Technology

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.