> Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.

I'd add that experiences like GP help expose that the main difference in most products between 'premium' and 'disposable' is in the branding and the price tag. With few exceptions, most companies that used to make the respected brand of the thing (e.g. Sony, G.E., Craftsman) now churn out the same garbage as you used to find 30 years ago in a fleamarket with a brand you'd never heard of - and that's if they don't actually outsource the design and/or production to that low-bidder company and simply license their logo directly to them.

And that's because these are all public or PE-owned companies, and it's a shortcut to easy short-term quarterly growth if you can cut your costs while keeping your price high or almost as high (after all, you're a "Premium Brand" so you can leverage your past reputation to trick customers into continuing to pay that premium).

That’s a western perspective because we are spoiled and have no thought for sustainability.

Please take a look at poor countries of the world like Pakistan. They have a repair culture. They have vehicles from the 80’s out on the road doing daily driving work instead of being used as vintage show pieces. It’s a poor country, this is a necessity. But nevertheless seeing the repair culture there in contrast to the disposable culture in the western world makes me pause.

Good clothes can be definitely stitched. Some brands even offer free or reasonably priced repairs. Patagonia or Citizen Wolf are two examples that spring to mind, and it's even more common once you cross a certain price point. Same applies to good hardware, but you need to do some research before buying.

I am afraid Google's business model is incompatible with this approach as they have almost no customer service because it doesn't "scale". Actually, what they are doing is turning customer service costs into externalities, i.e. environmental waste.

> Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.

No, it's because repair involves labor and unless we ship it across the world to take advantage of people making a dollar a day it's just not worth it.

The cost of making and importing stuff from the third world is just so cheap now that it's simpler to get a new one then to have someone making a living wage in the west fix it.

Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance.

In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.

I'm going to offer a counter narrative here based upon my experience. I have LG appliances and they have fairly reasonable "fix everything wrong" prices. It's not literally everything, your bells and whistles might not work, but if you want just a washing machine, just a dishwasher, or just a fridge/freezer, it will be less expensive than the cheapest new option out there.

When our fridge stopped fridging, we got it fixed for $300: this included replacing the compressor and the coils. When our dishwasher stopped washing, we paid $250 to have 3 or so things fixed at once. And so on.

I don't know if any appliance makers offer this, but if LG still offers it when we eventually replace, they're going to be on the top of my list.

My washing machine started making weird loud noises recently. Had a repair guy come by and he told me it's the plastic gears in the gearcase wearing down. I asked him what it would cost to repair and he said with parts and labor it would be cheaper to buy a new one. He told me to just keep using it and deal with the noise until it stops working, so that's what I'm doing. When the time comes I'm considering paying $150 for the new gearcase and trying to fix it myself, but it's so stupid to that it's come to this

It's the result of manufacturing at scale being so tremendously more efficient. It really does use less human effort, resources, energy, whatever metric you want to measure, to just produce a brand new one than to produce a more resource-intensive one and then try to fix in a one-off fashion.

"Planned obsolescence" is the engineering reason for this so it's well planned.

"Disposable" is fine! Things have a useful lifetime and uneconomic repairs are just that. Nothing needs to last forever.

>Clothes are replaced, not stitched

Unlike a lot of hardware and such in our homes, this mostly just boils down to people refusing to learn and is incredibly easy to remedy. Basic stitching is not super difficult. My partner has very light knowledge of stitching, learned it mostly as a kid and never used it much, but has repaired plenty of my clothes. I'm wearing stitched jeans as we speak (pocket got caught on a hook and tore nearly off). Typically gives my regularly worn clothes an extra year or two of life.

Welcome to modern life. It looks amazing — but its all a lie.

They completely changed their watch design for the Pixel Watch 4 so that it is actually repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/News/113620/the-pixel-watch-4-is-the-...

How is Apple any different? IIRC Apple watches have an abysmal repairability score too.

If anything, Apple is in general the worst on this particular metric. Switching to Apple because you had a repairability problem with another brand is kinda funny.

I went all in on the Nest ecosystem when I bought my house eight years ago, and Google absolutely ruined it with the botched acquisition. Half the stuff is Google branded, half is Nest branded, a different half has Google branded software and a different half has Nest branded software. None of it really works reliably anymore. The lock to my front door is completely incompatible with modern "Google Home" and I'm unable to change its passcode.

It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.

Love their SaaS offerings though!

Apple gets a 3/10 for repairability to Google's 9/10 on their latest Pixel Watch 4.

They had a fix for that in development! Sadly but not surprisingly, it was cancelled:

https://9to5google.com/2024/07/12/chromeos-lacros-ending/

I still think it’s amazing they manage to fit all that AI technology into something as small as a button.

You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.

MacBooks aren't that unrepairable, you just have to go to someone who isn't Apple. Apple will tell you that you have to replace the entire logic board, and then you go to the independent repair shop and they can fix whatever it was for $100.

I've repaired my MacBooks multiple times before (although not one in the last seven years, so maybe they are totally unrepairable, but I doubt it).

The main issue is that Apple will want to replace everything to avoid you coming back and saying it didn't work, when it's actually a different issue.

It is absolutely unlike the situation for MacBooks, where you can walk into any of hundreds of retail stores and talk to someone who will quote you a repair or replacement price.

How is "I don't like the price of the readily-available vendor or third-party repair services" the "same" as "no repair is available for any price from the vendor or third parties"?

> Same for MacBooks

I have a macbook but my father had dropped my m1 air (which my brother has gifted me) accidentally from his car on literal straight concrete bricks from a considerably high height.

The damage is literally close to none aside from just a very small bump* but later I realized that if it was any other laptop then it would've been smashed to pieces but Apple's aluminium body came into clutch.

I am not much of apple's fan but I wish to give credits where its due and so from my anecdotal evidence it wouldn't have been the case with atleast my mac air.

This thing is crazy light, has a decent battery life and survived quite a high damage with tis but a scratch. Credits where its due to Apple hardware engineering.

I don't wish to oversell apple tho but from my anecdotal evidence, it handled pretty good in real life stress test and I am super happy with it surviving that drop with almost literally no difference, so there's that.

what? did you even bother to google ;-)

"AppleCare+ covers fall and accidental damage (drops, cracks, liquid) for a reduced, fixed service fee per incident. It offers unlimited incidents (or up to two per 12 months, depending on the plan), providing a significant discount over out-of-warranty repairs. A service fee, such as $29 for screen repairs, applies"