I live just south of Indianapolis.. I remember when one of their relatives ran an "everything electronics" store. Was packed to the gills with anything and everything you could imagine. In fact, it reminded me of what Shenzhen is shown now by Bunnie. You could buy new stuff retail, or buy returns and broken or unknown by the pound.

Now, we have wealth upon wealth with technology of all sorts. But those things are sealed with alu lids over the board. Or this talks to the cloud. Or that is glued together with ultrasonic sealing so opening = destroying. Or batteries are buried with ultrasonic and glue and spot-welding. They're made intentionally user-unservicable.

All of it means that you have a snowball's chance in hell in fixing it. And yes, SMT is servicable. So is through-hole. And if these companies provided their pinouts for flying probe or provided probe posts, we could check what part or system is acting up. If we knew their voltages, then following that as a test would be easy. Or someone could re-solder that Atmel 328p DIP (or Arm, or PIC) after using a programmer to reprogram and then use it.

Instead, we see flat screens hauled down to the dumpster. DVD and blurays are dumped. Computers of all sorts and types, that likely have a single miniscule flaw "destroy" the whole device. It makes the game great for consumer culture: consume consume CONSUME! Companies can make shoddy stuff that has a MBTF "warranty + 1 day", and whoops that cap or vreg blows.

Seeing that e-waste makes me cry. I know how much resources are put into that via how much I paid, and I also know how much of that is externalized to our environment.. and Mother Earth's account is going lower and lower. I don't need that new thing. I just want to fix that thing that broke that necessitated me to get the new.

Hi neighbor. Indiana has a Bill this year.

Here’s what I wrote in:

Hi Justin,

I'm one of your constituents and I'm writing to ask you to support Right to Repair legislation in 2018.

As a Purdue physics PhD (makers all), it’s frustrating to see producers of electronic devices (mostly out of state mind you) keep their devices unserviceable by anyone but the manufacturer. Allowing service creates a flourishing repair culture, supports local entrepreneurs, and encourages reuse and recycling.

Please join Terry Goodin in the support for this bill. Let me know if there’s anyway I can assist you.

All the best, Rubidium

Of course, that old, often expensive, often tube-based equipment needed repair far more often than modern electronics.

Most everything I own lasts longer than I care to use it. (For context on that, I just replaced my iPhone 5S this month with a used 8, so I’m willing to run equipment quite a while.)

What does break before I care to get rid of is >50% electrolytic capacitor failures, which are generally easily repaired without a schematic. Beyond that, most anything is BER (beyond economic repair), even for someone who is capable of and interested in component level repair. I’m just not going to tear into a $500 TV beyond a caps issue. If I had to take it to a service center, it’s going to be $200 to take a look at it past the power supply.

I think that is mostly missing the point. Repair business is about scale just as much as any other business.

While it may not be economical for you personally to figure out the fault in your $500 TV, it might very well be economical for a sufficiently large repair business if access to schematics was easy.

There is no reason why you couldn't have a repair chain that can massively optimize the repair process by both collecting information about typical failures of particular products and by developing tools for diagnosing in particular products as well as their own spare parts, so they could offer things like free analysis for common problems and fixed-price repairs for those problems, for example.

Repair doesn't need to have a 100% success rate to be useful, but success rate and whether repair is economical depends heavily on availability of information. Every hour that has to be spent reverse engineering a device before you can repair it makes a few more percent of defects non-economical to repair.

Also, mind you that if it were an engineering goal, the increased use of processors in devices instead of specific circuitry could actually help a lot with repairs. While you might have a harder time figuring out what's going on with a scope probe, a processor in the system could actually help you with diagnosing problems, isolating faults, generating test signals , whatever. Instead, JTAG is disabled in sold products so you can't even use the diagnostic functionality that is built into the device.

I'm not sure that it's worth it for most customers to drive their [previously] $500 1080p TV over to a repair shop and pick it back up, even if the repair were free when a new 55" 4K LED TV can be bought for $400...

Hu? How does that work? For one, it's not like the new TV would not need to e transported to their home. Then, there is no reason why repair businesses are somehow inherently unable to offer pickup and delivery from and to the home.

So, you suggest that if you had to make a phone call to order a free pickup, repair, and delivery of the repaired TV, that wouldn't be worth it for most customers? Like, it's not worth it for most customers to essentially do nothing in order to keep using their TV? How come then that they still had the TV in the first place? I mean, not doing anything in order to keep using their TV is exactly what you do when it's not broken, right? If that's not worth it somehow, they should have thrown out the TV already, shouldn't they? So this has nothing to do with repairs then?

Impressive strawman evisceration; one of the best I’ve seen in a while.

Many online sellers offer bundled (aka “free”) delivery of that new TV. My last TV was ordered on Amazon and delivered right into my hallway. All I had to do was set it up.

My comment above says many would judge it not worth it to do the transport twice if the repair were free. I’m not sure the business model you’re imagining where a repair and two-way transportation would be free (or even sub-$200 in the US).

I know I'm the gggggp and watching an impressive strawman :)

But one thing to remember, is if we were to price goods based on their creation, profits, AND externalitites (environmental of various sorts), these $400 TV's would likely be around $1000 or more. Land rehabilitation costs a lot, as does air purification and water cleaning of various chemicals. And land isn't exactly growing, so every new piece of trash in a landfill is taking up a limited resource.

Given all those things we currently don't include would easily tip the scales to "Repair". Sure, things wear out and die. Components can burn out. But we have the technology to fix them; we have the engineering to design durable and repairable things.

But because things are "cheap" (call it a loan from the future that we can't default on), its easier to enforce throw-away culture until we can't. But some megacorps make a few more bucks. And we end up with the DMCA, copyrights, and other obnoxious laws and technologies actively preventing us from fixing broken things.

> My comment above says many would judge it not worth it to do the transport twice if the repair were free.

Many would judge it not worth to do the transport of the new TV once if the TV were free. Whatever. Comparing apples to oranges is still comparing apples to oranges.

> I’m not sure the business model you’re imagining where a repair and two-way transportation would be free (or even sub-$200 in the US).

I'm not sure the business model you're imagining where just the repair is free either, but that's the scenario that you made up, and I simply made it so it wasn't comparing apples to oranges (namely, one option where the customer has to do the transport themselves vs. one where the transport is done by the company).

Now, as for two-way transport sub-$200: What would be the reason why that would be so fundamentally impossible? The direction to the home is essentially the same as delivery of a new TV, right? And I doubt that Amazon pays anywhere near 100 bucks to get the new TV delivered to you? More like 20 to 30 bucks maybe? So, why would picking up a broken TV from home and delivering it to the nearest repair center cost 170 bucks?

If I bought a better TV for $400 I would get no benefit out of it. Charge me for a $10 capacitor and 30 minutes of labor, please.