It's your device, you should be able to repair it

Or maybe unlocking the bootloader?

>Now the author has shifted "right to repair" to mean mandatory device support and design requirements around repair-ability.

It's part of the conversation on planned obsolescence but you're right that's not strictly part of right to repair.

But these companies have been crowing about sustainability for a while now for PR purposes - now they may be legislated to actually provide sustainability in terms of product support and repairability.

HN submissions are supposed to be "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", but we've seen dozens of right-to-repair articles by now, and this doesn't bring anything substantially new to the table (unlike the top previous submissions https://hn.algolia.com/?q=right+to+repair).

There are weak versions of the right to repair that are only suited to enable third-party repair shops, e.g. by making schematics and parts available to "licensed professionals". But that is not what is generally desirable.

I agree that the article fails to make this clear.

Don't hide schematics, don't lock bootloaders, don't use NDAs to prevent sharing driver code, don't prevent component manufacturers from selling to third parties.

Instead of arguing on the exact definition of right to repair, we should all fight for the right to truly OWN our devices, where OWN := we have the legal right to do anything we want with the hardware AND with the software (because you can't really distinguish the two, now that all CPUs come with embedded TPMs running parallel closed OSes with ring -inf permissions).

How does this work with physical products such as cars? Is there a statute of limitations for automobile recalls?

Take that legacy software. For many technologies the software is not distinguishable from the hardware to the end user, yet faulty software could present a security risk or even pose physical danger. At the same time, vendors are dropping support for software at an accelerated rate while making it impossible to use third party fixes or replacements. This is not about having the latest features or being able to run the latest apps. It is about having the device being an asset rather than a liability.

This is really the same thing, i.e. comprehensive hardware documentation. If the hardware is well-documented then third parties can use the documentation to create hardware drivers and continue to support e.g. Android/Linux on that hardware even after the OEM stops providing supported software.

This is true even of iPhones; there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to port Android or any other OS to iPhone hardware given adequate hardware documentation. People are attempting to port Linux to M1 Macbooks even without adequate hardware documentation, though of course the lack of documentation is a severe impediment and the efforts consequently have yet to produce a usable port.

They constantly think it’s always about the customer, it isn’t. The products are almost always optimized for costs, nothing else.

If a manufacturer uses glue instead screws, they don’t do that to make it harder to repair. They prefer glue because it’s cheaper. The same applies for cheap components over high quality ones.

Want to increase the possibility of getting a durable and repairable product? Well, prepare to spend ten times as much.

Designing for repairability has costs both monetary and functional. Why should everyone have to pay these costs on the say-so of a few people whose main claim to legitimate authority is their social media follower count?

I believe this push for repairability is bad and that it will lead to bad outcomes for consumers. The market ought to be what tells us what product features are really important.

Take the essential ph-1 as an example. Now that the company is gone, if a device bricks during an update, that's it. Having the firehose file would make it possible to unblock it, but without it, a bricked phone is just spare parts (less the main board).

I'm sure mandatory first-party device support is better for the manufacturer than giving people the idea they should be able to control what software runs on their device. I wonder if that stance is a lack of imagination on the author's part or something more deliberate.

As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc.

We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction.

To move the overton window even a little bit towards where it was before, the demands have to be disproportionate. I say those demands are still reasonable. We should demand that any device and any component in any device be second source-able (just like AMD was a second source for early x86 chips). And for that matter since I am from Europe, any component should be second source-able from Europe. If IP transfers worked for China, they should work elsewhere.

(1) https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1012672/Pioneer-C-5600dfv....

Well, I would say it includes publishing the software interface of your hardware, and not making it impossible to replace the software. Those are the main roadblock on updating old tablets and phones.

I do really read those lines as fighting closed boot loaders, DRM on real goods, dependencies on the manufacturer's servers, and all kinds of purposeful hindrances that are so popular between the large industries nowadays.

I would really not include the "design for repairability" and software upgrades into the idea. But one does not need to include those to agree with the article.

Of course many would try to block that as it cuts into their planned obsolescence roadmaps...

Maybe people don’t care that much after all.

You're argument is with the author, and his interpretation, not with "right to repair". What "right to repair" is or isn't , is not decided by the author of this article. There are various organizations that are loosely related with a few shared ideals.

>We must very carefully define our terms here, because requiring someone else to provide on one's behalf presumes a right to the product of their labor.

Not really. Anyone can propose anything in an article, and they must be free to do so. Its upto us as a collective to think over ideas and proposals and then push for policy proposals that align.

Ultimately the terms will be defined in legislation, not on bbc.com

Any right to repair law that doesn't also include provisions to ensure you can run your own code on the device is hobbled. How "repairable" is a device that is cloud based but they disabled the cloud service?

I don't care that manufacturers support the software beyond what they've contractually signed up for, but I do care that I'm not left holding a brick afterwards by design. As long as the capability exists to put other firmware that exists on the device, or write my own, I'm protected from that, at least in the general case. If nobody has provided that firmware and I can't do it myself, that's still a situation I think it many times better than the alternative.

So moto, samsung, et all would be obligated to provided fixes for 5 years after they sold the last unit. If an oem can't meet that obligation just forbid their import.

We presume a right to the product of other people's labor for the privilege of doing business here all the time. See every product in existence.

I have no desire for any developer to have to do more work after the date of purchase to "fix" or "support" software. What I want is all the work to be done before selling the device. Quality control. Is this really too much to ask. I am not interested in purchasing what are effectively "works-in-progress".

If your IBM PC dies, you can definitely create a functionally exact clone based on publicly available information, and in fact many have done so, either virtually or physically.

IMHO if the manufacturer ceases to provide support, then it must open up the documentation and design, or allow all reverse-engineering of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvVafMi0l68

This is why the fund raiser, the public needs lobbyists to represent them against the corporate lobbyists.

Its also bad that these companies are funding/donating to politicians to go against the publics interest.

Not sure about this one: the continued support for older versions - yes, but the latest? Nobody can give you such promise (unless they explicitly do, for one reason or another).

Apple went as far as to prevent genuine, that is, salvaged parts, from legitimately bought phones, from being used to replace camera units [2,3,4], or lock phones with replaced batteries.

[1] https://youtu.be/w4eHZCuHob8?t=175 Louis talks about part availability

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/30/21542242/apple-iphone-12...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnG3h3Jewq4

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez3f1HgOa1o

You can upgrade a fairphone 3 to a fairphone 3+ yourself just by buying the updated components. It's pretty cool! But it isn't cheap.

https://shop.fairphone.com/en/

Jitterbug makes the phone to sell their service, so it's not directly comparable (it does demonstrate that the devices aren't that expensive to produce).

With the right marketing, this could be very successful.

"A repairable phone built to last," or some other creative slogan and marketing campaign centered around how wasteful and expensive other phones built around planned obsolescence are.

Caring about the ecosystem, recycling, and reuse is mainstream now (witness the BBC right-to-repair article itself, published on a mainstream news platform), so a company showing that it's sensitive to these concerns should do well.

In my experience it's the annual release cycle of Android coupled with the lack of OS updates by manufacturers which contributes to e-waste, closely followed by the lack of battery replaceability. My first smartphone (OnePlus One - 2014) still has the specs to be a perfectly usable phone, at least until 5G is widespread and 4G networks are decommissioned.

[0] https://www.fairphone.com/en/

This is why projects like the Pinephone and lebrem5 use such weird SoCs. Open source drivers are absolutely the only way to know that the phone manufacturer will even have the ability to maintain up to date software.

I wonder if the reason is really just that these manufacturers are all blindly following Apple's lead? To an outside observer, a lot of Android manufacturer's seem to be really stupid, however the reality might be different from their point of view. I don't know, but it's frustrating to see how little of a shit all Android phone manufacturers give. It's why I can't feel sorry when I hear that a company like LG or HTC are shutting down their smartphone division; it's their own damn fault.

Software and hardware support (from the manufacturer) are tied closely together, and the industry makes it really hard to achieve this.

Sure smartphones are quite thin these days, but there are vanishingly few people that want a phone that's 2.96cm+ thick.

Oh it is much worse that this. These 'Some' companies actively block repair shops from purchasing spare parts so they can repair end-users' devices.

The way I see it, we either tear up all IP laws to allow for drastically lower costs of entry and hope that solves the problem (and other ones too), or we pass laws requiring some minimum standard of repairability. Or maybe a little bit of both (aggressive unbundling laws?).

If we don’t create laws, at some point down the road we will go from “not much recourse” to literally none.

What if Apple created a phone with no ports that was filled with epoxy as the last step in assembly? What if powering it on at all meant logging in to your apple account?

They could in every meaningful way take that device away from you at the run of a single function.

If other industries can do it why can't we?

It's always bizarre to me to see regular people arguing against right to repair in online discussions. Literally the only parties who benefit from planned obsolescence is device manufacturers, and it happens at the customer's expense 100% of the time. Either these people are dumb, or (most likely) they don't actually understand what "right to repair" means, or at the very least are confused about it.

Replacing the frayed cable on a good pair of headphones, usb cable on a functning mouse or even broken display as part of a laptop.

I recently decided to take the more challenge task of repairing a swelling battery in a phone. I didn't have to worry about the back glass as it was already swollen such that the glass had cracked. It was surprisingly easy to take apart, remove the screws and little legos[0] get to the battery. Closing it up was extremely rewarding, as if I'd completed some hard surgery and was stitching just up the patient.

[0]: https://youtu.be/ZRDLw5ortyU

https://www.guns.com/news/2016/11/18/trove-of-internal-docum...

You know what's bad for human "safety"? Gratuitously burning through resources and causing pollution by making phones out of all sorts of rare materials and hucking them out.

These changes almost never happen. Whatever change you put the first time is likely the only change that will happen. Starting off with a compromise for fear of 'getting it wrong' is the easiest way to make sure you get it wrong.

Right to repair is a complex endeavour. There will be no simple solutions.

I used to make some money as a kid by buying batches of broken Iphone 3G/3GS's on ebay, replacing parts on them, and then re-selling them myself. Practically any part of that device could be replaced in less than 30 minutes with $15 worth of tools.

I have a 2012MBP and a 2014MBP that I gave to my family that are still serving their purposes after a few quick(and cheap) battery, RAM and HDD replacements over the years.

I don't expect my 2019 MBP to last more than 5 years without costing me at least several hundred dollars more when I inevitably have to bring it to the Apple store for them to fix something that very much used to be user-fixable in a matter of minutes.

However there could easily be regulation of labeling that could help.

E.g. mandate display of statistical years of working life, and number of years of software support.

At least this way customers would be able to make a choice.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft love to claim they are green because they put money into recycling old hardware. Except their business model for hardware revolves entirely around Increasing consumption and not reducing it.

Its cheaper and better for the environment to maintain electronics than it is to replace them every few years and recycle them. Recycling is far from 100%, especially with electronics. Its not like steel or aluminum where you can just toss scrap into a crucible and get pure ingots on the other end ready to be worked into something useful.

A lot of dissent seems to be around forced repairability.

Sure, if a component in a CPU failed there shouldn't be any deliberate effort by the manufacturer to restrict it's replacement/repair (especially by entirely artificial means).

> Does that mean the manufacturer must design and manufacture the CPU in a way for you to be able to repair it?

That's unenforceable, but it is preferable for environmental reasons that manufacturers consider the reapairability of their products where possible.

What isn't acceptable is deliberately ensuring parts aren't available or are designed explicitly not to work with compatible or identical replacements.

>Where does one draw the line as things get more and more complex?

If something is actually unrepairable it shouldn't be too much of a burden on manufacturers because there would be no interest in purchasing replacement components for something that is actually irreparable.

>Sadly, we don't live a horse and buggy world anymore where you could just get a new horse or fix a wheel if it stopped working.

Bad faith argument.

Even so, the main argument in right to repair isn't "Oh my gosh everything is so hard and modern nobody can do anything if only we were still repairing something easy like wagons".

The argument is that we should have the right for repairs to occur without unreasonable impediments.

Also, there are many devices where i don’t care for newer models, like the dishwasher.

I would modify that:

If a company restricts a consumer from repairing a device (either explicitly in warranty policies, or implicitly by producing devices that are hard to repair, restricting part availability, or not having manuals available), then the company must (not should) provide an extended warranty for all damage scenarios at cost.

Sounds fair, it takes work to keep software updated.

I actually have repaired iPhones myself in the past, including screens and batteries.

That turned out to be a waste of time because the replacement parts failed in a much shorter time than the originals

The reason I continue to buy iPhones is that more recent models don’t typically need to be repaired. I would much rather have a phone that doesn’t fail easily than one that can be easily repaired.

You can pay $150 to get a new battery put into your old phone but that doesn't seem worth it when you can get an entirely new phone that's "better" than your old one for $500.

If it were cheaper and easier to replace old batteries I'm guessing that people would keep their old phones much longer. That's my #1 reason for buying new phones: The battery in the old one just doesn't last as long as it used to and replacement batteries can be hard to come by and/or they're a serious pain to install (high risk too!).

Within the next two to three years though (assuming the global chip shortage lets up) we should start seeing phones with carbon cathode technology. Then again, car manufacturers might hog all the dual carbon and carbon cathode batteries so it might take a bit longer.

Apple will replace an iPhone screen for ~$100. I’m fine with that. But my washing machine which is repairable and has parts and schematics available from the manufacturer will cost me > $400 in labor to replace a $20 part. Plus it’s > 10 years old so I know more parts will fail. I’m just going to buy a new one.

Absolutely.

Also consider the movement up the foodchain of product development. How do you 'repair' something that's a SoC with a few wires to the outside world. Mechanical items, car parts for example, tend to move towards more complex unserviceable items...there was a time when mechanical fuel pumps were taken apart and rebuilt, headlights were a standardized $5 part rather than a major part of front-end styling.

I see the concerns of people although it usually all involves some particular product family that they have a special kink for.

I would guess that the endgame consists of items that cannot be serviced in any way (in order to push down manufacturing cost usually) combined with a figleaf of published information in order to satisfy the text of a 'right to repair' law.

The problem is precisely that you can't repair it even with all the skill in the world, because the schematics aren't documented, the components aren't for sale and the components are software locked to the device. That's what right to repair is. Just like you can repair your own car by buying the components and doing the work yourself you should be allowed to do this for everything you buy. No one is asking manufacturers to repair your device for free or give you components for free.

Surface Pro X and Galaxy Buds are great examples that show just compactness and relative repairability can coexist.

Also, "right to repair" doesn't mean manufacturers have to change their product designs in any way. iPhones today aren't hard to repair because they're thin, they're hard to repair because Apple ships DRM that checks the serial numbers of all the parts, so that it will refuse to work if you try to replace something.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY7DtKMBxBw

Open source code and device schematics shouldn't be a significant security threat. If device security is reliant on obscurity, you have improper security controls. Frankly, that should be on the device manufacturer, and not the consumer.

As for the second point, I should be able to install whatever software I want on my device...as its mine.

Not "clearly secure" -- rather it would be 'security by obscurity':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_by_obscurity

Quote: Security through obscurity (or security by obscurity) is the reliance in security engineering on design or implementation secrecy as the main method of providing security to a system or component. Security experts have rejected this view as far back as 1851, and advise that obscurity should never be the only security mechanism.