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We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower
(www.elektormagazine.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn't boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn't anything too important on it that I hadn't backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).
All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).
I think the "black box" nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn't turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to "fix" including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
Yet there's zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn't work, trash it.
This guy might be looking in the wrong places.
There are real limits to repairability in modern devices, some placed there just in order to force you to pay the manufacturer more money. But you're right that there's a lot we could do that we're just not bothering to do.
You don't have to fix everything, but just doing stuff like replacing connectors and capacitors could probably save 10% of the shit that we throw away, and it's not that hard to try.
I do agree with that completely and I'd like to add to it with an additional point.
When things break it sucks, but this does present you with an opportunity. If it's already not working, there's no harm in taking it apart and taking a look around. Maybe you'll see something obviously at fault, maybe you won't. But there's literally no harm in trying to fix it, especially if otherwise you were planning to toss it out.
And I really can't tell you the number of times I've seen a device stop working, and apon closer inspection the entire problem was something very simple, like an old wire broke at the solder point, and with it disconnected, the power switch doesn't work. When I was a kid and didn't know how to solder, I would fix issues like that with some aluminum foil, and often it worked. Just start with a screwdriver, open things up, take a look around. We owe it to ourselves and to the planet to just give it a shot.