Comment on iFixIt announce FixBot: Your AI Repair Helper

• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Much of it goes back to the 60s-80s when Western factories were largely outdated and realizing that East Asian factories were rapidly outpacing them and able to offer better products for MUCH cheaper. Rather than acknowledge they had become complacent and didn’t want to train their worekrs they instead focused on “made in America” bullshit and insisting that that new vacuum was no longer repairable. And… mostly that boils down to the idea that if you have vacuum tube transistors you can replace them easily whereas you can’t replace a transistor on a single chip.

  But, as we have learned in the intervening decades, you can… just replace the board. And many of those evil computers in cars actually drastically increased repairability/maintainability because you can actually tune many aspects with a computer and get VERY useful data out of the sensors.

  Because the reality is that you can make an SOC device that is INCREDIBLY repairable by focusing on how you do chip layout and what modules can be repaired. And you can make a multi-board setup that is immensely unrepairable by locking down parts with effectively DRM. And… there are also times where it actually does make sense to lock down/register those parts just like there are times it actually does make sense to glue the fuck out of that assembly.

  But that is nuance. And nuance is for women and The Gays™. So buy American and purchase a radio that you can repair until the day you die! And then buy a new radio next year.

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