, Brother printers, any and all household appliances.
Well... My headphones are 10 years old, my phone is 3 years old and all my previous ones including my Galaxy S2 (my first smartphone) are still in use by family, my kitchen doesn't have anything younger that 15 years - most stuff is 25+ years old - except the fridge, I replaced it because of power efficiency and the old one is at the cottage, nearly 35 years old. None of it was bought from a kickstarter as most of that stuff predates internet.
I really don't see the problem. Like you're saying people are buying new stuff because they want the new stuff, not because old is broken. There are tons of extremely cheap second hand things that could do the job and yet people keep buying new things.
How will this right to repair change anything? How much money was spent making it reality that could've been spent productively?
I had multiple manufacturers of kitchen appliances send me schematics so I could fix it myself instead of paying for a service visit. Many vendors have service guides online, including lists of parts. That's not hostile at all. You have to choose what you're buying, but it's not hard to buy from a solid company.
Soldering SSDs on the motherboard is a crime! Data storage modules should always be replaceable: 1. because they can fail easily (limited write counts), 2. because people need to wipe data before selling
I have seen a "for parts" Macbook on eBay with bad motherboard where the seller drilled through SSD and T2 chips to "wipe data". While drilling they damaged the topcase as well.
> I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.
I think this is part of the point you are trying to make, but everything requires maintenance. Not sure what model fridge you have, but a bulb replacement should be not too hard to pull off on your own.
With China clamping down on E Waste imports, the EU may actually be happy to push for something that's pro-environment. I think aligning the incentives properly will be a great thing long term.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/cron...