Category: Soap Box

The Culture of Disposable Technology

I really like taking things apart. When it comes to smart phones, the Nexus 4 was the last phone I really did any actual tinkering around inside. That phone had a 7/10 repairability score on ifixit, not bad. I had replaced the battery multiple times, and even the motherboard.

My current phone is the Google Pixel XL, it also surprisingly gets a 7/10 on ifixit. Looking at the battery replacement guide, it seems the display is likely to break when you pry it off. This seems much worse than the Nexus 4 to me since other than the screen, the battery is probably the next most likely component you’ll want to replace.

It wasn’t always this way. Removable batteries were common, that is before the rise of smartphones. Some lay the blame on Apple and the iPhone, but the industry as a whole needs to own this problem. The rate and pace of improvements has driven this issue, it’s quite common to replace your phone after 2 years – why make anything repairable?

Even the latest macbook pro has a removable cover.

 

Imagine if we put a few screws on the back of the Google Pixel XL in the same style? The battery is stuck right on the back cover.

The only hitch is the battery connector is on the wrong side of the circuit board.

It might be awesome to create after market phone bodies which enable easy repair, but re-house the existing electronics. While it’s unfortunate that modern screens are glued to the frame – I can deal with that being a part I need to replace as a whole. The structural benefits of the screen being firmly affixed are worth that. The back of the phone, other than possibly being a water-resistance problem, seems like an obvious location for access to the inside.

There is a security story here, making it hard to open the phone means you can trust the insides haven’t been tampered with. For the majority of users, this isn’t a key part of their threat model. Also, everything is broken anyways. Tamper proof stickers are also an easy solution to that. I’d even be ok if the panel on the back was glued on – and removing it voided my warranty.

It is probably a difficult business case to justify building an aftermarket phone body to re-house the electronics. Still I can dream.

The trend of making the screen the thing you need to remove to get into the phone is a bad decision for repairability. If the latest macbook pro can have screws on the underside, why can’t modern smart phones?

There is some hope if we look at the maker community and projects like kiteboard. There is also the Fairphone as an option, but it is not available in all countries.

Musings

Wow, 2014 seems to have zoomed by and I only manged to make 3 posts to this blog. There was some (non spam) comment activity from folks who’d found articles I’d written that were useful to them – getting feedback is always nice!

I was quite busy with my work on JavaScript runtimes (specifically Node/V8). You can check out the IBM DeveloperWorks page and grab the product of my team’s efforts. Folks that are keen to see code – should check my GitHub account and you’ll find ports of V8 for PowerPC and s390/zLinux.

Late in the year I switched roles at moved to the team that is delivering container runtimes on the IBM Bluemix cloud. We managed to rush something out the door for DockerCon Europe. It even made the IBM www front page:

Still lots to do in this rapidly evolving space, so it should be an interesting 2015 (which might keep me away from doing side projects).

Despite the fact I didn’t manage to turn out very many posts here, I was tinkering away in my limited spare time. From the top of my head: I fixed an XBox360, did lots of 3D printing (including some 2 color prints); modified my Printrbot to be more reliable; replaced some capacitors in a failing DSL modem to fix it; charged a FitBit using a hacked USB cable.. maybe I’ll try to post up a few of those as I do have notes (each of these posts takes a couple of hours usually).

So there you go, I’ve managed to break the ice and start writing here again. I have some work related stuff that I’ll be posting up here soon and hope to document some of the tinkering projects I’ve done (and have queued up) as well.

Goodbye NCF – Hello Teksavvy


Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic License photo by  cesarastudillo

I’d been with NCF as my internet provider for a long time, I’d even written up a review of the service. I still think it’s a good organization to support, but I can no longer recommend it as a good ISP to use. My recent experiences with them have led me to believe they do not have the technical skills available to assist their customers effectively, and they repeatedly failed to call me back as promised.

I had decided on Teksavvy based on success my friends have had, their overall reputation and my interactions with their sales and support staff answering my questions. I’m still on a DSL line, but now using 15/1 which is the fastest available to my home at the moment. I would have stayed with NCF but the upgrade cost from 6MB to the 15/1 speed was going to cost me $89.95 [this has recently changed to a $49.95] whereas the admin cost at Teksavvy was $50. I had picked April 21st as my switch-over date and set this up with the two providers.

This is when the disaster happened. We were over one week without internet service at home. Not fun. The big bad guy here is Bell, but it was handled very poorly by NCF staff.

The long story: I sent in the cancellation to NCF on March 31st. Set the date as Apr 21st. They have a form you submit to do this – however there is no email / indication that the form worked or was waiting to be processed. 24hrs later I called in to check if it was in queue, someone at the NCF office was able to tell me that it was indeed received.

I then signed up for Teksavvy starting as of the 21st.

Monday April 7th just before noon our home internet was disabled. No more DSL signal. A call to the NCF office was frustrating, I was told that the order to Bell was done correctly and the 21st was the right date. They failed to take any effective action to resolve my problem.

Tuesday April 8th. More calls to NCF, sounds now like Bell processed the disconnect order early. My only recourse? Sign up again with NCF, pay the admin fee and wait 5 business days to be reconnected. WTF?! Deep breathing. Call Teksavvy see if they can expedite my sign up with them, frustratingly I still have to wait the 5 days as that’s a Bell delay. Internet turn on day scheduled for the 15th.

Thursday April 9th. Call into NCF, talk to someone sort of useful at the office who is able to tell me the history of this screw up at NCF and what’s happened with Bell. He’s reasonable and says that they’ll have a refund to my account discussed. Promised to call me back with an update – still no call to date [as of this posting].

Sunday April 13th. Yes, we’re still without home internet. Called at 4pm by a Bell technician who is doing the outside work to connect us to DSL. I tell him my sob story about being out and is it possible we might have service today? He calls me back about an hour later and says that the outside work is all done, line looks good to go, but he was unable to get the Bell office to connect us early.  We need to wait for the Tuesday install date.

Tuesday April 15th, 3am. Dog wakes me up for some reason. He wants to go sit on the deck outside and look at the moon. Grr. Well, I’m up anyways – power cycle the DSL modem. 3:30am we’re on the internet again. 15/1 speed, still connecting through NCF [more evidence this was entirely Bell messing this up]. In the morning I setup my login / password to Teksavvy and switch over to that service entirely.

As usual, at the start of using a new service I end up talking with Teksavvy support multiple times. It hasn’t all been perfect, but in general I’ve had lots of straight answers from the people there and it’s easy to get to real technical people.