How sustanaible is asking smarthphones OEMs to provide spare parts

Hi, Jesus,

You raise a very good point - but it is absolutely fundamental to all hi-tech. No-one in the world (not even the guy who originally made it) can REPAIR a zapped silicon chip - and this is also true of many of the other components - so the product lifetime of all hi-tech is limited by the availability of spares.

It is extremely expensive to set up manufacturing for a batch of silicon chips - typically millions of dollars. For this reason, semiconductor manufacturers call an “all-time-buy” when they want to stop manufacturing - to give product manufacturers an opportunity to purchase all they will ever need. The quantity to purchase is usually very hard to judge. Once they have gone, the product is no longer repairable.

All integrated electronics is like this.

When the Victorians designed products (think the steam locomotive), they designed them to be repairable indefinitely, as any one component could be re-manufactured from scratch even as a one-off. To my mind, we need to re-think electronics to have this same characteristic. Steam engines will still be running when all our electronics is scrap.

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