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Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets (arstechnica.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

206 comments fedilink hide all child comments

But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don't do this not because they can't but because they don't want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

While I think we can do better in some spaces, the reality is that a lot of modern tech is fundamentally un-repairable. Not because of evil conspiracies but just because it is a lot easier to print a PCB and slot in some components than it is to connect vacuum tube diodes. And when so many of those components are fairly complex chips and the damage is less “oh, the metal prong on this chip broke” and more “oh, the via shorted out”?

Is this a fundamental piece of tech as it exist now, or is this just kind of the way that tech has manifested after 50 years of development inside of a profit driven system which incentivizes unrepairable and disposable products over things which can be sustained for a long time?

I'd also like to posit that we've experienced a relatively rapid growth in the last 50 years, and that possibly has also affected design. In a rapidly changing market, you'd be a fool not to design everything as disposable, since next year's thing is going to be so different and so much better that it's kind of ridiculous to expect as much backwards compatibility or to expect repairability since people won't be sticking with stuff for as long. Now, whether or not that growth is actually slowing down intrinsically, or if that growth is just slowing down as a result of the current structure of the market, who can really say.

But largely I would posit that, don't mistake the fundamental nature of a thing as being the same as said thing in relation to a much larger and broader system. We could frame infotainment systems and the increasing digitization of cars as an inevitability, but in a radically different context, like southeasy asia or africa, we might see cars that are prized for their ease of maintenance and utility value, fuel efficiency being a lower concern, and luxuries like infotainment being much, much lower.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

It is obviously both.

But you cannot have earbuds without microchips. Those things are often smaller than a single vacuum based transistor. Same with cell phones. Brick Phones weren't giant (just) because people wanted things to be bigger. They were giant and worthless for anyone other than Zach Morris because technology did not allow otherwise. And that is why basically every year (up until maybe a decade ago?) it was "And this is smaller and lighter because who wants a giant ass phone".

But... there are trade offs to that. When all the meaningful logic in a device is on a single board/chip, it can be REALLY small and you get a lot of inherent shock protection (nothing to get dislodged when it hits the concrete). But that also means that diagnoses increasingly involve x-ray machines and repairs are largely "replace the chip".

And, like I said, that is why the fairbuds are still full of glue for the actual internals and they don't sell the actual chips. ifixit commented on this on how it is likely for waterproofing reasons but... that still means you can't actually "repair" anything but surface damage and swapping out a battery (And while I am not convinced that is a meaningful value add, I still like it). That is the fundamental limit to when you aren't even dealing with chips with the spider leg prongs and are instead dealing with significant amounts of logic in the substrate of the board itself.

So if you want something that "values repairability"? You aren't getting earbuds. You probably aren't even getting headphones that (sane) people can just pop in their bag and go. You are looking at the bigass cans targeted at people who have Thoughts on psychoacoustics. Or, to put it in computing terms, you aren't buying a cellphone. You are buying a desktop. (... also, good luck fixing your motherboard. Because even if you identify the short and bypass it... do you really want to put an 800 dollar GPU in there?).

Which gets back to understanding what does and does not make sense to focus on "repairability".