> The culture of discard and buy another really comes about from items being pretty cheap and the repair costs being pretty high.
Not necessarily. A big part of it is simply our broken economic system. Many, many, many items are made to break.[1]
I hope we start to rent more things as a service instead of paying for them. If we paid a flat fee every month to have our houses lighted, I bet our light bulbs would be durable as heck. Obviously this is not going to be feasible for a while.
But why can't we pay a flat fee to have a usable Mac? Apple stores can be found all around the world. The incentive for Apple would be to use durable hardware and write highly optimized, a little more portable software.
I think gov'ts should force companies to think more about the long term by enforcing a longer minimum warranty for hardware, and force vendors to release security updates for at least 10 years. (All 32-bit Macs will have _zero_ professional use cases once Apple stops patching 10.6. Meanwhile, my mom has owned her XP Word machine for almost a decade.)
Building something suitable for repair requires attention to fundamental structure -- design, materials, construction. All of that has costs. I have shoes a decade old that look brand new and will look so three decades hence. I'm wearing a boot of a type that will last forever and could climb Mount Washington or attend a Fortune 500 board meeting. Every time I replace running shoes I curse their irreparability and 6 month life span. But a solid shoe costs three or four times a comparable cheaper shoe and need annual maintenance costing about 10-15% of initial cost.
I have one fountain pen that's twenty-five years old. Pricey, cost about 100x a disposable ballpoint, but it's charged by ink bottles and has now outlasted 500 of those things.
Or t-shirts, you can now get woolen ones that last for years, can be worn several days without washing, and are warmer or cooler as needed. But each is 20x the cost of cotton alternative, and they last best if washed in an expensive detergent and air-dried.
Now I think these are good choices economically, and also socially and even spiritually. But I can see why others might not like those costs. Buying stuff worth of repair is a form of savings. It imposes some new maintenance knowledge and chores. And it forces some long-term decisions, if you want to change the style message of your shoes every year then this is not the route for you.
The culture of repair and retain is already around us and has always been. The question is the proportion of the population willing to pay the cost and acquire the knowledge to access it.
> Every time I replace running shoes I curse their irreparability and 6 month life span.
Psst, there's no scientific basis to claims that certain types of shoes reduce the rate of injury[1]. If it's above freezing and not rocky or thorny, the self-repairing waterproof soles you've had since birth will work just fine.
To drag this slightly back on topic, simply not buying stuff is another route to reducing throw-away objects. How many things do we just buy and use without thinking? I haven't been able to come up with much beyond running shoes myself. A second car for some people? Food items that are easy to make oneself from more basic ingredients?
I know what you are saying about knowledge. I want to break out of the terrible world of throw-away razorblades, but it requires some googling (and living in the right country).
One obvious item where I have made the wrong decision twice are bloody Eastpak backpacks. They have a gazillion years of warranty on everything except the zippers. Now both backpacks' zippers are broken and I am shocked that absolutely noone is willing to repair them, even if you'd pay them most of the €90 that the bag originally cost.
The advantage of a service model for computers, cars etc., would be to avoid the huge one-time cost.
Ohmygod, I accidentally repeated what seems to be an urban myth in Germany. Eastpak DOES repair broken zippers - unlike all the independent repair shops that I have asked.
Grandparent poster, thanks for making me actually google this!
I don't agree that governments should force warranties on anything. You might think it's going to fix it, but it's just going to create an unexpected consequence somewhere else, like a feeble progress of innovation, risk averse manufacturers or probably something like an oligopoly of a handful of manufacturers who have the financial resources to run such long warranties. We wouldn't have an iPhone 4S if Apple was still spending time and money repairing Gen 1 iPods.
It's not a broken economic system. Forcing people to keep things for longer won't make anyone better off.
> We wouldn't have an iPhone 4S if Apple was still spending time and money repairing Gen 1 iPods.
You are right that this makes the transition harder. If there was a rental model, Apple would just replace and recycle Gen 1 iPods.
> It's not a broken economic system.
We can disagree about Apple, but Planned Obsolescence is a fact for some products and I can't see how it is not broken, unless you leave natural resources completely out of the picture. (Then our current model is awesome.)
But an extra 0 is not a safe indicator of a durable product. Only a service contract or law can guarantee this.
Conversely, the durable Nokia phones that half my friends and family still happily use never had an extra "0" on their price tag. They probably incurred losses to Nokia by being well-crafted.
No, and the absence of the 0 doesn't say anything definitive either. But there's a general tendency that you can get more durable products if you're willing to pay for it.
Nokias came at a premium a decade ago, and in the "dumb-phone" market still do. Not exactly 10x, though. Their dumb-phones division is hugely profitable, it's smart-phones that are weighing them down. By the way, while they are durable, they're not the least bit serviceable.
What I meant by this is: For $1 light bulbs, transportation and time would have to be incredibly cheap to build a service infrastructure that doesn't waste more resources than it saves.
Taking a Mac for a repair or exchange is convenient in most parts of the world already because that's what people do in their first year (or three) of using it. Adopting a full-scale rental model isn't that far fetched.
This is only true if you consider "the world" to mean the US (~2/3 of all Apple stores) and a handful of major cities in each of just 12 other countries [1]. Most of Apple's sales and servicing are done through third-party retailers. There's zero incentive for Apple itself to get into the rental/servicing business. They can just churn out another 100 million iPods, iPhones and MacBooks every year, take their known profit margin and leave all of the low margin after sales to someone else.
I know there's no incentive for them under the current circumstances, exactly the opposite is true.
You are right about the resellers. I didn't think about the name because I have never bought or repaired anything in an official Apple Store, I am not even sure if I have ever entered one. The authorized stores have been awesome so far! :)
Not necessarily. A big part of it is simply our broken economic system. Many, many, many items are made to break.[1]
I hope we start to rent more things as a service instead of paying for them. If we paid a flat fee every month to have our houses lighted, I bet our light bulbs would be durable as heck. Obviously this is not going to be feasible for a while.
But why can't we pay a flat fee to have a usable Mac? Apple stores can be found all around the world. The incentive for Apple would be to use durable hardware and write highly optimized, a little more portable software.
I think gov'ts should force companies to think more about the long term by enforcing a longer minimum warranty for hardware, and force vendors to release security updates for at least 10 years. (All 32-bit Macs will have _zero_ professional use cases once Apple stops patching 10.6. Meanwhile, my mom has owned her XP Word machine for almost a decade.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence