Support for right-to-repair laws slowly grows

How's the ads on Facebook and Instagram doing?

Disappearing from Adwords is not the same as disappearing from Google.

Give the conspiracy theories a break.

I've never been a believer in conspiracy theories, but Google just "turned off" finding independent or small IT companies from their platform in favor of big established players with huge organic results... and nobody gives a shit.

It's one thing when a government regulates a market, yet another when a company does it ...

One of the worst arguments imo is that argument about emission control circumvention. It's so disingenuous it makes me almost sick. Sure, protecting the environment is critically important - at least in my opinion - but it's certainly not this supposed mass of people circumventing emission controls that are the real criminals when it comes to environmental damage. Businesses seems to proudly, and continually, carry that torch by themselves. As long as not laws or widespread public outcry makes it impossible for them to make business, environmental damage is a absolutely ignored by all but a very few.

They do have a point on emission controls, though. Pretty much every person I know that owns a diesel car has either ripped out or plans to rip out the particulate filter. Doesn't matter that it's illegal, doesn't matter that it hurts everyone around. People just don't care.

I'm all for the right to inspect and mod electronics, hardware and software alike, but we also need alternative ways to stop socially irresponsible people.

I think there are many reasons for not supporting repair - some better some worse - but this is still the most stupid one.

yes and no. Most today's CE devices lose 3/4 of their utility when disconnected from their shared medium. People running such mediums usually require some sort of certification from the participant devices, and in case the device has been modified, a re-certification after modifications is usually required.

Even replacing a couple of diodes by a looking-close-on-paper analogue might harm performance for neighboring participants in the communication. I let you imagine what one could do with arbitrary firmware images on a fully unlocked device.

I'd be curious to see what solutions to that the infrastructure people work out when these laws are eventually adopted.

I've seen the price list once recently but I can't recall how I found it and it's evading me right now. The upgrades were basically several thousand to tens of thousands. Wish I could find where I saw this, searching gets me nothing.

The anti-circumvention provisions, to which you're referring, have caused all sorts of problems. But the bill was passed as a whole, and those provisions were part of what was traded off for the copyright safe harbor provisions. You have to look at the whole bill to see the balance that was struck.

All that said, I fully support the right to repair movement.

Because throwing it away would be ridiculously wasteful, instead I went to Home Depot, bought a steel rod of appropriate diameter for $3, cut off a piece and used that.

So I got 2 umbrellas for the price of one.

Laptop parts are commonly available on Ebay for very cheap. Laptops are generally very serviceable (especially Thinkpads, Latitudes, and other business-class ones; MS Surfaces are not however) and it's not that hard, with a small screwdriver, to take them apart and replace various circuit boards. Considering how much a new laptop costs, and how cheap something like a miniPCIe WiFi card is, it's absolutely worth it to repair.

Another important thing is that many mass-produced things fail in the same way, so you can frequently Google for your product and failure mode, and find someone talking about what the problem was and how they fixed it. YouTube is an excellent source for repair videos for many things; frequently companies selling repair parts (such as for appliances) will make these videos themselves, to help boost sales and as free advertising (which they actually get paid a little for if lots of people watch the video).

I think that's a dangerous route to follow. I completely agree with right to repair legislation, but I can also imagine a situation where a company makes ten thousand of something and sells it in a year through a retailer, and then keeps replacement parts available for a long time. Warehousing, inventory, service and delivery costs could easily make parts cost more than the original item.

I once went to a lecture given by someone from Boeing. He said that when they use an obscure electronic part in their aircraft, and it reaches End of Life, they buy all the stock they can get hold of, store it in a very secure location, and charge a lot for it. The real value of this part is way larger than the original manufacturing costs would imply. It doesn't cost as much as a plane, but if your plane cannot fly without it, then it's pretty darn close.

I love right to repair policy as much as the next man, but I don't entirely agree with this statement. Certainly from my experience in the aerospace industry where some of the hardware is 20+ years old, the company might not have produced the product for the past decade and have none of the machines/molds/designs to make the part any longer, and it's a niche item so there are no spares. In that instance, we could well be looking at paying them upwards of £20k for something like a lighting bracket which we initially bought for £500, because we're effectively paying them to buy/build the machinery, redesigned the product, and replicate said part without any of the economies of scale they had initially - and it needs to be done because otherwise instead of a £20k bracket you're looking at a full multi-million pound redesign for something as minor as an obsolete part.

You can't expect people to pay stupid money to pay for spares, but likewise you can't expect businesses to keep equipment to manufacture products from decades ago for when the spares run dry, or expect them to have the gift of foresight to predict how many spares they'll need years down the line.

I don't expect Microsoft to be able to easily identify obscure hardware issues with a design like my Surface Book 2. I do expect them to create a hardware product that doesn't break easily. Supplying the specs is a big benefit in my purchase decision. But not something I think should be required since it will undoubtedly give competitors more of an edge in their own development.

The onus is on me to purchase a product that matches my needs.

The world is a bit crazy sometimes.

In the case of modern farming, "not buying John Deere" is the equivalent of going out of business.

I don't see how it's a difficult concept that not everything needs to be repairable at the molecular level. Is a phone "less repairable" because it uses a CPU instead of discrete logic chips? Is some 1971-vintage arcade game "less repairable" because it uses discrete logic chips instead of resistors and transistors? Is some electronic item from the 60s "less repairable" because it uses resistors and transistors instead of resistors and diodes?

It's pretty simple: if a part is easily available in a factory for assembly into a final device, that's probably a repair part. For a modern smartphone, that would be the motherboard, not the CPU. (It is possible to replace cellphone CPUs however, but it's a very difficult operation requiring special equipment and training.)

For legal issues, however, I think it's pretty simple: if the manufacturer is able to repair it, then anyone should be able to offer that same service, if they can acquire the tools. No one should be held back by laws that only benefit the manufacturer.

>1. There has definitely been abuse of cryptographic locking by parties such as John Deer. I feel that places where such locking is used only to prevent third-party repairs it should be illegal.

This is much trickier than the SoC issue, but I agree with you: if the only purpose of something is to prevent 3rd-party repairs or replacement parts (as with printer ink/toner), then it should be illegal.

1. 100% agree

2. I've thought a little bit about this. I think it would be fine if the warranty can't be voided if the consumer can show in court that there's a preponderance of evidence that the issue they're having is unrelated to the third-party repair. This might mean in practice warranties hard to enforce if you've gone in for third-party repair, but I feel like usually it's old devices that you're fixing with third-parties anyway. It's also possible there's a perverse incentive to make components very sensitive to the case being opened or something, but it seems unlikely that that's possible without making the device fragile overall in situations where it would still be covered by warranty, which would cost the manufacturer money and also make the device less popular in the first place.

Another thing I was thinking, either instead of or supplemental to such a policy, is to require manufacturers of a certain size to have an open certification program that third-party repair shops can participate in, and to honor warrantees if repair has only been done by certified shops. This could be abused if the manufacturer makes the certification program really really shitty so no one does it, and if repairs by the manufacturer themselves is a huge revenue stream then that would almost certainly what would happen; but someone like Apple makes most their money selling new devices (I assume), so why risk the fines from regulators and the bad PR? And so while Apple won't have much incentive to make it easy to get certified, the fact that they have to honor warrantees of devices repaired by certified shops means they'll at least be incentivized to teach the certified shops not to break the devices.

3. I'm skeptical of the importance of this. The security should be in the entropy of my fingerprint, not the right fingerprint scanner being used, no? Like how locking down which keyboard are allowed to be connected to your laptop is not important to securing the password lock?

Spyware on the touch ID sensor is worrisome, but no more than spyware on any of the other input sensors, and is there really anything the manufacturer can do, technically rather than legally, about someone who physical accesses to your device and then hands it back to you to put your fingerprint and password back into?

4. This seems to me like a lack of information problem and an incentives structure problem. In theory, if everyone had total information and knew which of the alternatives lasted the longest and therefore had the lowest total-cost-of-owernship, and some kind of financial engineering let them buy the product on lease or something so the upfront cost could be competitive with the cheaper, shorter-lived alternatives, then everyone would do that, right?

The main theoretical problem here is designing the "lease" to incentivize the consumer to take good care of the product, without being predatory; if we had that, we wouldn't even need total information because it could be viable for the vendor to provide the product on lease or something with a low upfront cost.

Obviously there's a lot of other practical problems like, people who buy new smartphones usually don't want it to last 10 years, they want the latest and greatest cutting edge device; but that seems like it could maybe be solved by saying, you pay $200 now and give us the phone back in 2 years; if you don't give it back then, in 2 years we charge you another $400 (or something?); and then reselling the refurbished phone?

There's also the fact that lots of people who buy iPhones specifically like it in part for the status symbol, so they're not looking for the lowest upfront cost. But the idea that the right pricing structure should theoretically let a company that makes a long-lasting, repairable device with a low total-cost-of-ownership be competitive seems like it should be possible, no?