[HN Gopher] The French repairability index - one year after its ...
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The French repairability index - one year after its implementation
[pdf]
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-06-21 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.halteobsolescence.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.halteobsolescence.org)
| acd wrote:
| Lets create an open hardware itx like case standard for laptops.
| Imagine if you had standard displays. L-ITX
|
| Imagine a similar itx like standard for phones M-ITX with
| standard batteries and displays.
| paulmd wrote:
| That already exists - there are already open, modular phone and
| laptop chassis standards. The market largely doesn't want that.
|
| Standardized components tend to be _significantly_ larger than
| an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also
| end up being pretty bad - like I 'm curious, why do you point
| to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing?
|
| Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all
| had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical)
| and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU
| and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified
| location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler
| standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of
| airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple
| times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for
| convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it
| impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power
| rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they
| used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and
| SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And
| all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed
| and become niche unsupported standards of their own.
|
| In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very
| smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-
| variety mini-PCs, and those builds are _extremely_ fraught with
| compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half
| inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular
| coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that
| level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors
| that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a
| fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply
| smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are
| thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than
| having to work around layout decisions that were made literally
| in the 1970s by IBM.
|
| For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives
| (ITX) is _extremely_ unpopular outside the home-builder market,
| virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO
| standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already
| doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone
| to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible
| implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw
| placement vary hugely, because the market doesn 't want giant
| full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den.
|
| Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be
| abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue,
| for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue...
| dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable
| issue... people hated it.
|
| It would be great if we had one standard that covered
| everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated
| standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things
| inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that
| overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables,
| devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted
| space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones
| that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were.
|
| Again, you can disagree all you want, but these products
| already exist, there is Framework aimed at the laptop market
| and Fairphone and others in the phone market. That is not what
| the market as a whole wants. But hey, government intervention
| can always force the issue, right?
| onli wrote:
| Did someone see an API? I'm specifically looking for a way to get
| the repairability score for smartphones, via their codename.
| tims33 wrote:
| I find this statement hard to believe: "76% of those people that
| in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the
| index." It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding
| most people have of their technology devices.
|
| I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this
| document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.
| thomasahle wrote:
| I think you are misreading the sentence. It doesn't say how
| many people noticed the index. It says how many of the people
| _who noticed the index_ found it helpful. (See
| nonrandomstring's comment.)
| tims33 wrote:
| I see what they are saying. I'm still not sure it is a useful
| data point other than to say the index isn't detrimental.
|
| My conclusion from the report is that it is still too early
| to determine the impact of the program.
| bombcar wrote:
| I could believe it if French law required it as a sticker or
| otherwise on the product/ads, like US food details are on each
| product.
| bchanudet wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's actually required by law, but usual
| retailers have been communicating a lot on this in the last
| year. Most of them display a sticker in their stores, but the
| score is also prominently shown on their websites[0][1]. I'm
| really not surprised that a lot of people willing to buy
| something noticed the repairability score, because it's near
| impossible to miss it.
|
| [0]: Some examples on two of the biggest
| appliance/electronics retailers:
| https://www.boulanger.com/ref/1157777, https://www.darty.com/
| nav/achat/gros_electromenager/lavage_s...
|
| [1]: One last example on the Orange (mobile services
| provider) shop: https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/one
| plus-9-pro-5g-n...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most
| people have of their technology devices.
|
| Obviously the French are quite a lot poorer than the US, if
| that's where you're coming from, so values for things like
| repairability are going to be different.
| tims33 wrote:
| No, I definitely wasn't saying that. My point is that people
| are generally pretty oblivious of the vast majority of facts
| and features of their electronics devices.
| boudin wrote:
| That's just not true
| chrisseaton wrote:
| That the French are poorer? People in the US are about 50%
| richer when you account for purchasing power and things.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
| pseudojim wrote:
| We're already way off topic, but it's 40%. And we're
| talking about two countries with significantly different
| tax rates and social contributions.
| kkfx wrote:
| The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch
| exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the
| availability of spare parts.
|
| But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with
| a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year,
| ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as
| much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a
| mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected
| lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
|
| Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified
| technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new
| gear.
|
| Personally, for standards:
|
| - anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for
| anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing
| machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and
| standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an
| original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with
| standard whips inserts etc;
|
| - all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a
| reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10%
| of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no
| need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have
| a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else;
|
| - ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no
| bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5
| years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically
| readable and usable by anyone;
|
| - anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians
| from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their
| publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the
| whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company
| loose so much that no one want even try.
| bombcar wrote:
| > anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for
| anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing
| machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and
| standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an
| original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with
| standard whips inserts etc;
|
| This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops -
| parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that
| similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve
| slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has
| a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how
| full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be
| full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting.
|
| However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these
| repairs - _make it so that out-of-warranty repairs /repaired
| items sold are VAT-free_. Once the financial incentives are
| lined up, people will be _begging_ for dead items they can fix
| and resell.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold
| are VAT-free
|
| Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store
| repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance
| without VAT plus $5 for the repair?
|
| If the goal is to reduce people's consumption and incentivize
| them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured
| goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable
| goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell
| them.
| bombcar wrote:
| The idea would be for _out of warranty_ repaired items; in
| other words, the device was bought years ago and is
| otherwise destined for the landfill.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Oh, I see. Still seems like more labor required to verify
| and audit warranty status. Seems simpler to enforce an
| excise tax on the manufacturer/importer.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for
| better repairability.
|
| If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the
| motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could
| burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the
| motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being
| jammed.
|
| If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough
| force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components.
| That can make the product impossible to repair, if some
| injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place
| was broken.
|
| A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of
| the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears
| are very standard components that are far easier to find
| replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being
| made for one specific model of mixer.
| spockz wrote:
| But then it isn't planned obsolescence. It is planned
| obsolescence if the plastic gear wears and breaks down
| without a jam occurring. In your model it is a fail safe or
| circuit breaker. In the GP it a part designed to fail sooner
| (in wall clock time) to make sure you buy a new product.
| msbarnett wrote:
| But that's the crux of engineering: these two things are
| _in tension_ - the part which is designed to fail safely if
| a jam occurs will, by its very nature, also be subject to
| wearing down sooner than if it were made of cast iron and
| caused the entire mixer to fail catastrophically during a
| jam.
|
| In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and
| declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!".
| Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing
| companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards
| long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer
| warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears
| ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the
| tradeoffs involved.
| mrob wrote:
| There are overload protection mechanisms without
| sacrificial parts, e.g. ball detents. They don't
| inherently have to wear down faster. Plastic gears are
| likely cheaper and lighter, though.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The key would seem to be if the part that fails is easily
| replaceable, then. If I make a design that has a part
| meant to fail-safe in a situation that would otherwise be
| dangerous to the other devices (I'm an EE rather than an
| ME, so we'll call it a "fuse"), the good-faith
| repairability practice is to put the part in an
| accessible location and make it a part that is readily
| available. If I wanted to encourage replacement of the
| whole device, maybe I make it a soldered-on part in the
| potted section of the PCB.
| bombcar wrote:
| But taken to an extreme each car would look like a military
| truck (because each component could have been made
| stronger) - to prove planned obsolescence you'd have to
| show that the _rest_ of the device will last longer than
| the part _and_ there 's a comparable part that would work
| better.
|
| For example timing chains vs timing belts, apparently there
| are reasons they choose one over the other, but maintenance
| is part of keeping them operational.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for
| better repairability.
|
| If it was a planned safety features then spare gears could be
| included or easy to find and buy for cheap(a device I bought
| had a safety fuse and it comed with 3 extra ones , also it
| was designed to be simple to replace it, no screws or
| "genius" needed. On the other hand a laptop of mine got
| destroyed by a high power voltage, but not destroyed at once,
| made me spent some more money on repairs until it finally
| died, all because some cheap safety feature was not included
| (even if hard to replace))
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Here's a comment I posted a year ago about the sacrificial
| plastic gear in a Baratza coffee grinder:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27018629
|
| One of the replies is a truly frightening story about people
| who broke the sacrificial gear in the tailgate window
| mechanism of their Toyota Landcruiser and machined a new one
| out of brass!
| Hellbanevil wrote:
| katbyte wrote:
| There are other (better) but more expensive ways to prevent
| damage to the motor. The plastic gear in a mixer is the
| cheapest way to solve the problem while also ensuring the
| device wears out fairly quick compared to a better built
| unit. It's a win win for the manufacture while a total loss
| for the consumer (and environment)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Great example of why "planned obsolescence" isn't always bad.
| In this case the weak gear acts alike a kind of mechanical
| fuse. So long as it's within a context of easy replacement.
| the-smug-one wrote:
| Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt
| poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products.
| Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general
| attitude.
|
| > sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will
| break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get
| a progressive tax
|
| A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't
| sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality
| of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of
| finished product. Punish excessive returns.
|
| > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified
| technicians'"
|
| I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide
| behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-
| stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled
| technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise
| the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal.
|
| > must be made of standard parts
|
| Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't
| so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on
| standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent
| component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp
| package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in
| any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical
| assemblies.
|
| > all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a
| reasonable price
|
| No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like
| compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to
| manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply
| lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business
| making the part for which there is demand?
|
| > ALL software MUST BE open sourced
|
| Gets my vote! :)
|
| > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence
|
| Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can
| be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality
| expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of
| death" should be punished mercilessly.
| adamc wrote:
| How do you know MTBF for recent (new) products? If they get a
| waiver, why wouldn't manufacturers make every product model-
| year-specific to avoid such a requirement?
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| If it is anything like hard drives, then you just make up a
| big number that no one ever actually sees in the real
| world.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| As far as enforcement, one could create a disposal tax
| chargeable to manufacturers. High quality items should need
| to be disposed of less frequently.
|
| This kind of tax already exists for recycling programs, so it
| has to be at least somewhat possible.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer
| with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after
| few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a
| progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your
| device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale
| price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of
| normal usage.
|
| So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built
| one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How
| is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to
| fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
|
| > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified
| technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new
| gear.
|
| Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The
| factory in China will generally happily sell you some.
|
| > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians
| from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their
| publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the
| whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the
| company loose so much that no one want even try.
|
| The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has
| a component that will wear out first.
| w-m wrote:
| Wouldn't the simplest way to punish selling crap be to bump up
| the years of required warranty significantly, for most product
| categories?
| bombcar wrote:
| Don't some countries in Europe already have this? Minimum
| warranties because the product must work for X number of
| years no matter what?
|
| A sliding tax that got _larger_ the shorter the warranty was
| would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a
| certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product
| model; a device that has been made for five years is going to
| be more repairable than one that changes every year, if
| everything else is the same).
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| A bigger success than I expected.
|
| - 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource
|
| - 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and
| indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be
| helpful for orienting their final purchase choice
|
| - French authorities hope that the repairability index will
| contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025
|
| I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things,
| and expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed,
| one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted.
| I hope we can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very
| recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted
|
| I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an
| era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be
| the norm in the near future.
| bombcar wrote:
| Here's a link to the index in French (lawnmower, battery):
| https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/jardin/tondeuse-...
|
| But you can see the pretty pictures and the numbers.
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