"Michael Straight, a former jockey paralyzed from the waist down, was left unable to walk for two months after the company behind his $100,000 exoskeleton refused to fix a battery issue. "
“I called [the company] thinking it was no big deal, yet I was told they stopped working on any machine that was 5 years or older,”
Honestly, the law should be that the batteries need to be designed to be replaced by off the shelf options. Basically, add instructions on how to relatively easily to replace the battery cells with the same ones found inside laptop batteries that can be ordered off Amazon or similar places.
But people don’t want that. They want small, sleek devices that don’t weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.
From what I can tell the battery in question wasn’t the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.
That’s a false comparison. We have Lithium and NiMH batteries available off the shelf for common things that aren’t phones. The technology is available for a COTS phone battery replacement, as long as it matched a common form-factor.
And if phones can’t work around a common battery form-factor but yet all look like fucking candy-bars, then I call bullshit.
Until something goes wrong and they discover (usually too late) that they actually did want that.
Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?
In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.