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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

Problem is that when your M1 cpu goes bad, you cannot buy the chip from Apple to replace it (tools to do that are fairly inexpensive now and within hobbyist reach). Something like this should be regulated - companies should be required to provide spare parts for x period of time after product phase out. Companies should be forbidden from telling suppliers to not sell spare parts to 3rd parties. We need regulation for the right to repair.

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Sure, but why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it, having the government mandate and tell you what's good for you helps no one in the long run.

The big companies have no real problem complying with the regulations, it's quite clear that consumers don't actually give a damn. All you've now succeeded in doing is making sure any startup has a tonne of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through to get it right.

What you need to do is identify where a transaction has not been made between two parties for fair recompense. One potential area is to say that without adequate repair cover you are now forced to dispose of your electronics and pay for the safety disposal so that it does not pollute the environment for everyone else. Then a consumer might see the need for repair rights and make an informed value decision.

Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical.

As an anecdotal example; circa 2011 the australian goverment brought in legislation to make portable A/C units more efficient. Great, right? Wrong, the government in it's infinite ineptitude managed to word so that it only effected dual vent portable A/C units and left single vent A/C units unaffected. Instead of making dual vents more energy efficient the companies pulled all dual vents from the market and now you can only get single vents which are woefully inefficient. This is not the companies faults, they did exactly what you would expect them to do. The government fixed the legislation 11 months ago but unfortunately we can still not get dual vent A/C at all in Australia.

Because eventually all other values besides profit for 5 companies will be sacrificed if you go down that road.

Why do consumers need the government to enforce child labor laws? FDA regulation? OSHA? These lessons are written in blood.

Yes, you might need to work on the regulation in order to get it just right but "who cares, whatever" is not acceptable unless we want to live in an effectively-communist world with a few vertically-integrated corporations setting all the rules.

It would be great if every conversation about regulation on HN wasn't dominated by posts re-litigating if the concept of regulations should exist in the first place.

Agree with everything you said except for the fact that you seem to be using "communist" to mean "authoritarian/fascist."

Are you saying that being able to repair something independently for a consumer doesn't have value? If free market cannot solve the problem, then regulation is needed. You can see that market is moving towards non repairable single use devices or that they can be only repaired at a extortionate price by authorised repair shops. If there is no regulation, all companies will be moving into that direction chasing that extra profit and consumer will not be able to vote with their wallet if everyone does it. Your example is comparing apples to oranges. I am not saying that regulation should influence product design, but rather the producers should give access to spare parts and schematics. I agree that regulation like for A/C example isn't great.

He's saying that when consumers routinely buy products that need to be serviced by first parties, over devices that can be opened and repaired by the end user, the market is voicing its opinion on whether reparability has value to them.

I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head.

Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in?

It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up.

I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".

how about

$vendor shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to anybody

I think you’re misconstruing his points by bundling it with the overused interrogative of “are you saying...”, he is saying it has value if the people so decide. A government regulation forcing people to do something they already aren’t doing leads to the sort of didactic nonsense like running government sponsored commercials every 20 minutes telling you to wash your hands and use hot water to combat covid.

> Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical.

Hmmm... Ok... I think get it now! Regulations are always bad and never good. Wow, it's so simple. Thank you for this valuable and insightful information.

> why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it,

I would argue that a lot of consumers _do_ value it, but they don't know enough to ask about that up front.

Most people want to buy a thing, then use that thing, and when it breaks they reasonably assume that they should be able to get it fixed if they'd like. Cars work this way, appliances work this way, etc.

I think the reason why people don't ask for this up front is that

(1) most people would assume they have the right to repair (and thus don't think to ask) and/or

(2) life is short, and we shouldn't need an advanced degree specializing in a particular category of products in order to know all the ins and outs of buying one :)

> Sure, but why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it, having the government mandate and tell you what's good for you helps no one in the long run.

I don't think it's that simple at all. There are lots of small reasons people right now act the way they do which in the aggregate makes it look as though they don't value repairability. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer a world where repair was easy and cheap. It also doesn't mean that a world where repairs are easy and cheap isn't preferable to one where it isn't, in a bigger perspective (environmental, for one).

A regulation to this effect has already been voted for in EU parliament just last week [1].

[1]: https://repair.eu/

fwiw not quite but we are on the right track

"The vote means that the European Commission now has the full support of the Parliament in moving forward with the development of laws [...]"

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