Asshole Design and Crappy Design

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This community covers both asshole designs and crappy designs.

Discuss manifestations of asshole designs whereby the design is deliberately anti-consumer. Manifestations of crappy designs are also welcome in this forum, which reflect poor designs that are not borne out of deliberate contempt for the consumer.

Use of these prefixes is encouraged:

[a/d] ← you are confident that the design is an Asshole Design

[c/d] ← you are confident that the design is a Crappy Design

[ObD] ← Obsolescence by Design (a specific variety of a/d).

Unprefixed titles are useful if you’re uncertain whether the design is deliberate.

Rules:

Please avoid posting web-related designs. Instead, post those in:

!assholedesign_web@infosec.pub

Related communities

!crappydesign@discuss.tchncs.de

Existence Rationale:

There are other communities for Asshole Designs and Crappy Designs, but all of the communities at the time of our founding exist only on centralized instances. We are currently the sole decentralized community of this kind. (update: another crappy design forum was recently found in the free-world-- see related communities above)

founded 2 years ago

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activistPnk@slrpnk.net

Bosch Filtrino hot water dispensor… booby-trapped disassembly (infosec.pub)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net

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I simply needed to remove the shell of this thing.

They cannot simply use screws because that would make it easy to disassemble quickly and non-destructively. So they invented some obscure bizarre clips that require special tools and specific /unpublished/ knowledge. So I was forced to pry around the seam of the plastic until some clips broke. I guessed correctly that a sliding motion was needed but this made no difference because they apparently have hidden latches that must be manipulated before sliding.

Since there are no clues about what prevents us from sliding it open, it’s tempting to pry off the power button in case that is blocking the sliding. The button turns out to be spring-loaded and non-removable, so plastic breaks and shrapnel of small parts scatter when removal is attempted.

After ripping the motherfucker apart, of course clips are broken and the plastic around the edges is chewn up and malformed. Hitting it lightly with a heat gun makes the plastic edging get closer to its original shape by exploiting the “memory” of plastic but it’s never quite right.. always melts and shrinks a little.

I find no videos on disassembly. Folks should really post a video showing the frustration of triggering the booby-traps just as a warning to people.

Of course there are no useful docs for this other than the user manual which pretends that repair is never needed.

Assholes!

Update

I managed to exfiltrate a diagram from a parts shop: Diagram of Bosch Filtrino THD2021/03 hot water dispenser

The joint between part 130 and 140 was a bitch.. broke clips. The joint between 130 and 160 was also a bitch.. required plastic to bend in some dicey gymnastics.

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[–] Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

Oh, they can be engineered to come apart. The profit is better if you are one of the few people who actually take things apart, but you destroy it in the process.

I recently fixed this clock/Bluetooth speaker thing. All clips, except for two screws hidden behind the thick faceplate. The only way to know they were there was to feel that it wasn't coming apart. Pressing the faceplate to feel for indentations revealed nothing. There was not any good reason for the screws to be there, and you could just break it apart. That would have destroyed the ribbon connector though.

Just asshole design