I'd rather focus on the solutions than what some people did wrong - of which there are plenty of examples for every good initiative.
>All I’m saying is be careful not to be focused on the single dimension of component-level repair in this case as well. Good intentions to improve one variable can backfire if it doesn’t consider its effect on the entire lifecycle.
You can only improve your model from past data. When it comes to major policy initiatives we are getting better at many things every passing decade. We only have to measure outcomes when it comes to childhood immunization, poverty, childhood mortality, healthcare, etc, etc. All of these were far far more complicated to execute than right to repair.
>It isn’t hard to imagine a similarity disastrous situation if tens of thousands of sweatshops started dumping flux and solvents in their rivers, when Apple may have a more environmentally controlled process in spite of a modular approach to repair. Just because something is labelled "recycling" doesn't guarantee that those processes are lower impact than any alternatives.
It also isn't hard to imagine things going well, and as long as we're imagining I prefer to be positive rather than negative. I am not only talking about recycling - but also reuse and repair. Devices are ending up in landfills because companies refuse to let repair shops do their job. This is why we need a right to repair law.
>I agree with the the public's right to repair, in that it compels companies to share the same repair parts, procedures, and tools that the company itself uses. But you're asking for more than that, which I think is unreasonable, and a misguided hill to die on, particularly for environmental reasons. If component level repair of iPhones was more accessible, you won't see this cottage industry flourishing in well-regulated high wage countries with strong information industries. This is high-skill labor intensive work. It will happen in low-wage countries with skilled workers, many of which have horrible environmental protections.
If things were open and available, you'd see experts from all walks of life - smart teenagers working on the lower hanging fruit (replacing buttons, screens, fixing charge ports etc) for extra cash on the side, older people who were left out of the labor market, etc, etc. I see immense potential. If specs were open it would be much easier to design an automated diagnostic tool-set to reduce the time-cost in evaluating which component has failed, etc, etc.
I see regular people discuss complicated car repairs about their alternator or fuel injector or vacuum lines, and this is only possible because the components are not a mystery. We have entire generations of people who grew up knowing for a fact that a car has components that can be repaired by experts. With consumer devices we have an entire generation that grew up thinking of electronics as blackboxes that you don't touch because you can break them and then its impossible to repair them, etc.
As far as the point about high-skill labor - no that is not necessarily true. It would be easy to develop tools to pinpoint the location of failure. Not only that, if I was a repair shop I'd replace the customers broken device phone like-like with a repaired one and then send the repair to a 'bulk repair' service which can then farm out the repairs based on complexity and other factors. Its very easy to imagine a system that CAN work, just as you say its easy to imagine a system that CAN'T :)