Unfixable Computers Are Leading Humanity Down A Perilous Path

Wired:

The future of this planet depends on the quality of our electronic devices — and how long they last.

Read the whole story at Wired

From our partners

Comments

[frank1946]

12:53 AM on 06/26/2012

Still have my old IBM PS/2...............Windows 3.2, DX2 66 Mhz. and 400 GB with 28 K Modem.

Runs fine but AOL 4.0 does not work.

Sold new for $ 4,626.00

[Dan Langdon]

01:55 PM on 06/25/2012

There was a time when if something broke, you repaired it. Now you just throw it away and replace it. This is wasteful in the extreme.

[Grouchy Larry]

11:04 AM on 06/25/2012

With 7 billion of us on a world of limited resources and no means of sustainable living, electronics waste is but one of many nails in humanity's coffin. To my grandkids, sorry we couldn't get our collective chit together. Some tried, but were vastly outnumbered and underpowered.

[Kenz300]

09:54 AM on 06/25/2012

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.....................

Every PC should be required to be sent back to the manufacturer at the end of its life for recycling. There should be a deposit on them that gets refunded when the PC is sent back.

[mumi009]

07:48 AM on 06/25/2012

Planned obsolescence. A horrible term. In an earlier time there were places to go to have TV's, toasters, vacuum cleaners and many other household items repaired. Car parts were rebuilt or repaired and not simply replaced. Clothes were mended, staines removed and not tossed. Appliance owners could evendo it themselves!

I get mad when some little piece breaks off a device rendering it unuseable and unrepairable, thanks to design and manufacturing techniques. The device has to be replaced because it cannot be repaired. Sometimes I don't replace it.

Now, all the manufacturing takes place in China. There is not even a discernable repair industry anymore in the U.S. and Europe. No jobs here, either.

What we didn't or couldn't use was handed down or passed around or sold second hand.

We are suffocating in our own garbage!

[mumi009]

07:38 AM on 06/25/2012

I was not impressed with the Apple Store, where I took my Macbook Pro (vintage 2008). The spring latch for the cover (on that model) no longer caught, and the Macbook could not be closed properly.

At the Apple store I was told it was not repairable. The apple technician(!) said there was no other solution other than leaving it be or buying a new display.

I was not satified with this answer and googled the problem. I found a DIY-Video in Youtube published by an Apple certified technician. It should me exactly what to do in real timie. I neede fiftenn instead of 10 minutes to do the repair because I have fat fingers.

Now, the cover and latch operate perfectly.

I reported the repair to the Apple store where I first went and sent the management a link to the Youtube video for training purposes.

I guess there are some bad apple stores in every barrel.

[fatnugly]

10:39 PM on 06/24/2012

Is this new that's the Apple products have alway been. When you want to upgrade you throw it in the trash and buy a new one.

[DRaymond]

08:52 PM on 06/24/2012

Perhaps the biggest offense the tech work makes against sustainability is the non-replaceable battery.  

All batteries will wear out, no matter how high the build quality of the rest of the device.  Moreover all batteries could be easily recyclable if only they could be removed from the device.  But some companies make it so labor-intensive to remove the battery that the price to replace the battery is assured to be nearly as expensive as the new device...and you have to do without your device in the meantime.  So the whole thing...both the device that could be returned to service and the battery that could be recycled, gets trashed.

[JohnTheMac]

09:37 PM on 06/24/2012

That sucks! Who is making a laptop with a non-replaceable battery?

Apple offers battery replacement on all their laptops. No biggie.

[DRaymond]

02:36 AM on 06/25/2012

There is a big difference between offering battery replacement service and having a replaceable battery.  A replaceable battery is one you can replace yourself.  If you have to send it to a repair depot or take it to a certain place and have and have an expert do it then you do NOT have a replaceable battery.  And there is no reason for it at all other than making continuing to use the unit be too expensive and cumbersome to do so.

[JohnTheMac]

08:41 AM on 06/24/2012

On one hand, the way they made it, things are harder to fix or upgrade.
On the other hand, the way they made it, you won't have much need to fix or upgrade the computer.

I love ifixit, I've used their parts and guides several times. Most often was changing hard drives in laptops because of failure or flakey performance. That's just not going to happen with non-moving parts like Flash ram storage. Upgrading RAM is just not going to be needed any time soon when the base model is 8 GB. Damaged power plugs just aren't happening with the magnetic power adapters. Fixing backlight failures in laptop displays is also history since LEDs became the standard.
Sorry, I don't think it's much of a story.

[DRaymond]

06:01 PM on 06/25/2012

Screens never crack, batteries never wear out, keyboards never get flakey, memory never gets flakes. LED's never go dim.

And even if they did there is always a factory certified genius nearby who will fix them every place on the planet, right?  Things like pentalobe screws and glued-in batteries are just there to protect ourselves from the fact that we are not geniuses.

[JohnTheMac]

10:54 PM on 06/25/2012

Check out the MOST COMMON laptop problems:
http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2011/12/08/most-common-laptop-hardware-problems/

Power connections coming loose from motherboard? Not happening on MBP Retina (or any Apple laptop

Loose ram modules? nope, they're soldered
(I had a dell with RAM sockets that were faulty!)

CCFL lamp or inverter failed? Not happening with solid state LED lights:
http://www.lcdparts.net/XB.aspx

100,000 hour lifetime of LED backlights.
I know... someone out there will say they'll use that up in 1.5 years, because they're power users... I'm ready for that one!
(like the guy from ifixit who says the 1,000 charges from the Retina battery would only last him less than 2 years, or some nonsense like that)

mechanical hard drive going flakey? sorry, not happening.

In the meanwhile, the machine is super small thin and light, so you'll be using the heck out of it.

[LetsComeDownToEarth]

11:33 PM on 06/23/2012

I made too bold of a statment. I hope we can turn back and fix this mess, however with the current situation it looks grim.

[LetsComeDownToEarth]

11:31 PM on 06/23/2012

We are on a slippery slope with no turning back. For every couple who would now find employment in this ideal fix-it yourself society, many more would lose their jobs in the private sector due to lost revenues for their companies which generally leads to layoffs. To top it off the garbage industry with its deep pockets would lobby for days to stop us from moving to a more effecient, long lasting consumer product society. The more trash they take in, the more they get paid, as sad as that is.

[ok3apples]

04:29 PM on 06/23/2012

there was a time when everything got repaired: vacuum cleaners to toasters to tvs. The business model of planned obsolescence began in the 60s and earned companies a lot of profit. No one thought about waste and the consequences of it. Everything we throw away lands somewhere. As top soil erodes and the deserts spread and more people are added to the population and water becomes scarce this junk that takes up massive amounts of land WILL come back to haunt us. Already the oceans are full of plastic that is ending up inside fish. It's a mess and we seem just too selfish to live differently. Computers should be easily fixable... you buy one and it should last your lifetime with repairs. People could make good livings fixing things again. And the value of things should be more than it is now.

[ran6110]

02:44 PM on 06/23/2012

While I agree with a lot of this what can you do if your one person that maintains their own equipment against 10s or 100s of thousands of people that toss their broken equipment and buy new?

Even keeping a laptop battery that holds less than 50% of it's charge is damaging by trying to draw charging current every time you plug it in even though the batter won't take the charge!

Also a lot (not all) of repair shops not only charge outrageous amounts they pad the bill on unsuspecting customers. When I lived in Utah an elderly neighbor took her computer to Best Buy when it stopped working. The service tech reseated the hard drive cable and she got a bill for $235 and $130 of it was for vacuuming the system out!

After that I took photos of how to open the cover and where to vacuum one a year.

[wtf is this]

02:12 PM on 06/23/2012

Somethings have to change in order for people to have their equipment repair:
1) cost of the repair vs cost of buying new.
2) time it takes of the repair vs immediate gratification of buying something new with all the new bells & whistles.
Not seeing either of those as solvable issues. & it would certainly slow down growth of the manufacturers. So perhaps focusing on ways to reuse/recycle is where the action should be. Make it easier to get the equipment to a recycler who can do something useful with it than to toss it out.