I once had an alternator with a failing rectifier/regulator that was starting to overcharge. The part cost $70 and the whole alternator cost $110 so I decided to just buy an entire new one. I also know a friend who had a Mitsubishi of some type with the cat converter built into the exhaust manifold. I started to fail and trigger check engine lights so he traded it in before the next inspection. I forget what it cost but it was pretty bad.
TV’s are another form of electronic that I find to be almost disposable. I frequently see low end units come in that were bought where you can also buy toothpaste, toilet paper, and milk. Sure, they can be fixed but not for a decent price. A new TV of similar specs costs $500 and has a 1 year warranty while the part to fix it costs $450 and has a 30-90 day warranty only. My feeling is that the rest of the TV could go at anytime so it isn’t worth fixing the unit. Plasma TV’s seem to be really bad about the parts costing a bunch.
CH air compressors seem to be a lower end brand. I actually owned a Harbor Freight model like this and felt it was a quality unit for what I paid. The oil could be changed and it was made to be repaired. Unfortunately it bit the dust in a fire that damaged the unit. IT still turned on but needed enough work to make the unit a disposable. I tore it apart to scrap it and was actually pretty impressed with the build quality for such a cheap unit. I have no doubt it would have continued to provide decent service for years to come had it not been damaged. I wonder if your units was made with planned obsolescence in mind with that cheap brush holder.
As for the low-end cheap desktop and laptop computers, I am not impressed. Of course I tend to see the ones that fail and don’t see the ones that work fine so I am biased but feel these are made very poorly and meant to be disposable. I for one can’t stand the integrated APU’s that take like 10-15 minutes to boot on a fresh loaded OS. That is the way they work out of the box and they just get worse as viruses and such become a problem. I had one of these in that actually didn’t meet the minimum PUBLISHED requirements to run Windows but was running it, although quite poorly, anyway. This is how it came from the factory. It had a gutless CPU and barely any RAM. IT came from a rent to own place so you know it cost a pretty penny for this junk.
A cheap low end computer may be fine for some people but others bring them to me to try and upgrade them because they are so frustrated with the slowness. They aren’t happy when I tell them it isn’t really upgradable.
Lower costs yes? Higher performance and reliability? Not really.
Yes, really. Soldered connections are far more reliable than a pin and socket connection. Just because high end buyers are resistant to soldered connections does not make socketed connections better.
As processors get faster, the memory and controllers have to be located closer to the CPU. Eventually the high end computers will have to abandon the sockets. You may see VSLIC (very large scale integrated circuits) chips in the future that will have the complete computer on a single chip.
True, integrated components may be less likely to fail but when they do, the entire thing becomes disposable. I also understand the higher speeds with integrated circuits and shorter pathways. Intel and AMD have essentially done this with their recent chips. Anything Intel from the Sandy Bridge or newer generations finally got serious about onboard graphics with a lot of that being integrated into the CPU package. Even the AMD APU’s which I personally only see the low end models of and am not impressed, are actually pretty decent at running HD video. The thing I don’t like is that they are SLOW and little can be done to improve the performance besides buying a new computer. People buy this crap just because it is cheap and then are extremely unhappy with the performance.
As for cars, I have been reading up on the Aveo and other Daewoo products which are considered “disposable cars” lately. It looks like these aren’t terrible cars over all but you don’t want to neglect the timing belt change interval at all! My girlfriend has a Suzuki Reno which is a Daewoo product. The Suzuki Forenza is basically the same car too. While other cars have a better margin of error on going over the timing belt change interval, this one basically has no margin of error. Being a cheap car to start, it is considered disposable when the timing belt breaks and trashes the engine.
This car wouldn’t be my first choice but it looks like it isn’t a terrible car all things considered. Just do not ever neglect the timing belt change. She is WAY overdue and a timing belt, water pump, and tensioners/idlers are going to be done this weekend.
Plus , the tinier they get, the less repairable the are for Joe Handyman.
The assembly soldering is so micro tiny that I can not replicate that function on my work bench.
Only the robots with their needle point soldering can do that stuff.
In fact I think some of it is a type of glue allowing continuity.
I tried to repair the usb connection on my wifes Kindle. It had come loose from the circuit board inside…I was UNsuccessful
Yep, the only tablet type devices worth repairing are the high dollar ones. The $100-200 ones are just disposable as it costs more to fix than to buy new. The $600 ones are a different story. It is worth a look at repairing them. This is pretty much the same with cell phones.
I have yet to see a CPU socket fail. But I’ve seen a few CPUs fail, and I’ve seen motherboards fail. With the everything-soldered together solution. You’re going to end up replacing the who shebang should one component fail. On a low end machine, where the board and CPU are worth $100 together that’s not huge deal financially speaking. But If you’ve got a $1000 CPU and a $500 motherboard, replacing both would financially annoying. That’s why you’re not going see such a solution on high end hardware anytime soon. Intel took so much backlash when the announced that Broadwell would be socketless that they had to change their plans and do socketed CPUs for the foreseeable future. Broadwell, Skylake, and Cannonlake will all be (or at least offered) in socketed form.
The only failed CPU sockets I have seen fail are usually user-related problems such as improper/forced installation. I have seen a handful of CPU failures with AMD being the majority of those. The thermal management on some of the older Athlons was terrible and they would just fry if the fan died. Motherboards DO fail relatively frequently from wear/tear, bad luck, user error such as spills, and power surges.
I agree that you are probably not going to have a failure of the CPU socket. The reason for this is that Intel sees a direct/integral connection as another way to improve performance as the electrical connection will be better. Fewer connections means a better and cleaner electrical signal. I can understand Intel wanting to eliminate sockets for this reason but also understand that tinkerers and hobbyists such as myself are not going to like the loss of this modularity for upgrade and repair purposes.
Everything electronic these days is built with surface-mount components. While generally reliable, when they do fail, it takes special skills and a steady hand to repair these. I’ve been soldering since I was 7 years old and I’m not at all good at working with these. A lot of circuit boards may have 2-4 layers of conductors, making it nearly impossible to repair them if a poor connection develops or the board gets cracked from abuse, thermal stress, etc. (I’ve fixed many single-layer cracked circuit boards with wiring overlays)
For a cheap laptop or tablet, intended for grandma that isn’t ever going to look under the hood or consider upgrading, soldered-on CPUs somewhat make sense. CPUs rarely fail. Memory on the other hand does fail more frequently. Would even the most skinflint consumer care if they had to pay an extra $2 for a device with memory sockets vs. soldered? Hopefully not. To me, not making it possible to easily replace components that do fail makes as much sense as BMW deciding to not include an oil dipstick on some models.
Re. cheap, slow computers though, how much is everyone’s time worth? If you save $200 by cheaping out on your PC, yet the bootup and every action you perform on it takes seconds to minutes longer than it would on a more powerful unit, along with the frustration that goes with the waiting, have you really come out ahead? In a corporate environment, how much lost productivity and low morale is caused by bean counters cheaping out? I’ll get off my soapbox now…
Agreed. Some products are basically meant to be disposable at the price point they are sold at. Some gutless PC or laptop sold at a low price at a store where you can buy milk, toilet paper, and toothpaste take like 15 minutes to boot on a clean OS. This is unacceptable to me. When billing $50 an hour to work on something like this, most people soon realize that buying something along these lines is not a time saver in the long run.
I made a point to walk by the computer isle of the large retailer that sells milk, eggs, toilet paper, toothpaste, and all other things this weekend. The pricing made no sense at all. Some of the better units were the cheaper ones on the shelf. Some of the lowest end ones were $500-600. I don’t know if they are about due for a pricing or product reset but this was very odd. The sad thing is that the office supply store across the street has similar priced units on sale that are far and above better units for comparable prices most of the time. I don’t know if people think they are saving money buying a computer with a W or WM in the model number (hint: this is an abbreviation for the retailer) but they are often not.
The Black Friday units are also usually pretty gutless. I had someone bring one in wanting it upgraded. Everything was soldiered onto the main board and there were no expansion slots of any kind. I basically tell people Black Friday sales are a way to clear out crap that wouldn’t sell on any other normal day.