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Comment by subaquamille | Hacker News Reader

While following the same goal, France's trying a different approach: a repair score [1] that will be stamped on products:

Concretely, a grade out of 10 will be added to the labels of washing machines, laptops, smartphones, TVs and lawn mowers. This score will be calculated based on criteria such as: ease of disassembly, price and availability of spare parts and access to repair information.

No new market rule but a more informed consumer. I thought you guys would like this "free-market makes-best-decisions" gov lobbying.

Hope it won't end as the precedent: we got a "healthy-score" on most food products -which is great- but the cheese lobby put much effort to gets special rules as salt and fat would give them an awful grade [2]

1: https://repair.eu/fr/news/french-repairability-index-what-to...

2: https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/content/download/150263/f...

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You're assuming the average consumer thinks far enough ahead to care about a repairability score. The average American has become conditioned to their electronic devices being disposable. Most wouldn't even know where to go if they did have something repairable if the original manufacturer won't fix it.

We absolutely need BOTH to bring back small electronics repair shops (yes I know you can still find them but they're exceedingly rare compared to 30 years ago).

It's a shame this trade is dying. Electronic repairs is such a fun job, but most new equipment is designed as disposable.

Maybe they don't care about repairability that much, but I DO think people compare labels and specs and other things to death when shopping. (but yeah, the pricetag might rule)

Cost of quality labor in the US where I live is more than $100 per hour. Probably even more for specialized electronics requiring academic knowledge.

It doesn’t behoove me to care about repairing any electronic worth less than $5k probably. Any decent brand lasts so long and the ratio of probability of failure to cost to replace is so low that it’s just not worth it.

When something breaks, the decision is to spend $x to fix versus $x+$y to buy new. I’m not buying electronics to last more than 10 years, the protocols and everything are going to change anyway. I might as well buy new and get an update rather than fix old and be stuck with old tech.

High value purchases on the other hand make sense, since a few thousand dollar fix for a $30k to $50k car might be worth it compared to buying another $30k to $50k car.

Consider the farmer with a combine or 4 wheel drive tractor at $250K..$350K per unit.

And the crops need to come off this week or we loose $2.5M but the company says ship it to Kansas city for repair so we can upload the new software...

Yes, that clearly needs to be addressed.

What if right to repair lowers the barrier to entry so much that low cost labor can do the repair instead?

Yeah I know it is overused but it is not difficult to imagine a "Uber for repairs".

My assumption would be if manufacturers are forced into making things more repairable, it would by virtue make them easier to recycle.

When things are glued together, you generally have to break them apart, which contaminates different types of materials making recycling significantly more difficult.

Maybe I'm just being too optimistic but I don't know how human society continues down the path of pulling raw materials out of the ground, turning it into a "device" which is then just thrown away. There is a finite amount of material on the planet, and most of the things we're throwing away end up quite toxic when buried indefinitely. I won't have to worry about it, or my grandchildren, or maybe even 5 generations from now, but it's a question of when, not if.

That calculation is definitely an important consideration but "reparability" does not have to mean "keep an outdated machine running indefinitely".

Reparability includes design that enables troubleshooting.

For example: Run the "$x to fix versus $x+$y" on a non-functional fridge. A fridge designed for repair might have a thumb-screw panel for access to the logic board with clearly labeled test pads for fuse continuity. This (or other, similar repair-friendly designs) would allow you to more easily determine the value of "x" and more accurately assess whether "x" is small enough to make repair the more viable option.

I fear that that will be "Californiaed" like with the prop 65 label. The intention was to inform the consumer if a product was dangerous, but due to California being California, that label is on basically every product and that label has now lost its meaning.

I think a repairability label is less likely to get bucketed into yes or no. A score might be manipulated or skewed.

That said, something like a nutrition or privacy label might be a better fit. For example, if something has a battery, can it be replaced by the user or even replaced at all.

The equivalent for the california labels of "this might give you cancer" would be something like "you might be able to replace the battery"

At least I would hope the french scores / standards would be objective enough to be useful.

if california had a "cancer scale" or something it would be more useful than it is today. Maybe that lead paint is "grade a cancer" but your bed sheets are only a "grade d cancer" i dunno.

It seems much easier to demonstrate repariability over "we are 100% sure that nothing in this product causes cancer or increases its risk".

I view this as more similar to energystar in the us, where I can see efficiency of appliances. Or mandatory fuel economy labeling.

The key to prevent that is to make it something like the IoT label [1] that has been proposed for several years

That was more around security of the devices, but I would like to see a label that covered 4 parameters

1. Security

2. Repariblity

3. Openness / Cloud Dependency / etc

4. Privacy

[1]https://www.cylab.cmu.edu/news/2020/05/27-iot-labels-consume...

>No new market rule but a more informed consumer. I thought you guys would like this "free-market makes-best-decisions" gov lobbying.

I love "give the consumer the tools to make their own decision" solution.

The little bit of .gov lobbying that inevitably sneaks in anyway will create an opening for savvy consumers to save money by buying things that punch above their score (we already have this kind of thing for appliance energy ratings) or by researching scores and figuring out that something is actually highly repairable if you don't mind buying the service literature off some sketchy site you had to use Google Translate on.

The only problem is, this only works if there's enough competition for consumers to have a real choice. If Apple and the 4 (?) largest Android manufacturers all decide they're content with a repairability score of 2, there isn't a whole lot consumers could do, regardless of whether they'd like more repairable devices.

I like the new phones, they pack more tech/power/screen into a nicer package every year. Remember when phones weren't water proof?

Yeah because the majority today isn't.

That state is not stable (in game theory sense) though.

At least on Android there's no real vendor lock-in so defecting from "unrepairable" phones will let you eat some portion of competition sales.

And since that doesn’t happen, it means the economics of a repairable phone don’t make any sense.

Another (unlikely, but possible) market exploit is that a large enough supplier could intentionally encourage the existence of lower-quality manufacturers, allowing them to gain trust from consumers who wish to buy (what they believe should be) quality, durable products.

Considering Apple got a very good score for their newest laptop, this is index is broken my design.

EDIT: by instead of my

> Considering Apple got a very good score for their newest laptop…

Just curious, from who?

iFixIt scored the current MacBook Pro design a "1", and the current MacBook Air design a "3".

The French repair score system mentioned by OP gave the latest Macbook 16" a repair-ability score of 7/10. This unfortunately makes the French approach pretty much useless.

Do you have a source? This could be a mistake. I hope it is a mistake

As others commenters point you as a source, we'd love to know your original source ? The ones I found seems to refer to rumors.

Any scoring system will be aggressively manipulated by billion-dollar corporations, so I'm not sure how effective it will be in the long run. Apparently Apple's laptops already score well, which is a point against the system.

> Concretely, a grade out of 10 will be added to the labels of washing machines, laptops, smartphones, TVs and lawn mowers. This score will be calculated based on criteria such as: ease of disassembly, price and availability of spare parts and access to repair information.

The problem I foresee with this is that the label can only capture information accurate at the time of purchase. By the time you need to repair, probably a few years down the line, and possibly with a different owner, how accurate would that information be? How useful is it to consumers in this case?

Unfortunately this is one of those vanity projects, considering that Apple got a very good repairability score. It's likely a mean to get extra money under the table for assessing the score that could be then used in marketing. I am not saying this is actually happening, but in my opinion it looks like designed for this purpose and it has nothing to do with helping consumers.

Who exactly makes these review score?

I think food grades would be tricky. Just about anything in moderation can be healthy.

If moderation is key then grade them based on how much you can eat without side effects. Bad food would get a low score because it is easy to overeat.

That is highly dependent on the individual (lifestyle, health conditions, family history, etc).

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