Have you tried to repair a mobile device recently? Like an iPad or an MacBook? The odds are good you’ve never even tried to take one apart, let alone put in replacement parts. Devices like these are notorious to try and repair because they aren’t designed to be fixed by a normal person.

I’ve recently wondered why it’s so hard to repair things like this. I can recall opening up my old Tandy Sensation computer to add a Sound Blaster card and some more RAM back in the 90s but there’s no way I could do that today, even if the devices were designed to allow that to happen. In my thinking, I realized why that might be.

Build to Rebuild

When you look at the way that car engine bays were designed in the 80s and 90s you might be surprised to see lots of wasted space. There’s room to practically crawl in beside the engine and take a nap. Why is that? Why waste all that space? Well, if you’re a mechanic that wants to get up close and personal with some part of the engine you want all the space you can find. You’d rather waste a little space and not have busted knuckles.

A modern engine isn’t designed to be repaired by amateurs. The engine may be sideways or have replaceable parts put in places that aren’t easily accessed without specialized equipment. The idea is that professionals would have everything they need to remove the engine if necessary. Moreover, by making it harder for amateurs to try and fix the issues you’re are preventing them from doing something potentially problematic that you’ll have to fix later.

The same kind of thing applies to computing equipment. Whereas before you could open the case of a computer and try to fix the issues inside with a reasonable level of IT or electrical engineering knowledge you now find yourself faced with a compact device that needs specialized tools to open and even more specialized knowledge to fix. The average electrical engineer is going to have a hard time understanding the modern system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs when you disassemble your phone.

Usability Over Uniqueness

The question of usability is always going to come into play when you talk about devices. The original IBM PC was a usable design for the time it was built compared to mainframes. The iPhone is a usable design for the time when it was built as well. But compared to each other, which is the more usable design today?

Increasing usability often comes at the cost of flexibility. I was talking to someone at a fabrication lab about printer drivers for a laser etching machine. He said that installing the drivers for the device on Windows is easy but almost impossible on a Mac. I chuckled because the difficulty of installing a non-standard printer on a Mac is part of the reason why it’s easy to use for other kinds of printers. The printing subsystem traded usability with things like Bonjour printer installation over flexibility, like installing strange printers on a laptop.

Those trade offs extend into the hardware. Anyone that worked on PCs prior to Windows 95 knows all about fun things like IRQ conflicts, DIP switch settings for COM port addresses, and even more esoteric problems. We managed to get rid of those in the modern computing era but along with that went the ability to customize the device. You no longer have to do the dance of finding an available IRQ but you also can’t install a device that would conflict with another through hardware trickery.

By creating devices for the average user focused on usability you have to sacrifice the flexibility that makes them easier to fix. If you knew you were constantly going to need to be tweaking the jets on a carburetor you’d make it easy to access, right? But if a modern fuel injection system never needs to be adjusted except by a specialized professional why would you make it accessible to anyone that doesn’t have tools? You can see this in systems that use proprietary screws to keep users out of the system or glue parts together to prevent easy access.

Tom’s Take

I miss the ability to open up my laptop and fix issues with the add-in cards. The tinkerer in me likes to learn about how a system works. But I don’t miss the necessity to go in and do it. The usability of a system that “just works” is way more useful to me. It reminds me of my dad in some ways. He may have loved the ability to open up the engine and play with the carburetor but he also had to do it frequently to make things “work right”. In some ways, removing our ability to repair things in the IT space has forced manufacturers to build devices that don’t need to be frequently repaired. It’s not the optimal solution for sure, but the trade off it more than worth it in my mind.