-- Someone who likes repairability as much as the next guy.
Do you mind connecting the dots on this? Apparently you think it's self evident why it would have those effects on companies, but it's not, at least to me.
Big companies can afford it, start ups can’t. The alternative for an incumbent is less profit and a higher barrier to entry for ne competitors. The alternative for the start up is not existing
As a small company/startup, right now, you design, make, and sell a product. It may just be you or a small team. The design of your product may be complicated, but the usability from the user perspective may be simple AND FOOLPROOF. There are no other considerations generally other than the product works, and people like it and my margins are good.
With more regulation, like requiring the right to repair, the task above just became a lot more difficult. You now have to design a product that can be repairable, which can be more expensive from your design/production side. You have to make sure there is documentation to go with that for consumers to repair every aspect of your product, an incredible amount of time. And then you have to have a way to "rescue" a user if they really screw up the product and "brick" in in a sense. This will add to the total cost and the time it takes to go to market and/or iterate on the product. Small companies in many ways, can't afford this. not to mention being in compliance of the regulations and the additional cost/time that will take.
On the other hand, a larger company will have no issue complying with these regulations as far as documentation, user support, return and fix issues, etc. Making sure consumers have the tools available to "repair" the products as well. Because larger companies have economies of scale, both with supplies, manufacturing, and labor costs, it is much less of a burden for them than a small company barely trying to survive.
I see the largest difference this will make is that larger companies won't put extra time and money into locking down devices so they can't be repaired. For example, locked down diagnostic modes, and special hardware to open devices.
> And then you have to have a way to "rescue" a user if they really screw up the product and "brick" in in a sense.
Are you sure? There has to be a sane cut-off for when a device is broken and when it's repairable. A company will not be forced to provide directions on how to fix my device if I've decided to use it in a "will it blend" demonstration, so statements like this are FUD without us getting a good grasp of the details of when and what a company will actually need to comply with this.
No, you don't. Pretty much the only thing you have to do is provide the same information that you provide to your authorized repair centers. If you don't repair a product, and therefore you don't have a service manual or diagnostic codes, you don't need to now create them to satisfy the law.
This is about having things like "secret" diagnostic codes that require you to go to a dealer to pull off.
If your workflow is "move fast and break things" or "just ship it, we won't have to support it in a year anyway" then, yeah, this will be a pain in the ass.
Apple doesn't repair logic boards, if you have a bad backlight controller on your MacBook Pro and it's out of warranty you can expect to pay $700+ for a logic board replacement - repair shops can replace the backlight controller for a much more reasonable fee.
Right now Apple products are the most popular market for these 3rd party repair shops exactly because Apple charges so damned much for out-of-warranty repairs, and they work in a legal gray area because Apple won't give out board schematics or sell replacement components. Without schematics troubleshooting issues ranges from anywhere to a pain to impossible, without parts anything that can't be readily sourced from a manufacturer (thankfully they use bog-standard Texas Instrument controllers for the LCD backlight that you can buy reels of, but other components like the SMC, GPU, etc. you are pulling off boards that were dumped from the factory or if you can somehow find "new" ones the chances that they are DOA is dubious since they're often factory rejects).
Nobody wants to make life more difficult for companies designing their products, the Right to Repair crowd just wants to be able to fix their own devices provided they have the skills to do so.
Components? Sure, but you bake that into the cost you sell them at. You're already buying them in massive quantities, so let repair shops order some from you - nobody is going to complain about having to pay x% over cost of materials to cover your expenses.
Not suing people for repairing or tinkering with your hardware is also a "cost" I suppose if you want to phrase it that way, because of the lost revenue you would have gotten from locking down the market and only providing overpriced replacements yourself. It's a cost in the same way that a law against stealing purses imposes a "non-zero cost" on all of us, since we don't have that potential source of revenue available to us anymore...
As an aside.. AFAIK, nobody ever been capable of producing regulations and laws that don't have unintended consequences, or even have guaranteed results. Working off of probabilities, a right to repair law makes sense to me. Maybe it doesn't to you, but your argument is purely your own speculation, which is valuable, but its hard to argue against.
Whenever the largest corporate entities are talking about how bad something is for "small businesses", it really means it is bad for them.
Yeah. "Small business" and "family farm" are nice words for the big guys to hide behind.
No small business can afford to just eat that cost so it's either going to be paid in risk or out of the productivity of existing staff.