Lenovo PC Boss: 80% of Our Devices To Be Repairable By 2025 (theregister.com) 28
Paul Kunert writes via The Register: Talking on stage at the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023, Luca Rossi, senior vice resident at Lenovo and president of its Intelligent Devices Group, said the company has committed to a net zero emission policy by 2050, and analyzing the components used in its hardware is part of the equation. "On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment." He added: "More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, by the customer or by the channel and we are enabling this with a design for serviceability kind of approach." This means that "batteries, SSD, many things, will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste."
Good (Score:2)
But it should be 100%, at least for general-purpose mass-market devices. Repair-ability should be the default. Any designer that designs a device to be hard to repair needs to justify that decision. "Planned obsolescence" and "vendor monopoly on repairs" are not acceptable justifications.
Examples of justifications:
* "It's way too expensive to make it repairable" - the burden of proof is on you, the designer. "Lost profits" from a captive repair business and/or people replacing things earlier than they wo
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If general consumers really wanted repairable, the marke would be catering to them. What you really have is a small group of users who both want cheap and repairable, which is completely fair to want, but it isn't some conspiracy against them.
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The contest isn't between cheap and repairable, it's between compact and repairable. I don't mind my devices being a little chunky but repairable. Lack of repairability is from this race to the thinnest and the lightest. I am OK without perfection on those things since they are small enough already. I understand that you will say that is not what the market wants, but just me. I am not so sure about that.
Take gaming laptops for instance. Most of us just want portable workstations with these, not true mobili
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Wouldn't the frame.work laptops [frame.work] match you needs? The Laptop16 can even have a discrete graphic card (the RX 7700s if I remember correctly).
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No. It costs more than twice a laptop with a similar GPU.
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Oh, I see, your top priority is the purchase price. My bad, I got the wrong idea from your first post.
In my view, prioritizing quality and repairability is crucial, as increased demand is the key to driving down the costs of such laptops. Besides, in the grand scheme of things, you end up saving more since durable devices have a longer lifespan. But hey, everyone's entitled to their own opinions, I suppose.
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> Oh, I see, your top priority is the purchase price.
I don't mind a better repairable one costing more in price, within reason. However, at some point, you have to draw the line and say that this does not make sense any more. At over 100% more, for me, it does not make sense. I am wishing for the trade-off for repairability comes from extreme compactness, rather than price, using commodity components, rather than specially created components by a single manufacturer.
Framework is a great laptop by design
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The contest isn't between cheap and repairable, it's between compact and repairable. I don't mind my devices being a little chunky but repairable.
The thin, light, powerful Carbon X1 laptops are repairable.
The high end business laptops mostly are because they need that to offer the high end service contracts, like next day on site repair. They can't simply swap out the laptop because people don't really consider it to be a useful service if all their data vanishes and they need to set up a new laptop from sc
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To be fair though, you only really need the ability to swap the storage to solve the data vanishing problem. These days everything else could be soldered on most machines, as the CPU and RAM will never be upgraded. I've owned modular laptops before (with socketed CPU and MXM video card) and there was no value to that whatsoever. MXM isn't enough of a standard (no version of it is) so you can't be sure that you can swap another MXM card. Odds are, there are zero valid swaps outside of the same thing it came
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To be fair though, you only really need the ability to swap the storage to solve the data vanishing problem. These days everything else could be soldered on most machines, as the CPU and RAM will never be upgraded.
True that it's possible, but in practice, the wifi and for some reason bluetooth are socketed. Just about everything can be replaced (screen, keyboard, trackpad, trackpoint (tm)/clitmouse, 3.5mm socket, fan) relatively speaking with ease. Given they offer on-site repairs, there's some effort to m
VBI comeback. (Score:2)
Green washing (Score:2)
I am also wary what repairability could mean. We all now that unless it is highly modular (and the modules are not redesigned every year), it will be hard to get repaired by the customer. Modules need to be reasonable - not like laptop 8800GTX card in MXM format that costs about the same as a new laptop even four years after the unit was bought. Many laptop computer have soldered RAM chips and soldered SSDs. DIY PCs hardly have a
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Net zero emissions just means the company trades pollution offset credits and buys enough to offset whatever emissions they produce. Nobody truly has zero environmental waste.
But this begs the question (Score:2)
Repairability is good but we need longevity (Score:3)
We need OEMs to support their units for at least 10 years for repairability to truly benefit the environment, since the lowest common denominator still leads us to junk our stuff way sooner than necessary.
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Firmware update/CPU microcode updates have rarely been the key factor to "junk our stuff". Not on consumer side, and for the average person.
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Chipset firmware updates dry up after 5 years, CPU microcode after 7 years, GPU firmware/drivers after 10 years.
Is the firmware and microcode after 5/7 years important?
As for GPU drivers, that's kind of dependent on the OS and GPU manufacturer. The NVidia ones dry up after, well, my FX880M card last got one in 2019, 9 years after it was released. On Linux, Intel and AMD (and Nouveau which is what I run now on my laptop) go on forever.
After 10 years in the Windows world you start beginning to OS EOL problems
It was like that (Score:3)
Until asshat companies chose profit and greed over customers. My Lenovo T430s is completely repairable and upgradeable. Lenovo, like Apple and others, gave the big fuck you to customers recently. Customers are starting to point the finger back.
I'm gonna guess (Score:3)
The 20% that isn't repairable is the soldered down RAM. That shit is an industry plague.
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The 20% that isn't repairable is the soldered down RAM. That shit is an industry plague.
It's LPDDR which until this year had no socketed form factor ant all and still has not standardised one though it is in progress. It is the only choice for a low power laptop and the SO-DIMM socket is just too sketchy electrically to support low power RAM. This is not a manufacturer conspiracy.
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No: Dell already did it and JEDEC is I the process of standardizing it. It's a completely new form factor and socket called CAMM (compression attached memory module), which uses a high pin pressure for a much more consistent and low resistance connection.
Replaceble Intel/AMD stickers (Score:2)
why doesn't anyone mention those?
So the Apple PowerMac G4 from 1999 ! (Score:2)
At what price? (Score:2)
20% (Score:3)
I have a lenovo notebook. The screen frame is glued, the lcd is double side taped, the keyboard is riveted.
"Everything that's old is new again" (Score:2)
I've been repairing/upgrading my IBM/Lenovo laptops for ages.