EU Law Requires Companies To Fix Electronic Goods For Up To 10 Years (euronews.com) 137
Companies that sell refrigerators, washers, hairdryers, or TVs in the European Union will need to ensure those appliances can be repaired for up to 10 years, to help reduce the vast mountain of electrical waste that piles up each year on the continent. Euronews reports: The "right to repair," as it is sometimes called, comes into force across the 27-nation bloc on Monday. It is part of a broader effort to cut the environmental footprint of manufactured goods by making them more durable and energy-efficient. Lack of spare parts is another problem, campaigners say. Sometimes a single broken tooth on a tiny plastic sprocket can throw a proverbial wrench in the works.
Under the new EU rules, manufacturers will have to ensure parts are available for up to a decade, though some will only be provided to professional repair companies to ensure they are installed correctly. New devices will also have to come with repair manuals and be made in such a way that they can be dismantled using conventional tools when they really can't be fixed anymore, to improve recycling. German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said that the next step should see manufacturers forced to state how long a product is expected to work for and repair it if it breaks down earlier. This would encourage companies to build more durable products, she said. In a next step, environmentalists and consumer rights groups want the "right to repair" expanded to include smartphones, laptops and other small electrical devices.
The bloc's ecological design directive -- of which the right to repair requirement is a part -- will also revise existing energy labels that describe how much electricity washers and other household devices consume. The new seven-step scale from A to G will be complemented by a QR code that provides consumers with further information, such as how loud the devices are.
Under the new EU rules, manufacturers will have to ensure parts are available for up to a decade, though some will only be provided to professional repair companies to ensure they are installed correctly. New devices will also have to come with repair manuals and be made in such a way that they can be dismantled using conventional tools when they really can't be fixed anymore, to improve recycling. German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said that the next step should see manufacturers forced to state how long a product is expected to work for and repair it if it breaks down earlier. This would encourage companies to build more durable products, she said. In a next step, environmentalists and consumer rights groups want the "right to repair" expanded to include smartphones, laptops and other small electrical devices.
The bloc's ecological design directive -- of which the right to repair requirement is a part -- will also revise existing energy labels that describe how much electricity washers and other household devices consume. The new seven-step scale from A to G will be complemented by a QR code that provides consumers with further information, such as how loud the devices are.
Up to... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can't find the text, but I assume it's by category and only some categories require the full 10 years.
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https://ec.europa.eu/commissio... [europa.eu]
o 7 years minimum for refrigerating appliances (10 years for door gaskets);
o 10 years minimum for household washing-machines and household washer-dryers;
o 10 years minimum for household dishwashers (7 years for some parts for which access can be restricted to professional repairers);
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It won't matter anyway. Unless they put in a lot of restrictions the companies will just sell every part for ten times the MSRP of buying a new one, and only make them available to a single repair vendor globally.
But they need to supply repair manuals (Score:2)
Also, to the credit of the EU, they have only included more mature types of appliances where underlying designs have already become commoditised and fairly uniform. We are not talking iPhones and such. This is much more
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And neither points to the actual legislation. Not in the mood to go searching for the actual wording.
I did go searching, and despite finding (some of) the actual legislation I can't find specific timeframes within it (and that's with multiple Ctrl+F searches within the text).
However, if anyone wants slightly more info:
The basis of the rules is the "Sustainable product policy & ecodesign" framework [europa.eu] which deals with energy efficiency and sustainability.
You can find the ammended main text of the legislation [europa.eu] <- here, and the breakdown of specific product types [europa.eu] <- here, with further links to the speci
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It's after reading stuff like this that I wonder when and where it all started going wrong. It's almost as though it's designed to be as opaquely verbose and pointlessly complicated as possible, whilst still retaining the image of usefulness.
I don't think it's hard at all to read, once you've found the regulations (which is a pain indeed). The first bit (and the 'legislation' document that you linked to) is a bit of legal context and stuff describing how member states of the EU need to handle things.
Scroll a bit down in the per-product regulations and you get something similar to an engineering specification. I'm sure that the engineers that design the equipment have to deal with thousands of pages of internal engineering documents that are muc
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It just means that different things have different legal minimum terms for parts availability, not that the company can choose zero years.
We already have rules that mean the minimum warranty period is effectively 2 years, although many EU countries give you rights beyond that period.
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Zero years is up to ten years. Unless the legislation requires "at least ten years" it's worthless. Both the summary and the article use the weasel word version. And neither points to the actual legislation. Not in the mood to go searching for the actual wording.
Nor does it appear to address the costs of repair and repair parts. Spare part pricing could make repair uneconomical compared to purchasing a replacment. Just becasues a 10 cent resistor failed doesn't mean you be given information on troubleshooting to do board level repairs, the repair manual may simply require replacing the entire board for a mere $500.
In additin, the cosst of mantaining spare parts inventory will simply be passed on to the consumer in the intial costs as well as charging for them for
Tech isn't advancing all that fast (Score:4, Interesting)
Only thing is, the only way you can get this sort of thing is with laws. There's just too much money to be made in planned obsolescence and you only have to pour a little of that cash into marketing to keep it going.
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There's just too much money to be made in planned obsolescence
Sorry but that's a fantasy that people are misattributing. Beyond not supporting security updates on phones there's basically no "planned obsolescence" in consumer gear. The few cases which have been identified have been very vocally called out and in some cases forced companies to backtrack on their attempted phase out.
There is however a trend to build cheap shit usually made in China that breaks down after a couple of years, but hey that is precisely what consumers want to pay for. Hard to blame the compa
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The number of devices that contain glued-in, proprietary batteries alone is proof enough that "planned obsolescence" is abundant. Mass-produced run-off-the-mill standard batteries, when usable, would not even have to be part of the product sold, and thus could even lower the price of the device.
Yes, but if you're talking about phones, user-replaceable batteries make them thicker and heavier, and the vast majority of consumers won't buy phones with them. If you could convince large numbers of people to change their mind about that, to value long device lifetimes over sleekness, it would happen. Heck many smartphone manufacturers started out with replaceable batteries, because it was obviously a good idea, only to discard them when they realized that their customers didn't care, preferred thinness,
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You know, I doubt that many people care about the thickness of the phone by a few mm.I'm pretty sure they care more about the features and once other manufacturers start copying Apple (which is notoriously anti-repair) the number of options goes down.
But OK, maybe a soldered in battery is better. There is still no reason for Apple to authenticate the battery and screen to the phone, making it either not work or display error messages if someone replaces those parts and does not authenticate them - doing tha
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Most glued in batteries are not glued, but simply fixed with a sticky paste that can easily be removed with some hot air.
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The number of devices that contain glued-in, proprietary batteries alone is proof enough that "planned obsolescence" is abundant.
False. Again you're miss-attributing to planned obsolescence what is actually largely a consumer driven trend to demand thinner sleeker devices without plastic, clips, or external blemishes or lines. The use of various adhesives is an engineering requirement to achieve this.
Also the majority of these devices are easily repairable and the batteries are available. Just because *you* lack the skills or tools to repair something, doesn't mean the device has planned obsolescence.
Also your comment is ignorant to
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That is funny. When the phones became so thin everyone had to start adding cases with knobs so they could hold them. No where on any message board or forum did I hear the large chanting of MAKE IT THINNER. My last phone that had a replaceable battery was pretty dang thin and I never saw a review or comment saying Con of phone... too thick.
So who is driving this must be thinner idea? And why we can't have user replaceable batteries?
I would point my finger at the company that charges extra money just to repla
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That's a knee slapper!
The market is stuffed full of things that fail early and could have been built to last for $1 more.
Beyond that, it's stuffed full of things that should be easily rapairable but aren't.
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So what you're saying is your product is more expensive? Not sure why you are both laughing and agreeing with me at the same time, but you do you man.
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Even on a $5 item that is unlikely to become obsolete (for example, an LED bulb), paying $6 instead could add 15 years to it's service life, but good luck getting one of those.
Most of the arguments against durability screech "but that will be more expensive", but actual analysis suggests the extra expense is lost in the noise while the extra durability would stand out loud and clear. It perfectly fits the old saying "Penny wise and pound foolish".
Have an example [hackaday.com]. They'll crow about them all day, but they wo
Look into how Printers are manufactured in the US (Score:2)
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Maybe look at what planned obsolescence means.
There's not major issue with printers in Europe or USA. Shit breaks and need repair. That isn't planned obsolescence.
The iPhone thing is unfortunate, but don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, especially when what you do appears so overtly malicious. Thinking the iPhone throttling is some big brained Dr Evil level planned obsolescence scheme by Apple is just silly.
Also producing a low cost low performance product is not planned obsolescen
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Tell that to the laptops I've had that have batteries that are non replaceable, no spares exist, and when the battery is removed, the laptop will not POST. Planned obsolescence is a thing. Even cars have it. Look how modern cars tend to become money pits after 150,000 miles (241.000 km), just because the over-complex subsystems start failing, and it doesn't take much, like a CAN wire that gets gnawed by a mouse or exposed to the weather because the insulation cracks while the vehicle was parked, for it t
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Tell that to the laptops I've had that have batteries that are non replaceable, no spares exist, and when the battery is removed, the laptop will not POST. Planned obsolescence is a thing.
Nope. You seem to be unable to separate the concept of an engineering decision forced by consumer demand for ever thinner sleeker devices with no external blemishes and planned obsolescence. Also I've yet to find a single laptop where I haven't been able to replace the battery. That includes glued together slate devices with an iFixit Repairability score of one. I've also never seen a battery I've not been able to buy online. I suggest you put a bit more effort in.
Now repeat with me: Just because there's no
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Your Galaxy S works just fine... well, sort of. If you're using official OS builds you're limited to Gingerbread (Android 2.3), an ancient version of Android that most apps no longer support. (You can take it up to at least Android 7.1 with third party OS builds.) It only has 512MB of RAM, so there are modern apps that wouldn't even load if builds of them for Gingerbread existed. Its network support is limited to either the original version of HSDPA (if you have the GSM version) or EV-DO (the CDMA version);
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My dishwasher broke with very strange symptoms after it is more or less exactly 25 years old.
As a fan of conspiracies I would assume: such a timeframe is rather fishy.
China is going to be mad (Score:3)
At the same time, Europe (in fact, all of the West), needs to pass laws to PREVENT the exporting of any 'waste'/'junk'/etc. Basically, we need to recycle these in our own nations.
Re: China is going to be mad (Score:2)
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We have a 15 y.o. whirlpool washer/dryer doing great. We have had several items break, but I have been able to fix these on my own, for less than $100 each time.
However, we had a Electrolux fridge. One of the WORST POS appliances that I have ever owned. WIthin 5 years, it was hauled off. 5 fucking years.
It broke every 6 months. I tried fixing it. Called in appliance repair ppl and they could not fix it after more than 12 visits.
The only others that I have heard was horrible was Hain.
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Maytag, kitchenaid, and Whirlpool are owned by the same company, who builds shit in china now
Uh no. Whirlpool owns it, and it is STLL built in America. And, the stuff they have, I am told remains rock solid. Well, whirlpool/kitchenaid that is. I would not buy a maytag from the last 20 years.
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I would pay $2000 for a washer built with that level of resilience.
Miele stuff still seems to be pretty reliable.
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I would pay $2000 for a washer built with that level of resilience.
Miele stuff still seems to be pretty reliable.
Yup. My 10 year + Miele vacuum still sucks; th eonly repair I've done is replace the cored when I couldn't convince peopel not to just yank it out of the wall by the cord, resulting in a broken plug and retract mechnism.
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Yes, and you've just doubled or tripled the cost of a product. Did you think PCs, phones, TVs and such were already too expensive?
People who live in EU cou
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Many countries have required car manufacturers to keep parts available for 10 years for quite some time already.
A lot of vehicle parts are common between vehicles. They don't get warehoused, they continue being manufactured as they're used by a large number of different vehicle models and manufacturers.
This would encourage manufacturers to use common discrete parts, rather than assembling a bunch of standardised parts into a large proprietary blob sold as a single expensive item.
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You ever heard about "economics of scale"?
Probably not.
People who live in EU countries already complain they are ripped off on prices - take the US price and change the currency from USD to Euros, about 40% higher. ... any example?
Never heard about that
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Could be made so much simpler (Score:5, Interesting)
When the support expires, so should all patents and copyrights. This will enable third parties to provide parts and support.
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Congrats, you've just destroyed all innovation. I mean it's not like a company will take the risk of losing it's payments by adopting a new technology with an unknown part life time and a supply or EOL issue from their vendor can force them to give up patents.
As usual, the "simple" idea ignores some very real problems.
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Nah, they'll just require their vendors to agree to provide the parts for the needed lifetime. The vendor will agree because everyone is requiring that and they want to make sales.
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Nah, they'll just require their vendors to agree to provide the parts for the needed lifetime. The vendor will agree because everyone is requiring that and they want to make sales.
Nope. You're thinking too generally. Sure a typical capacitor or common transistor, or microcontroller may have that process. But the world is full of special purpose devices by specialist vendors doing limited run production for which datasheets don't exist.
There are many devices like this. If you're lucky you can work around an EOL issue (ever send something for repair and you got back a product that has a completely different PCB revision? that's how this happens), if you're unlucky the device is special
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That's because under the current legal framework, they CAN tell you to go away. Change the framework and the value of such a component goes to zero. I doubt they'll just sell the factory and get a job at Starbucks, instead they'll start agreeing to keep the device in production. Larger manufacturers might even demand that the "secret sauce" be placed in escrow. Stop producing and your customers get the right to have someone else produce.
I have seen a lot of products where the cost of going with COTS rather
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If you're focusing on dishwashers then you better write a law for dishwashers. Generalised simple solutions are either not actually simple or not actually general.
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How do you support something when your upstream vendor doesn't provide parts needed for support? The proposal is completely unworkable in the real world.
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This will enable third parties to provide parts and support.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to replicate custom parts and assemblies? How much are you prepared to spend on repairing a dishwasher that is showing ten years of wear, rust , scratches, and dents?
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How many custom parts does a dishwasher really require? If using custom parts is more expensive, then there will be more incentive to use standardised parts. Standard interchangeable parts will be cheaper and more widely available.
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Dishwashers do not rust.
They are made from stainless steel.
If your dishwasher does not last 10 - 20 years you made a mistake in the purchase.
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Even stainless steel can rust.
Besides, only the insides of the dishwasher are made of stainless steel. The outside frame is just painted steel and does rust.
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Even stainless steel can rust
Not inside of a dish washer. You would need a current, by salts and/or less "noble" material.
The outside frame is just painted steel and does rust.
Is that just nitpicking or pointing out your kitchen is somehow "wet"?
My 25 year old dishwasher has no rust as far as I can tell. I wonder if I should try to get it repaired or get a new one ... not really a money or conscious issue, more an issue of convenience. They would bring a new one and take the old one ...
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Or it might actually increase innovation, since you'd be incentivised to make larger improvements on the previous version rather than charging an extortionate amount for minor tweaks.
Thank...government (Score:5, Interesting)
While I strongly believe in this applying to everyone in some way or another, including tech companies, I'm really most concerned about replacement parts for common household stuff. I had to get rid of a perfectly good Krups blender recently because the glass jug wasn't available anymore. I've heard about modern fridges dying after just a couple of years, and it's so prohibitively difficult to get parts, the whole thing needs to be trashed, which is insane.
The older I get, the more I appreciate analog devices that work well. Like, have you tried to find a triple-beam balance scale? I was thinking it would be nice to buy a nice little scale for weighing out coffee instead of the ugly $20 garbage ones that I've been buying. The $20 one has tenth of a gram precision, but they're utterly disposable and honestly, they don't look very nice. Well, no way to get any sort of scale that measures to that sort of precision without tracking down old school laboratory surplus, and even then, I really couldn't find what I was looking for. I'll pick up the chase again in a couple years, I'm sure, but boy, they don't make it easy.
I hope there's a trend back towards repairability. I know that's anti-capitalist of me, but I'm okay with that.
Replacement parts (Score:4, Interesting)
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Analog, yes like my bone conduction hearing aids. Sure, digital can be customized with many features but their audios suck compared to analog to me.
Seems like an easy fix (Score:3)
I'm sure companies will have no problem following this directive. Just make the replacement parts obscenely expensive so that almost no one bothers. And keep a small stock from the initial production run to cannibalize for the handful of customer that absolutely insist. Of course now that their products come with repair manuals and last longer they can start charging a higher premium.
The automotive industry has been moving in that direction for years.
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Oh look, slashdotter finds way to circumvent law. If there even is such a hole in the law (I doubt it, these things are usually mulled over slighty longer than the 3 seconds you took to come up with this shit), what will really happen is that companies not in compliance or trying to fuck the system will be fined or can stop selling their products in the EU altogether.
You know what's the most fun part? The EU is actually setting the standards. The spineless US is along for the ride only, but you'll get to
Re:Seems like an easy fix (Score:4, Interesting)
Things must be durable, Free of defect, etc etc. A Fridge can be expected to be fault free for 10-15 years.
Consumers deal with the shop they bought it from.
Spares/consumables must be fair and reasonably priced
You can NOT contract you way out of the act.
And no, manufacturers have not run away.
We also have laws covering pricing, the price MUST include ALL taxes, fees etc. What you see on the tag is what you pay.
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Australia AU$149 (including taxes)
Exchange rate 1.29 so that would be AU$129 + taxes of 10% = $142 which leaves $7 for wriggle room on the exchange rates.
And then AU/NZ citizens don't need to pay $20 to get the extended warranty, the CGA would give up to 5 years.
Re:Seems like an easy fix (Score:5, Interesting)
A Fridge can be expected to be free of fault for 10+ years and its up to the retailer to fix, replace, refund.
Prices are not higher here, shops are not closing, etc etc.
Also prices for parts have to be fair and reasonable.
Good times! (Score:4)
Repair business will once again boom, and we will have more business opportunities.
As an old service tech, I'm thrilled to hear this!
Let me tell you what happened with 3 year warranty (Score:2)
Above a certain price, products must come with 2 or even 3 year warranty. Guess what happened. Shops stopped selling to individuals, the law doesn't apply to companies. Want to buy a $1000 electronic part for your PC? No, no, cannot do that. I can see a similar thing happening with this as well.
Fridge with a tablet on the door (Score:3)
Makes sense for appliances that were traditionally not changed for 20 or even 30 years. My grandma's fridge for example has been rocking for so long, it might even be older than I am. However recent ones with complicated insides quickly give up, or at least parts of functionality do so. (Ice maker => gone, fancy tablet => no longer updating).
For example, it might make sense to have raspberry pi style "compute boards" that are replaceable. Your "tablet" no longer works: buy a new computer board. Display is broken? Get a new one. As long as they use standard parts it can even be partially upgradable.
On the other hand, moving this to traditionally fast changing devices could be an issue. My phone was an HTC HD2 10 years ago. It was the most "open" device I ever had. Came with Windows, but unofficially supported Android, Firefox, and Ubuntu. (I actually used Android on it). However even if I still had it today, I would not expect it to be repairable. The CPU or RAM production lines are long gone.
Does that include software security patches? (Score:2)
With more and more "smart" appliances wanting to get online to function properly, what good is the appliance 5 years down the road if the software was not going to have patches just after 3 years? There *will* be security holes in the software, keep using the appliance then it is just a matter of time before the appliance become part of a botnet, or worse.
That's not what we want. (Score:2)
We want access to fix the things ourselves or by a third party.
Home warranties are nice, quality is nicer (Score:2)
I got a home warranty on our house when we bought it. It covers all the major appliances and house systems and it has definitely come in handy.
They covered a rebuild on a 15-year-old A/C unit. That should extend its life for another 5-10 years.
But ultimately, I would rather have quality products. We have an LG dishwasher that is not even two years old yet and I think it is on its last legs. When it fails, though... I guess a call to the home warranty company will be in order.
The actual rules (Score:4, Informative)
The article is a bit vague about what the rules exactly are. Here is the official list of applicable EU regulations [europa.eu] (search for "1 March 2021").
Dishwashers: [europa.eu]
spare parts available to professional repairers for 7 years after market introduction (motor, circulation and drain pump, heaters, piping, door assemblies, PCBs, pressure switches, thermostat, software).
Spare parts for end users for 10 years after sale: door hinge and seals, other seals, spray arms, drain filters, interior racks and plastic peripherals such as baskets and lids, for a minimum period of 10 years after placing the last unit of the model on the market.
"delivery of the spare parts within 15 working days after having received the order".
Refrigerators [europa.eu]: Similar, under Annex II, Section 3.
Washing machines [europa.eu]: Similar, under Section II, Annex 8.
TVs and computer monitors [europa.eu] (Annex II, Section D, sub 5):
7 years after market introduction, for professional repairers: internal power supply, connectors to connect external equipment (cable, antenna, USB, DVD and Blue-Ray), capacitors, batteries and accumulators, DVD/Blue-Ray module if applicable and HD/SSD module if applicable,
10 years after last sale, for end users: external power supply and remote control for a minimum period of seven years after placing the last unit of the model on the market;
There's quite a bit more than spare parts in those regulations. Have a look at them; they are not that difficult to read; they are more like engineering specifications than law texts.
Something like this is overdue. (Score:2)
Throw-away electronics is a ecological nightmare, so the idea is good. However, it would also be due to price in the eco - balance and have the market adjust. When regular smartphones go from 200 euros to 1000 euros there will be another strong incentive to make them repairable.
Too small to repair (Score:2)
So much ill-directed angst. (Score:2)
Similarly it always makes me chuckle to see someone slap the hull of the 1980s washing machine in
Good (Score:2)
As someone who is apt to try and fix things rather than throw them out, I think part of the problem is just pricing of replacement parts.
I paid $175 for my microwave. The plastic handle on the front broke. A new 10 inch plastic handle? $45. That's over 1/4 the price of the entire item.
I haven't done any firm research but I'd be willing to bet if you assembled an entire item from replacement parts you'd be paying dozens of times more than buying an assembled one.
If they skirt the intent of the law by mak
This is bullsh*t (Score:2)
Clearly, this illustrates the fact that bureaucrats have zero understanding of technology. What happens if a company designs a product around a third-party component that gets EOL'ed two years later?
Shit will become more expensive (Score:2)
Nothing stops a company to give the usual warranty, and just jack up the prices of parts so that's cheaper to buy a new one over a repair. That way the stock of parts you need to keep for 10 years is smaller.
What are "conventional tools"? I mean, glue, and using a hot gun to pry open a smartphone ar
Re: this is actually good (Score:2)
The quality of Chinese products is excellent, and pretty much exactly what you pay for.
Re: this is actually good (Score:4)
Re: this is actually good (Score:4, Insightful)
I think replacing the board on a radar detector is probably a bad example - basically the board is* the product. What else is there? A few LEDs, a radio antenna (possibly several if directional - still just a piece of wire), and a few pieces of injection molded plastic to hold it all together.
For most modern consumer electronics it just doesn't make much sense to replace "the board". The exceptions are things like phones which have touch screens and batteries that are also responsible for a substantial fraction of the price.
For my money, a good rule of thumb would be to require products above some threshold value to make all components responsible for more than maybe 20% of the total cost to be easily replaceable - e.g. the CPU or SOC in electronics should be socketed. And if no single component is worth that much, recommend that the system be made modular enough that any replaceable subsystem cost no more than maybe 30% of the total.
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WRT item three, I am not a child. I know what the hell I'm doing and do not need you pretending to be Mom or Dad. Now give me your hand so I can smack it with this ruler child. As for soldering, have you considered that you might just be a klutz? Many people can handle it just fine with a hot air gun.
Shall we criminalize DIY home repairs too? Should people be allowed to change a lightbulb without a license? Do you need to call your Mommy when the pilot on your water heater goes out?
As for item one, most of
Re:No this isn't good (Score:5, Insightful)
Right to repair is not a new thing. People had right to repair, even if it was not enshrined in law.
You could get circuit diagrams for a TV or a radio. Most components they used were standard and readily available, with some special components (flyback transformer, CRT), you could get from the manufacturer or some other company.
There is a reason for closed systems, and people trying to outguess engineers will fail. Every time. Be it the guys who flash tunes on their engine computers, then wind up having to get a valve job done because they screwed up the timing so bad that pistons and valves collided in the cylinder.
And yet, people can replace their own brake pads all the time. And could do it for as long as cars existed. So what if someone damages their own property while doing something stupid?
The days of soldering are gone, and good luck reflowing/reballing modern chips.
It's a skill, one that is possible to learn. Also, if I do not want to do it myself, I can take it to any repair shop that would replace the chip for me. Assuming, of course, that the manufacturer has not gone out of their way to make the chip almost impossible to buy. A cellphone or a laptop is not some kind of magic that can only be performed at the factory and nowhere else.
Beside, the main failures on cellphones are batteries and screens - both can be replaced without soldering a BGA chip. Again, assuming that the manufacturer did not make it so that it would be impossible to replace the battery without "authenticating" it to the phone with special software that is not available.
So no, right to repair is not dead, though manufacturers really want it to die and do everything they can to make devices as difficult to repair as possible.
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My only concern is cost. A lot of things that consumers c y about aren't due to something malicious but solely because using a computer to design a compact and efficient thing is both easier and less costly. I've heard those complaints from both auto repair guys as well as people wanting to repair electronics and if a company is forced to redesign things in a way that makes those repairs easier I can't see them doing anything other than passing the costs on to consumers.
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I think that if the manufacturer could get away with charging more, it would. Or do you think that, say, Apple is operating on tiny margins and if they had to design their phones to be easier to repair it would cost too much?
Oh wait - Apple spends additional effort and money to design their phones to be non-repairable. I'm pretty sure that authenticating battery and screen to the phone is more expensive than not doing that (need to write code that does that, test it, use additional chips on the battery and
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Companies that sell refrigerators, washers, hairdryers, or TVs...
Actually, it's about refrigerators, washers, dishwashers, TVs, and computer monitors. No hair driers; not even tumble driers.
See my other post: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
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Cry me a river with the always classic always used... "But it is too hard."
Try sourcing your components from a reputable company that can guarantee that they can and will provide parts for over 20 years. They have the mold etc to be able to do it. Require that in your contract. If every company in the UK is requiring that in their contracts it will be very standard for the supply sources to include that option.
Never thought I would see the day when in America the response to a challenge is .. "But it's too
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If they are still contracted to provide parts then parts of the business will still have value, so even if the main business folds someone will buy the pieces that are worth having.
This could also force businesses to think long term rather than aiming for a pump and dump in the next quarter.
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When I first designed it I might have used parts that were already a few years old.
If you don't do lifecycle management with your suppliers that's on you. Not on the poor consumer you're screwing.
Re:How can this work? Wasteful (Score:5, Insightful)
What is wasteful is this throw away society. Why waste the resources to make a washing machine that lasts 30 years when you can waste 4x the resources to make machines that each last 5 years and get paid by the customer every time.
Sure this doesn't apply to everything like your smartphone, but just asking for 5 years isn't much. This just in time manufacturing kills warranties and product life cycles. Turns out it can also delay production (hello auto industry).
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Had Sears stuck with making quality, repairable appliances, as opposed to following everyone else and just importing and rebranding stuff off the Chinese slowboat, they likely would still be in business. People want something other than cheap imported crap, and are willing to pay for it, but companies just love the siren song of finding some place on Alibaba, having them send a bunch of widgets, and they rebrand and mark the price up, even though quality is lousy.
I'm glad Europe is at least doing something
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This is demonstrably not true, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that "low quality" electronics are a lot better than they used to be; the components and assembly processes are so automated and standardized that there's way, way less difference between "premium" and "shanzai" than there used to be (especially if you ignore intellectual property considerations).
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Why would they typically show up SHORTLY after the warranty expired when the reasonable expectation for things with no moving parts is double or triple the warranty period?
Answer, because they were "value engineered" to death.
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For example I'm looking at a Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB. 5 years warranty and 1.5 million hours MBTF. There's 8760 hours in a year, so if the MBTF is true, then it suggests that the majority of failures happens long after the warranty has expired.
IF that's given then at least hypothetically the consumer can compare the MBTF and warranty period.
If the MBTF is only slightly higher tha
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In general, for a free market to work properly, the consumer needs to be allowed to have easy access to the information that allows them to make an educated choice.
Hence I'm not opposed to legislation that makes manufacturers and vendors not only disclose that information, but do it in a way where the consumer doesn't have to dig through a labyrinth of confusing garbage information.
That way the consumer may still choose to disregard that information for whatever reason they see f
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You actually mean MTBF (mean time between failure) not MBTF. However that is not how the measure works either.
In best car analogy, the MTBF of a car tyre might be 10 million miles. That would mean that on average the tyre would do 10 million miles before some random manufacturing defect caused it to fail.
However the the tyre would also have a service life of say 50k miles. That is you need to replace them way more frequently that the MTBF would suggest.
So the MTBF of your Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB means that
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A standard clause if warranty legislation usually is that normal effects of wear and attrition are not covered by the warranty.
Some products where wear is in their nature usually don't even have warranties and that's fine. Stuff like ink or toner cartridges for printers.
Still, the point is that they provide that information. Cartridges for printers usually give you an estimate of how many pages of a given size can be prin
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Something here does not add up. NAND flash retention times are in the 1~10 year range. Or are we saying that "loss of data I have stored on the device doesn't count as a failure, as long as I can reformat the device and keep using it"?
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But to address your concern: Under what conditions? SLC, MLC, TLC (like the Samsung), QLC? If the device is not powered? At what temperatures?
I've had various SATA SSDs (TLC mostly) in continuous use for longer than 10 years. Those are fine under these conditions.
As long as the device is powered data loss can be
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Well, I'm truthfully not sure exactly what I'm asking, except for clarity on what "MTBF" actually means. Having written a lot of weasel words in my time, I recognize them when I see them. Characterizing storage device endurance meaningfully is a fiendishly tricky thing, and
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I'm not sure you can consider a system that is not powered-on as being operational.
But sure, that normal can seem to be as tricky as legalese, where you have to look up definitions of individual words because they do not coincide with colloquial use.
Though we can infer that the system has to be operational. You usually also get information about normal ranges of operation temperatures. Save voltage range. Safe amount of vibrations.
Now what is a failur
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The MTBF only applies within the designed service life of the device. For that SSD, if we take the design service life to be 5 years and the MTBF as 1.5 million hours, it means that about 2.5% of them (in round numbers) are expected to fail within that five year period. The company makes no promises about the failure rate after that, and the bathtub curve of electronics failures shows that it will increase over time.
The service life might actually be intended to be as long as ten years (though no warranty f
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They're not being required to extend the warranty, just parts availability. So the cost of labor to repair will be the consumer's to bear if they choose that route.
As for the cost of labor, that may change somewhat if/when repair becomes more common. Most of the rate you get billed for does NOT go in the actual repairman's pocket.
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Come back after your 50'th birthday and say that, you little baby!