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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

> "But from where on Earth do you derive the right to repair your tablet easily and without any specialized tools from this?"

Suppose you have passed your right to repair. I can design a device so that it takes unreasonable effort and eqipment to repair it. Makes it more expensive to repair than to buy a new one. You would have achieved nothing.

This has already happened - have a Samsung A50 with a broken screen, and you can buy a new screen for £40. However the phone is basically a glue sandwitch, and it costs the same to repair and to buy a new one.

On another note, Microsoft Surface laptop is unrepairable - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...

If you pass right to repair without any provisions for ease of repair, it will be a toothless, useless tragedy of a law.

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> Suppose you have passed your right to repair. I can design a device so that it takes unreasonable effort and eqipment to repair it. Makes it more expensive to repair than to buy a new one. You would have achieved nothing.

No-one is going to buy a car or tractor that can't be repaired at all. And it'll hit pretty hard if people realise even apple can't replace their screen and they'll need to buy a new thousand-dollar device every time the screen breaks. Apple and John Deere have a huge incentive to make devices repairable, they just want to monopolize that repair business. That's the problem here.

Oh boy, do you know that device manufacturers are actually refusing to repair plenty of devices - I am not talking about warranty shenanigans, but refusing to repair for any money at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE

I have taken my A50 to Samsung, and they are not fixing it no matter how much I pay them. On my Withings smartwatch the glass cracked, and was considered under warranty. They explicitly told me it is unrepairable, and replaced the watch with a new one! How the Fk are they unable to replace glass on a watch?

Just about everything has already became either unrepairable, or uneconomic to repair, from fridges to TVs to phones to smartwatches. The are a few exception like vehicles or large equipment, but the events so far indicate that people will buy unrepairable equipment because they have already done so in many industries. Consumers generally have no way to know how repairable something is, especially for a new product.

Lastly, a device does not have to be completely unrepairable - it could require absurdly specialised and expensive equipment, that only the OEM will ever afford, so you will be back at the monopoly problem.

The problem with the imac pro repair is not that apple couldn't repair it, they're perfectly capable of doing so, it's that they refused to. Under right to repair Linus would have been able to purchase replacement parts and either repair it himself or get it repaired by someone professionally. You've given a perfect example of a case where right to repair is absolutely necessary.

There's plenty of devices that are still (with some effort) repairable. And there's plenty of consumers who take repairability into account when purchasing, like me and probably yourself after your experience with the A50. Also it's difficult, but the A50 is certainly repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Samsung_Galaxy_A50

I worked delivery in the past at a big box home improvement store. Samsung and LG fridges, if anything happens (such as the ice maker stops working), in some cases the otherwise perfectly working fridge is just thrown out and a new one is shipped. Somehow it costs less that way, I was told.

I had a slightly different issue. I had a Samsung Smart Watch (Samsung Gear Live) the charger was a cheap custom POGO pin cradle. After a month of use the cradle assembly cracked. I contacted Samsung for a warranty repair and they were going to charge over $50 to replace. I decided not to get it replaced and sold the device on eBay.

Couldn't they just use a standard USB micro interface or Qi standard charger?

I have not purchased a Samsung device since.

I guess usb might have compromised water proofing but certainly a qi charger interface makes a lot of sense.

>The are a few exception like vehicles or large equipment, but the events so far indicate that people will buy unrepairable equipment because they have already done so in many industries. Consumers generally have no way to know how repairable something is, especially for a new product.

But this is only because people have no choice but to buy unrepairable fridges and phones. If people could buy repairable ones then that would factor into brand reputation and people would buy the fridge or phone that's got 3% lesser specs for the same price for the peace of mind that being able to repair it in the future brings.

To play devils advocate: It might just not have been possible. The only way to "repair" many devices today is put a whole new PCB in Perhaps ypur A50 was no longer stocked or made. Does your "pay any price" include 100k%USD to spin up a whe production line and its supply chain to make 1 replacement PCB for you?

> No-one is going to buy a car or tractor that can't be repaired at all.

I respectfully disagree, most buyers don't consider repairability. Things just need to last a reasonable time given their initial cost and expectation for level of duty.

If a car could be made that was economically reliable for a 7 year warranty period plus another 3 years (10 years in total) without maintenance, yet be totally unrepairable at the end of its life, would consumers care? Not if it was cheap and had the right amount of cup holders.

I just had a Bosch electric hedger fail on me. I opened it up and discovered the bearings had been sitting in slots moulded into the plastic shell; one bearing had seized and spun causing the plastic to wear/break/melt making the unit unrepairable. I was surprised, since it was a Bosch, and expected better. I then realised I bought it over 15 years ago, and it had worked flawlessly without maintenance of any kind. Therefore the engineering was superb and totally fit for purpose.

UPDATE: I will add that farm tractors are different. These are capital equipment and have an economic life that could span decades.

> I respectfully disagree, most buyers don't consider repairability.

That is... incomplete. A buyer's lack of conscious consideration of something is not the same thing as placing no value on it. They simply assume it is present and not substantially different than the norm.

> Therefore the engineering was superb and totally fit for purpose.

I disagree. Now your tool is polluting somewhere in a landfill. With superb engineering this tool would have been repaired and be of use.

My late grandmother bought a fridge in the sixties. She kept it all her life (she passed away 5 years ago), the thing never failed and was as much cold as a new one. Afaik it was bought by someone that thought it looked cool and is probably still working right now.

And was probably so inefficient it caused far more damage than replacing it with the latest model every 10 years

End of life is important to cars. Many cars are leased, calculation of the resale value at the end of the lease is important to the price you pay. Then the next buyer expects to have some value in the now 7-10 year old car to apply to the next one. That is only possible because it is repairable for the most part.

Of course computers are cheaper, nobody really expects a computer to last more than 5 years, so repair isn't nearly as important.

I'm still using a late `09 Mac Mini I bought new, so over 10 years old now and I still have no imperative reason to replace it. I've replace the HD and maxed out the RAM about six years ago and it's still all I need to get my work done. And a newer "faster" PC won't improve my productivity. I write code and use BBEdit to do that.

Back in the 80s and 90s the tech was changing so fast I had to purchase a new Mac every couple years to run the software I needed, but I've not done that for over 10 years now and I don't see any good reason at all why a new PC can't or shouldn't last ten years for the average user.

Aside from gaming and video editing, neither of which I do much of, there's really no compelling reason for me to want a new Mac.

> And it'll hit pretty hard if people realise even apple can't replace their screen and they'll need to buy a new thousand-dollar device every time the screen breaks.

That’s almost word for words what an Apple Genius employee told me the other day when I wanted to repair an iPad. He told me very clearly that Apple doesn’t repair and only replace iOS devices, and I would lose any data that isn’t backed up.

> On another note, Microsoft Surface laptop is unrepairable - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2....

Not just the laptop. The entire surface line is a nightmare to try to work on. Recently, I was doing a "simple" repair on a Surface Keyboard -- just trying to flatten out some dents from the inside, so the power port would fit in right.

It took 4+ hours -- to get it open. After that, it took another 15-20 min to remove the mobo on the inside, 30 to try to fix the dents, 15-20 to put the mobo back in, and another 10-20 to get the back on again.

All for a repair which may or may not actually work, because MS doesn't sell parts.

iFixit gave the latest Surface a fairly decent reparability rating. I was surprised to see how much more improved the teardown was compared to the mess of the earlier versions.

Interesting. I'll have to check that out.

Thanks for letting me know.

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