We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s just not working. You open it up to attempt a repair, but you could really use some information on what you’re looking at and how to enter service mode. Only… a Google search turns up nothing but dodgy websites offering blurry PDFs for entirely the wrong model, and you’re out of luck.
These days, when you buy an appliance, the best documentation you can expect is a Quick Start guide and a warranty card you’ll never use. Manufacturers simply don’t want to give you real information, because they think the average consumer will get scared and confused. I think they can do better. I’m demanding a new two-tier documentation system—the basics for the normies, and real manuals for the tech heads out there.
Give Us The Goods
Once upon a time, appliances came with real manuals and real documentation. You could buy a radio that came with a full list of valves that were used inside, while telephones used to come with printed circuit diagrams right inside the case. But then the world changed, and a new phrase became a common sight on consumer goods—”NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS INSIDE.” No more was the end user considered qualified or able to peek within the case of the hardware they’d bought. They were fools who could barely be trusted to turn the thing on and work it properly, let alone intervene in the event something needed attention.
This attitude has only grown over the years. As our devices have become ever more complex, the documentation delivered with them has shrunk to almost non-existent proportions. Where a Sony television manual from the 1980s contained a complete schematic of the whole set, a modern smartphone might only include a QR code linking to basic setup instructions on a website online. It’s all part of an effort by companies to protect the consumer from themselves, because they surely can’t be trusted with the arcane knowledge of what goes on inside a modern device.
This Sony tv manual from 1985 contained the complete electrical schematics for the set.
byu/a_seventh_knot inmildlyinteresting
This sort of intensely technical documentation was the norm just a few decades ago.
It’s understandable, to a degree. When a non-technical person buys a television, they really just need to know how to plug it in and hook it up to an aerial. With the ongoing decline in literacy rates, it’s perhaps a smart move by companies to not include any further information than that. Long words and technical information would just make it harder for these customers to figure out how to use the TV in the first place, and they might instead choose a brand that offers simpler documentation.
This doesn’t feel fair for the power user set. There are many of us who want to know how to change our television’s color mode, how to tinker with the motion smoothing settings, and how to enter deeper service modes when something seems awry. And yet, that information is kept from us quite intentionally. Often, it’s only accessible in service manuals that are only made available through obscure channels to selected people authorised by OEMs.
Two Tiers, Please
I don’t think it has to be this way. I think it’s perfectly fine for manufacturers to include simple, easy-to-follow instructions with consumer goods. However, I don’t think that should preclude them from also offering detailed technical manuals for those users that want and need them. I think, in fact, that these should be readily available as a matter of course.
Call it a “superuser manual,” and have it only available via a QR code in the back of the basic, regular documentation. Call it an “Advanced Technical Supplement” or a “Calibration And Maintenance Appendix.” Whatever jargon scares off the normies so they don’t accidentally come across it and then complain to tech support that they don’t know why their user interface is now only displaying garbled arcane runes. It can be a little hard to find, but at the end of the day, it should be a simple PDF that can be downloaded without a lot of hurdles or paywalls.
I’m not expecting manufacturers to go back to giving us full schematics for everything. It would be nice, but realistically it’s probably overkill. You can just imagine what that would like for a modern smartphone or even just a garden variety automobile in 2025. However, I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect something better than the bare basics of how to interact with the software and such. The techier manuals should, at a minimum, indicate how to do things like execute a full reset, enter any service modes, and indicate how the device is to be safely assembled and disassembled should one wish to execute repairs.
Of course, this won’t help those of us repairing older gear from the 90s and beyond. If you want to fix that old S-VHS camcorder from 1995, you’re still going to have to go to some weird website and risk your credit card details over a $30 charge for a service manual that might cover your problem. But it would be a great help for any new gear moving forward. Forums died years ago, so we can no longer Google for a post from some old retired tech who remembers the secret key combination to enter the service menu. We need that stuff hosted on manufacturer websites so we can get it in five minutes instead of five hours of strenuous research.
Will any manufacturers actually listen to this demand? Probably, no. This sort of change needs to happen at a higher level. Perhaps the right to repair movement and some boisterous EU legislation could make it happen. After all, there is an increasing clamour for users to have more rights over the hardware and appliances they pay for. If and when it happens, I will be cheering when the first manuals for techies become available. Heaven knows we deserve them!
A bit dramatic yes, but a trip through the branch education and asianometry channel should drive home that things are considerably more complex and I don’t see that trend abetting.
And I demand a brand new 2025 4×4 Mercedes Zetros, a blowjob and a GeForce RTX 5090.
Everyone can dream.
Chances are the documentation you’re asking for doesn’t exist in the first place. They’re not going to give you their CAD models used in manufacturing or internal development documentation. They’d have to clean it up, see what secrets they can publish, and then roll it up into something they could hand over.
The question is, are you willing to pay for the work?
It’s oddly endearing to see this being portrayed as being done to somehow protect the consumer. Deep in my cynicism, I cannot fathom any purpose for a denial of access to schematics and service information as anything other than way to bolster future sales.
If I can repair my TV myself, I won’t buy need to buy another.
While I think we’re going to be over represented here, my class of customer who will actually refuse to buy another product from a company that denies them access to service information are the smallest minority, most people don’t care or at most will make some perfunctory comment about how that’s the way things are now, and throw it in the trash and buy another.
Enough documentation and decent service manuals are one of the benefits of retro computing.
As a member of the manual team for my employer, I appreciate the sentiment but without a big financial incentive, it won’t happen. We spend months developing a manual with the lowest-common-denominator in mind (ad absurdum, sometimes). We don’t even have every aspect documented sufficiently for internal use. The tech debt is all but insurmountable. I’d love to be able to release a technical manual with all the crunchy details, but after 20 years selling basically the same product, we’ve had only 2 inquiries about functionality that wasn’t included in the device. They just want to flip the switch and it works.
Nope. Historically, humanity has always been largely illiterate. At least half of us are below average.
As for ‘no user-servicable parts’, it’s a risk mitigator. Liability in the U.S. court systems oft rewards the weak and stupid. And by ‘weak’, I mean those have have chosen to be weak and benefactors of state largess.
What you want has a name: “service manual”.
Service manuals are still available for most white goods I believe, and YT or ifixit tear downs for a lot of stuff.
i think a more holistic understanding is warranted. There are a lot of reasons that a lot of products don’t come with service manuals by default, and i think overall the reasons are really practical. Like, some products will be replaced instead of repaired, and to some extent that sounds sinister but also it’s real. At some point everything switched to SMT instead of through-hole and the number of people who might plausibly repair it became infinitesimal. And many products have good (perhaps third-party) documentation online, so no point shipping documentation in the box with it. And a lot of products simply don’t need much documentation for the repairs that are practical, for example because you will be replacing modules with ZIF connectors. And then of course a lot of products really do come with quality manuals, especially things where people are inclined to hire an installer (like appliances). And then there’s the huge category of IoT garbage, which you will by necessity throw away when the vendor stops maintaining their cloud, and that’s just how it is and no amount of documentation will change it for 99% of users, and the remainder will hack it whether documentation is provided or not.
i do like openness, i just think when it comes to resources for repair and hacking, we’ve got more than we ever had before. And that’s why vendors, distributors and manufacturers don’t provide as much inside the box. You don’t bend over to give food to someone whose belly is already full. We haven’t really lost anything, imo.
I fully agree with your sentiments. There are some things that just aren’t realistic to repair. Sure you could find out your washing machine has a bad microprocessor, but then what? Are you going to try and do BGA rework and replace it? Would you have to buy a new processor pre-programmed or expect the manufacturer to open source the code and flash it yourself? Easier just to do it the way it is now, with service manuals basically just being “If x doesn’t work, replace board Y.”
Even goods without service manuals publicly available, like TV’s, cell phones, etc are typically divided into multiple purpose made pcbs all wired together. So someone with some aptitude for electronics can pretty easily work out “USB connector doesn’t work, replace USB PCB”. Making the need for a true pcb schematic level diagram pretty pointless from a repair perspective.