22 Jul
2007
22 Jul
'07
6:18 p.m.
On Sunday 22 July 2007 18:11, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 22 Jul 2007 at 14:58, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
It's quite possible, but not being "on the inside" I really couldn't
say for
sure. I know that an awful lot of stuff has become commodities, with prices
being pressed ever downward, and so it's not surprising to see them cutting
corners in various ways. At least a microwave is one of those few appliances
that's still mostly metal, these days, I don't see them going away from
that any time soon (though it wouldn't surprise me if they did somehow).
Much has changed in manufacturing where it's apparently way more economical to
deal with fewer subassemblies so repairs get more expensive when the price of
those goes up (and I see this happening with cars, too). And then there's
the basic costs of operating a service business, which don't drop -- they
continue to rise, as costs go up, and when it becomes cheaper to buy new
then you lose that chunk of your business.
We did a lot of c64 repairs way back when. When the machine sold for $595 as
it did at first, then a $60 repair bill made economic sense. When they sold
for only $99 (as they did later on), it was a tossup. And that's one of the
things that killed our last business, that combined with the board-swap that
most PC users felt that they could handle themselves as opposed to getting
something fixed by a shop.
I remember the early 8" floppy drives having 3-figure price tags. In those
days they were worth fixing. I never got an 8" alignment disk but I did get
a couple of them that were for 5.25" drives, at $25-50 each, and they were
worth the investment, but these days with 3.5" drives being either tossed
and available for free or maybe $5-6 at most, they're simply not worth
messing with. Same trend, different bits...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
Having been there and done that in the past,
it's not the repairability
of the sets, its the economics of running a service business and the
amount of money that you need to charge to stay in business vs. the cost
of simply replacing it with a new one. _That_ is what killed it for
me...
Roy, one thing occurred to me. What is the current service life
designed for by the major manufacturers? I ask because of a recent
episode with a microwave oven.
We replaced a microwave oven that dated from about 1980 with a newer
one about 4 years ago. The big difference (both were Japanese
brands) is that the oven box in the old one looked to be a very tough
porcelain enamel--almost impossible to scratch. In the newer model,
the coating was a simple baked-on epoxy enamel paint that failed in
less than 2 years. After recoating it a couple of times with ratttle-
can epoxy, I gave up and purchased a new one with a stainless steel
interior. But the oven itself is much lighter and I suspect that the
electronics will not have 20 years of life in them.
Is a shorter service life by design a feature of modern consumer
electronics (and in particular, computer gear)appliances and
automobiles?