- 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource
- 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and
indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be helpful
for orienting their final purchase choice
- French authorities hope that the repairability index will
contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025
I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things, and
expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed, one-use
products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted. I hope we
can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.
> A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted
I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.
It can be a bit hard to find reliable/repairable electronics.
I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while.
I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.).
Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver.
Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos.
To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts.
For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.).
My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.)
The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.
Lawn mowers made from plastic parts can get ratings ~9 out of 10. Interesting because plastic wheels and plastic cowlings etcetera get broken, there is a commitment to replacements but how long before they disappear. . . The index doesn’t seem to contain any metrics for: hardiness, fault tolerance, reliability, toughness, or general ability to avoid breakage in the first place.
For foreigners: French numbers 7,1 means 7.1
Here’s a translation of some of the ratings - I think it is out of date - unfortunately most of the docs I Googled were PDF and I couldn’t be arsed dealing with PDF.
Criterion 1: Documentation
Sub-criterion 1.1: Availability of documentation
Sub-criterion 1.2: Instructions for use of product maintenance and updating tips
Criterion 2: Disassembly and reassembly
Sub-criterion 2.1: Ease of disassembly and reassembly (breakdown/breakage parts)
Sub-criterion 2.2: Tools required (breakdown/breakage parts)
Criterion 3: Availability of spare parts
Sub-criterion 3.1.1: Commitment to the duration of availability (breakdown/breakage parts)
Sub-criterion 3.1.2: Commitment to availability (functional parts)
Sub-criterion 3.2.1: Commitment over the delivery period (breakdown/breakage parts)
Sub-criterion 3.2.2: Commitment over the delivery period (functional parts)
Criterion 4: Price
Ratio/price of the most expensive part (breakdown/breakage parts) to the price of the new product
Criterion 5: Specific criterion
In the category of laptops I thought I'd see the Frame.work in the first place (as it has the best iFixIt index), but instead the place is taken by the P775DM3-G, a Clevo laptop, a brand I had never heard of (the brand is listed as a "Why" but that's an error, this is the reseller's name).
the two "why" laptops before the frame.work laptop are ranked 97.6 which is rounded to 98 and then 9,8 as score; the frame.work is ranked 97.0 without rounding so it ends being 9,7 .
the frame.work gets a higher score on the ease of disassembly and the tools you need to disassemble, but it gets a lower score on the documentation ( <flame> maybe documentation is not in french </flame> ) and on the price ratio for the component; probably frame.work parts are a bit more expensive in comparison with the price of the laptop.
The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the availability of spare parts.
But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Personally, for standards:
- anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc;
- all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else;
- ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone;
- anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability.
If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed.
If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken.
A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general attitude.
> sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break
after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a
progressive tax
A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell
crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design
isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish
excessive returns.
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified
technicians'"
I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind
"safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole
conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly
perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely
likely to be lethal.
> must be made of standard parts
Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so
unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard
component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component
classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and
you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We
totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies.
> all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price
No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled
anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and
sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark
and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is
demand?
> ALL software MUST BE open sourced
Gets my vote! :)
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence
Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a
good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing.
But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished
mercilessly.
> anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc;
This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting.
However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
> But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some.
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
> at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale
I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]).
Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products. Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.
I hope they apply this to childrens toys as well as high value consumer electronics.
Everyone likes to crap on the consumer electronics sector but I have seen with my own eyes literally skips full of plastic trash which barely lasted one use before being disposed of because they were broken or single use.
The films "Kinky boots" comes to mind. Something broke inside me when my manufacturing materials lecturer stated "we do not always needs products to last forever so we have the ability to design materials that wear and tear within a defined envelope of usages and time" Looking at my iPhone cable I'm so glad I failed that course.
That already exists - there are already open, modular phone and laptop chassis standards. The market largely doesn't want that.
Standardized components tend to be significantly larger than an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also end up being pretty bad - like I'm curious, why do you point to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing?
Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical) and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed and become niche unsupported standards of their own.
In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-variety mini-PCs, and those builds are extremely fraught with compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than having to work around layout decisions that were made literally in the 1970s by IBM.
For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives (ITX) is extremely unpopular outside the home-builder market, virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw placement vary hugely, because the market doesn't want giant full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den.
We also tried a lot of these concepts with the laptop MXM graphics card factor... but it turns out the mezzanine format adds a lot of thickness, cost, etc, for really not a whole lot of benefit. Laptops are inherently such specialized things that you end up with problems with chip placement, memory placement, cooling, power delivery, etc... and in particular it was basically never possible to swap between brands, because these factors meant the laptop just couldn't fit the GPU and actually power/cool it. It's just easier and better to design a solution that sits on the board. Socketed CPU/GPU in laptops are done, BGA is the future.
Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue, for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue... dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable issue... people hated it.
It would be great if we had one standard that covered everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables, devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were.
Again, you can disagree all you want, but these products already exist, there is Framework aimed at the laptop market and Fairphone and others in the phone market. That is not what the market as a whole wants. But hey, government intervention can always force the issue, right?
I find this statement hard to believe: "76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index." It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most people have of their technology devices.
I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.
I think you are misreading the sentence. It doesn't say how many people noticed the index. It says how many of the people _who noticed the index_ found it helpful. (See nonrandomstring's comment.)
> It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most people have of their technology devices.
Obviously the French are quite a lot poorer than the US, if that's where you're coming from, so values for things like repairability are going to be different.
The data is handled by a startup, so I’d expect it to be out of the open data initiative at this stage. You should contact them if you have a specific use case in mind.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
- 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource
- 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be helpful for orienting their final purchase choice
- French authorities hope that the repairability index will contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025
I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things, and expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted. I hope we can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.
[+] [-] yodsanklai|3 years ago|reply
I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.
[+] [-] chmod775|3 years ago|reply
I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while.
I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.).
Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver.
Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos.
To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts.
For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.).
My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.)
The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.
[+] [-] Mochsner|3 years ago|reply
For smart watches, just dont. Unless it's Joey Castillos sensor watch or something
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
But you can see the pretty pictures and the numbers.
[+] [-] robocat|3 years ago|reply
Lawn mowers made from plastic parts can get ratings ~9 out of 10. Interesting because plastic wheels and plastic cowlings etcetera get broken, there is a commitment to replacements but how long before they disappear. . . The index doesn’t seem to contain any metrics for: hardiness, fault tolerance, reliability, toughness, or general ability to avoid breakage in the first place.
For foreigners: French numbers 7,1 means 7.1
Here’s a translation of some of the ratings - I think it is out of date - unfortunately most of the docs I Googled were PDF and I couldn’t be arsed dealing with PDF.
In French (pardon the fucking image, sorry, WTF is going on with unpardonable French results? Fuck accessibility huh?): https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/produit/tondeuse-a-gazon-s...[+] [-] henearkr|3 years ago|reply
https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/multimedia/ordin...
[+] [-] Keats|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlecometo|3 years ago|reply
the frame.work gets a higher score on the ease of disassembly and the tools you need to disassemble, but it gets a lower score on the documentation ( <flame> maybe documentation is not in french </flame> ) and on the price ratio for the component; probably frame.work parts are a bit more expensive in comparison with the price of the laptop.
[+] [-] kkfx|3 years ago|reply
But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Personally, for standards:
- anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc;
- all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else;
- ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone;
- anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
[+] [-] dale_glass|3 years ago|reply
If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed.
If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken.
A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
> sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax
A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish excessive returns.
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'"
I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal.
> must be made of standard parts
Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies.
> all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price
No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is demand?
> ALL software MUST BE open sourced
Gets my vote! :)
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence
Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished mercilessly.
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting.
However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|3 years ago|reply
So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some.
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]).
Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
It blows my mind that some vehicle repair manuals are basically impossible to find.
[+] [-] the-smug-one|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w-m|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iasay|3 years ago|reply
Everyone likes to crap on the consumer electronics sector but I have seen with my own eyes literally skips full of plastic trash which barely lasted one use before being disposed of because they were broken or single use.
[+] [-] ddkwool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
I've heard it phrased differently: anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.
[+] [-] acd|3 years ago|reply
Imagine a similar itx like standard for phones M-ITX with standard batteries and displays.
[+] [-] paulmd|3 years ago|reply
Standardized components tend to be significantly larger than an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also end up being pretty bad - like I'm curious, why do you point to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing?
Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical) and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed and become niche unsupported standards of their own.
In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-variety mini-PCs, and those builds are extremely fraught with compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than having to work around layout decisions that were made literally in the 1970s by IBM.
For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives (ITX) is extremely unpopular outside the home-builder market, virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw placement vary hugely, because the market doesn't want giant full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den.
We also tried a lot of these concepts with the laptop MXM graphics card factor... but it turns out the mezzanine format adds a lot of thickness, cost, etc, for really not a whole lot of benefit. Laptops are inherently such specialized things that you end up with problems with chip placement, memory placement, cooling, power delivery, etc... and in particular it was basically never possible to swap between brands, because these factors meant the laptop just couldn't fit the GPU and actually power/cool it. It's just easier and better to design a solution that sits on the board. Socketed CPU/GPU in laptops are done, BGA is the future.
Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue, for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue... dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable issue... people hated it.
It would be great if we had one standard that covered everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables, devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were.
Again, you can disagree all you want, but these products already exist, there is Framework aimed at the laptop market and Fairphone and others in the phone market. That is not what the market as a whole wants. But hey, government intervention can always force the issue, right?
[+] [-] tims33|3 years ago|reply
I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.
[+] [-] thomasahle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
Obviously the French are quite a lot poorer than the US, if that's where you're coming from, so values for things like repairability are going to be different.
[+] [-] onli|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bibelo|3 years ago|reply
I'm french and I was reassured of my choice to buy a fairphone when I saw its indice de réparabilité is 9.3/10
[+] [-] ab_testing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramshorst|3 years ago|reply