Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://www.osnews.com/story/133436/microsoft-and-apple-wage...
> What’s good enough for the car industry, is more than good enough for these glorified toaster makers. Cars are basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on, but Apple and Microsoft make complicated toasters that you need to really screw up in order to hurt anyone with. Computer and device makers must be forced to make parts and schematics available to any independent repair shop, just like car makers have to do.
> So many perfectly capable devices end up in dangerous, toxic landfills in 3rd world countries simply because Apple, Microsoft, and other toaster makers want to increase their bottom line. It’s disgusting behaviour, especially with how sanctimonious they are about protecting the environment and hugging baby seals.
It's a common way to make bad mistakes though.
Here's an allegation of that argument being brought up by Apple.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2019/05/01/apple-iph...
> The currently available objective evidence is not sufficient to conclude whether or not there is a widespread public health concern related to servicing, including by third party servicers, of medical devices that would justify imposing additional/different, burdensome regulatory requirements at this time. Rather, the objective evidence indicates that many OEMs and third party entities provide high quality, safe, and effective servicing of medical devices.
https://www.fda.gov/media/113431/download
From my personal experience poking at a CPAP machine, there's nothing magical about it. All the sensors and active elements I could track down are available from the respective manufacturers in large quantities. The CPU is a freaking off the shelf STM32F4 with the jtag header still on the board. This is not some impossible to debug hyper-integrated design.
The latter part is interesting, as public side of FDA filings doesn't have all the V&V filings. I suspect that's why FDA is less sanguine about re-manufacturing.
The oldest devices I serviced run on Windows 3.1 and still work fine. There's a touchscreen mono CRT that runs on some custom build of Windows 3.1 in daily use at that office. I use Windows 98 daily.
The only reason this has been possible for car makers until now is because the technology to stop it didn’t exist. But it does now, and car makers are definitely moving in the direction of “lock down”. You already can’t replace wireless key fobs, and entertainment head units are locked down. Repair manuals are locked behind a monthly subscription web site, and the third-parties who used to publish their manuals are giving up. John Deere is infamous for taking it to the next level with farm equipment. The way things are going in the auto industry, as soon as it’s possible to technically enforce the use of “genuine” crank shafts and head gaskets, they will not hesitate to do so.
?
https://www.citrusford.com/parts/parts-tips/how-to-program-f...
https://northcoastkeyless.com/2020-gmc-sierra-keyless-entry-...
I believe it's only Massachusetts that forces Car makers to share repair information to independant shops?
(We need a broad federal Right to Repair law.)
I'm an Independent Watchmaker and 99.99% of watch companies stopped selling parts to us a few years ago. Rolex was quite a bully. They made guys go out and buy $30 grand worth of equipment if they wanted to have access to parts/info. (Rolex owned many of the equipment manufactures). They then turned around and cut their parts accounts.
I've heard all about the danger of repairing your own vechicle/devices. It makes no sence. Companies are not liable if the devise has been altered, or repaired, by anyone other than them? Right? The second a company thinks they might possibly be liable for a product, they send out investigators hoping they could blame a third party repair?
Consumers just want a choice to bring their broken vechicle/device to a guy who charges a reasonable amount to repair.
They are tired of no options other than tossing it, or having it repaired at Factory prices. My local auto dealerships are charging $270/hr for out of warranty work. This was a few years ago. I have older vechicles, so I'm lucky for now. I've actually gone to automotive school, and the complexity of these newer cars scares me. To anyone looking to buy a new car, ask about parts, and service after the warranty end. Oh yea, avoid the independant auto shop that works on everything in most cases. These new vechicles have deep trouble codes, that only expensive dealership scanners can access. Your OBD2 scanner will not get to the deep layers of the multiple computers in modern vechicles. Nothing will change until the consumer says no. I'm starting to preach sorry. It just bothers me on so many levels. I guess I got it from my dad?
I was with him when he bought his new '98 Dodge Dakota. He told the salesman, "I need the Service Manual too". Back then access to repair information was expected. If anyone told him otherwise, he would never have bought the truck. He ended up giving it to me, and I have been working on it ever since. I couldn't imagine buying a new car without a Service Manual. I was looking at new cars a few years ago for my mom, and asked the sales guy about Service Manuals. He laughed. He said even Independant shop owners bring their cars to us. I couldn't believe customers happily sipping Starbucks coffee, in the fancy lounge, with the shop rate sign right behind them "$270.00/hr". I left thinking the world has changed. (I have no clue to shop rates as of 2021. I kinda don't want to know.)
Why are companies doing this? I think we all know. Some fresh faced MBA realized, "We will get them coming, and going.". They call it Vertical Integration, or greed? There is a lot of case law that protects companies though. It's going to be a fight.
I'm going from memory here, so don't quote me. In the 70's a group of watch owners wanted to buy parts for their broken watches. The government thought it was a fair request. They used the Sherman Anti-trust Act to fight the watch companies, mainly Swiss companies. It was kinda settled, and the judge sided with the watch companies. They were under no obligation to supply part to consumers. They still provided parts to Watch Repaiers for awhile though. I believe all case law favors the manufacturers. If any lawyer reads this could you explain it to me?)
Gee. That'll buy some nice CNC gear, maybe even the sort you could use to fabricate watch parts.
(Obviously an exaggeration given the exacting tolerances and other requirements, but if a few dozen of you got together and pooled your resources...)
This. I will be happy even if Apple ( and specifically Apple ) will do this themselves instead of charging parts that earn their exact same margin as if you were buying a new computer. Everything is wrong with the logic board, which cost you $400+. Apple speakers are ( comparatively speaking ) easily blown. FlexGate, StainGate... the list goes on and on. What could have been an easy fix which turns out to cost few hundred bucks.
I think this argument will backfire in a couple of years from now.
A car does not feature my personal data - up to now. A harddisk with your account information and so on is not the same as an engine.
Car makers become more and more data aware and ironically there is no engine in the traditional sense in e-cars anymore.
I am, however, against the idea of companies being forced to design products around being easily repairable. If a company wants to make a super thin device with basically no easy way to take it apart, that's their prerogative. If a company wants to solder on components to the device like RAM or the storage or the cpu or gpu, that's their prerogative. There are tradeoffs to both approaches to designing the products and you'll find in many markets you will absolutely find many options on the market to suit your own needs or wants. The government doesn't need to be involved in this respect.
A motherboard with soldered on components like RAM or CPU are still more likely to fail because of a bad capacitor or some liquid damage on the traces.
You may have interpreted the statement the latter way. If interpreted as I suggested, surely it's fairly uncontroversial? Capacitors are quite notorious for failing.
Soldered-on RAM and flash, while almost impossible to upgrade, is way more reliable. No vibrations means way less mechanical stress.
It depends, software bugs or different workflow cam cause your storage or battery to fail faster, then you need to throw away the entire device because things are impossible or expensive to repair.
And RAM may be reliable but when it's replaceable it means I can upgrade it and use the device for longer instead of having to buy a new device.
You generally don’t want to run flash near full. That shortens it’s life.
I really don't like the idea that manufacturers MUST provide easily replaceable parts. That will affect product weight and dimensions.
Anyways, repair shops are dealing with chips all the time, so I see no problem of chips being changed, swapped and, if manufacturer provides list of supported RAM chips - those can be changed too.
So do emissions standards, and they also effect performance. But as a society we realise we are better off with them than without.
Forcing a repairable device reduces waste and is, in my opinion, better for the vast majority of consumers.
There is no need to micro manage how a device manufacturer designs their products as long as they offset the pollution they create by either paying the local governments to dig more landfills or recycle their own products or send it over to someone who can recycle.
There are still open problems on how to measure the pollution but it's a more flexible approach than a repairability score.
Markets are not perfect, so why does regulations need to be perfect? They just need to be better than the alternative.
Except a rating like that doesn't actually indicate expected average device lifetime at all. It's common knowledge Apple devices are low on repairability, yet they have average device working lifetimes and post-sale vendor support periods much longer than the very best you'll find among their competitors.
You can also see this from the way they retain their second hand value for years longer than competing devices with much higher repairability scores. People buying these devices second hand know perfectly well they have practical longer working lifetimes than their competition, and they're willing to pay for that.
I think most people just want to ban the worst anti-repair actions, like trying to disable the device in the event of repair attempts or preventing the use of otherwise compatible 3rd-party hardware with key signatures or proprietary authentication mechanisms.
It is a very neoliberal view to think free markets are the only source of innovation and government is just standing in the way.
Governments create lots of different incentives to foster innovation. Patents themselves are a government regulation meant to encourage innovation. Ironically companies have corrupt government to such a degree that patents today is often a hindrance to innovation. However well designed patent laws are likely better than no patent laws at all.
If a new part is smaller than an old part, the new part probably uses less materials. Less heavy metals in the solder and component body etc, less weight for shipping which burns all kinds of fuels, etc etc.
Saying "thinness" is kind of stupid, because making the full outside shape of something too tiny to even use, is the stupidest way to use a decrease in the size of all the parts inside.
The gains could just as well be taken advantage of by filling the same space with other stuff like more battery or even empty air.
Taking the idea to an unlikely extreme just to illustrate: A phone that was the exact same size as my current one, and performed the same jobs no better or worse than my cirrent one, but which was mostly a hollow shell just to give my hand something to hold and screen to see, and all the eletronics were in a little glass thumbnail would be perfectly great on several fronts.
Reduced component size has made an infinity of things either more efficient, or made them possible at all instead of impossible. There is no such thing as "small enough already". That's identical to saying "efficient enough already".
Totally agree. But they should be publicly labeled as extreme polluters whose devices aren't repairable and who design devices that way intentionally.
They should be free to do it, and then free to be denounced for it.
>The government doesn't need to be involved in this respect.
The environmental aspect of unrepairable devices should probably be regulated like any other industry who makes the decisions to pollute because they want to.
2) You could incorporate total material usage + average power consumption
That will get incentives in the right place.
Many of us here would have been called in to upgrade a family members SATA hard drive, which was black magic to them, but trivial for us. Same applies to soldered on RAM. DRM issues aside, its a trivial job to upgrade for someone who knows what they are doing. As long as the software doesnt refuse to recognize it.
And it makes much more sense for governments to legislate around theoretical concepts like DRM, rather than trying to be a technical standards body detailing how you should structure electronics. They are bound to always be behind on technical matters.
It's not that complicated or costly to enforce.
Two points.
- What is your evidence that it is not complicated or costly ? Remember that lost profits because of repairs is a perfectly valid cost to be considered here. - Someone builds a device, it is their device and they are selling it to you with full advertisement that certain parts can not be repaired. How moral is it to impose additional restriction on such an entity through government coercion ? Seems immoral thing to me. Today it is about repair, tomorrow it will be something else.
I agree that people should do their due diligence when purchasing their tech products, but I am strongly against a company doing something solely for the purpose of impeding repairability.
Yes. How much cost do you think a large company incurs to make few documents publicly available.
Note that it is not just a document you share, you are putting your entire company's reputation into that doc, every cut corner and opening yourself to potential lawsuites as well.
If you want corporations to have free reign on being able to innovate, there has to be some counter-incentive to force them to find innovative solutions around lengthning the life of of the product and its ability to be repaired and recycled.
As it stands today, bad press is the only incentive and its effect is easily mitigated by marketing and lobbying.
It needs to hurt. Innovation is born out of a need to improve. Making manufacturers responsible for their decisions is a way to balance their incentives.
I ask this as somebody who would love to have the schematics of all my devices. I would love to know why this actually isn’t a big deal.
2. Screw trade secrets anyway. They should get zero consideration in any matter of law or public policy.
Anyone capable of recreating an electronic device from schematics can easily reverse engineer such device from the board. They are not secret. Reverse engineering them is a little time consuming, but it's not hard. Circuit board design follows established conventions. I can fix boards without schematics.
Especially when there’s possibly thousands or more ‘official’ repair people, whatever information they have is not a trade secret.
Furthermore, any other company could pretty easily reverse engineer or at least approximate the schematics (the kind we’re talking about here) making it not a trade secret.
I haven't heard anyone actually push for this. I've just heard people ask for access to information and the ability to buy parts.
Just leaving everything to the market isn’t tenable. Markets have all sorts of flaws. It is one of the reasons why we have so many environmental problems. In this case it is appropriate for governments to devise regulations to remedy obvious problems.
Let's say company A asks manufacturer F to make 100,000,000 units of a product. One element of this product costs $10. An enterprising person suggests that if 1% of the material submitted to the mfg line was counterfeit, but could be made to pass "inspection" they could make at least $10,000,000. They could resell the "genuine parts" on the grey market at a 50% markdown, but only pay 1% of the cost for the counterfeits. The product would ship. Company A would ultimately be left to deal with the 1% (but not trivial number) of unhappy customers and perhaps a class action lawsuit due to "not meeting specs".
In the post I am responding to, there is no requirement by anyone to validate that a part is within spec. Current contract manufacturing for a lot of products does not involve the originating company being able to independently validate the product before it is shipped to the end user. All validation needs to occur during manufacturing, on-site at the manufacturer. If you aren't validating what goes into manufacturing, how can you make any promises as to what comes out?
If company A decides to implement serialization of parts to combat manufacturing "problems". Those advocating "right to repair" are going to be upset because they are now 100% collateral damage. There are other aspects of this, where chip vendors attempt to lock-in customers with the promise of using "custom part numbers" (HP has a fabulous history for this, extending back to the 1980's) or for "custom" programming during fabrication. Many, many. many parts now contain programmable elements and silicon vendors have capitalized on this to gain a business advantage and lock in.
In a world of fraud, especially in the "repair" market, how can and do you establish trust when purchasing parts?
Let's also look at something entirely different. The "Blue Pill" is a development board, originally based on an ST microelectronics STM32 part. If you wanted to purchase a "Blue Pill" board, you will now >90% of the time (based on price) receive a counterfeit product - the microcontroller will not be an STM32 part and it will not exactly meet the specifications (especially in low power situations). Who is to blame? Who pays for this fraud? Should this be "fixed"? How? By who?
Pivoting again. This news "report" is a product, delivered to customers. Are journalists prepared to document the thought processes that went into their product. Will they commit to documenting any changes to the product, including why the changes were made and for what reasons? This is what many of these articles are implicitly asking of hardware manufacturers!
I am generally in favor of being able to repair, but it isn't as simple as toilet roll unroll forward or backwards? (a deliberately chosen metaphor as the majority of the worlds population does not use).
2) Irrelevant: Companies can and do defraud each other already; that has nothing per se to do with right-to-repair.
3) General observation: If one finds oneself needing to write a Breivik-manifesto-length screed in defense and explanation of some viewpoint, that may be a sign that the viewpoint needs rethinking.
Without out projects to revive old phones, which have to struggle to reverse engineer qualcomm modems, we would have so much more stuff in landfill. I use 10 yr old phones and they are just as fast as back then and get the job done.
The only reason to upgrade is to push their "addictive" app store as that is the major way of making money
[1] Besides enabling reduce and reuse, right to repair also goes directly the business interests of these companies, because 3rd party repair shops exist under RTR instead of 100 % of the repair revenue going to their franchises or them directly.
I say this as someone who would still use Apple licenced repair shops. The standard of service quality is high, and the results are dependable and consistent. Why is it not enough to compete on quality, and why do they have to behave in an anti-competitive manner?
Laptops, same thing. Even here on HN I've seen multiple people talk about how the only reason they can even carry a laptop at all is because Apple's newest whatever is so amazingly thin and how even a single extra ounce would make the laptop completely unusable.
So manufacturers have a choice. Glue everything together and make it unrepairable, or get dragged through the mud by reviewers and tech enthusiasts.
I don't think it's reviewers being harsh in their judgements independently so much as most press of that kind has a symbiotic relationship with manufacturers. They need new products with new USPs, however trivial, to feature to justify their existence. More product updates mean more marketing, a faster purchase cycle, more decisions for consumers to make and therefore more interest in reviews.
To be fair, as a customer, thin and light weight is nice, and given the choice between a phone with a replaceable battery and one that is more mainstream, well, my One Plus doesn't have a replaceable battery.
Motorola tried making cashing in on pent up demand for Android phones with batteries that could be swapped out. It didn't work out too well for them.
I submit for debate the proposition that many manufacturers of hand-held electronic devices have already passed this point.
In relation to the thinness, it's the other way around, I guess? Last time I checked most women's clothes don't even have pockets (someone should start a movement for that, the right to have pockets in your pants). My wife's got a massively oversized phone with a big battery pack on the back, while I don't even tolerate a case because it's bulky in my pocket.
Are you sure that you are the one that "understand" ? It is as possible that reviewers get paid (with money or products) to push for thinness, mega pixels or other numbers so consumers would buy the newest and most expensive versions.
In the end, people started paying more for things that were built more cheaply. Thinness from Apple wasn't about being sleek and sexy, it was about reducing material costs first and foremost. Surprised that part of it all was completely missed by reviewers. I still think they went too easy on Apple with regards to the iPhone 6 bendgate issue. It, at most, was "oh no, it bends..." and not "What the shit, Apple? You're reducing the aluminum to such thin layers that it's no longer structurally supportive?!"
And what do we see now? Soldered in back glass pieces. Not glued. *SOLDERED.* Environmentally friendly, my ass.
They include things like special screw, limiting sales of parts, and serializing parts so you can't use replacement parts to repair another.
The fact that certain devices or parts requiring specialist tool is a non-issue.
At least as long as manufacturers make the back side of devices so utterly slippery that you have to put them in some kind of shell just to be able to hold them, lest you drop them six times a day.
Both passed over intense opposition from the auto industry; almost all advertising in the lead up to the vote was in opposition.
But it passed in both cases because... it's common sense. If you buy a product, it's yours and you should be able to do what you want with it, whether that means modifying the hardware or running whatever software you want.
Keep in mind that this doesn't mean you shouldn't own or repair your stuff, but there are significant differences between products, and those differences aren't always clear.
Yeah. I don't even understand why we have to argue in favor of stuff like this. Somehow we ended up living in such a fucked up world where the things we purchase don't actually belong to us and we actually have to fight tooth and nail to make it sane again.
Customers should be able to legally get parts. If the original company is done making them someone else should be allowed.
I highly doubt repaired devices are massively cutting into sale. Most people don't want to deal with the hassle and would rather have something new anyways.
That's one of the reasons I think about Fairphone, but with my experience I bought for myself Pixel 1 with a broken screen, that I repaired myself. Now my phone is all good except software and that makes me think about the Fairphone again. Can't wait until Linux phones will get better, maybe Pinephone 3 will be a good main phone. But I would like to see a small phone, like latest Unihertz Jelly, but without an awful Mediatek SoC.
Looking online, displays only cost around $50-$90. So I've considered doing that instead, but if I go down that route, my phone will no longer support the "True Tone" feature. This is because Apple burned the serial number of the display onto the motherboard, so if you try to replace it, they'll know and will disable features even though they work perfectly fine.
So in addition to the cost of the screen, I'll also have to buy a screen reprogrammer, which is a device that can copy the serial number from my old display and write it into the new display, so that the phone doesn't realize I replaced the screen. The prices I've seen online for these are like $60+, so it's still cheaper than sending it to Apple.
I don't understand how this isn't 100% illegal. How the hell can Apple get away with doing something so obviously malicious and detrimental to consumers and the environment? Those are some Scrooge McDuck levels of ridiculousness.
It might be illegal but you would need to fight in court for ears so existing laws are applied.
But there are effectively no functioning regulatory institutions in the United States today, so who's going to stop them? Apparently companies like Epic have more judicial clout than the federal government these days...
They probably are inferior to the official Apple ones though (not that I'd care enough to pay 3-6x the price)
Many such cases probably don't connect the dots and instead just think iphone battery life sucks which is bad press for Apple.
I doubt it, your secure enclave-protected secrets and data will still be there after the repair (unless they move the logic board from the old phone to a new one, which would be very interesting).
I think it's better to align financial incentives.
Is this something most people are familiar with? I know Tiffany sells luxury jewelry, but that's about it.
The upstream vendor may discontinue a part so nobody could repair it if they didn't already buy enough inventory. Products sometimes have to get redesigned just to keep manufacturing them.
To really make this work, they'd have to keep enough parts inventory for the expected lifetime of a product (beyond warranty repairs), and also resell them to whoever asks.
I'd guess OEMs are reluctant to sell replacement parts so they don't get cleaned out and can't do their own repairs?
A systematic fix for this might require more standardization and less churn in the industry.
Cars get recycled by junkyards so that's another source for parts for older cars. There's probably a lot less money in that for electronics.
Another interesting aspect is reputation of quality in case repair shops don't restore the device to original performance, while customers still think they are running genuine parts, because it's very hard to visually inspect and understand what happens inside, as opposed to a toaster.
Not saying i'm for all these locks but pointing out it's a lot more multi-faceted than the article presents it.
How many hardware backdoored PC's have you encountered in your life?
0: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo?t=703 (I'm assuming that "we only protect against piracy when the attack costs less than 10 games" implies that Microsoft expects to make around this much in post-purchase profit)
1: https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-not-making-any-money-on...
I took an 8yo MacBook Pro to an Apple Store to have the battery replaced. They did the service, but when I got the device back, the MagSafe charging port would overheat substantially while recharging.
I brought it back to an Apple Store and asked them to take a look at the DC-in board under warranty because something obviously got messed up during the replacement battery installation. They gave it back to me several days later without having so much as cycled the battery to recreate the problem.
I ferried the laptop to another Apple Store and they replaced the thermal paste and gave it back to me with the screws in the wrong place. They claimed the overheating issue was a pre-existing problem because the SMC had thrown an error due to my third-party SSD during the pre-repair diagnostic. At the time of dropoff, they also demanded that I wipe down the LCD with an isopropyl pad despite the Apple website saying to use a dry cloth or water.
I returned to the second Apple Store and they finally ordered the DC-in board (part cost less than $3). The guy there tried to convince me that the SMC is not a chip, but just a theoretical concept that Apple uses to diagnose problems. They replaced it, but they told me over the phone that they had reversed the repair because it didn't work. When I went to pick up the laptop (they didn't offer to FedEx it out to me as the other store had), I saw that they had indeed replaced the DC-in board and that this solved the problem, but they tried to pass off the problem as a software issue for some reason. Also, they had forgotten to remove the plastic film from the part before installing so I had to open the laptop up and reinstall the DC-in board anyway.
It turns out the DC-in board should be installed with the (unplugged) charging cable magnetically attached, so that it orients correctly and makes good contact when you tighten it down.
I live two hours from the nearest Apple Store so this was a total pain in the butt. Apple could have simply sold me a DC-in board -- or at less than $3, they could have given it to me for free under warranty -- and I would have been happy. I had to do this song and dance to get a genuine replacement part, and in retrospect I could have paid ten times as much to get the part from iFixit instead of paying for gas and taking the time to drive out to the Apple Store.
Apple's stranglehold on the parts supply only worsens the ownership experience for their devices. Almost every person I dealt with seemed unqualified to work on computer repair, yet I wasn't able to buy genuine parts to do the repair myself. If you're not going to let me buy the parts, then your staff should know to remove plastic film from parts before installing them. They should know what screws to place where. They should know what the SMC is. They should know that under Magnuson-Moss, a third-party SSD doesn't invalidate the warranty on a battery replacement. They should refrain from saying "it's an eight-year-old old laptop so we may not be able to repair it." But they don't. Either Apple has to train these people or they have to let us buy parts and circumvent their ignorance.
> But it was Google that surprised advocates with the vigor of its opposition.
As for why - perhaps the submitter felt that it was misleading for the title to pick on just MS and Apple when Google is also implicated in the article? That's a legit reason to edit a title on HN—it's one of the unlesses in "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait".
Probably not random. Since there is always _at least_ one anti-Google article makes to front page every day. And the quality of discussion on Google related is probably the lowest on HN. The mod team didn't seem very eager to moederate Google related threads so far.
Everyone who has preferences for one $Bigco over another thinks that HN and HN mods are biased against their favorite $Bigco and biased in favor of whatever $Bigco they don't like. You could substitute any other $Bigco for Google in your comment and it would be exactly what other commenters claim. This is tedious, as I mentioned; it is merely a projection of the commenter's own preferences.
It's the same phenomenon by which zealous sports fans think the refs are totally biased. It's actually a cognitive bias rooted in the fact that the bad (what you dislike) stands out more than the good (what you agree with)—i.e. people heavily weight what they dislike, and underemphasize, or simply fail to notice, all the opposing data points.
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