Young people are 'lost generation' who can no longer fix gadgets

[ZLoth]

From The Telegraph:

Young people are 'lost generation' who can no longer fix gadgets, warns professor

Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned.

Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to "˜just work' and have no idea what to do when things go wrong.

Unlike previous generations who would "˜make do and mend' now young people will just chuck out their faulty appliances and buy new ones.

But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics.

This year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are entitled "˜Sparks will fly: How to hack your home' she is hoping it will inspire people to think what else they can do with common household objects.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[Brian556]

I personally prefer to fix things rather than replace them. saves a crapton of money. I replaced the power supply in my 42 inch TV. It cost $120.00, vs $600.00 for a new TV.

I fixed my desk chair, saving about $75 or more.

[triplemultiplex]

They make stuff so that you can't fix it yourself.  When the crucial piece of injection-molded plastic snaps in two, there's nothing you can do.  The whole thing is junk and you have no recourse but to buy something new.  It's infuriating.

Or they use some cockamamie, super specialized screw head to purposefully keep you out of "their" technology.  ( *cough* Apple *cough* )

Built-in obsolescence is more profitable but it is extremely wasteful.  I expect everything I buy at Wal-Mart to break within a year.  And we've just accepted this.
Cheaper is more expensive in the long run.

[bandit957]

When I was in 8th grade in 1986 or 1987, I somehow fixed my calculator that some kids at school intentionally broke. It still works, almost 30 years later.

[bandit957]

Recently, I finally got around to fixing a broken knob on a radio that fell off in 1998. Of course, I got the radio in 1997, and the knob had already fallen off after less than a year.

[jeffandnicole]

Um, we've lived in a disposable society for over a decade. Is Britain just catching on?? :-)

[NE2]

Old people are 'lost generation' who can no longer do anything but complain about kids these days

[english si]

Um, we've lived in a disposable society for over a decade. Is Britain just catching on?? :-)

What part of "have grown up" do you not understand? That suggests that its been going on for the last 18 years.

Old people are 'lost generation' who can no longer do anything but complain about kids these days

I'm not sure the 8 months pregnant professor is that old. Probably, however, her pregnancy has taken her out of the ivory tower and into noticing kids.

And, AFAICS, she's not blaming the kids, but the disposable society created by her peers and elders.

This is only news as the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are an institution, so papers will run a story or two on them, and bad news (especially, in the Telegraph, if it is about how things weren't how they used to be) is basically click bait-equivalent.

[Scott5114]

A lot of times, the time/energy/expense/experience it would take to repair a broken gadget is more than it would take to buy a new one. You have to track down a part, have the right tools for the job, and know what you're doing.

I had a netbook with a broken W key. I mangled the clip so badly trying to reattach it that it was unusable. I could have tracked down a correct-sized clip on the Internet and tried to not mangle it again, but I just used it without the W key for a few months (I could still get a W by hitting the little rubber thing beneath the key) until I bought a new laptop.

[kkt]

I had a netbook with a broken W key. I mangled the clip so badly trying to reattach it that it was unusable. I could have tracked down a correct-sized clip on the Internet and tried to not mangle it again, but I just used it without the W key for a few months (I could still get a W by hitting the little rubber thing beneath the key) until I bought a new laptop.

You were working in the White House in January of 2001?

[Scott5114]

Haha, I thought of that as I was posting that, but no, it was well into the Obama administration when I bought this netbook. The reason why the W key broke in the first place was because a gust of wind tipped a container of apple juice onto the keyboard. I removed a few keys to get the stickiness out, but I could never get the W key to seat right and finally the clip got ruined.

[Duke87]

The nature of "gadgets" has changed radically. Fixing something that's purely mechanical is a lot easier than fixing something with a computer chip in it. We now live in a world where your toaster has a computer chip in it, so yeah.

[Pete from Boston]

If you don't make anything, you probably don't fix anything, and vice versa.

[The Nature Boy]

I once went on a date with a girl whose dad is a mechanic. He owned a pretty big shop in the town I grew up in actually. Somehow during the date, she mentioned that she need an oil change. I asked her if she was going to have her dad do it. She said that her dad didn't feel comfortable working on it because it was a fairly high end new car and required specialized parts that her dad didn't have so she had to take it to a bigger shop.

That in a nutshell is kind of why we don't see things being repaired as much. Everything now is much more complex than it used to be and often times, the parts, pieces and even knowledge aren't interchangeable between brand names. You know how to fix that Sony product? Great, but that knowledge won't help you with your LG product. The Apple example given above is a great one actually.

It's not a generational thing, it's just an evolution of technology thing.

[NJRoadfan]

I managed to diagnose the broken 4 year old plasma TV here in the house. Took 5 minutes, a multimeter, and Panasonic's service information provided to me via a repair forum. I pinpointed the problem with one of the boards in the TV. I could have done the repair myself, but it was easier for me to send the board out to a service to get repaired and tested. I have done board level repairs in the past though. Its usually bad capacitors In this case it was shorted transistors.

In theory highly integrated circuit boards with "jungle" ICs are supposed to be more reliable to begin with vs. a larger board with a ton of discrete components (like what was found in the plasma or pre-1990s CRT TVs). Basic troubleshooting knowledge is transferable between brands, but only if you can get a hold of the service information. Sometimes the service manuals alone won't help though (they are mostly for getting the thing apart and telling you voltages on the test points on the boards), the document I used to fix the plasma was published well after the TV was on the market using warranty and repair data compiled in the field and pinpointed common problem areas and how to test for them.

[bandit957]

Another cool thing I did myself recently was unclog the toilet.

[ZLoth]

Here is my two cents worth. Feel free to disagree. 

I place some of the blame for this whole mess on the MBAs, not the Engineers. The creed for the past few years has been to increase revenue and reduce costs. If that means using lower-cost parts, moving the manufacturing to another country, or engineering the product to fail after a few years, so be it. Look how well that worked out for GM and those ignition switches. I have a friend of mine who is swearing up a storm over how their Maytag refrigerator failed badly after a few years, and Maytag used to be known for reliability. Not anymore. Word is that the brand is about to be dropped by Whirlpool. And, isn't one major television manufacturer, Vizio I believe, makes only enough parts for the entire production run of their televisions. If the television breaks under warranty, they will just send you a new one. If it breaks outside of warranty, good luck getting parts.

For plenty of consumer products, it isn't worth it to repair the item once it's broken. Sure, it's repairable, but the cost/benefit ratio just isn't there. This past year, my mother's BluRay player stopped playing discs certain discs that were previously playable. After trying a firmware upgrade and checking the discs on my BluRay player (exact same model, only difference was included HDMI cable), I ended up giving her my old BluRay player and got myself a new one which was not only cheaper, but more feature rich including streaming playback of videos. It wasn't even worth the attempt to take apart and repair the player.

What bugs me is when they make certain things that should be user-serviceable non-servicable at all. My Galaxy S3 phone (obtained in 2012), for instance, makes it really easy to swap out the battery. Just pop off the back cover and swap the battery. (I can go through three batteries in a long day if I'm not connected to a charger... and this is the curse of most smart phones, not just mine, due to Internet connectivity, photo taking, and such). Meanwhile, for a iPhone owner, replacing a battery requires surgery. No wonder external USB power packs are popular. And, a quick check of Google shows how easy it is to take apart my Kindle Keyboard 3 and my Galaxy Nexus 7 to replace the battery. I actually replaced a cracked screen on a Kindle Keyboard 3 because of the 3G capabilities rather than get a newer model.

Then, there is the alternatives. I was about to take a long road trip in Fall, 2013. I discovered that the CD player on my car stopped working properly. It would have cost $300 to fix the CD player which I rarely used anymore. I ended up having a friend of mine install a FM modulator which connected directly to the antenna input of my car radio so that I tuned in to a specific frequency to listen to music/audiobooks from my cell phone/MP3 player. The install of that FM modulator, $100, cost less than it would to fix the CD player AND it gave me more functionality. (Oh, and before you ask, there was no feasible option to hook directly to the radio. I know, I googled it multiple times). Oh, and on that same car, I have done some basic repairs such as replace the headlamps and turn signal bulbs, but other repairs have involved my mechanic. I don't even do my own oil change because it is faster and more environmentally friendly to take it to a local oil change place.

There are several reasons why I dislike Apple products. One of the reasons, as noted by iFixIt, is that over and over again, the products are notoriously hard to take apart and repair even for stuff that should be user serviceable, such as hard drive and memory. Apple has even made it hard to use third-party products. In OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple has effectively disabled TRIM for third-party products unless you disable device driver security.... all in the name of preserving Apple profits.

Meanwhile, I have just assembled a new desktop here. I know everything that went in my box, and I can easily go in and repair it or upgrade it. I don't believe that I saved money, but I got a system that I liked. Windows and Linux is a lot more configurable, and how many tweak guides are out there? My previous computer ended up lasting seven years, and several components from that computer ended up in my new box. While I was waiting for the 980 video card to actually become available (for the first two months, it was extremely hard to get), I ended up taking apart the old 460 video card that was crashing due to overheating, cleaned off the old thermal "dust", applying some Arctic Silver, and reassembled it. It worked great, and it is now slated to go into a financially-challenged friend's computer.

What brings up another point... there are people who will buy the absolute cheapest item, whether it be a television set or a DVD player, then are surprised when that item breaks down a year later. Yet, with a little bit of research and spending just a little more, they would have had something that lasts a bit longer. Yet, what do we have? People camping out for Black Friday deals on a no-name television. Go figure.

[Pete from Boston]

For those things that don't have user repair designed out of them, the abundance of forums and YouTube videos on self-taught repair is astounding.  It's sort of a golden age of user empowerment in this regard. Coupled with a measly Haynes manual, this development has saved me thousands in auto repair alone.

[ET21]

Old people are 'lost generation' who can no longer do anything but complain about kids these days

True story. So many people in older generations are amazed when I'm able to fix something for them. They expect me to not know 

[Takumi]

For those things that don't have user repair designed out of them, the abundance of forums and YouTube videos on self-taught repair is astounding.  It's sort of a golden age of user empowerment in this regard. Coupled with a measly Haynes manual, this development has saved me thousands in auto repair alone.

Same. Two of my cars have been junkyard rescues, and both are now alive and well. Today there was a car just like one of mine at the junkyard - same color, only one year older, only 70,000 miles (for a 2000 model year Honda, that's barely used). The owner threw it out because it wouldn't start after cranking for awhile. 3 ECUs were in the car, all of them probably good. After pulling off a bunch of parts that were in better shape than the ones on my car and my dad's car, we discovered the problem was simple: the car had a motor from a Japanese-market model of the same car. Here are some slight differences in the way the engines are wired, so it requires some simple modifications to work. They weren't done. By the time we were finished the car was too far gone to get running, but that engine is probably fine.

[D-Dey65]

A lot of times, the time/energy/expense/experience it would take to repair a broken gadget is more than it would take to buy a new one. You have to track down a part, have the right tools for the job, and know what you're doing.

I can vouch for that with my Kodak EasyShare C182, which has a broken door covering the batteries and SD card compartments that would cost $80 to replace, almost the same price I paid for my camera itself.

In the meantime, I'm also having a bitch of a time getting some damn malware removed from my PC!

UPDATE: I just solved that problem with System Restore. I just wish I could've restored my PC to an earlier date.