So I admit being pessimistic about actually getting Right to Repair laws passed. Lawmakers keep being told that 'it stifles innovation' and since they often have as limited understanding of technology as I do as to the innards of political wheel-greasing they often fall for that tripe.
Are there any known Right to Repair statutes (US or Int'l) or bills that show signs of life?
Massachusetts passed Right to Repair as a ballot measure (which Tesla basically flaunts by making manuals extremely expensive to rent). But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair without special tools and knowledge."
> But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair without special tools and knowledge."
I'm okay with that. I just don't want businesses to be able to deny access to their manuals, threaten to void warranties for 'abuse' for performing an action that their authorized techs do all the time without any adverse effect on the hardware, or remotely kill software used in the hardware because someone replaced some atoms arranged in a less than ideal manner with some other atoms arranged in a more ideal manner without paying the business themselves to do it.
I guess I believe in this "right to repair" movement, but only so far as to ensure that if you're capable of taking your device apart and putting it back together without breaking anything that you don't automatically void some warranty.
I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
> I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
Why not?
> I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?
Making something that’s easy to take apart often makes it bigger, because interfaces need to be modularized. I’ve never needed to open one of my iPhones and would not want them 1mm thicker to be repairable.
Maybe you've never needed to open your iphone because it would serve no purpose. If I could upgrade my old iphone by taking it apart, I wouldn't have bought a new one in the first place...
You don’t have to buy a new iPhone to replace the battery, so presumably you’re imagining upgrading the processors, camera, sensors or some other aspect of the iPhone. Those components are so tightly integrated and custom fitted in each iteration of the device that it is technically impossible to “upgrade” them independently.
That's the opposite of what the comment meant. The suggestion is that where it doesn't change the size/quality you mandate easier disassembly. Next to zero subjectivity.
Yes I got that. But my point is that this involves second-guessing every design decision.
You propose some new design which is more compact / easier to manufacture / more reliable because it has fewer connectors, and then you take it to the ministry for approval. How do they know whether your changes are justified? Maybe they sketch an easier-to-disassemble variant which is no bigger than yours, and reject your design, but they don't understand the why it will cost you twice as much to assemble that design (in your factory, with your workforce) or why you rejected that kind of connector (your experience with the supplier, or your vibration tests). Can you prove why you made these decisions? Call expert witnesses? This just seems like an impossible minefield to me.
I think better to tilt the balance in other ways, like pushing longer guarantees (regardless of whether the best solution is an unbreakable one-piece object, or a repairable one) and forcing recycling (so that the sticker price includes more of the total lifecycle cost).
Because whether or not something could have been designed and made differently is a difficult, subjective, decision.
We're not talking about the need to have cops decide whether 71MPH was too fast or not. We're talking about whether your customers would hypothetically have been as satisfied with an iphone that was 1mm thicker, because if they would, there's a law which says you have to make it repairable. Bring your expert witnesses and panel surveys to convince the jury.
I once had a Mazda 6. In order replace the PCV valve one has to remove the manifold. A ten minutes job on any other car was a couple hours in this one. They didn't make it easy just because I have the right to repair it myself.
You shouldn't have to deal with an extra mm and all the inconvenience that comes along with it just to support my right to replace the battery.
> > I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
> Why not?
Because,
1) I personally don't care about this.
2) More important than 1, I don't think the law/government has any business deciding this. The market can decide (spoiler: it already has).
Did the free markets ended slavery in US or under-age working? I remember many good things had to be forced with laws and not let to be decided by the big companies.
No, I am invalidating the point of "Free markets" solve things, so you can ignore the slavery and put other things free markets did not solve like pollution,cigarettes etc but I assume someone would bring the excuse that the goverment was at fault all along and free markets were not free.
In a very oblique manner it did. Industrialization (which was very much a product of free markets) of the Northern States made the economics of slavery untenable in the North. Once people were not as blinded by profits, they could actually see that slavery was a moral evil. In the South, the economics were very different and therefore a lot of rationalizations were formed as to why slavery was not that evil.
In addition, Industrialization enabled larger population growth in the North as well as larger production. This is what gave the Union the advantage in manpower and material that allowed the North to win the Civil War.
How were the markets less free in the south? From what I know from history the difference was that south was more agriculture focused and this meant they had different interest then the north , I am not from US so I did not studied all the details of US history.
Even if say free market solved the issue, is it reasonable to wait centuries for the free markets to solve things then dare to vote some laws ?
Well the labor market was certainly less free, for one :)
It's worth knowing that the south was once considerably richer than the north, but industrialisation changed things in the 19th C, by the end of which the north was vastly richer (per capita), richer than anywhere had ever been before. In this sense free capitalism did vastly outcompete an unfree economy.
> Once people were not as blinded by profits, they could actually see that slavery was a moral evil.
It was actually quite the opposite. Pre-industrialization, serfdom and slavery were basically equivalent. You hand a local lord and if you worked for him you got food and shelter. Your alternative was to run off into the wilderness and fend for yourself, which frequently meant starving or freezing to death or being mauled by a bear. Unsurprisingly not many people chose that.
Then factories show up and suddenly your alternative is to run off and go work in the factory. Naturally many people started preferring to do that, which turned the plantations upside down because their economic system was based on the workers not having anywhere else to go.
Their response was brutal. Chains to keep slaves from running away, hunting runaway slaves with dogs, savage beatings, etc. None of that stuff was really commonplace before industrialization. The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
But that response was as futile as it was brutish. The factories made slavery uneconomical. You can't defeat supply and demand with chains and whips. All they do is cause the slaves to want to run away more.
The factories destroyed slavery directly, by out-competing it. It's questionable whether the war was even net positive -- that was a whole lot of blood spilled over an economic system that couldn't have sustained itself much longer in any event.
I agree with what you say. I meant my comment mainly about the North. There, like you said, the factories made slavery uneconomical. Because their livelihoods did not depend on slavery, people were able to take a more objective look at the morality of slavery and come to the conclusion that it was an evil.
In the South, people's livelihood depending on slavery. Because of that, their minds did all sorts of rationalizations as to why slavery was not that bad.
>The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
The other thing that made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom was the racial aspect. If a serf had some skill and went to a town and somehow became a craftsman, people could not look at the him and know he had once been a serf. Because of the racial aspect, ex-slaves could not escape people immediately knowing that they had been slaves.
The issue here is that garbage is an externality. If the device can be repaired it remains in service, otherwise it goes to a landfill to be replaced by another device that will itself also end up there.
Garbage is a problematic externality because if you try to charge true cost for it, people throw their garbage in the street or the ocean instead of paying. So we generally have subsidized trash pickup, and then "the market" literally overproduces garbage due to the subsidy.
One solution to that is to require the devices to pay the recycling cost up front, but everybody hates that because it makes the device more expensive, moreso than making it repairable would.
The other is to require it to be modular/repairable so that when one component fails or becomes obsolete it can be replaced or upgraded, which extends the life of the other components and reduces the total number of devices that have to be produced and ultimately end up in a landfill.
This may actually increase the original purchase price of the device by quite a bit, because the manufacturer will end up selling fewer units (that's the whole idea) but still have to recover the same fixed costs. But then the user doesn't have to replace their device as often, so the net cost should be slightly lower (the gain being the actual reduction in waste).
I think you are misconstruing the aims of the right to repair movement. Its nothing to do with forcing companies to make it "easy" to repair, but rather about preventing companies from including "features" which serve no purpose besides preventing third party repair.
An example would be a tractor that is designed to be cheaply serviceable, but has a feature which disables any replaced parts until a message signed by the the original equipment manufacturer and authorizing the replacement part has been received.
You're right, I remember this initially, but many discussions about right to repair get hijacked and center around topics like iFixit and their blatantly self-serving anti-Apple campaigns.
As self-serving as it is, iFixit is doing a social good IMO. If it weren't for them, I would have spent more money replacing or having someone else repair my iPhone. So I don't care if they make money off of it, they save me more money in the long-run, and they prevent a larger number of phones and other devices being cycled through the economy before necessary. If that means punching up at Apple, so be it. Apple can take the hit.
Planned obsolescence is a very shitty and cynical strategy on the part of manufacturers, and anyone fighting against it is on the right side.
Don't. For example, Louis Rossmann recently kicked up a storm when he claimed that Apple used the customs to seize his "genuine" battery shipments (which was widely reported in the media and gave him significant publicity), except it turned out that he left out the fact that the parts were unauthorized: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9pow06/louis_rossman.... Self-serving PR stunts that consist of misinformation and depend on the subsequent media outrage don't help "the right side".
That reddit post you linked to also does its best to avoid focusing on the actual situation. There's no such thing as an "unauthorized" battery. If factories are producing batteries with a default Apple logo (ie to Chinese standards), and he's instructing them to cross it out, that also seems completely legitimate.
> That reddit post you linked to also does its best to avoid focusing on the actual situation.
No, it doesn't. In fact, I think it's pretty explicit in making the situation clear:
> First of all, let me start by saying, I am not defending Apple's terrible stance towards Right to Repair.
> I think Apple's R2R policy is awful - It sucks that once the device you buy is on the "obsolete" list, you can no longer get 1st party service from Apple. Not only that, but there are no legal ways to obtain parts. IMO this is something all of us should be putting pressure on Apple to change. I'd love it if there was a law on the books that forced companies to make spare parts for products available to customers for x amount of years after the warranty expires. That would allow people to continue using the devices they buy.
> In closing, I'm going to continue supporting Louis, iFixit, and their attempts to secure our rights to repair the products we own.
But it is also very obvious that Louis Rossman was clearly dishonest. Actually, I don't quite understand your argument:
> If factories are producing batteries with a default Apple logo (ie to Chinese standards), and he's instructing them to cross it out, that also seems completely legitimate.
How is this "completely legitimate"? Apple is (quite understandably) annoyed that some factories decided to make batteries that Louis could peddle as genuine Apple batteries, when it's clear that they are in fact not these at all (they're crossing out the logos to pass customs, for heaven's sake). Of course they're going to be seized, because they're counterfeit: Apple probably wasn't even involved here. I'm surprised he has the gall to try to make this a huge PR issue by claiming that Apple was trying to stop him from repairing Macs with genuine batteries that he bought when he knows they're just shady batteries from China he's trying to bring into the country.
iFixit would have fewer specialized parts to sell if Apple stopped making it so difficult to open. They seem to be pretty genuine about wanting things to be fixable.
Batteries which are soldered to the board instead of using a connector, motherboard is all one assembly including the keyboard, fewer ports, nothing user serviceable. That all seems like measures to make manufacturing easier from my perspective.
Measure that make it harder (but not impossible) for users to disassemble their devices serves to avoid people doing accidental damage (and voiding their warrantee). It's possible to get a pentalobe screwdriver, and anyone not willing to get one probably has no business opening up an Apple product.
Yeah, countless businesses have been bankrupt by the mistake of using standard screws that regular plebs to violate their warranties. Apple simply can afford to take that kind of risk, their margins are very tight as it is!
For those downvoting me, if you genuinely think that pentalobe screws are bad, can you please explain why someone who doesn't have access to a pentalobe screwdriver has even the slightest business opening up an iPhone?
Other way around. Anyone qualified to replace a battery should have no difficulty getting their hands on a pentalobe screwdriver.
In fact, it would not surprise me in the least if vendors selling third-party iPhone batteries included pentalobe screwdrivers with the battery (or offered it as an add-on).
There is that but also access to spare parts. Louis Rossman talks about how it’s hard to get replacement chips to fix motherboards because Apple locks down the distribution channels so they have to relay on harvested components from failed boards or chips who fell of the back off a truck.
It's also important to specify that we don't ask for MORE documentation (although that wouldn't hurt), just access to the documentation they give to the authorized technician, or their own staff.
Where do you draw the line at repair-hostile vs. secure? I agree many things are hostile to repair, but let's take the new T2. It's awful for repair, but actually does have security benefits against evil maid attacks, a serious security risk. Stuff like this also applies to unrootable androids (a major pet peeve of mine).
I think we all would do well to remember that it's always easier to say something is wrong than to create a solution. It's also worth noting that governments are arguably worse than anyone else at determining such edge cases as secure vs. user-hostile.
A device is repair hostile if repairing requires the permission of a third party instead of the device owner.
Security is different because a device can be made secure without it being repair hostile - e.g, the owner of the device has the private keys in a signed code update. So a maid can't just Willy Nilly change your baby monitor, but you can.
How do you store these? It's not really user friendly for the average consumer, and certainly has little recourse if you lose them all. How well does it usually go when people are told to keep track of, say, a dongle? What if each device needs one?
The point isn't that every user will know how to repair their own products, rather that they could if they choose.
Think about your lawnmower. If the engine won't run, maybe you can figure out through a bit of research that it's probably the spark plug. So you can go buy a spark plug and swap it yourself. You don't need the manufacturer to authorize your new spark plug.
However, many people would not know anything about where to begin replacing their spark plug, and don't want the hastle to learn, so they bring it to the manufacturer and pay a premium to have it done for them. But if they someday decided to learn, they could learn themselves. Or even take their lawnmower to a friend who can help them.
To take away those option entirely, only leaving the one option -- paying the manufacturer a premium to do it for you -- is what I have an issue with.
Bonus: the lawnmower manufacturer could include a type of safety lock that does not allow you to work on your lawnmower, to prevent a user from hurting themselves. However, the manufacturer should also give the user the ability to remove that lock, positively asserting that they know what they're doing (like giving the private keys, or allowing a motherboard switch to be toggled which unlocks the system, etc)
Yes, and I would say that might be a good middle ground. I personally really like having the freedom to customize the software I run on the device. However, there's always the security question, and it's true that not being able to run unsigned ring 0 code is a powerful security feature.
So I assume there may be at least 2 distinct issues:
1 preventing people to repair their hardware with software locks, not selling parts, not providing documentation, copyrighting schematics, repairs manuals and doing all you can to not allow third parties to fix hardware.
2 building thins that are impossible or hard to repair because you don't care about the fact that for a broken key you have to replace half the laptop because your profits are high enough and making a more repairable device is too much work , more expensive or not as cool looking.
IMO point 1 should be illegal, I should be able to buy parts for my laptop,computer,phone,car or other device and have a specialist repair my device.
Point 2 is more debatable, some manufacturers could abuse this to force you buy new things when the warranty expires rather then you replace the broken component. At least forcing the companies to pay the correct price for proper recycling without hidden externalities would help on this point.
I disagree with some of your sub points from point 1. Selling parts, providing documentation, and building repair manuals are forcing behaviors form companies. Compelling them to do provide a service or product that they would not otherwise provide. Legislation that prevents certain actions is great, but I'm wary of any compulsion from governments to companies and individuals.
If you want to take stuff apart, Go for it! But Apple should not be required to write, edit, and sell manuals that it does not want to.
But why should Apple be special? As an example for cars most countries have laws that force them to provide you parts years after the car is no longer sold, don't you think that having companies not selling you parts make them have to much control over you?
1 So let me know why should some companies not sell parts?
2 why not share the pdf with schematics and diagnostic software or punish people that share them(is not cost)
IIRC there are also laws that after a certain time anyone is allowed to produce and cell (certain?) car parts to ensure that cars that are on the road can still be repaired and serviced.
Same should be applied to electronics (and a wide range of other consumer goods).
Exactly, imagine the abuse if say only Ford could sell Ford windshields or other parts and you had to change the parts on approved store that may not even exist in your country. I bet Ford would like top patent and copyright the parts and have the monopoly on them but fortunately we have laws for that and we need similar laws for electronics too.
How do you feel about mandatory warranty periods? I see the requirement of repair manuals for a mass-produced product as a very similar thing, and both are justified as part of ensuring a fair bargain where you get what you paid for, not a device that randomly fails and wastes all the money you put into it.
> How do you feel about mandatory warranty periods?
You know what you're getting when you buy the product. It's critically important to be able to say "no warranty whatsoever"; Open Source wouldn't exist without that, and neither would the (still quite small) open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers.
(I do feel that you should always be legally allowed to try repairing something. That doesn't mean the manufacturer has to actively help you, or do work for you for free.)
First of all, all open source is free or you can build it yourself, so if the product does not work you did not wasted your money because you did not bought it, you signed no contract(I know you can pay for open source and for support).
>You know what you're getting when you buy the product
This is not true, even today many people go in store, browse things and buy without going and read tons of reviews and complains about the product, do you think that the majority of people that buy a printer know the crap the manufactures do related to the cartridges(it is not printed on the box)? Companies would abuse their power to make more money, I remember when a law had to be passed here in Romania so that money exchanges would print the commission rates on big letters at minimum 10 centimeters because their were abusing people and no competition or educating people fixed it. better to fix the root cause then work around with free market ideology.
> You know what you're getting when you buy the product.
No you don't. That's most of the point of warranties.
> Open Source
Sharing source code isn't a sale. If you do sell a program, open/closed source doesn't matter, and you don't need the ability to say "no warranty".
> open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers.
If you make more than a thousand of something, you have the resources to include a few diagrams and a simple but useful manual. For now I won't say anything about smaller quantities.
> If you make more than a thousand of something, you have the resources to include a few diagrams and a simple but useful manual. For now I won't say anything about smaller quantities.
If someone makes more than a thousand of something, they probably also have the resources to buy you a free lunch, too. But that's not the product you bought.
Sales are never just the product. At the very least there are rules about scams, basic safety, radio interference... Sometimes it's okay to have legal requirements that lead to fewer problems down the line. You might not think this particular rule is worth it, but it's not out of line with existing rules. And a lot of people do think it's worth it.
Whether a rule is "worth it" or not isn't the evaluation I'm making at all; the first question, before that, is "is there a critical life-or-death reason to interfere with a private transaction". There are plenty of features I'd like to have, and I look for people who sell products with those features. I often support people that specifically provide better documentation, open source software, diagrams, schematics, as well as companies that give back to the people and projects who make components they use. That's my choice, because I value those things. I'd certainly like other people to value those things as well.
Are you against all the existing rules that aren't life-or-death, then? Because they make life a much better place when you don't have to obsessively research every single product you buy.
And generally you can avoid it for bespoke items. It's not a barrier to personal deals.
I'm in favor of independent voluntary certifications (and testing labs, and similar) that encompass a large number of associated features and properties. I shop at places that have good return policies, and I like the resulting incentives to not sell products that will generate many returns. And I'm strongly in favor of having enough up-front information to know whether you're in a buyer-beware as-is situation or a "you don't need to check very carefully" situation, and make decisions accordingly.
I don't want to prohibit the equivalent of "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY".
> And generally you can avoid it for bespoke items. It's not a barrier to personal deals.
I'm not just talking about bespoke or "personal deals", I'm also talking about "crowdfunded, we made 6,473 of them, but we're not a big company". Or "here are some schematics to build a piece of hardware, I'm not making any promises about the result". Or any number of other situations in which the choice is not "write and provide a repair manual or not", it's "develop the product or not".
> I'm in favor of independent voluntary certifications (and testing labs, and similar) that encompass a large number of associated features and properties.
Got any suggestions to make that actually happen? The benefit per sale is small enough that it's really hard to get the demand together on a per-product basis. Consumers don't have the time to learn every minor certification body either. But making the decision in bulk, as a society, is a lot more feasible.
Also, there isn't an infinite variety of products. The more dimensions you have to filter by, the worse your result gets per dollar. The free market can't solve everything at the same time.
> I don't want to prohibit the equivalent of "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY".
That is again not a sale. And you can have triple your $0 back if it breaks.
> I'm also talking about "crowdfunded, we made 6,473 of them, but we're not a big company". Or "here are some schematics to build a piece of hardware, I'm not making any promises about the result". Or any number of other situations in which the choice is not "write and provide a repair manual or not", it's "develop the product or not".
A small crowdfunded operation can do this more easily than a big company. They can have a designer spend two days getting the final schematics together and writing a short document. It's such a miniscule cost that it will almost never be the difference between producing and not producing, and that tiny risk is worth the benefits.
And a schematic documents itself pretty well. But if you really don't want to make any promises then maybe don't charge money for the design.
For example, most consumer ice makers on the market in the UK has the same design flaw. I know because I learned in frustration to spot the signs. The design is clearly copied by multiple manufacturers. The problem is someone cut a few cents of their BOM by leaving out a sensor for when the water tray has rotated far enough, and instead just runs the motor 'long enough'.
Except most models on the market uses a plastic tray where doing that repeatedly eventually causes the tray to crack from the stress.
Most consumers buying those products won't know. It took my second one breaking and me taking apart both that one and my third one before I realised how the design is broken. Turns out even wildly different looking models still use the same basic mechanism.
In this case it's a trivially fixable machine once you know what the problem is if you have access to a spare tray. The exact same part would fit in many mods. Except they're not available for sale. So you junk 5-10kg of serviceable metal and plastic parts because of lack of a 100g part.
That may be fine for the manufacturers, but it's hugely detrimental to society that these products are being sold when most people have no way of telling upfront that they'll fail - it takes just long enough heavy use that most reviews don't reflect the problems.
> You know what you're getting when you buy the product.
To add to what others said on it: no, you don't. You would if the manufacturers provided full specs, data sheets and CAD drawings of the internals. They don't, for obvious reasons. What's worse, the whole point of a sales copy is to confuse you about what you're getting - providing disinformation, in form of vague promises of emotional effects and feature statements so broad you could drive an aircraft carrier through. A lot of consumer laws exist to counter this dynamic.
> Open Source wouldn't exist without that
It would, if the software was also free :). This is a longer topic, but there's an argument to be made that software industry is in its sorry state precisely because it's allowed to sell software "with no warranty whatsoever".
We must prevent repairs in order to maximize shareholder profit in order for the wealth to trickle down in order to allow consumers to replace their nonserviceable goods.
The trick is to shove money at the shareholders faster than they can bank or consume it - this way, the overflow will spill down to the lower tiers of society.
I'm almost the diametric opposite of that; I believe that manufacturers shoud be compelled to build things to be easy to take apart, replaceable, and upgradeable, if that can be done at a net-zero cost, and should be subsidized by the state if it can't, possibly with tax breaks.
But I don't believe that they should be required to keep it under warranty in that case. I'm fine with a company putting a warranty seal on a device if they don't want people to touch the insides.
That's already illegal[0] in the US. However that won't stop companies from from telling 99.9% of its customers that aren't aware of the law, that their warranty is void.
> submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
Who defines "useful lifetime" though? The manufacturer would then be even more compelled to make engineer planned obsolescence since no one wants to be on the hook for having to take back products 10, 20, or even 40 years from now. But keeping electronics operational for multiple decades is one of the goals of right-to-repair. With your proposal we'd have nothing but short lifetime disposable electronics. We should be focusing on solutions that create less waste, not more.
I really dislike the "Right to Repair" movement because I see it as a lobbyist (iFixit pushes it heavily for example since they make money off it) & niche driven push that is both wasting a real chance to get at some actual critical problems and generating new ones of its own. The two big issues are reasonable life span as part of the purchase price, and questions about ownership vs security.
1. For the first, most people do not care about "right to repair", what they want is a more roughly a "right to have repaired for a reasonable time period related to the cost of the item in question." Ie., it's a standard Free Market pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either case if it doesn't the manufacturer should take care of it at no further direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage of buyers get screwed at odds they don't know as well as the manufacturer, unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the manufacturer knows the odds not them). It's something that should just be part of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly.
How the manufacturer "takes care of it at no further direct cost to the consumer" is an implementation question for which there are many good answers that come with different tradeoffs and costs. "Right to Repair" legislates one specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired result and then let everyone experiment and adapt.
2. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains vs owner control and it's complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair: allowing any independent 3rd party to "repair/replace" that by definition means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too. Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up, be social engineered, etc. I'm not comfortable with it being illegal for me to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device (though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or whatever could help). But that's a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some cases.
I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say, manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple's case, I would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the choice can be made (I'd also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I've yet to see a Right To Repair that covers any of this.
--
It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don't know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on that, but not in a great way.
The touch ID thing was weird from what I read, why can Apple replace a button safely but someone else can't, one issue was that Apple refuses to sell the genuime part, for security reasons can't you reset the touch ID stored data and have the user use his PIN after the replacement is done(in the assumption Apple wold sell you the button )?
For the "price should include lifespan" legislation in particular that would need to come out of extensive expert and general discussion. I certainly don't claim to know off the top of my head what would be the best solution. But I definitely think a reasonable approximation can be come up with, even if it's something as simple as "X months for every Y dollars capping at Z". Maybe a log formula or some categories would be worth it, or maybe not, but we can definitely do better then "1 year, and a few more for a bunch of extra money." If a $1k+ computer fails after 13 months it shouldn't cost someone a penny, whether its a 3rd party repair or not. How companies meet that obligation should be up to them, but it should be an obligation. Some no doubt will just work to make things easier and cheaper to repair, that's a totally valid way to cut their costs. Another approach is simply to invest more in chasing more 9s in QA. Maybe they just raise the price if they think the tradeoffs in more expensive repairs result in enough value. There won't be any one right solution, what matters is that the price paid ensures a reasonable lifespan.
For the "owners can choose what level of control they" I think it's more straight forward, and involves a small group of players too. Manufacturers of devices that have hardware and/or software crypto stacks should simply be required to offer a model that will let the owner load their own root keys as well and have those be equally valid for authorizing either hardware, software, or both.
Ok, but you now have an iPhone that can leak your fingerprint or face data, or make it easy to pull credit card information off of. When that happens, will consumers (and the media!) blame Apple for making an insecure phone or the repair store for using untrusted hardware?
If I am remembering correctly, secure enclave has already been compromised. It was mentioned in an article about development iPhones for sale on the black market. So physical access to the device means all of that is already accessible.
You seem to be ignoring that some manufacturers, like Apple, will straight up refuse to do repairs or sell replacement parts in some cases.
One such iconic example was Linus Tech Tip's Mac Pro. They know they broke it and tried to pay for repairs, but Apple straight up refused to repair it, saying instead they needed to buy a new one.
Similarly Apple refuses to do repairs or charge extreme amounts once a Macbook is "too old", even if it's otherwise perfectly serviceable. And they are increasingly engineering it in such a way as to specifically prevent other companies from doing the repairs that they won't.
The point of right to repair is that it acknowledges that the economic interests of a manufacturer are to sell you a replacement, not to repair/service a machine. Rather than try and force them to not maximize profits, the legislation is to let others compete in the repair business space. Similar to automotive repair.
>You seem to be ignoring that some manufacturers, like Apple, will straight up refuse to do repairs or sell replacement parts in some cases.
Seriously, can you please explain how on Earth you got "me ignoring that" when I directly stated I thought it should be legally required for all manufacturers, specifically including Apple, to do repairs for a long period of time. I used 4-5 years as an example period that might be reasonable for a $500-1k phone.
>Similarly Apple refuses to do repairs or charge extreme amounts once a Macbook is "too old"
Which is why I'm saying that shouldn't be allowed. Holy crap is this place frustrating sometimes.
>And they are increasingly engineering it in such a way as to specifically prevent other companies from doing the repairs that they won't.
I don't see that. I see an inevitable result of engineering things to be as compact and efficient as possible. The higher the active to dead matter ratio, the less leeway there is for simple repair and swapping too. The problem isn't making that tradeoff, the problem is not pricing it in.
>The point of right to repair is that it acknowledges that the economic interests of a manufacturer are to sell you a replacement, not to repair/service a machine.
Lots of things in a free market are not in a manufacturers interests, like dumping toxins. If there was no such thing we'd never have to worry about externalities and such in the first place. That's why a free market is created by regulation and requires regulation for running, it's just a tool. It makes the most sense to regulate the desired result. Just pass a law saying manufacturers must offer 1 year of warranty on every $125 value of electronic goods up to a maximum of 6 years. Or make it a formula that scales down. Or a host of other ways. But match people's expectations that "this device I bought should work for a reasonable lifespan" and require them to meet that the exact same way we require them to meet standards for safety and labor and environment and on and on and on.
This is one of the issues that really blows my mind on HN. The disdain technical people here often display towards people in other fields even now is really sad.
> Which is why I'm saying that shouldn't be allowed.
How? You're going to pass legislation that mandates manufacturers support repairing indefinitely and at a reasonable cost? What if they go out of business, or just literally don't have a repair division in the first place? And why does the manufacturer get gifted a monopoly here?
> I don't see that. I see an inevitable result of engineering things to be as compact and efficient as possible. The higher the active to dead matter ratio, the less leeway there is for simple repair and swapping too. The problem isn't making that tradeoff, the problem is not pricing it in.
That's because you're confused as to the topic it seems. Nobody is saying that devices have to be easy to repair. They are instead saying you can't DRM replacement hardware and actively block importation of replacements, which is literally what major companies (including Apple) are doing right now. It isn't about engineering trade-offs compromising ease of repair, it's about literally engineering it to be impossible to repair (without DRM keys)
> It makes the most sense to regulate the desired result. Just pass a law saying manufacturers must offer 1 year of warranty on every $125 value of electronic goods up to a maximum of 6 years.
Well for starters because that's not actually the desired result, nor is that even a _good_ result. And you're calling other people's posts "frustrating", lol
> The disdain technical people here often display towards people in other fields even now is really sad.
I never once suggested any such thing. If you are so intellectually dishonest that you take fixed terms and caps and turn it into "indefinitely" then there is no point in discussing things any farther.
I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.
I feel the same about my 2012 MacBookPro. While it was a _tiny_ bit down the path of "not user serviceable", replacing the battery and trackpad was extremely easy. And one of the first things I did to it was replace/upgrade Apple's RAM and drop an SSD into the optical bay.
I'm old enough to remember the days of the "cheese grater" Power Mac/Mac Pro, when Apple would explicitly call attention to how expandable and user-serviceable a case they'd designed for it.
I still think that the "cheese grater" was the pinnacle of apple desktop design (and I've never owned a mac), I just love it - enough that I damn near bought a broken one to use to build my new PC in the end laziness won and I went corsair but it's still an amazing piece of industrial design.
It really was, it still looks better than the vast majority of modern PC cases with better build quality, the bigger ones all seem to be some variant of "How many RGB's can we shove in this" with flimsy plastic and sharp edges.
my last computer i built i went with a fractal design case and couldn't be happier really. they make excellent cases. the drives are not in the main chamber so it is a completely void airflow design for the major components and all the routing is done nicely. really great design. That corsair one looks pretty nice for a standard layout case though.
Funny how those machines came up in the SJ era and now what we get are inconsistencies, products that are too thin for their own good and limited repairability
I remember in the old iBooks back when WiFi was a new thing you could order without it and install your own card later in about 15 seconds.
There were little sprung pull tabs between some of the function keys, pull them back, lift the keyboard out, AirPort card slot was right there. RAM slots too.
And the removable keyboard, gosh! Those keyboards didn’t just shit the bed if a piece of dust got in them, but even if they had it was a separate part that you could swap out without replacing half the computer. Good times.
I have a 2016 MBP now. Betting the resale value when the 4-year keyboard warranty runs out is going to be about what the rest of the computer is worth for spare parts.
half a centimeter thicker? .04 pounds heavier? how did people even use machines that heavy and thick? did they come with medical insurance to help with the back strain?!
I carry a 1.1kg Dell XPS in my bag, if I went up to 2 or 2.5kg my wheelchair would be a bit more unbalanced and more difficult to push uphill. The soft drink fits in my cupholder.
Maybe not, but there's a middle ground somewhere between "keyboard replacement takes 30 seconds" and "keyboard replacement means replacing the entire top case assembly because it's all glued together."
Borrowing some comments from MacRumors forums for price:
> If a repair, the invoices I have from top case replacement due to failed keyboards show a parts cost of $695 and a flat rate labor cost of $100, for a total of $795 plus any applicable tax. At last count, I have six such invoices from failed keyboards.
> That's what it shows on my invoice as well, thank God for AppleCare. I have only had the one, I hope I don't need it again. By chance, did you discuss replacement with that many failures? I would hope that's an option at some point.
(These are from January last year, a few months before Apple admitted they had a problem and extended the keyboard warranty to 4 years)
For a keyboard a higher failure rate than their previous models, that's not a good trade-off. People have other reasons to want a Mac laptop, maybe they don't know what they're getting into, so they're still buying it. But the longer this continues the more lasting damage it does to Apple's laptop reputation.
Right now people can talk themselves into buying a more expensive laptop from Apple by saying "it's a good computer and it'll last for years." What happens when you can't justify that anymore?
The late 08 (aluminium) ones are wonderful. Toolless battery replacement. Replaced the keyboard in mine which required a teardown of every single piece of the laptop, but it wasn't difficult.
Yes, it's a joy to be able to switch out RAM, HDDs, and batteries so easily in those white MacBooks. The only serious flaw with them was that the plastic around the keyboard became discolored with use, but that's just cosmetic. I used mine with an external monitor anyway. They only cost about $100 on eBay these days, so if my 2008 MacBook ever dies, I'll definitely try to repair it, but I don't think it ever will. The best thing about the design of the 2008 MacBook is that they were made to last forever.
That is why I'm holding to my 2011 ThinkPad T420 for dear life. I replaced keyboard 3 times ($30-$40 off ebay), changed HDD to SSD, and replaced CD-ROM with another SATA drive bay.
Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems.
I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB and upgradable to 16.
What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.
I've been building my desktop (and now servers) for 25 years. The idea of taking my computer in to a store to fix a drive or ram or worse, buying a new one because of a hardware issue is absolutely foreign to me.
I had hoped laptops would be just as easy to tweak and build by now but it seems the world favors the apple way.
I'm going to keep building. It's _far_ less expensive. I can tweak my system to fit my needs and adjust as my needs change. And I have a solid understanding of the most used tool in my life.
Also things like PC part picker make it so much simpler than it used to be that I barely even need to think about it any more.
I don't think this really holds water. I bought a Thinkpad L380 recently, it was a great computer with upgradable ram and ssd. I ended up returning it because of the lack of a ThunderBolt 3 port, but if it had one of those I think it would have been near perfect.
This is probably already used for countries where Apple has no local presence. Here in Israel there are no Apple labs, so up till this year iPhones had to be shipped to Apple Ireland for repairs. (but Macs and iPads could be repaired by authorized, non-Apple labs due to a less-stringent repair policy)
Recently the news reported of a specific authorized reseller gaining the option to repair iPhones here, and sometimes even outright replace them -- all authorized by Apple. Maybe this programme made that possible.
Even with right to repair, if users cannot find the parts (especially chips) they won't be able to fix anything. Also, they can make it more complicated circuitry to make it harder to fix. No matter what, users are still at the mercy of the manufacturer.
They certainly can, but instead they're purposefully making it impossible to get specific board components so that a single chip defect/failure becomes an $800 paper weight https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc at 8:30 Louis explains that newer MacBooks, one of the most common issues is unfixable due to isl9240 being unsourceable.
Anyone who has ever been to Shenzhen’s HQB electronic market will chuckle at the Apple claim that iPhones are “too complex” for non-Apple techs to repair.
The grammar mistake in the supposed official document - "Keep doing what your (sic) doing" - is very unlike Apple. Raises a red flag on authenticity in my mind.
It's nice to see that Apple is trying to help people repair parts. I personally see nothing wrong with Apple choosing to do this itself and simultaneously saying that it doesn't want the government stepping in.
I am capable of blowing $20K in one night. Why should I do it?
You can't buy something and make up new service demands thereafter, or force a private company to design a product or service according to your requirements. What you may do is vote with your money and not buy what you don't like.
The fake right to repair is a nonsense idea... Can't wait for it to become "law" so that I can force Ubuntu to code latest h/w drivers for my 5 year old distro.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAre there any known Right to Repair statutes (US or Int'l) or bills that show signs of life?
I'm okay with that. I just don't want businesses to be able to deny access to their manuals, threaten to void warranties for 'abuse' for performing an action that their authorized techs do all the time without any adverse effect on the hardware, or remotely kill software used in the hardware because someone replaced some atoms arranged in a less than ideal manner with some other atoms arranged in a more ideal manner without paying the business themselves to do it.
I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.
I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
Why not?
> I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?
So, you can still make it mandatory where you don't need to make things bigger?
I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
You propose some new design which is more compact / easier to manufacture / more reliable because it has fewer connectors, and then you take it to the ministry for approval. How do they know whether your changes are justified? Maybe they sketch an easier-to-disassemble variant which is no bigger than yours, and reject your design, but they don't understand the why it will cost you twice as much to assemble that design (in your factory, with your workforce) or why you rejected that kind of connector (your experience with the supplier, or your vibration tests). Can you prove why you made these decisions? Call expert witnesses? This just seems like an impossible minefield to me.
I think better to tilt the balance in other ways, like pushing longer guarantees (regardless of whether the best solution is an unbreakable one-piece object, or a repairable one) and forcing recycling (so that the sticker price includes more of the total lifecycle cost).
Well, I dunno, but that's a question with every law, and thus not exactly an argument by itself?
> I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
But why would there need to be micro-management?
We're not talking about the need to have cops decide whether 71MPH was too fast or not. We're talking about whether your customers would hypothetically have been as satisfied with an iphone that was 1mm thicker, because if they would, there's a law which says you have to make it repairable. Bring your expert witnesses and panel surveys to convince the jury.
You shouldn't have to deal with an extra mm and all the inconvenience that comes along with it just to support my right to replace the battery.
> Why not?
Because,
1) I personally don't care about this. 2) More important than 1, I don't think the law/government has any business deciding this. The market can decide (spoiler: it already has).
In a very oblique manner it did. Industrialization (which was very much a product of free markets) of the Northern States made the economics of slavery untenable in the North. Once people were not as blinded by profits, they could actually see that slavery was a moral evil. In the South, the economics were very different and therefore a lot of rationalizations were formed as to why slavery was not that evil.
In addition, Industrialization enabled larger population growth in the North as well as larger production. This is what gave the Union the advantage in manpower and material that allowed the North to win the Civil War.
Even if say free market solved the issue, is it reasonable to wait centuries for the free markets to solve things then dare to vote some laws ?
It's worth knowing that the south was once considerably richer than the north, but industrialisation changed things in the 19th C, by the end of which the north was vastly richer (per capita), richer than anywhere had ever been before. In this sense free capitalism did vastly outcompete an unfree economy.
It was actually quite the opposite. Pre-industrialization, serfdom and slavery were basically equivalent. You hand a local lord and if you worked for him you got food and shelter. Your alternative was to run off into the wilderness and fend for yourself, which frequently meant starving or freezing to death or being mauled by a bear. Unsurprisingly not many people chose that.
Then factories show up and suddenly your alternative is to run off and go work in the factory. Naturally many people started preferring to do that, which turned the plantations upside down because their economic system was based on the workers not having anywhere else to go.
Their response was brutal. Chains to keep slaves from running away, hunting runaway slaves with dogs, savage beatings, etc. None of that stuff was really commonplace before industrialization. The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
But that response was as futile as it was brutish. The factories made slavery uneconomical. You can't defeat supply and demand with chains and whips. All they do is cause the slaves to want to run away more.
The factories destroyed slavery directly, by out-competing it. It's questionable whether the war was even net positive -- that was a whole lot of blood spilled over an economic system that couldn't have sustained itself much longer in any event.
In the South, people's livelihood depending on slavery. Because of that, their minds did all sorts of rationalizations as to why slavery was not that bad.
>The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
The other thing that made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom was the racial aspect. If a serf had some skill and went to a town and somehow became a craftsman, people could not look at the him and know he had once been a serf. Because of the racial aspect, ex-slaves could not escape people immediately knowing that they had been slaves.
Why?
> The market can decide
Does that mean that it should decide?
> (spoiler: it already has).
Has it? How did you determine that?
Garbage is a problematic externality because if you try to charge true cost for it, people throw their garbage in the street or the ocean instead of paying. So we generally have subsidized trash pickup, and then "the market" literally overproduces garbage due to the subsidy.
One solution to that is to require the devices to pay the recycling cost up front, but everybody hates that because it makes the device more expensive, moreso than making it repairable would.
The other is to require it to be modular/repairable so that when one component fails or becomes obsolete it can be replaced or upgraded, which extends the life of the other components and reduces the total number of devices that have to be produced and ultimately end up in a landfill.
This may actually increase the original purchase price of the device by quite a bit, because the manufacturer will end up selling fewer units (that's the whole idea) but still have to recover the same fixed costs. But then the user doesn't have to replace their device as often, so the net cost should be slightly lower (the gain being the actual reduction in waste).
An example would be a tractor that is designed to be cheaply serviceable, but has a feature which disables any replaced parts until a message signed by the the original equipment manufacturer and authorizing the replacement part has been received.
Planned obsolescence is a very shitty and cynical strategy on the part of manufacturers, and anyone fighting against it is on the right side.
Agree.
> anyone fighting against it is on the right side
Don't. For example, Louis Rossmann recently kicked up a storm when he claimed that Apple used the customs to seize his "genuine" battery shipments (which was widely reported in the media and gave him significant publicity), except it turned out that he left out the fact that the parts were unauthorized: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9pow06/louis_rossman.... Self-serving PR stunts that consist of misinformation and depend on the subsequent media outrage don't help "the right side".
Go read our laws and do try to keep up with them, eh? You're one of the reasons things like this are happening.
No, it doesn't. In fact, I think it's pretty explicit in making the situation clear:
> First of all, let me start by saying, I am not defending Apple's terrible stance towards Right to Repair.
> I think Apple's R2R policy is awful - It sucks that once the device you buy is on the "obsolete" list, you can no longer get 1st party service from Apple. Not only that, but there are no legal ways to obtain parts. IMO this is something all of us should be putting pressure on Apple to change. I'd love it if there was a law on the books that forced companies to make spare parts for products available to customers for x amount of years after the warranty expires. That would allow people to continue using the devices they buy.
> In closing, I'm going to continue supporting Louis, iFixit, and their attempts to secure our rights to repair the products we own.
But it is also very obvious that Louis Rossman was clearly dishonest. Actually, I don't quite understand your argument:
> If factories are producing batteries with a default Apple logo (ie to Chinese standards), and he's instructing them to cross it out, that also seems completely legitimate.
How is this "completely legitimate"? Apple is (quite understandably) annoyed that some factories decided to make batteries that Louis could peddle as genuine Apple batteries, when it's clear that they are in fact not these at all (they're crossing out the logos to pass customs, for heaven's sake). Of course they're going to be seized, because they're counterfeit: Apple probably wasn't even involved here. I'm surprised he has the gall to try to make this a huge PR issue by claiming that Apple was trying to stop him from repairing Macs with genuine batteries that he bought when he knows they're just shady batteries from China he's trying to bring into the country.
It's not a law of nature that making things better for yourself will make them better for your customers. In fact, the opposite is usually true.
In fact, it would not surprise me in the least if vendors selling third-party iPhone batteries included pentalobe screwdrivers with the battery (or offered it as an add-on).
It's also important to specify that we don't ask for MORE documentation (although that wouldn't hurt), just access to the documentation they give to the authorized technician, or their own staff.
I think we all would do well to remember that it's always easier to say something is wrong than to create a solution. It's also worth noting that governments are arguably worse than anyone else at determining such edge cases as secure vs. user-hostile.
Security is different because a device can be made secure without it being repair hostile - e.g, the owner of the device has the private keys in a signed code update. So a maid can't just Willy Nilly change your baby monitor, but you can.
How do you store these? It's not really user friendly for the average consumer, and certainly has little recourse if you lose them all. How well does it usually go when people are told to keep track of, say, a dongle? What if each device needs one?
Think about your lawnmower. If the engine won't run, maybe you can figure out through a bit of research that it's probably the spark plug. So you can go buy a spark plug and swap it yourself. You don't need the manufacturer to authorize your new spark plug.
However, many people would not know anything about where to begin replacing their spark plug, and don't want the hastle to learn, so they bring it to the manufacturer and pay a premium to have it done for them. But if they someday decided to learn, they could learn themselves. Or even take their lawnmower to a friend who can help them.
To take away those option entirely, only leaving the one option -- paying the manufacturer a premium to do it for you -- is what I have an issue with.
Bonus: the lawnmower manufacturer could include a type of safety lock that does not allow you to work on your lawnmower, to prevent a user from hurting themselves. However, the manufacturer should also give the user the ability to remove that lock, positively asserting that they know what they're doing (like giving the private keys, or allowing a motherboard switch to be toggled which unlocks the system, etc)
I can't flash my Android phone without unlocking it, which format it, and as long as it's unlocked, there's a warning message on boot.
There's always a way to make it serviceable, worst case, allow the user to deactivate theses security feature after a full format.
1 preventing people to repair their hardware with software locks, not selling parts, not providing documentation, copyrighting schematics, repairs manuals and doing all you can to not allow third parties to fix hardware.
2 building thins that are impossible or hard to repair because you don't care about the fact that for a broken key you have to replace half the laptop because your profits are high enough and making a more repairable device is too much work , more expensive or not as cool looking.
IMO point 1 should be illegal, I should be able to buy parts for my laptop,computer,phone,car or other device and have a specialist repair my device.
Point 2 is more debatable, some manufacturers could abuse this to force you buy new things when the warranty expires rather then you replace the broken component. At least forcing the companies to pay the correct price for proper recycling without hidden externalities would help on this point.
If you want to take stuff apart, Go for it! But Apple should not be required to write, edit, and sell manuals that it does not want to.
1 So let me know why should some companies not sell parts?
2 why not share the pdf with schematics and diagnostic software or punish people that share them(is not cost)
Same should be applied to electronics (and a wide range of other consumer goods).
You know what you're getting when you buy the product. It's critically important to be able to say "no warranty whatsoever"; Open Source wouldn't exist without that, and neither would the (still quite small) open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers.
(I do feel that you should always be legally allowed to try repairing something. That doesn't mean the manufacturer has to actively help you, or do work for you for free.)
>You know what you're getting when you buy the product This is not true, even today many people go in store, browse things and buy without going and read tons of reviews and complains about the product, do you think that the majority of people that buy a printer know the crap the manufactures do related to the cartridges(it is not printed on the box)? Companies would abuse their power to make more money, I remember when a law had to be passed here in Romania so that money exchanges would print the commission rates on big letters at minimum 10 centimeters because their were abusing people and no competition or educating people fixed it. better to fix the root cause then work around with free market ideology.
No you don't. That's most of the point of warranties.
> Open Source
Sharing source code isn't a sale. If you do sell a program, open/closed source doesn't matter, and you don't need the ability to say "no warranty".
> open hardware community. Nor, for that matter, would small hardware manufacturers.
If you make more than a thousand of something, you have the resources to include a few diagrams and a simple but useful manual. For now I won't say anything about smaller quantities.
If someone makes more than a thousand of something, they probably also have the resources to buy you a free lunch, too. But that's not the product you bought.
And generally you can avoid it for bespoke items. It's not a barrier to personal deals.
I don't want to prohibit the equivalent of "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY".
> And generally you can avoid it for bespoke items. It's not a barrier to personal deals.
I'm not just talking about bespoke or "personal deals", I'm also talking about "crowdfunded, we made 6,473 of them, but we're not a big company". Or "here are some schematics to build a piece of hardware, I'm not making any promises about the result". Or any number of other situations in which the choice is not "write and provide a repair manual or not", it's "develop the product or not".
Got any suggestions to make that actually happen? The benefit per sale is small enough that it's really hard to get the demand together on a per-product basis. Consumers don't have the time to learn every minor certification body either. But making the decision in bulk, as a society, is a lot more feasible.
Also, there isn't an infinite variety of products. The more dimensions you have to filter by, the worse your result gets per dollar. The free market can't solve everything at the same time.
> I don't want to prohibit the equivalent of "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY".
That is again not a sale. And you can have triple your $0 back if it breaks.
> I'm also talking about "crowdfunded, we made 6,473 of them, but we're not a big company". Or "here are some schematics to build a piece of hardware, I'm not making any promises about the result". Or any number of other situations in which the choice is not "write and provide a repair manual or not", it's "develop the product or not".
A small crowdfunded operation can do this more easily than a big company. They can have a designer spend two days getting the final schematics together and writing a short document. It's such a miniscule cost that it will almost never be the difference between producing and not producing, and that tiny risk is worth the benefits.
And a schematic documents itself pretty well. But if you really don't want to make any promises then maybe don't charge money for the design.
For example, most consumer ice makers on the market in the UK has the same design flaw. I know because I learned in frustration to spot the signs. The design is clearly copied by multiple manufacturers. The problem is someone cut a few cents of their BOM by leaving out a sensor for when the water tray has rotated far enough, and instead just runs the motor 'long enough'.
Except most models on the market uses a plastic tray where doing that repeatedly eventually causes the tray to crack from the stress.
Most consumers buying those products won't know. It took my second one breaking and me taking apart both that one and my third one before I realised how the design is broken. Turns out even wildly different looking models still use the same basic mechanism.
In this case it's a trivially fixable machine once you know what the problem is if you have access to a spare tray. The exact same part would fit in many mods. Except they're not available for sale. So you junk 5-10kg of serviceable metal and plastic parts because of lack of a 100g part.
That may be fine for the manufacturers, but it's hugely detrimental to society that these products are being sold when most people have no way of telling upfront that they'll fail - it takes just long enough heavy use that most reviews don't reflect the problems.
To add to what others said on it: no, you don't. You would if the manufacturers provided full specs, data sheets and CAD drawings of the internals. They don't, for obvious reasons. What's worse, the whole point of a sales copy is to confuse you about what you're getting - providing disinformation, in form of vague promises of emotional effects and feature statements so broad you could drive an aircraft carrier through. A lot of consumer laws exist to counter this dynamic.
> Open Source wouldn't exist without that
It would, if the software was also free :). This is a longer topic, but there's an argument to be made that software industry is in its sorry state precisely because it's allowed to sell software "with no warranty whatsoever".
That's not what I'm referring to. I mean that you know when buying the product that there's no warranty.
For example, the manufacturer doesn't have to waste the energy to recycle the case if the case can be reused by making the battery user-serviceable.
First, the shareholders get all the profits.
Then what?
...that's it.
/s
But I don't believe that they should be required to keep it under warranty in that case. I'm fine with a company putting a warranty seal on a device if they don't want people to touch the insides.
That's already illegal[0] in the US. However that won't stop companies from from telling 99.9% of its customers that aren't aware of the law, that their warranty is void.
[0] Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act
Who defines "useful lifetime" though? The manufacturer would then be even more compelled to make engineer planned obsolescence since no one wants to be on the hook for having to take back products 10, 20, or even 40 years from now. But keeping electronics operational for multiple decades is one of the goals of right-to-repair. With your proposal we'd have nothing but short lifetime disposable electronics. We should be focusing on solutions that create less waste, not more.
1. For the first, most people do not care about "right to repair", what they want is a more roughly a "right to have repaired for a reasonable time period related to the cost of the item in question." Ie., it's a standard Free Market pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either case if it doesn't the manufacturer should take care of it at no further direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage of buyers get screwed at odds they don't know as well as the manufacturer, unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the manufacturer knows the odds not them). It's something that should just be part of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly.
How the manufacturer "takes care of it at no further direct cost to the consumer" is an implementation question for which there are many good answers that come with different tradeoffs and costs. "Right to Repair" legislates one specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired result and then let everyone experiment and adapt.
2. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains vs owner control and it's complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair: allowing any independent 3rd party to "repair/replace" that by definition means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too. Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up, be social engineered, etc. I'm not comfortable with it being illegal for me to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device (though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or whatever could help). But that's a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some cases.
I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say, manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple's case, I would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the choice can be made (I'd also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I've yet to see a Right To Repair that covers any of this.
--
It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don't know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on that, but not in a great way.
For the "owners can choose what level of control they" I think it's more straight forward, and involves a small group of players too. Manufacturers of devices that have hardware and/or software crypto stacks should simply be required to offer a model that will let the owner load their own root keys as well and have those be equally valid for authorizing either hardware, software, or both.
If you have a bypass to that security, the anti-replacement measures won't work on you.
If you don't have a bypass, then the replacement parts won't leak any more than the old parts.
One such iconic example was Linus Tech Tip's Mac Pro. They know they broke it and tried to pay for repairs, but Apple straight up refused to repair it, saying instead they needed to buy a new one.
Similarly Apple refuses to do repairs or charge extreme amounts once a Macbook is "too old", even if it's otherwise perfectly serviceable. And they are increasingly engineering it in such a way as to specifically prevent other companies from doing the repairs that they won't.
The point of right to repair is that it acknowledges that the economic interests of a manufacturer are to sell you a replacement, not to repair/service a machine. Rather than try and force them to not maximize profits, the legislation is to let others compete in the repair business space. Similar to automotive repair.
Seriously, can you please explain how on Earth you got "me ignoring that" when I directly stated I thought it should be legally required for all manufacturers, specifically including Apple, to do repairs for a long period of time. I used 4-5 years as an example period that might be reasonable for a $500-1k phone.
>Similarly Apple refuses to do repairs or charge extreme amounts once a Macbook is "too old"
Which is why I'm saying that shouldn't be allowed. Holy crap is this place frustrating sometimes.
>And they are increasingly engineering it in such a way as to specifically prevent other companies from doing the repairs that they won't.
I don't see that. I see an inevitable result of engineering things to be as compact and efficient as possible. The higher the active to dead matter ratio, the less leeway there is for simple repair and swapping too. The problem isn't making that tradeoff, the problem is not pricing it in.
>The point of right to repair is that it acknowledges that the economic interests of a manufacturer are to sell you a replacement, not to repair/service a machine.
Lots of things in a free market are not in a manufacturers interests, like dumping toxins. If there was no such thing we'd never have to worry about externalities and such in the first place. That's why a free market is created by regulation and requires regulation for running, it's just a tool. It makes the most sense to regulate the desired result. Just pass a law saying manufacturers must offer 1 year of warranty on every $125 value of electronic goods up to a maximum of 6 years. Or make it a formula that scales down. Or a host of other ways. But match people's expectations that "this device I bought should work for a reasonable lifespan" and require them to meet that the exact same way we require them to meet standards for safety and labor and environment and on and on and on.
This is one of the issues that really blows my mind on HN. The disdain technical people here often display towards people in other fields even now is really sad.
How? You're going to pass legislation that mandates manufacturers support repairing indefinitely and at a reasonable cost? What if they go out of business, or just literally don't have a repair division in the first place? And why does the manufacturer get gifted a monopoly here?
> I don't see that. I see an inevitable result of engineering things to be as compact and efficient as possible. The higher the active to dead matter ratio, the less leeway there is for simple repair and swapping too. The problem isn't making that tradeoff, the problem is not pricing it in.
That's because you're confused as to the topic it seems. Nobody is saying that devices have to be easy to repair. They are instead saying you can't DRM replacement hardware and actively block importation of replacements, which is literally what major companies (including Apple) are doing right now. It isn't about engineering trade-offs compromising ease of repair, it's about literally engineering it to be impossible to repair (without DRM keys)
> It makes the most sense to regulate the desired result. Just pass a law saying manufacturers must offer 1 year of warranty on every $125 value of electronic goods up to a maximum of 6 years.
Well for starters because that's not actually the desired result, nor is that even a _good_ result. And you're calling other people's posts "frustrating", lol
> The disdain technical people here often display towards people in other fields even now is really sad.
Talk about unrelated & unwarranted, wow.
I never once suggested any such thing. If you are so intellectually dishonest that you take fixed terms and caps and turn it into "indefinitely" then there is no point in discussing things any farther.
We only have it good for one generation (unibodies)
How times change!
I went with one of these in the end https://www.corsair.com/ca/en/Categories/Products/Cases/Carb... because it's a box to put bits in, no fuss, no muss no RGB.
https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-ser...
edit: also it's laid out to be super silent and if you pair it with the right components it is quite.
The handles on that thing were rough.
There were little sprung pull tabs between some of the function keys, pull them back, lift the keyboard out, AirPort card slot was right there. RAM slots too.
And the removable keyboard, gosh! Those keyboards didn’t just shit the bed if a piece of dust got in them, but even if they had it was a separate part that you could swap out without replacing half the computer. Good times.
I have a 2016 MBP now. Betting the resale value when the 4-year keyboard warranty runs out is going to be about what the rest of the computer is worth for spare parts.
/s from an annoyed-with-the-touchbar-mbp-users
But nobody other than a handful of people would rather have a much heavier device in exchange for being able to replace their WiFi card or keyboard.
Borrowing some comments from MacRumors forums for price:
> If a repair, the invoices I have from top case replacement due to failed keyboards show a parts cost of $695 and a flat rate labor cost of $100, for a total of $795 plus any applicable tax. At last count, I have six such invoices from failed keyboards.
> That's what it shows on my invoice as well, thank God for AppleCare. I have only had the one, I hope I don't need it again. By chance, did you discuss replacement with that many failures? I would hope that's an option at some point.
(These are from January last year, a few months before Apple admitted they had a problem and extended the keyboard warranty to 4 years)
For a keyboard a higher failure rate than their previous models, that's not a good trade-off. People have other reasons to want a Mac laptop, maybe they don't know what they're getting into, so they're still buying it. But the longer this continues the more lasting damage it does to Apple's laptop reputation.
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
Right now people can talk themselves into buying a more expensive laptop from Apple by saying "it's a good computer and it'll last for years." What happens when you can't justify that anymore?
Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems.
I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB and upgradable to 16.
What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.
I had hoped laptops would be just as easy to tweak and build by now but it seems the world favors the apple way.
I'm going to keep building. It's _far_ less expensive. I can tweak my system to fit my needs and adjust as my needs change. And I have a solid understanding of the most used tool in my life.
Also things like PC part picker make it so much simpler than it used to be that I barely even need to think about it any more.
You could get an expresscard to USB3 card?
I'm speaking based on experience with the X230 though.
Recently the news reported of a specific authorized reseller gaining the option to repair iPhones here, and sometimes even outright replace them -- all authorized by Apple. Maybe this programme made that possible.
I am capable of blowing $20K in one night. Why should I do it?
You can't buy something and make up new service demands thereafter, or force a private company to design a product or service according to your requirements. What you may do is vote with your money and not buy what you don't like.
The fake right to repair is a nonsense idea... Can't wait for it to become "law" so that I can force Ubuntu to code latest h/w drivers for my 5 year old distro.