This is a rant about right to repair, but is marked NSFW because it has to do with a sex toy, and I don’t know where the line is. Like many rants, this starts with a questionnaire purchase.

I’m the proud owner of an Arcwave Ion. The manufacturer describes it as a revolutionary sex toy for men, which is probably overselling what it does, which is vibrate. I bought it in an exploratory (and, to be honest, thoroughly baked) mood, and generally enjoyed it, but there were a couple major design flaws:

1: No charging during use. When it dies, you’ve got to do something else for an hour while it sits in its obeliisk. This is particularly frustrating because it’s marketed as being designed for long sessions, and it just can’t keep up. 2: The battery can’t be replaced after wearing out. It’s going to keep dying faster and faster, until you just throw it away in a fit of frustration and buy a new one (at least, that’s the plan the resident MBA undoubtedly wrote on the whiteboard). 3: You have to hold a button for three seconds to turn the device off, by which point your edging session is ruined and you suddenly have to do laundry. 4: Turning it on takes a full eight seconds. The detection feature is on by default and doesn’t work. This may be a biological issue (I’m not exactly hung like a soda bottle), but it means that the NASA-esque startup sequence is: Hold the power button for three seconds, wait two seconds for the device to boot, then hold the “detection disable” button for three seconds.

So I did what any self-respecting hacker would do after one too many frustrated evenings. I heated up the soldering iron, dug out the screwdrivers, and got to work. I figured it had some kind of speaker and signal generator that I would be able to power with a wall wart instead of the battery, but that ended up being pessimistic. As it turns out, the role of the PCB, microcontroller, battery, and buttons is to provide 1.5v to a DC motor.

I replaced all of the electronics with a single AA battery holder and power switch I found in my junk drawer, which fixed every issue I had with the device. It can run forever if you’re next to a battery charger. It has no latency on the controls because it’s just a goddamn switch, and I won’t need to throw the whole device away in a year when the internal battery gives up on its one (admittedly terrible) job. It now, at long last, does what it’s supposed to do, and all it took was replacing the electronics of a “revolutionary” $200 cutting-edge singularity-era future-tech device with $0.10 worth of junk that has been around since the release of the AA battery in 1907.

But this is just about the simplest change anyone could make. It’s definitely not worth flexing. I barely needed the soldering iron. Why bother to write this?

The answer is that this has become an annoying pattern, and I am now old enough to yell at those.

I also have a coffee grinder designed to dispense enough grounds for a single shot of espresso. Any sane engineer would have a button that does this and a knob to adjust the amount, but this was not designed by a sane engineer. To use it, you have to hold the capacitive touch switch for three seconds to turn it on, then press it again to grind the coffee (after which it beeps, because if there’s one thing a coffee grinder needs, it’s an audio cue to let you know that it is no longer ear-splittingly grinding coffee).

Instead of a knob, there is a second touch switch, which you have to keep pressing to increment the timer. If you accidentally touch it after setting it correctly, you have to press it twenty more times to loop back to where it was. They literally stole a meme interface for phone numbers, and I can’t tell if they missed the sarcasm or did it out of spite (No judgment, I guess. We’ve all had those days).

Once again, the fix is really simple. And once again, it should have been totally unnecessary.

There is an infuriating trend of poisoning perfectly good mechanical designs with garbage user experience, and I say this as a full-on IoT cultist. I probably have six hackers fighting for dominance over my dedicated network for smart garbage, and I don’t really care, because I feel like a wizard when I say words and things happen. But these aren’t overcomplicated internet connected devices. They are basically power supplies for motors. In no universe should that be the hard part.

I don’t really have a conclusion here. More of a question. Why are they like this? The battery thing makes sense in an evil sort of way, though I’m sure it makes Mother Nature shed a single lonely tear. The best fix for that is probably political; governments need to mandate that devices with built in batteries allow end users to replace them without a soldering iron (which I’m sure they’ll get to right after they figure out how to turn on their computers without asking the grandkids). But why the unnecessarily terrible interface? Is there a cabal demanding a minimum threshold of annoyance? Is user frustration a breakthrough new power source? Is it breathing room for next year’s new and improved version that just works? It’s too aggressively terrible to be an accident, but I don’t know why anyone would do it on purpose.

  • Leigh@beehaw.orgM
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    1 year ago

    I don’t have anything to add to your questions, but these comments made me LOL:

    the NASA-esque startup sequence … I probably have six hackers fighting for dominance over my dedicated network for smart garbage

    Lol, I got a good chuckle out of this. Fantastic sense of humor

  • Karlos_Cantana@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    This also applies to cars. Why should I have to look at a screen, find an icon, touch it to open an app, then find the touch controls in there rather than just have a physical button and/or knob that is always in the same place and tactile, so I don’t even have to look at it to operate it and accomplish what I’m wanting?

    • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I got a 2020 car with a full touch interface save for a few physical buttons. Initially I thought it was awesome. Sleek, gorgeous, futuristic. After a few months of driving it, I was getting a little bit annoyed at some of the steps to access certain features. After a few years of driving it, I’m definitely on the physical buttons side.

      • Rinox@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        The most absurd one is when I got into a Tesla Model 3 and had to search through the settings on the screen the toggle to open the glove compartment.

        That’s what I call brain damage design, cause you can only design this shit if you have brain damage.

      • Takatakatakatakatak@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        After having a few entirely too modern vehicles, I bought a 2012 toyota FJ Cruiser. It’s the most pleasant cockpit I’ve ever been in, and it could not be any more manual if it tried. Some things just don’t need to be complicated.

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I figured sex toys are difficult to service because they have to be waterproof. I before reading through I was sure you’d find a lithium ion battery in there. There’s probably some devices out there with such batteries. It would be dangerous for these to burst into flames mid use.

    Also charging in use means extra circuity so more complexity.

  • Balthasar~@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    The entire text I misread soldering iron for a regular iron. Up until the very last paragraph. Now everything makes a lot more sense.

  • mooseknee@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Very interesting read lol. I think part of it is definitely to encourage repeat purchases. If you like a product and for the layman there is no way to maintain it, you’ll probably buy it again. More money for them! In regards to the interface being terrible… The only reason I could think would be overly cautious on avoiding injury? If there are so many tactile requirements, your fingers can’t be ground, which means no lawsuit. Who knows why companies decide certain things. (Like Chrome making you have to choose custom for page amount instead of auto populating the field and making me take an extra step)

  • spark431@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Why do you keep buying these weird electronics? I have a coffee grinder that works exactly as you describe - press a button and it spins a grinder for a number of seconds set by a dial, up to 30.

    • Goopadrew@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, weird choice to bring coffee gear into this, which has a pretty large community advocating for manual hand grinders and brewing with a plastic cone instead of a coffee machine

  • Celivalg@iusearchlinux.fyi
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    1 year ago

    Very nice prose btw, enjoyed reading

    And yeah this sucks, my coffee maker has a 60 second boot sequence… Now I once suspeced it was heating up, but I don’t think that’s actually the case (found one that heated up in less than 10 seconds), more like someone decided to put an OS to manage the 8 touch buttons, pump, grinder and heater… Now appart from the boot sequence, it’s nice…

    But microwaves… What does fish mean?

    • SoManyChoices@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      If your microwave has a “fish” button, it was designed by Satan.

      Unless that triggers one of those huge cartoon hammers to pop out and bop the user on the head.

  • LambentMote@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    Thanks for a very enjoyable read. I’m a user-experience designer for web software and I’m absolutely baffled by modern product design. Fuck capacitive buttons and unnecessary screens.

    Good design is problem solving. That means first it has to work, then it can be elegant and beautiful. Function before form.

    I have a new stove that I already resent to heck after less than 3 months. I yell at it impotently multiple times a week. It’s a glass induction cook top with capacitive buttons on the top. To turn it on you have to press the power button, then the icon for the burner you want, then tap or mash a line with + and - icons multiple times to set the power. All that to replace turning a single knob on my old gas burner. The icons for the different heating elements have digital clock type displays to the left of them that light up with – if the thing is on, but TO the right of the last icon is another identical display so new users can’t tell which display is for which icon (turns out the last one is for the timer but it lights up and looks exactly the same as the others when the timer isn’t active and is spaced exactly the same distance from the last icon as the other displays). If you rest anything metal near the buttons it beeps incessantly. If it gets the slightest moisture on it it switches itself off and then beeps incessantly. I’m a patent person but whoever designed that thing deserves to spent the rest of their life in a void with only their own creations and a horseshoe crab for company.

  • Takatakatakatakatak@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    That was a very enjoyable and well constructed rant. You are the voice of truth here. There are SO few situations where capacitive touch interfaces will beat a simple button or traditional potentiometer. It’s an annoying trend that needs to die.