"Linux is only free if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawisnki
This statement may have some applicability here. If you find it fun and interesting to fix your own gadgets, then by all means, go for it. But go into it with the understanding that the value of the time spent on such DIY repairs will likely far exceed any financial savings.
You're right, if you consider only the monetary value of the gadgets in question, and ignore other results of fixing your own things (like personal satisfaction, added general knowledge of how things work, value of social interaction in groups like Restart, ability to build or fix higher value devices in the future, externalities in the replacement gadget's production not reflected in the price, etc.)
jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
>jwz's quote would be better restated: "Linux is only free if your time has no value, and you know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Really? Who said that if you have other stuff to do with your live you are a cynic?
If you just use a Win/Apple box and get done with it, instead of getting "social interaction in Linux groups, general knowledge of how OSes work, etc", and go and DO stuff with your computer -- that implies you know the value of nothing?
How about the stuff you actually want to do with the computer (practice law or medicine, write books, create graphics, work for an NGO, control equipment for your lab, etc etc) are more valuable to you that what you get out of mingling with the Linux crowd?
How do you do that? Someone volunteered me to be support for my entire family, and I can assure you that things that take seconds in linux take hours/days in windows land if not worse, and there'a a huge number of problems in windows land that simply don't exist in linux land.
The primary troubleshooting / repair method seems to be the reinstall OS and all drivers and software, some of which randomly disappears from the internet since last reinstall. Viruses and spyware everywhere, not ready for the enterprise or anything financial related. No software repos. I don't use windows personally other than one gaming partition, but as a family support guy I assure you its a nightmare out there in windows land.
OSX not so bad, at least on a desktop. Its competitive with linux. Takes a lot of domain specific knowledge to know when a job is cheaper on OSX or linux.
Most people don't do law, medicine, write books, graphics art, work for NGO, or control equipment in a lab. Almost no one does any of that stuff. For most people you install Debian and Chrome and leave them alone. They'll probably need working flash player. That's about it.
I've had a linux machine at work since new year's , and I've been an OSX user since 2004. I'd say that my I've lost more time to that linux machine in two months than I've lost to OSX in two years, and that's not even counting the microannoyances in the UI.
>Wow do you do that? Someone volunteered me to be support for my entire family, and I can assure you that things that take seconds in linux take hours/days in windows land if not worse, and there'a a huge number of problems in windows land that simply don't exist in linux land.
Well, hundrends of millions of people can and do use Windows just fine, even for power-user, advanced stuff, and the same people would be totally lost in front of Linux. Heck, my dad uses Windows and Office, and he got his first computer when he was 50+, and he haven't even went to college. And he learned how to browse, send email, use Excel, take images with Norton Ghost, use torrent (!), pirate some niche software he wanted etc, re-install windows, etc.
The way Windows are designed most problems can be solved by reinstalling, using some GUI app etc. For us it might sound funny, but reinstalling the OS as troubleshooting is quite a fast process, and not as hair tearing as delving into the console and understanding intricasies of package managers, third party drivers and the like in Linux.
Plus drivers are always available, since it's the number one OS and manufacturers oblige.
>Most people don't do law, medicine, write books, graphics art, work for NGO, or control equipment in a lab. Almost no one does any of that stuff.
Actually millions of people do that stuff every day. Lawyers and doctors ARE millions of people. Scientists ARE millions of people. People working at an NGO are millions of people.
Heck, billions of people work with Office and its ilk of apps for their white collar job.
And I've never met a user who just surfs the internet. Perhaps some too old people. Sooner or later, all the new users I've seen want to write a document, download movies, view and edit their compact camera photos, burn a DVD, burn their CD collection, listen to music, etc etc.
I know what you're saying, and a lot of the time it's true, but it's not like all or even most people would put a monetary value on every single second of their time. Hell, a few weeks ago I started building a model plane - the time I've put into the project runs well into the thousands of dollars by now, but that wasn't the point of the project.
I remember a post here some time ago claiming that startup CEOs should value their time at $1000/hr, to force themselves to always make best use of their time. I can see how that works in context, but it doesn't mean said CEO shouldn't take a couple of hours off to watch a movie, thinking its true cost is $2000+. That way lies madness.
We can't all work all the time. It's fine to burn a few hours learning something new and just having fun, and it sounds like that's exactly what this woman did.
The impetus for my comment was that her first instinct was to bring the iPad to the Apple store to get an estimate. After finding out that it would cost $200, she embarked on fixing it herself. This implies that her motivation for doing it herself was at least in part financial. Given the effort it took, that seems to have been a fool's errand.
I didn't mean to imply that recreation or personal fulfillment should be viewed as a cost center. If that were the case, I would owe myself millions of dollars :).
There are lots of people who don't really have the ability to arbitrarily sell their time at whatever value they assign to it.
(I guess this is something like the marginal value of the DIY repair could easily be higher than the marginal value of learning something else or seeking and doing work)
Its a well known psychological phenomena (I can't remember the name of it), that something you have worked hard for has more value than if you acquired the same thing say by winning it in a competition.
I assume in this case she also learned a lot from the process, which she will value also.
Not to derail this completely, but only about 60% of the US population have jobs. The rest are either too young, too old, too sick, criminal record, credit/security risk, drug history, too unemployable, too skilled/expensive to hire, whatever. So applying a metric of value that only has meaning for 60% (and dropping) of the population to the entire population is a mistake. Also at least anecdotally I can't get overtime pay so my opportunity cost is about zero. True, I could look for short term contracts or take up day labor, but ... If it takes me less labor hours to repair something on the desk than to drive out to the apple store and wait in line and drive back, I'm ahead of the game. As a skilled artificer I have disassembled and repaired mac minis in less than this journalists three hours. Getting to the optical drive in a mid 2011 mini is not amusing.
Anyway the relevance is I've been rolling this around in my head for awhile WRT a local disabled veterans group. The prison industrial complex has completely captured the "recycle old desktop PCs" market but I think the disabled veteran group could enter and take over the phone/tablet glass replacement market. One UK journalist took three hours, and cultural similarity between US and UK would imply as a journalist she probably never held a screwdriver before in her life. In comparison two disabled veterans working as a team, each with an arm shot off (or cognitive brain damage, or in wheelchairs, or PTSD anger issues, or whatever) might take an entire 8 hour day and still might not succeed, but if the primary purpose is therapeutic giving a feeling of usefulness, and social interaction, and maybe some manual dexterity, who cares?
I've little contact with the disabled veterans group other than being a non-disabled ex-dotmil guy who makes donations once in a while. There's nothing "disabled veteran" about this idea, so someone else in another area could likely apply this idea to any disabled services organization. Anyone want to "steal" this idea does it with my blessing. No idea how to turn this into a startup other then existing competitors, but if you can do it, best of luck.
Not really. Often the value of device greatly exceeds value of work. Also repairs are trivial with some basic skills and equipment. For example replacing capacitors takes 15 minutes and extends life of device by several years.
I myself got into soldering because my laptop broke down. 10 years ago replacement would cost my monthly salary and I had nothing to loose. I practiced a bit on old TVs and after two days I soldered laptop motherboard.
Plus some repairs are really trivial. For example several problems can be 'fixed' by baking electronics in oven. Heat will re-solder some connections and electronics could work for another year or two.
It takes several hours (something like 4) to fix a cracked screen if you know what you're doing ahead of time. Professionals can fix a screen in well under an hour.
It's something like $120 for the screen and replacement, or like $40 for the parts themselves. I value my time at greater than $20/hour, so I would pay to have this fixed every time.
Youtube videos are good source of information, also service manuals are usually available.
Used IPad 2 sells for over £200 on ebay.co.uk, new device would cost even more. Replacement screen from china costs $60 including shipping. Also Apple is really bad example since its devices are not designed for repairs.
Even $20/hour would be decent pay for many people.
In this case you would get £200 ($330) - $60 / 4 hours = $67 / hour . This is tax free, with tax you are around $100/hour salary.
The economic argument falls a bit flat, because it ignores both basic economics and its own premise that time is money.
Most people who can directly translate time into money - those for whom four hours of time spent repairing a device equates to 4 hours * x/hour are in a position where they cannot add four hours to their workweek. They do not set their own hours or are at the ceiling of paid hours or cannot acquire additional paying work.
On the other hand, the argument completely ignores the time costs normally associated with acquiring a new piece of electronics. These include the time spent researching hardware, comparison shopping, physical acquisition, learning the features of the new device [since it is unlikely to be identical to the old] and then configuring the device to meet one's expectations.
Consider the author's economic options:
- purchase a used older iPad similar to the damaged one.
- replace it as a tablet and compare Windows, Android,
and iOS products.
- replace it with another Apple product without
considering other products.
The time and effort involved in researching and acquiring a device in the first two alternatives to repair is fairly obvious.
Even in the third case, there's still potential for enormous time spent comparing various models and optional configuration and reading reviews to decide on the exact specification, then potentially searching for the best price.
What really makes the third choice attractive is not the time savings but the simplicity of the decision tree. Deciding on another iPad immediately carries less mental overhead. This is exactly the same advantage as repair - a person can make a direct decision as soon as the device breaks.
The advantage of repair is that it scales. Buying a soldering iron potentially reduces the cost of future repairs. Buying a replacement device stands no chance of reducing the cost of future replacement devices. Consumer oriented behaviour produces nothing but more consumer oriented behaviour. In that sense it is economically irrational.
Although if you argue in the Apple store for long enough and loud enough about how shitty their kit is, they usually replace it anyway to get you to shut up.
This statement may have some applicability here. If you find it fun and interesting to fix your own gadgets, then by all means, go for it. But go into it with the understanding that the value of the time spent on such DIY repairs will likely far exceed any financial savings.