They don't make 'em like they used to...
Monday, May 11, 2009
When was the last time you repaired anything that broke? When was the last time you actually had something break that could be repaired? I often look back over the history of technologies and see how things used to be built to last, or to be serviced: the end result would be continued service.
In today’s mass-market (but lost mass-production) world, if a part breaks you replace the part. If enough parts break you replace the entire machine. There was a time (way before my time, obviously, I’m just waxing) where you could actually take a part out of a transistor radio and fix it yourself. Try tearing apart and fixing any electronic device today, you’ll probably need a lot of PCB and solder to get the job done, if you even can.
The genesis of all this is that I’m selling a car, and my grandfather wanted to take parts out of it and keep them in case a different car broke down. What I had to explain to him was that this wasn’t the ‘50s; cars weren’t produced with enough parts in common or bulk technologies that you could cannibalize one vehicle to repair the other. Hell, if you look under the hood of two different vehicles in the same size range, chances are their engines aren’t remotely the same shape or size- from the same company.
Essentially if you had two devices that are similar in function and one breaks, you cannot use the other to fix it. The companies don’t want you to do that. If you repair something that breaks, they make no money. If you replace by buying another one from them: bingo! You’ve earned the trait: capitalism!
I’d like to go back to that idealistic time I read about in history books where mass production truly meant mass production. Instead of 800 factories producing 800 unique and non-interchangeable parts, you have 100 factories producing the same part for a variety of machines. This makes parts cheap, this makes repairs cheap, this prevents so much useless machina from filling landfills. We’re no longer a mass-production society, but a specific-production society. The more specific and anal retentive you can be, the better it is for the company… just not anyone else.
It’d be better for the environment, and it’d be better for the consumer. And in times like these when capitalistic faith is at an all-time low, you companies out there might want to start building up a little consumer brand loyalty and faith.
Barring all that, I’d settle for repairing an electronic part without having to do enough research to be an electrical engineer at the part’s manufacturing company.
Or if you’re going to make stuff so specific and unrepairable, at least make them last…
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