Right to repair

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 18:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

“You should take a look at the hair dryer; the cord is damaged,” my wife tells me. I immediately think of the usual issue: the protective sheath near the strain relief is damaged. A perfect opportunity to try out that pack of Sugru-like putty I haven’t opened yet, hoping I grabbed the black one.

But the problem is more serious: the electrical wire is exposed, and half of the copper strands are broken, so it needs to be replaced immediately. There’s no point trying to explain to my wife, “Using the hair dryer in this condition is dangerous, blah blah blah…” She wouldn’t listen anyway. The best thing is to thank Saint Nikola (Tesla) that nothing bad happened.

How hard can it be to replace a cord in an electrical appliance? Just remove a few screws, cut off the damaged section of the wire, reconnect the intact part, and put everything back together. Ten minutes of work, tops.

But no. Not anymore. These days, even the casings of hair dryers aren’t held together with regular, stupid screws. They aren’t even secured with plastic clips, which, with a bit of practice, are still manageable to open. No, they’re glued shut. As if it were an iPhone.

Long story short, it was impossible to open the hair dryer without breaking it. Everything was glued, even the strain relief. Once assembled in the factory, it’s designed to be thrown away at the first sign of trouble—which is exactly what I ended up doing.

I stubbornly took it apart anyway, just to sort the pieces into recyclable and non-recyclable materials, but all the while, I was thinking about the damage these reckless industrial policies are causing our planet.

The right to repair your own electronic devices isn’t just an obsession of a few slightly fanatical nerds; it’s also a crucial way to reduce the waste of polluting materials.

Being green doesn’t just mean eliminating plastic from packaging; it also means ensuring that the products we make can be easily repaired. Anything else is nonsense.

Jony Ive quits Apple: a tragedy or a blessing?

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 06:00:00 +0000

– Source: The London Standard.

Jonathan “Jony” Ive, after thirty years, is leaving Apple to start his own company, LoveFrom, which will have Apple as its first client. The news has filled tech (and non-tech) headlines worldwide for days (as you can read here, here, and here). Almost everyone, after overcoming the surprise of the announcement, expressed hope that the collaboration between the English knight¹ and the California-based company could continue just as before.

I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that would be a mistake. Jony Ive was overdoing it.

Jony Ive is (or was?) a great designer, and over the course of his long career, he created outstanding products. I’m thinking of the various iMacs, from the G3 that marked Apple’s revival to the lamp-like G4 and the all-in-one G5. I’m thinking of the iPod, the iPhone, and iOS 7. But, like many star designers, at some point, he went overboard, embracing an anorexic aesthetic that prioritized design over functionality. Everything became too thin and minimalist, with zero accessibility and repairability.

This gave us the ultra-thin MacBook Pro, aesthetically perfect but technically incomprehensible – a laptop that forces you to carry around a plethora of adapters just to connect a basic USB stick. Or the horrendous butterfly keyboard, whose keys feel like tapping on glass and can be rendered unusable by a speck of dust, forcing you to replace the entire top case (and sometimes the whole laptop!) for a single malfunctioning key.

Then there are the AirPods, which, when their battery dies (two years if you’re lucky), have to be thrown away because even Apple can’t replace the battery without destroying them. Or the iMacs, Mac Minis, and MacBook Airs with soldered RAM that can’t be upgraded. Whatever configuration you choose at purchase is what you’re stuck with forever.²

And let’s not forget the most spectacular flop of all: the Mac Pro, now good only as a (very expensive) trash can. A professional computer so minimal that, to truly use it, you need a bunch of external accessories, all precariously connected via cables. A professional computer that’s not upgradeable (it’s still stuck in 2013), a true contradiction for anyone wanting to preserve the hefty investment it requires. A professional computer that overheats, overheats a hell of a lot!, making it unsuitable for the heavy workloads it’s supposed to handle. Is this the fault of engineers who can’t do thermal calculations or a designer who cares little about the actual function of the product?

Is it just a coincidence that the latest Mac Mini once again offers easily upgradable RAM? Or that the new Mac Pro has returned to its old design — a large, perforated metal case for better heat dissipation, easy to open, with plenty of space for adding drives, RAM, and interface cards? Or that the MacBook Pro keyboard is being redesigned for the umpteenth time in three years?

Perhaps Tim Cook and Apple’s board concluded that Jony Ive had gone too far and decided to finally get rid of him, despite the narrative of a mutual agreement.

It was about time. As Apple users, we deserve better.

– Source: The London Standard.

Jony Ive was knighted in 2012. ↩︎
A technical absurdity: the amount of RAM needed to keep a computer running optimally increases over time with advancements in operating systems and applications. Upgrading RAM is one of the most effective ways to significantly extend the life of any computer. ↩︎

Iphone on Melabit

Right to repair

Jony Ive quits Apple: a tragedy or a blessing?