Steve Wozniak speaks on Right to Repair [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
He says Apple II shipped with complete schematics and source code listings.
"In a lot of people's minds power over others equates to money and profits. Hey, is it your computer, or is it some companies' computer?"
He talks about companies trying to control and inhibiting repair and modification and compares it to the liberating and creative experience that he had and how that lead to him building the apple. He also compares the situation to a previous phone monopoly and how standardization and freedom lead to innovation.
The message is really strong and important and goes beyond what I assumed is going on with this movement. The Right to Repair isn't just about being able to fix things yourself. It is about fundamental freedoms that enable creativity, innovation and efficiency.
Put in other terms, the Apple II was not open source. The schematics were freely available, at least some of the ROM's source code was available, there were no barriers to repair (if I recall correctly, there were no custom chips/components), and people were free to modify the hardware. Yet you could not make copies, straight-up or modified, without being sued by Apple. A cleanroom approach would have to be taken to make something compatible. The world seemed to be okay with that. Things like schematics and code served supported repairability, which was an expectation of consumers back then, so the vendor voluntarily provided it.
That being said, a true open source approach to hardware would have still been frowned upon back then.
I'm very much in support of companies being required to provide schematics, where reasonable. Also I see no reason why they should be able to stop manufacturers selling parts to repair shops.
I don't think that forcing design choices, such as modular components, easily replaceable batteries, requiring certain ports and things like that are a good idea. These ideas should stand on their own, if there is a market for it then let people make that choice for themselves, including the downsides that come with it.
I think if right to repair can't get a handle on what's being advocated for then things like phones and laptops will be left out of any major legislation.
"So one example of what Right to Repair is not: The European Union, I believe, was looking to mandate that Apple use USB-C instead of Lightning, because USB-C is a standard and Lightning is not a standard. I don’t want people to think that has anything to do with Right to Repair because it doesn’t; that’s completely separate. I’m not looking to tell Apple, “You need to use this type of charge port. I want you to use micro USB. I want you to use USB-C. I want you to use this.” No, what we’re saying is, regardless of what you use to charge your phone — you could use a banana to charge it — just give us access to be able to purchase that charge port so that if the charge port in the phone breaks, we can fix it for customers rather than tell them, “Your phone is now a brick.” So I think that is a good example of what Right to Repair is not: We’re not looking to say, “You need to use this port. You need to do this.” Just don’t intentionally lock people out of the ability to fix it once you’ve chosen how to design it."
-------
Right to repair has a fine handle on what is being advocated for, and it is spelled out in the legislation. I don't think people read it though. In the EU, it is different than in the US. I do not support legislation that forces design choices on modularity or using specific ports. That's EU Right to Repair, but I have no business on that since I don't live there.
US right to repair is about making things available. Use microUSB, USB-C, mini-usb, parallel port.. so long as it's made available for purchase to repair shops/users.
I get that you're kinda the de-facto figurehead of the movement but let's not pretend that your reasons for supporting this are altruistic and that you're not pushing for this because you run a business that needs this to go through. Regardless of what companies we're talking about, your business would eventually go under if the current situation doesn't change so forgive me if I take everything you say with a grain of salt, especially considering that you've made misleading claims in your videos and ignore when people call you out on it. That, to me, is not the way to grow support for people's rights over the products they own. The only way to do that is to be blunt and honest about what the situation is on both sides and what the motivations for the two sides are. They are not irreconcilable.
Apple is. They'll "repair" it for you (they go out of their way to make sure that nobody else can - if not with the charge port then certainly with some of the other components) for a price. But they typically do this by replacing the item and destroying the old one. And the difference between that and a true repair matters from an environmental perspective.
This is the kind of stuff I talk about when I say that people like you are hurting the R2R movement. Either you're not aware of these things or you're intentionally being misleading to try and push people into supporting R2R. In both cases, you're doing a disservice to the discussion.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/19/17258180/apple-daisy-ipho...
If a customer has a basic problem, and you tell them that
a) You will not fix their phone b) You will not recover data from their phone. c) Your only option at Apple is to have them send your phone off to neverneverland, and get someone else's refurb for half the price of a new one
Did you tell them that their phone was now a red colored rocklike substance that can be used to build a house? No, bt that doesn't mean the person who left that store being told their phone was a "brick" was lying to you. You're effectively telling them their old phone is bricked. The fact that this was done for a long time over basics such as a charge port is sad.
Let's not even get into the fact that boards that had been inside iPhone 6+ and flexing for years were being used in refurbs. People who paid the replacement fee were given refurbs that were close to failure, and once warranty ran out, bye bye.
Whether or not a robot is going to go through your recycled device to give Apple a refurb to sell isn't what matters to the customer. When a customer who has a basic headphone jack issue gets told "there is nothing I can do for your device other than send it back to the manufacturer and get you a replacement in two weeks for $349 when your phone's resale value is $300" when a headphone jack goes bad, instead of "yes, let me perform a 15 minute repair using a cheap flex cable that a toddler could do", that sucks. Right to Repair isn't about forcing the manufacturer to fix it, either. It's about making sure the parts are made available, so that either a repair shop, or the consumer themself, can do that job rather than have their phone go off to a robot.
If right to repair isn't about forcing manufacturers to fix things, then why is it about forcing manufacturers to facilitate anything that could hurt them or their brand? Third parties are free to make their own parts and they're free to perform repairs with parts from other devices. Your misleading argument basically amounts to "I want Apple to do work and keep stock for me so that I can make money at their expense without having to follow their standards or guidelines". That's nonsense.
This is also incorrect. I don't understand why you find the need to continuously make things up throughout your posts in this thread.
The law is not asking Apple to stock the chip. It would be sufficient if they not restrict the manufacturer of the chip, from selling freely in the market.
Why do you repeatedly lie? It's really not cool.
>that 99% of customers don't care if it's "their" phone that they have when they leave the store so long as it's indistinguishable for them.
You are implying that most customers DO NOT CARE about paying $349 vs $50? They do not care about having to reload their data from scratch vs. leave in 10 minutes with everything as it was?
How can you imply I am being disingenuous and say this with a straight face?
>. It's great that you have the skills to do the 15-minute repair with a cheap flex cable and it's great that you're training an army of toddlers to do this very repair process for every phone with a broken jack
Yes, it is great - you can have as much salt as you want about an "army of toddlers", but yes, technicians doing repairs for $50 in 10 minutes without erasing data that the manufacturer wants $350, in 2 weeks, while erasing data is a GOOD thing. Feel free to make fun or handwave it away as much as you want, but in the real world people value their time & their money and don't wish to senselessly waste it.
>"I want Apple to do work and keep stock for me so that I can make money at their expense without having to follow their standards or guidelines". That's nonsense.
You are correct; this is nonsense, because you strawmanned & made it up, as you have most of what you've posted here. Nothing I have asked for would be an "expense" for the manufacturer.
Stop making things up. It's seriously not cool.
Saying "and you know it" isn't an argument, it's what people fighting back and forth in drama TV say.
> No one is telling customers "your phone is now a brick" when their charge port breaks
I did not say they tell customers your phone is a brick when their charge port breaks.
AASP did say, that when your headphone jack(attached to charge port) breaks, your only solution is
a) Send it back to manufacturer b) 2 week turnaround time c) All data GONE d) You spend half the cost of a new one, to get someone else's refurbished phone.
Citation: https://youtu.be/OR5ZUl0Q-NI?t=100
Brick could technically be one way to put it, since they will not fix your phone.
>and "right to repair", as a whole" does not have a fine handle on what's being advocated for.
It actually does. The bills in almost every state in the U.S. are virtually identical. What are the differences between House Bill 1212 in Washington and S4104 in New York that make it impossible to tell what is being advocated for? What are the inconsistencies?
These are bills in different states on opposite sides of the US, with totally different legislators; and each bill makes it clear they are advocating for the same thing.
What causes confusion over what Right to Repair is asking for is the opposition. They will make things up, like claim I am asking for source code, or demanding everything be modular. None of this is in any of the bills. No one cares though, because no one reads them.
>especially considering that you've made misleading claims in your videos and ignore when people call you out on it.
No citations. I'd respond to your assertion of a misleading claim if I knew what it was.
>That, to me, is not the way to grow support for people's rights over the products they own. The only way to do that is to be blunt and honest about what the situation is on both sides and what the motivations for the two sides are. They are not irreconcilable.
This seems to have gained a lot of steam. There are a small minority of haters, but that is what it is. You'll get that with anything that you do, and there is no movement that avoids this.
>and there are very few people, and I'm excluding you in this, who aren't trying to push their desires for it for anything but selfish reasons. I get that you're kinda the de-facto figurehead of the movement but let's not pretend that your reasons for supporting this are altruistic and that you're not pushing for this because you run a business that needs this to go through.
So now we have moved onto, "I don't have an argument so I am going to call you self interested." :( This one is less fun.
I have 1.58 million subscribers on YT. I hate using this word: it makes me sick.. but it is the case. I am "famous." If I say, "man, if only I had a schematic for an 820-00170" on stream, it gets emailed to me by someone from a hushmail address. If I say "man, I'd love to fix X, I just can't get this chip. Damn. If only I knew someone at TI.", I get a box with no return address in the mail with a spool of chips, and a handwritten thank you note for the content. This will happen from now until the end of time, because once you reach 1.58 million people, at some point, one of those people works somewhere or knows someone who can get you what you need.
I'll be fine. My business will go on just fine. I'm good.
You know whose repair businesses won't be fine? The repair shops that AREN'T run by C-list youtube celebrities. The businesses that are genuinely at the mercy of what they can buy from ebay or mobilesentrix.
I chose to get to this part last, because IMO it is deflection without substance. How does whether I benefit from something matter when arguing whether it is a good thing for society? It's like saying "Look at how selfish he is, PRETENDING he is altruistic when advocating for clean drinking water legislation. He's not doing it because he cares about making the world better. HE JUST WANTS CLEAN DRINKING WATER FOR HIMSELF TOO! BECAUSE HE DRINKS WATER! Yeah, can't trust him."
This is nonsense. It is natural, if the world is made a better place, that you as a citizen of the world are one of the beneficiaries of this improvement.
My customers benefit from saving money & time, and having choice(including the choice to get access to the parts/manuals to do the repair WITHOUT INVOLVING ME from this same legislation). Other shops benefit from having tools, diagrams, etc to do their job. I benefit from job security in the event that "fame" isn't enough going forward to get me what I need to do my job.
I like seeing people follow in the footsteps to success I was lucky enough to achieve. YT can be said to be a form of advertising, but stuff like this https://repair.wiki/w/A1707_2016-2017_15%E2%80%9D_Touchbar_M... I write in my spare time because I like knowing that someone else might be walking that path I took to success a little easier with less roadbumps in it. There is a happy feeling I experience knowing I am improving my small corner of the world.
This you? I literally just pasted this from above. How is that not suggesting that people are telling customers that their phone is a brick when the charge port breaks?
Also, puhleeeeeeze... it's a good thing for society? There are any number of people for whom this won't be a good thing. I don't doubt that your business will go on just fine and that's why I think you're reticent to talk about it. The repair shops that "aren't run by c-list YouTube celebrities" can't do what you do. The majority of people running repair shops can't do the repairs you do. You may think it's easy but you completely ignore the number of the mall kiosk "repair shops" that do shoddy work and can't put a new screen on right and expect them to do work that requires soldering and component-level surgical operations.
You know how auto repair shops have a really, really poor reputation and how it's usually a joke about how taking your car in for an oil change results in all kinds of "upsells" for people who aren't savvy with their cars? This is exactly why. Also, before you make some kind of straw man up, I'm not suggesting that there's no middle ground or that the current situation is the perfect situation either. I'm only saying that you pretend like everyone else is going to get the same experience from every repair shop and all we have to do is pass these Right to Repair bills and the free market will take care of everything and that's just a bunch of bull.
I do not mean the phone is an actual red rectangular prism used to construct buildings, and anyone listening to that video knows that. I mean that to the customer, they have a device that is dead. You are using the literal interpretation of the word brick to be ridiculous.
>Also, puhleeeeeeze... it's a good thing for society? There are any number of people for whom this won't be a good thing.
Name one person that would be harmed by the availability of a charging chip.
>The majority of people running repair shops can't do the repairs you do. You may think it's easy but you completely ignore the number of the mall kiosk "repair shops" that do shoddy work and can't put a new screen on right and expect them to do work that requires soldering and component-level surgical operations.
I do not ignore the fact that there are bad repair shops. The existence of a bad repair shop, whether first party or third party, is not an argument to remove people's ability to repair their own property.
>I'm only saying that you pretend like everyone else is going to get the same experience from every repair shop
Again, we'd probably be able to speak and get along much better if you stopped making things up. I understand. You dislike me. You're salty about me - I get it. but there is no need to continuously make things up. I have not stated this. There are good repair shops, and horrible repair shops - and I feature BAD repair shops on my channel in repair videos. I castigate their practices & bad work. I have no problem doing that. There is bad in every industry.
My argument is that, the existence of one bad repair shop, is not on its own enough to justify restricting repair for everyone.
No, I'm not. I mean it in the sense you're referring to and, again, you know that. No one in their right mind would infer that I meant an actual brick. You're so insufferable and dishonest, Louis.
Luis Rossmann even (maybe non-intentionally) touched on it in a recent video and said that's it's unacceptable for manufacturers to block bootloaders on their devices, restricting you from the type of OS you can run. That's strictly a Free Software Movement issue and not necessarily a Right to Repair issue.
Right to Repair is basically hardware equivalent to FSM. You can even think about it as such - one is fighting for your right to repair your own device and the other for your right to repair software on that device. Obviously, that's a major simplification and there are many other implications in both movements, but they're both set on the same set of principles.
That's why a big part of the Free Software community is using old thinkpads - they have the freedom to run whatever software they want (as they don't have Intel Management Engine) AND the right to repair and modify the actual hardware (those devices are a joy to open and repair).
I also believe that companies should provide hardware schematics with their devices and customers should be able to repair them and modify them using these. As for the "copy" part, I don't quite get what you mean. What exactly did you mean by copy?
Is a device with one part changed/repaired is a copy? Is a device build completely out of parts got from other, damaged devices is a copy?
Because if you meant that you can't just use the schematics to build and sell a device based on them as your own, original device then that's obvious. Copying a device and selling it as your own creation is just fraud and absolutely not the kind of thing that FSM is fighting for. It's a common strawman argument used by the FSM opposers though.
Well, you could; you just couldn't sell them. You could make them for private use, if you wanted.
Because it absolutely is about that - no manufacturer should be able to tell what you can and cannot do with your own device. That includes what kind of OS you're able to run, what kind of programs, how much data you're sending to them, etc. Controlling your software is still stealing ownership from you because when you can't control what software are you running, you can't control what your device is doing.
the Free Software movement is about the same, but a right to repair and modify software was never defined as a law.
so the difference is that the Free Software movement is about gaining new rights, that we didn't have, while right to repair is about restoring rights that we already had, and that have been taken away.
There are definitely people that want to go this far. They would like to see full schematics and part listings.
However I think most of the people don't need the specifications in "the preferred form for modification". They simply want to stop companies from taking steps against repairs. They don't necessarily want help doing the repairs, they just don't want to be thwarted. For example
- Outlaw contracts that forbid part manufacturers from selling parts to third parties.
- Outlaw "chip paring" features such as would give errors if you replaced a screen because it was the "wrong" screen.
- Remove restrictions on repair shops such as limits on number of parts and allowed types of repairs.
I was too young for the Apple II, but as a kid I saw a father working with his in his garage. He was always inventing something, and connecting it to the Apple.
In a way, it was one if the first Raspberry pi's? Kinda?
> US$595 (equivalent to $1,596 in 2020)
Slightly more than a Pi. I could not afford one back then, particularly when you factored in the floppy disk drive prices.
But the reality is nothing quite like the pi existed back then. Computing was significantly more expensive than it is now.
https://www.amazon.com/Laptops-Under-500-Computers-Tablets/s...
posted from a mac
Still tho, gotta love that toys like Raspberry Pi and Arduino (and other similar stuff) have been reviving the old-school "hacker" and "maker" mentalities. Downright amazing some of the nifty stuff people been building lately with them single board computers and other such components.
Our TV was out for a month once because my dad could not figure it out.
Apple wanted to make FaceTime open sourced and they couldn't because of a patent troll. I don't even think we can get into the complexity of today's hardware systems without running into any number of reasons why that stuff can't be "open-sourced". It's great that super-techy people want to be able to repair their own devices (and there's no reason currently why you can't) so I feel like the current right to repair movement, and especially people like Louis Rossman, are doing a huge disservice to the ideas behind people's actual rights to repair devices they buy when they conflate them with "open-source" and completely ignore the fact that 99% of people don't care.
Unless they find a way to show people what the upsides and downsides of the current situation are objectively, they're never going to get the support they need. As it stands, they're being misleading at best and downright lying at worst to try and push a narrative that gets to the end goal and, as soon as the lies come out, it'll push the momentum backwards instead of carrying it forward. The number of people with expertise to actually fix most of these issues with these complex devices is incredibly small and dwindling and opening that up to anyone and everyone without some kind of plan in place is just going to spectacularly backfire.
I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Louis Rossmann are both the perfect example of why Right to Repair should work while at the same time being an amazing example of why the current versions of R2R can't work.
It can be done, but it is a huge waste.
Take the A1989 Macbook. Let's say you bring it in because it stops charging. It's 2019. It's dead. Let's pretend I am a normal repair shop, and not someone with youtube fame that can find someone at intersil/renesas that can get me chips.
Let's say the ISL9240 charging chip dies.
I can, in theory, do my research, and find out that the iPhone XR charging case uses the same chip. I can buy that charging case for $100+, disassemble it, locate the ISL9240, remove it, reball it, and replace it on the customer's logic board.
but......this is insane.
a) I have to waste a battery charging case, including the lithium battery.
b) I am adding $100+ to the repair cost since I have to stock & sell this case now just to get a chip.
c) I have to do research to figure out what other device on the market uses this chip, on top of the work of figuring out what is wrong on a complex 5+ layer PCB.
The viability of this repair, for a shop that needs to get their customer in & out in a day or two for them to remain satisfied, goes out the window almost immediately.
>Even if we're talking about Apple devices or even Sony devices, there needs to be a balance between repairability and access.
What does this actually mean? What is the downside to this chip being made available for sale, so that when the device fails it can be repaired? What are we balancing here?
>Now, someone with enough social followers can create a PR nightmare for a company based on something that's totally out of that company's control so it's no surprise that no one wants to open up that Pandora's box.
It is 100% within the company's control whether or not they want this part to be available; the reason it cannot be sold to anyone is because they make it that way.
>I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Louis Rossmann are both the perfect example of why Right to Repair should work while at the same time being an amazing example of why the current versions of R2R can't work.
Where is the argument in favor of why this cannot work, and how I am example of it? Where is the citation? How is it for decades parts and chips were made available with zero problems and now it can be asserted that this "can't work" with no explanation?
This increasingly feels like someone's throwing poo at the wall in the hopes of finding something that sticks.
First of all, nobody is asking for detailed instructions on how to produce all the parts from some base level. A schematic is only really going to show a level deeper. It would be plenty useful just knowing what connects where, and why. Meanwhile the actual knowledge to produce the part from scratch isn't even that useful in terms of repair unless the scale is rather massive.
Secondly, I'm not aware of any reason it would be so terribly illegal to tell somebody how to violate a patent. The whole point of the patent system is to let people know how to do exactly what the patent is for - but in exchange the creator gets a temporary legal means of preventing others from actually doing it. The actual means of violating a patent are inherently public - otherwise the patent could not exist in the first place.
So I have no idea how Qualcomm would sue anybody out of existence for telling people information that is already public. Of course this is limited to patents. There may be other aspects in play that would result in secret information that could not be distributed. But patents are not it.
Is the issue being framed incorrectly by the "right to repair" movement? Or are "freedom" and "liberty" understood very differently across the pond?
The counter-argument to that is that mega corporations are government like power structures in their owns rights and have been deputized by the government officially and unofficially many times.
Let the market decide if repairability is desired or not. If customers really want it, certainly there will be companies offering it.
Much better to have millions voting with their money and purchases than a few bureaucrats deciding how they believe things should be.
Classic.
> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.
-- Noam Chomsky
> The neoliberal era of the last generation is dedicated, in principle, to destroying the only means we have to defend ourselves from destruction. It's not called that, what it's called is shifting decision-making from public institutions, which at least in principle are under public influence, to private institutions which are immune from public control, in principle. That's called "shifting to the market", it's under the rhetoric of freedom, but it just means servitude. It means servitude to unaccountable private institutions.
-- Noam Chomsky
The (not really) free market already decided that the rich should get richer that survival of the human species doesn't even compute as an agenda item. How inspiring, how wise.
And of course, people organizing themselves via government is just "a few bureacrats", but you asking if you're "the only one" to believe what you believe, or a company "deciding the strategy it prefers", that's different.
I heard about him in college via the "mathematical linguistics" stuff which was a pretty creative idea.
Like anyone else he also has defects, his more recent commentary on American politics is arguably worthless because he completely dismisses everyone to the right of him as "the most dangerous group on the planet."
He's probably the only major earnest anti-capitalist that still supports the right wing of the democratic party.
But yes, if you pin him as a "Democrat" you might get that impression, in reality he's so far left that the Joe Biden administration has classified his beliefs as subversive and dangerous.
The patent and trademark system needs work, but the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater.
There's so many kinds and examples of egregious behaviors by patent holders that you have to wonder if we're just better off with starting from scratch and deal with the tradeoff that may come with it.
They are also regulations. You can't opt-out of the patent system.
> You can weigh the benefits or lack thereof and chooses to opt-in or opt-out.
What is your proposed mechanism to opt-out? Do you mean that an inventor can choose not to apply for a patent? If so, that's not an opt-out of the patent system. You are still subject to all other valid patents.
> Regulations are a government-created burden.
Including patent regulations. It seems you support the regulations that you consider "good" and call them incentives.
Environmental and consumer rights regulations are both regulations and incentives in exactly the way patents are. They are enforced by the state and incentivise certain behaviours.
> You can't opt out of a regulation.
True. As stated, you can't opt-out of patent regulations either.
I am not intimately familiar with the example you gave so I shall just take your word for it that it is a flaw in the system.
This baby is only protecting big corps now. Nothing can be done at the moment without violating some "rounded corners" patent. The only reason individuals can get away with it for a while is that it is not worth for patent holders chasing. As soon as they make some money the vultures come down.
2) They're only asking that companies not make it legally impossible or use software to prevent people from buying and replacing components. IMO the only reason you would do that is to force people to throw away broken devices.
It was a nightmare.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
You'd have to spend all your time advocating, evaluating, fighting for everything important in your life: the quality of your housing, the quality of your children's education, the quality of your car and your consumer goods, and so on.
Say the government started dictating minimum standards of feng shui, and costs went up because of it, and you couldn't have the house you wanted because it didn't match feng shui standards.
Wouldn't you say 'but I don't want feng shui - I don't care about feng shui'.
People could not have voted with their wallet because there was no alternative. We're approaching the same type of problem with tech giants. People just want to ensure that components can be replaced and that the tech giants aren't going out of their way to prevent that.
It's like if Apple grew because of government intervention. Oh wait...
People should be able to fix their car, appliances, watches, etc.
It's not just about personal computers.
Companies know they don't have to supply parts, schematics, and can even brick devices if a person tinkers with their product.
They are relying on those customers coming back for repair.
Do you like bringing your new car to the $290/hr. dealership mechanics, because the independant shop can't access to brain of the car?
If the supply of rare earth metals and other components needed to produce products is constrained or politically at risk, it makes sense for strategic intervention to try to ensure better longevity of products, to improve resilience. That's a government level risk in some ways, as countries are now highly dependent on technology.
Disruption to chip supply chains is already having an impact. If the financial incentives are to drive selling more chips to replace existing devices whose lifespan could be extended by repair, it's possible we reach a "local optima" free market solution that limits device lifespans, where a global optimum point exists with long lifespan devices that are easily repaired, and gives better "big scale" outcomes, but which might not yield the same cosy 24 month re-purchase cycles for mobile handsets etc.
On the other hand, consumers don't have the option right now to buy a repairable device, so they can't easily vote with their wallets and signal their demand for this. In an era of chip shortages, as a government I would want to ensure I was gearing up policy-wise for a period of reduced availability of supplies, prioritising the key demand that is nationally significant, rather than letting the free market determine they can make more profit from selling another range of new mobile phones at inflated high margins, since the last generation of handsets had an artificially suppressed lifespan.
Personally, I don't really believe "free markets" are inherently good and would prefer something like a "fair market" that helps ensure competition doesn't get easily shut out by big players and generally limits their ability to make people's lives worse for the sake of profit.
One by one, remove the replaceable battery, remove the 3.5mm, remove the microSD card slot (and neuter it software side so it's near useless), some will complain, but the majority will just adapt to it, buying new phones more often, wireless earbuds, more expensive phones with more storage. Just as the companies wanted.
Looking back, the majority will see all the things they lost but by then it's too late (or not, change can happen thanks to movements like RTR).
So, the free market works more like tyranny of the majority in practice.
At what point in a technology lifecycle does discontinuing support for that technology stop becoming “tyranny”?
What's in the best interest for consumers isn't always what's in the best interest for corporations. Hence why governments sometimes need to step in with legislation.
There is customers that really want it and there's companies that offer it.
The big issue is that reparability is an afterthought, you only consider it once you need it and at that point, it's already too late. It's also a rare event, thus again something easy to forget.
That's all forgetting the environment impact of replacing a whole unit instead of defective parts. We sadly are far from being able to make companies responsible for the waste their product cause. This would at least make sure less waste is going out.
The craziest is that many right to repair cause aren't about forcing companies to do anything, many are just to allow people to repair their device. You simply can't repair a John Deere tractor without a license, which is just absurd.
The free market is generally great but our biology has an exploit actively being exploited.
Sure there are lots of us that use logic and reason to make purchasing decisions... But there are many people who do not. Dancing cartoons of young skinny people on flashy backgrounds to music DOES get people to spend money.
I too got downvoted
I think realistically the only thing we can demand is user-replaceable battery. Everything else is doomed to end up on a single chip integrated. And that chip either works, or doesn't. It's not about profit, it's about integration and miniaturization.
Remove those two barriers then people can fix or not as their skill or funds allow.
No. Have a look at these three modern smartphones:
"IFixIt: Your Smartphone Doesn’t Have To Be Glued Shut!"
The fact of the matter is that customers won't buy those phones over the "premium" phones even if they are impossible to repair.
My potentially unpopular opinion (as someone that does mechanical design of electronic devices for a living) is that iFixit is actively hurting right to repair by focusing on the wrong things. They are focusing on an ideal that is never going to come to fruition because most customers won't buy a product that is worse than they have today just so they can repair it themselves. A vast majority of customers don't want to repair their own devices even if they were "easy" to repair. Rather, they should be following Louis Rossman's goal to make repair guides and parts are easily available to independent repair shops so that more people can easily have their devices fixed by 3rd party repair providers. A goal on top of that is that effectively "consumable" parts (e.g. the battery, ports), should have to be accessible without risk of damaging expensive components (i.e. you should be able to change them without removing the screens on the phone).
I don't mind us demanding Apple to be more flexible in authorizing and training third-party technicians, providing them with parts.
But I don't need every idiot to have a repair shop. I don't need this to be a "right". You still need to meet some minimum bar of competence in my book.
That fixability has a cost in ugliness and weight and usability.
No thanks.
Dell Latitudes look like what they look like mostly for cost and durability reasons, not repairability.
Take it to Apple or an authorised repairer, or have it recycled.
Apple also uses software to disable replacing parts.
The reason _I_ buy apple products is because they actually fix my machine when I bring it in for repair and don't do what HP, Dell and ASUS used to do which is hide behind: "please resend", "works for us", "we've had it for 18 weeks and now the warranty period is over" stuff.
Apple profits are not good for society as a whole. I don't see why we should optimize for Apple's profits.
Not just the cofounder but the real genius behind all their early products. Jobs was excellent at selling great products, but it was Wozniak who engineered and built them that great. Unfortunately in this world it's the non technical people who always get more consideration compared to engineers. Bill Gates himself had good hardware/software knowledge having worked with embedded systems for traffic control before MS, yet he is only remembered as former Microsoft chief.
Bunch of other discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27779907
It's mind boggling to me, but I see how much pride their users have for showing off corporate logos.
I would not support anything that added a microgram to my iPhone or MacBook or give up even one tiny feature to support the tiny fraction of people who can do repairs.
I would be comfortable with establishing a legal framework that allows standing for litigation on the basis of "subverting the right-to-repair for anti-competitive reasons" with those reasons being constrained to behavior truly unwarranted and without meaningful contribution to the quality of the product I get.
It's not black and white, we don't need to go full cyberpunk wild west to establish some level of control over our electronics.
Just being able to take your Apple device to a local repair shop, have it diagnosed and repaired while you wait, instead of driving through half the country and having to give up your device for days/weeks because Apple authorised repair centers are not allowed to keep spare parts in stock and have a whole backlog of repairs to perform.
Luckily, nothing I've advocated for will do that!
Keep your A1989 Macbook the way it is. Change nothing, but this one thing: when it stops charging, let Louis(or you) buy an ISL9240 from mouser.com. And let people buy a schematic from Apple, instead of waiting for it to get pirated to vinafix, or leaked to me by a fan who works at Apple.
That's it. That's all.
No change to your device's functionality, no change to your device's weight, no change to your device's software.
Does this sound fair?
I really do want to engage with people who have concerns about what Right to Repair might do to their devices. I want to learn your concerns. I want to learn how to ensure Right to Repair bills, as they are drafted, never inconvenience you or lower the quality of the devices you use. I want to learn how to create messaging that makes it clear that this is my goal.
Serious question, and I'd be honored to get a reply.
That is not what the right to repair is about. It is about allowing people who are not the manufacturer or blessed by the manufacturer do a repair.
And the massive fraction of people who can now choose who to hire for repairs. It is a lie to claim only repairmen are affected.
You are confusing the advancement of technology with the legal right to modify the things that you own. Completely false equivalence.
I'm not 'anti-consumerist', I'm just aware that we've built a society around throwing things away way before their expected physical lifetime of use.
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/t... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635