The Fix Is Out: Product Repairs Get Tougher

[dlevere]

Tinkerers are living in a New Age Of Obsolescence — a time where repair is, by design, often not an option.

There are many reasons that consumer products are increasingly manufactured in ways that make it nearly impossible to fix them.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/...scence-n614916

[bungholio]

I've noticed it's absurdly more difficult to repair things as time goes by, it's like they were designed by jerks or something. As a spiteful tribute, if I have something finally going bad or breaking down and I can't fix it, I gladly toss it in a garbage can where it can go to a landfill where it is complete waste instead of repaired by me. Normally I'm all against landfills, but if they design things to break and be impossible to fix, then I hope to forward their douchiness by helping make the Earth a little less of a livable place because they can croak for it.

I've had multiple PS3/PS4 controllers that just go bad. Once you open them up, it takes the dexterity of 10 human hands to manage to get it back together again, nearly impossible but managed once on a generic PS3 controller. The rest of them? Apparently Sony doesn't want me to open it up and fix it, so they must want it to go to a landfill.

Nintendo gamecube controllers have these really weird triangle whatever screws that I couldn't even get out. I welcomed them to a landfill too by throwing them in the garbage. I like buying generic controllers these days, generic has been fixable over the years.



Getting very tired of the joysticks on these controllers. An old Nintendo controller could be working perfect to this day, and my PS3 controller? Even when I played very little somehow a spring went loose within a year, I tried repair, I can't get into it and then put it back together because it takes 10 hands, so apparently their unspoken message to me is "Fill the landfill and damn those of the future!!!!"

[dlevere]

For those GameCube screws there's a special screwdriver that you can get for that.



Have you ever tried to replace a watch battery? It's damn near impossible!

[bungholio]

I remember it being something like a circle with a triangle with another circle in it. Got so angry I shoved a butter knife in and forcibly wedged it open to break the controller just because I hated those screws. I'm baffled another screwdriver was ever needed in the universe, the guy that made the phillips screw into a thing we all unintentionally round out because people who put them in put them in waaaay too tight is a turd for not seeing the suffering he'd inflict on all of humanity forever. We only needed a flathead, and if made strong enough it can also be used to wedge into things without breaking. Sony has microscopic nearly impossible not to destroy phillips head screws in their controllers, you need to apply too much weight against it when twisting or you'll ruin one and then you can't open it up.

[nensondubois]

As products contain more physical information they become more complex as a law of how mechanisms are required to house a more "information". The first device was hardware solely, then as things became mechanical like a typewriter, the requirements for fixing the new apparatus became more complicated. The same thing with technology where it evolves and systematically it evolves the same way an organism makes changes to itself over time and it becomes addendum.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

That rule does not always apply. I foresee computers using 3-dimensional quartz matrices as storage media instead of the ever-more-complicated and crowded silicon discs we currently use.

A 3-dimensional quartz crystal matrix could store trillions of petabytes of information in a space no bigger than your average six-sided gambling die. This info could be accessed via a highly precision-tuned laser, so that the info could be accessed at the speed of light, rather than the much slower "speed of electricity".

Also...photons occupy next to zero space, and are virtually massless, so would produce far less heat and create less bottlenecking than what exists in today's computers.

Oh, and did I ever tell you about the slowly fomenting revolution known as QUANTUM COMPUTING? If not, let me tell you about it sometime.

[bungholio]

I read about Google doing their simulation of a hydrogen atom or whatever. I'm still waiting for quantum too.