Re: what kills Look cleats?

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 07:14:15 GMT, "Mike Jacoubowsky"
<mikej1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>It costs a lot more to make something easily repairable.

Not always true, but the real point is that designers are no longer
given any encouragement to provide for repair capability vs. designing
for an acceptable length of time before failure. The typical TV
manufacturer makes essentially nothing from repairs, but has a keen
interest in getting the sold unit to last just long enough that the
customer will consider buying another of the same brand as a
replacement. In the early days of the change from tubes to
solid-state, the old paradigm of the TV (as a device with components
that would fail regularly but were easily replaced) dominated the
thinking of the consumer, and thus the designers had some impetus to
give the appearance of component-level repairability to their
products. As component designs (and their mounting methods) have
changed, the possibilities for repair have shrunk, but they're still
not zero in most cases. However, there's another factor involved now;
previously, electronic device schematics were made available for
consumer electronics as a matter of course in order that repair could
be accomplished in the field. This is no longer done for the majority
of the goods.

>Remember the old
>Quasar "works in a drawer" TVs? Well, maybe you're not old enough. But they
>had a totally-modular design, very similar to what Heathkit was doing. Lots
>of individual printed circuit boards that plugged into the main chassis.

And not too surprisingly, even though those boards had individual
transistors and other devices which could be bought on the
repair-parts market, Quasar only sold the complete boards as
replacement parts. They were already heading down the road toward the
disposable device.

>Ironically, I think it was improved reliability that killed off improved
>repairability.

To a significant degree, it did. At the same time, the switch to
surface-mounted components increased the cost and difficulty of repair
while making manufacturing cheaper.

>But now, in our never-ending quest to find the bottom
>(cheaper prices at any cost), we have neither.

Until recently, a handful of manufacturers could usually be relied
upon to produce a durable-enough unit that the extra cost of buying
their brand was justified...but even some of them are cranking out
lemons now. By way of example: For years, the only reliably durable
walkman-sized CD players were from Sony, and *any* of theirs was a
good bet to last at least three to four years. Then, a couple of
years ago, they started putting the contols on the top of the hinged
lid, with a ribbon cable to the main board through the hinge. Those
units didn't last long at all; the *connector* for the ribbon cable
would go intermittent at about 6 months, but as the full warranty was
just 90 days (and who cared? This was a Sony, you *knew* it would go
for years) lots of folks discovered that they would have to pay just
as much for an in-warranty exchange unit as they had paid for the new
one to begin with. (I won't go into how I found out about this.)
Sony appears to be going back to mounting the controls on the edge of
the main housing again, but in the meantime, their reputation for the
CD player product has been trashed...and given the other shenanigans
that they've been involved with, they've got a real consumer
confidence problem that they need to address. (Not that any of their
competitors is making a measurably better product in most cases; I've
sworn off Phillips/Magnavox due to various issues, Aiwa's stuff has
been nothing but a complete disappointment for years, most of the
others are not much better, and only a corrupt politician can afford
Bose.)
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