It being harder to repair means it shouldn’t be repairable? That’s an… interesting stance to take. Right to Repair is all about giving people the information and resources necessary to make a repair, especially if it’s not designed to be repaired.
It being harder to repair means it shouldn’t be repairable? That’s an… interesting stance to take. Right to Repair is all about giving people the information and resources necessary to make a repair, especially if it’s not designed to be repaired.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How are you going to repair something where a 12 nanometer path burned out? This is the kind of stuff that often needs outright destructive analysis to diagnose after the fact.
For technology like that, “repair” is “replace”.
And take a look at the ifixit teardown of the PS5.
www.ifixit.com/Teardown/…/138280
You have some plastic, some heat pipes, a fan, and then a single board with a few chips on there. MAYBE you can replace a couple modules and ports but, by and large, you are looking at ICs. Many of which specifically connect to different channels (sorry, it has been ages since I did any PCB work so I forget the term for the “wires”).
To make that repairable would require significant redesigns, likely increase cost considerably, and, ironically, make it more prone to failure because now you need proper ports/pinouts and the like.
Resources would be a lot better spent with a focus on electronics recycling. I think most best buys have an e-waste bin at this point but… I sincerely doubt the average pimply faced teenager isn’t just chucking that in the dumpster. A lot of county dumps/recycling centers will provide this but will also add stupid constraints like “each household is allowed N visits per year” that further discourage people from not chucking it in the trash or recycling bin.
nous@programming.dev 9 months ago
The bill is not asking for things to be redesigned to be more repairable. It is more focused on being able to get the spare parts, chips, tools and docs that make more repairs of the devices to be viable. Many places can already do component level repairs of boards. It might not be worth it if the SOC dies, but a board has many other components on it that are far more likely to fail and much easier to replace than the SOC. If a power regulator fails why should you have to buy whole new board? Or if a few resisters/caps get burned out/shorted they can be replaced without needing a whole new device.
No not everyone can do these repairs - but why should those that can be blocked from doing so? Why should companies be able to deny chip manufacturers from selling a 12c chip that can fix a several hundred dollar board? Why should chips be serialised so that you cannot swap them out with working chips from donor boards? Why cannot tools be made available to calibrate sensors after they have been replaced? Why should any company be able to stop you getting the parts and tools needed to fix the stuff you own? Or be able to go to someone else to fix it?
Not every device will be fixable - but why stop any device from being fixable just because a few cannot be?
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Because, as time goes on, more and more devices fundamentally are not repairable. We all know someone who (… ten or twenty years ago. Jesus Christ) bought the equivalent of an ifixit kit and did cell phone repair on a dining room table. And… most of them knew almost nothing and had horrible ethics.
A phone with a battery that discharges too rapidly or a broken audio jack? Not good, but likely not a huge issue. Something that is powered on for 18 hours a day with a big chonky power supply? We are looking at fire hazards. And a short that would take out an audio jack is a short that will take out the GPU and render the entire SOC as scrap anyway.
Providing tools to open things up more easily: I am fine with that but I also don’t really think it is necessary considering that those tools do exist and the professionals have them. And the rest of us buy them from ifixit.
Serialized parts? I dislike that on principle. But I also remember how many people burned out their Nintendo Switch because they didn’t realize that the official dock more or less pissed on the USB C standard and that the charger needed to handle that for you. And when the lifespan of a video game console is generally 6-8 years+ and has gone through multiple revisions and different part sets? I am not at all convinced that the effort to indicate specifically which wifi module IC can be bought as a replacement on which specific model. Especially since people will likely buy those from AliExpress (awesome website, by the way) and have no idea how to test if that is actually what they bought.
And, again, that assumes that whatever burned out the wifi module ONLY burned out the wifi module and there are no underlying damages that can cause future damage or become a fire hazard.
Which gets to the idea of selling replacement SOCs. Which… is what apple has increasingly begun to do. And that is not a solution in the slightest and is mostly a way to nickle and dime people when they don’t apply the heat spreader correctly or whatever else.
In a perfect world? This legislature would actually be based on knowledge and feasibility. That isn’t how the legal system works. So… yeah.
So focus on the fixable devices. But don’t try to shoehorn in lip service responses that mostly serve to undermine the bill itself. Because the end result would not be that Sony and MS and Nintendo provide detailed schematics and only well intentioned techs with x-ray machines do maintenance. The result would be that Hoover solders a few capacitors in place and argues that they are also an SOC and can only ship people new vacuums.
CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org 9 months ago
tabular@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ever seen the inside of a SteamDeck? If the device is designed in a modular way you replace one small circuit board instead of the whole thing.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah. the steam deck has different boards for the sticks, the face buttons, etc. But the actual “computer” part is still a single board (I also want to say the steam deck uses a SOC/APU but can’t be bothered to verify).
In the case of the PS5: They could pull the I/O onto a separate board (and I think that also already is? too lazy to verify) but… not much else. Different boards for each individual IC like the wifi module or whatever is just wasteful.
lobut@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Why can’t spare parts and schematics be available to a third-party repair center that has experience, so that we can take it to them … so they can fix it?
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Again, how are you going to repair something where a 12 nanometer chip burned out?
A human hair is 18000 to 80000 nanometers. And 12 nm is “older” as far as processes go.
So even if that third party repair center had an x-ray machine and a REALLY powerful microscope and could diagnose if there was damage? They aren’t able to actually repair it.
Which means they are replacing chips. Which, in the case of an SOC, is the entire chip (the black/grey box). So… maybe you can save the PCB (the green part) but that costs next to nothing and… do you really want to hope that a 600-1000 dollar chip was properly installed so that you can save 10-20 bucks on the board?
Which gets back to “okay, replace the entire board” which is increasingly “okay, replace the entire device except the plastic shell”.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s one hell of a straw man you have going there. Most people would just unsolder the chip from the circuit board and replace it with another one, or just replace the whole circuit board at once.
You’re not being intellectually honest in trying to argue the other side of this topic.
iopq@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The whole Steam Deck is $400 so its chip is not that expensive
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Watch YouTube videos showing component level repairs of gaming devices.