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0 pointsjhbadger11mo ago0 comments

Some of them even lasted in the 1990s (in the US). I had a CRT monitor blow a capacitor in the mid 1990s and took it to a repair shop. It cost me something like $100 to have it fixed, but that was still way cheaper than buying a new monitor. But yeah, after that everything became throw-away because 1) the cost of someone spending a half hour or so figuring out what the problem was and then repairing it would be more than the item cost to replace 2) greater and greater miniaturization meant that discrete components that could be repaired were few and instead it was just a "black box".

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3 comments · 1 top-level

the_biot11mo ago· 2 in thread

That's a bit of a myth. Lots of electronics can still be repaired just fine. Check out some electronics repair channels on youtube. I've repaired plenty of electronics myself.

Replacing instead of repairing really is mostly a cultural thing.

hnaccount_rng11mo ago

It's not (only) a cultural thing. It's primarily an economic one! Getting a $THING fixed requires typically:

1) Getting a technician out to identify the fault

2) Order the required replacement part and wait for it to be shipped

3) Getting the technician out again to actually fix the fault

The technician needs to be sufficiently skilled, wants vacations and sick days. We can somewhat trade-off utilisation vs. travel time, but I would be shocked if we can get a single turn out to be reliable below an hour. Even if we are optimistic and calculate with 100 bucks / hour this means the cheapest possible replacement is 200 bucks. That means it's _strictly_ cheaper to immediately throw everything below 200 away. And for everything more expensive we still need to beat opportunity costs and failed-to-actually-fix-the-problem fixes.

If you do these calculations in earnest I'd be shocked if _economically_ it's worth to repair anything below 500 bucks.

jhbadgerOP11mo ago

Well, maybe. In cases where they don't either reduce the electronics to a single custom IC or cover the electronics with resin it might be possible from a technical perspective. It still isn't probably worth it from an economic perspective, but it might still be worth it if you value the environment over cost.

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