When Gadgets Should Be Repaired, Not Replaced

When I was 14, my stereo broke. Opening it up, I found a small piece of metal had been disconnected from the circuit board at the base. I grabbed a lighter, and melted the piece back in place. I plugged the stereo back in, and turned it on. It worked. It was the first time I actually got something I tried to fix working.

It's a story most of us probably have. The pure joy that follows when you fix a gadget that was once broken is hard to match, and once you do it once it becomes an addiction. However, as time has moved on, gadgets have gotten smaller and harder to work on. They're harder, if not impossible to fix, and most of us decide it's easier to just buy a new one than it is to repair one.

But just because it's easier to move on to a new gadget doesn't mean we should. Last month, I had the misfortune of losing both a hard drive and a graphics card on a notoriously impossible to work on iMac. My first reaction was to just abandon it and move on, but after a little research I found that while it was going to be a huge pain in the ass, both of those parts were replaceable. The final cost of repair? About $400, and a lot of time. The cost of a new 27" iMac? At least $1,800.

It's not just the fact I saved a lot of money. It's that I didn't have to buy a new thing. I fixed the computer I already paid (too much) money for, and breathed life back into it. When that startup chime rang again, it made my heart skip a beat.

The point is that a quick repair like this can get you something that more than meets your needs. When you're done, you realize that the newest thing isn't necessary. For me, that new iMac was shiny, but totally unneeded. Once I was running again I was happy with the old one. It's not just about repairing, it's about making what you already have work, even when you think it shouldn't.

We talk a lot about the value of making things here and doing everything yourself. But as Wired pointed out recently, the maker movement is just half of the equation. We need a "fixer movement" too:

We need, in short, a fixer movement. This would be a huge cultural shift. In the 20th century, U.S. firms aggressively promoted planned obsolescence, designing things to break...

Today e-waste has become one of the fastest-growing categories of refuse. We chucked out 2.4 million tons of it in 2010 and recycled just 27 percent. And ?recycling? often means shipping electronics overseas, where the toxic parts pollute developing countries. It?s a mess. A fixer movement could break this century-old system.

One superb place to start is fixing computers?because these days old models perform nearly as well as new ones. As hardware hacker Andrew Huang has noted, cloud computing has artificially slowed Moore?s law: An older laptop runs a browser just fine. Plus, computers are often surprisingly fixable. Vincent Lai, a Fixer Collective volunteer, gets handed ?dead? laptops??and for $20 I can fix it. It?s a user-replaceable part! For $20 the user could have fixed it.?

And Wired's totally right. Computers and laptops are deceptively easy to fix, and their lives are a heck of a lot longer than most of us give them credit for. I fixed and cleaned up my seven year old laptop to pass on to my dad a few months ago and the thing's still kicking just as strongly as it did the day I bought it. All it took was a few hours of work.

Of course, it's not just about computers. It's about every product we buy. From toasters to speakers, having the skill set (or the willingness to look online for repair guides, they're everywhere, I promise. You can also hunt down a local hackerspace for help), patience, and ability to fix the stuff we pay for really matters. The thing is, it's not always as easy as it should be.

In some cases, companies are just making their products smaller and less user-serviceable. But the other problem is that if you try to fix something yourself you're going to void the warranty. All of these issues have prompted sites like iFixit and Sugru to post their own "fixer manifestos." Both boil down to a pretty simple set of ideas and rights, including:

• The right to open and repair our things without voiding a warranty.
• The right to choose your own repair technician.
• The right to troubleshooting instructions and documentation.
• The right to hardware that doesn't require proprietary tools to repair.

While it'd certainly be nice for companies to make repairs easier for us, more than anything it boils down to making the effort to fix and preserve things ourselves. The maker movement, and the idea of creating something from nothing is a lot easier to sell than just fixing up that 30 year old blender.

Seriously, from bikes, cars, and chairs, to computers, repairs are surprisingly easy to do yourself. After all, when a broken gadget is brought back to life you feel the same elation as powering something on for the first time.

Photo by Kodomut.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/when-gadgets-should-be-repaired-not-replaced-534807800

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