[GTALUG] Ontario Bill 72: "Right to Repair"

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| That's a big problem these days, people put price ahead of value. 
| There's an old saying, "You only get what you pay for".  With many
| things, the "savings" are  less than the added cost or lost value.

It depends.

I often buy cheap-ish phones and computers.  That's because you save a
lot of money being a year or two or a tier or two behind the the best.

One can afford to replace the cheap unit more often and actually
then be ahead of the person who has to keep the expensive, better, old
machine.

That worked well when Moore's Law was in full force.

Now, obsolescence takes longer.  This is exactly when the ability to
repair becomes more important.  Perhaps that's why it is being shut
down.

My current main notebook is just over 5 years old and still great.  I
haven't had to repair it -- thank goodness, since it is an
Ultrabook(TM).  This is partly because, knowing that upgrades would be
very hard, I pushed all the specs when I bought it.

My current main desktop is just a little older.  It's still Just Fine.

I used to replace my desktop much more quickly.  Or at least want to.

=====

These properties emerge from the properties of a number of components.  In 
other words, the devil is in the details.

- I feel that the 4th generation Intel Core processors ("Haswell") were a 
  big improvement over the ones before but their successors have been only 
  modest improvements.  My desktop and notebook have Haswell processors.

- memory used to be cheap and it used to get cheaper at quite a clip (but 
  in fits and starts).  When I bought these two machines I got them with a 
  lot of RAM for the time.  They still have enough (I'd like more, but I 
  don't need it).  If the RAM market were behaving more normally, my 
  machines would feel pinched.

- Something new that I don't have: NVMe SSDs.  They are a lot faster than 
  the SATA SSDs I have.  I'm not convinced that I'd actually notice.
  (My notebook came with an SSD; I added one to my desktop.)

- USB C / USB 3.x / Thunderbolt / whatever doesn't seem to matter to me 
  yet.

- the number of cores per chip is creeping up.  I don't think that this 
  makes much difference in what I do (my desktop has 4 cores and SMT;
  I don't remember what my notebook has).

- newer processors handle HDMI 2.0 but Haswell DisplayPort can drive 
  UltraHD displays at 60Hz, so that's fine by me.