Gov. Polis Signs Bill Mandating That Consumers Have Options to Fix Electronics
coloradotimesrecorder.com
coloradotimesrecorder.com
> Like the repair rules passed in Minnesota last year, Colorado’s law notably covers data center and business-to-business equipment, only without Minnesota’s vague exclusion for “critical infrastructure” equipment.
> There are some exclusions, like game consoles (due to lobbying from game console manufacturers over piracy concerns), medical devices, ATVs, and motor vehicles, which are also typical for repair rules introduced in other states like California and New York. Like Oregon’s right-to-repair law, Colorado’s HB24-1121 explicitly prohibits electronics manufacturers from using “parts pairing” to prevent replacement components from working unless approved by company software.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24166894/colorado-right-t...
Perhaps they'll relax the restrictions on "non first party" components (likely you'll lose some functionality that aftermarket parts don't actually support), but use pairing to lock out parts from stolen phones.
I suspect that part of their strategy is to try to make stolen iPhones less attractive to thieves, and effective parts pairing would likely reduce the market for stolen phones stripped for parts.
Of course, if you can "blank" off a stolen part to appear as an unofficial one, that doesn't work! That idea is therefore likely to face challenges.
The challenge will be what is really meant by parts pairing - to some extent if you want to do some features securely (say touch ID), you probably want to pair the reader to the secure enclave with a shared AES key and similar. There could be tooling to reset and re-establish that pairing on an unlocked device.
Legislation often struggles to define exactly what is required though, so it will certainly be interesting to see how Apple responds.
Isn't that just what they already do? Apple has consistently framed the parts pairing as being about theft deterrence. I don't believe them for a second (and nor should anyone), but that is certainly what they claim.
I don't doubt at all that they see the theft deterrence as a significant benefit. I wouldn't even doubt that internally they justify many of their actions based on theft deterrence.
However, if it was only about theft deterrence, I would expect to see some things be a little bit different. If they actually supported customers repairing their devices, or third-party stores, there would be differences in how they approach this. We have plenty of history of Apple's behavior to know how they feel about self-repair and third-party stores, without even considering the theft deterrent actions.
How utterly and incredibly serendipitous for Apple, that they are able to solve the problem of theft, and it just so happens to also accomplish a ton of their other goals that they have been working on for a long time!
The problem with most of the theories about Apple having ulterior motives about parts pairing is that there’s no evidence that parts sales are even a blip on their revenue, not to mention a profit center. I have trouble imagining what those motives might be besides securing devices and restricting use of black market parts.
What is it about Apple that makes you trust them so much? Is it so hard to believe that a company formed around a ruthless businessman would continue to be ruthless? Or why would you believe that after Jobs died they suddenly changed?
The only serious potential issue I see with all of these restrictions is if they make 3rd party repairs too cumbersome or cost prohibitive. If not, then I see no downside, other than losing the ability to use cheap but sketchy replacement parts.
Depends on here you live. In some places, buying stolen parts is illegal. In those places, they would probably have a defense, since it would not be “fair and square”.
The exception to this is currency: if you're fairly paid with stolen money, you get to keep the money, regardless of whether the rightful owner is able to proof that it was originally theirs and stolen.
The fact that somebody may take a replevin claim against me because the digitizer in my phone was removed from their stolen phone does not, imho, have any bearing on Apple's rights and responsibilities with regard to me as a customer.
Sigh. You're both making claims that could be different between jurisdictions. If you don't know that, then you should probably stop now.
https://www.techlicious.com/blog/call-for-kill-switch-to-dea...
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/20/tech/mobile/smartphone-kill-s...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/cell-phone-kill-switches-prompt-d...
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/11/apple-to-allow-used-par...
The main thing potentially missing is there has to be a way that the shop can verify the given device's parts are not marked stolen prior to purchasing it "for parts"...
Which they have no reason to do unless the device is functional (and then the parts could be identified in software), because they could just as easily fill a non-functional device with cat litter or old newspapers instead of going through the trouble of sourcing functional stolen parts.
And there is so much more. One of my pet peeves was idiots lifting their trucks but doing nothing with their headlights or worse getting "brighter" headlights. It is possible to be stuck in traffic and be practically blinded by the truck behind you in your mirrors.
Don't worry, the Chinese got this trend covered with the 1000000 lumen headlights (actually producing about 1000 which is far less than the normal 1500).
Those are two category of product that have one of the longest lives of consumer goods, and have serious external guardrails and regulations around their safety.
There are MANY 50 year old aircraft flying around still, the average GA fleet age is 35+. Part of that is that replacement parts are approved by the FAA, and not the OEM. If the FAA says I can use an Garmin transponder in my Cessna, Cessna can't brick my plane even if they have a deal with Icom. There are still aftermarket parts being sold for models that were discontinued in the 1950s. Imagine if we had to throw away every old airplane when the manufacturer went bust.
Medical devices are the same, if a third party manufacturer is selling an FDA approved replacement battery for an older hearing aid, I would be pissed if the manufacturer bricked my device for not using their battery. Or even worse, how mad would you be if the original manufacturer, and the secret signing key for their batteries, went out of business and you didn't even have the option of an expensive OEM battery.
> "if a third party manufacturer is selling an FDA approved replacement battery for an older hearing aid,"
The FDA and FAA are massive bureaucracies that are not going to get into the business of regulating electronics. Practically, medical devices and aircraft should be exempt, as things are today. Suggesting legislation should be written otherwise, is negligent at best and malicious at worst.
The FAA has been in the business of regulating electronics for more than half a century. They are also in the business of certifying that replacement parts meet the same standards even when not endorsed by the manufacturer. There is a reason that a 1970 Cessna can have a modern avionics suite.
Why, or why not?
There are also all sorts of existing legal remedies for things like this. If you blast someone with x-rays through negligence like letting an amateur fiddle with the x-ray machine, you will have some serious legal issues regardless of whether or not the OEM is legally required to sell replacement parts.
You can have one law that says that medical machines must be repairable, and then you can have another law that says that medical machine repairers must be trained, or that repairs have to be inspected.
This is already a common thing in life or death services, yeah, anyone can do the work to wire their own house (since its an open standard), but that doesn't mean that a qualified electrician and inspector doesn't have to put their names that the work has been done to a safe standard.
That is not universally true in the US--and is probably widely ignored even in jurisdictions where it is theoretically true.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2024/january/09...
Edit - Source on AA fabricating their own tailcones: https://www.flightglobal.com/american-airlines-drives-effici...
We must not allow exceptions, it must be every single universal machine!
More R2R rights are needed:
1. Either the UL or EPA needs to grade devices for repairability and TCO
2. a. Repair parts and b. phone-home cloud features should be disclosed how long they will remain on the market
3. a. When parts are no longer available (NLA), it should be legal to produce compatible replacements including circumventing DRM, b. when cloud features are no longer available officially, API endpoint(s) shall be modifiable to point to other servers
4. Schematics should be made available for electronic products from businesses with 500+ employees
5. It should be illegal to brick parts and devices based on their age, the current time, or by model, or for installing third-party parts
I remember when Tesla was first forced to comply with MA's R2R laws. It was like something out of Hitchhiker's Guide...
There WAS a website where you could order parts, in theory. Except every single part on the site was either "Unavailable" or "Call Tesla", even down the simplest commodity bolts...
There WAS somewhere you could go to look at the documentation / service manuals. You did have to make an appointment, though, and you did have to pay a fee, and there was a time limit, and you couldn't bring any electronic devices with you, only a legal pad and pencil...
Wouldn't that be more of a Consumer Reports thing?
For example, every modern Mac will turn into e-waste within a decade since that SSD has to wear out. I don't care how high of a quality SSD you use, it just won't last forever.
My 2-year-old MacBook Air would be the perfect computer if I could just put a larger SSD in it, but I can't. So I'm already looking at buying a new computer.
Most R2R arguments address hardware wear (like battery/SSD degradation and physically broken parts that need to be replaced) rather than expandability and future-proofing (like increasing the size of your SSD/RAM or installing a faster CPU)
Direct link to the text as signed (pdf): https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/2024a_1121_sign...
At some point in the future we're going to get to the point where these things become fully integrated: solid state battery, display elements, silicon all printed into one solid glassy chunk.
[1] https://reason.com/2022/12/23/why-is-sesame-suddenly-in-ever...
People don't notice early enough that it will cause problems, and they don't have equivalent options available that are more repairable but only marginally different in price and capability.
Brand reputation reigns in "the worst", but pretty bad things still happen, and being unrepairable and non-upgradable isn't "the worst" so it keeps happening.
Because it isn't collectively valued relative to other things, like have the most performant device. The bundle of things people value includes repairability ... but not that much. As I said, you can buy repairable and upgradable system, they just tend to be last-generation tech and cost more. Buyers just don't value it more. But clearly they value it some, which reaches that equilibrium of reigning in the "worst" as you say.
If it was there at a fair price, lots of buyers would pick it.
But because the actual cost is quite low, we can have a good outcome by forcing it on companies, to also fight their perverse incentive to make disposable hardware.
I don't think this is true. Lot's of folks on a forum like this would pick it. But the social norms around repair have degraded significantly (in large part no doubt, to it not being a cost-effective option). But my main point is that it will take more than just availability. And thus there is no market pressure, so it doesn't appear to me that this is indeed a market failure, instead it looks like the market responding to the demand.
Let me illustrate further, if a top provider of electronics and appliances, but not fully market dominate in many niches, say LG, pledged and followed through on their pledge to ensure the repairability of their products, and remained price-competitive, would they gain significant market share over their competitors? In phones? In appliances sold at a big box store? Or would people choosing an Apple device, or GE Fridge still choose those options because of features and market clout and ignore the repairability? I predict they'd gain some marginal sales, but really wouldn't incentivize change amongst their competition.
Now there are markets where the dynamic is different. Farming equipment, where there are some strong challengers to Deere and one of the things they sometimes use to different is repairability. There the market failure I'd be concerned with is the vertical alignment of dealers with service.
This is a systematic effect, whose size must be quantified, so we can deploy appropriate regulation to counteract it.
One is when the market is too concentrated. So e.g. when substantially all of the SoCs in smartphones are made by just three companies, none of them have to provide adequate drivers or documentation unless the others do, and then their devices become e-waste as soon as they themselves stop updating the binary blob drivers for newer kernel versions, because the kernels the old blobs are compatible with have published security vulnerabilities. A better solution to this would be to break them up / stop letting them buy each other, but state-level governments have little ability to break up multi-national corporations and national governments have failed to do it, so here we are.
The other is when the rule is to protect customers other than the original purchaser. In many of these markets one customer buys the product new, with a warranty, and then sells it to someone else when the warranty expires. The original customer doesn't care about repairability because all their repairs will be under warranty, and may not even care much about resale value because they're affluent, so the OEM can sell them a device that isn't repairable. But that screws the customers in the second-hand market who need to make out-of-warranty repairs, and it's those who the law is trying to protect.
!=
Design For Durability + Design For Repair + Design For Low TCO
Recall how the GDR's unbreakable beer mugs failed to sell in the West and became lost to time because restaurant vendors insisted on selling "cheap", inferior, fragile products breaking regularly to ensure profits.
I prefer thinner, lighter glassware. Even if it breaks more often. The fact that these products didn’t do well in households should be Exhibit A for why restaurants’ profit concerns weren’t to blame.
Households weren't offered that choice because they never entered the supply-chain.
And it had nothing to do with restaurants' profits, and everything to do with distributors' and resellers' profits.
The goal is usually something like: ensure we meet durability requirements X, while minimizing costs.
Now in practice that might very much amount to the same practical impact, such as the product will break after the designed lifetime, but maybe not if it happens to be cheaper to use a simpler, cheaper component that actually is more durable. But probably there is some component that is the weak link that only meets the minimum design specs. And this yet one more reason why Repair is important, because many of the components are perfectly fine!
https://youtu.be/vEvBpjCOBu0?t=12m15s
Video reference links: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8mKisckj6gcJXX2f0P01BrB...
The reason why Louis Rossmann is - or, at least, was able to fix your MacBook is because Apple's vendors were breaching their supplier agreements. Apple worked around that by putting Apple logos on all their components and getting Customs to seize any parts shipments coming out of China.
It's actually an even BETTER candidate for board-level repair as they have easier to hand-solder, off-the-shelf through-hole components, and yet they still don't do it.
How on earth do you go about repairing a TV ? I mean, the prices at MicroCenter are already ridiculously cheap.
Then again, I suppose it's in the list to prevent manufactures from suing people as opposed to practical repair.
In my opinion, if the screen isn’t physically damaged (like having a WiiMote chucked at it), then it’s basically a plug and play electronic component that needs to be replaced. Besides removing the TV casing, it’s only marginally harder than swapping out components just a gaming PC.
It’s essentially just pulling some ribbons, swapping the components, then putting everything back in place.
So, can you replace the electronics by connecting to a different screen? For instance, from a different model, assuming the same resolution, like say put Samsung electronics together with an LG screen?
In theory, I suspect that there's a _lot_ of standardization going on among products from the same manufacturer, but less so among different manufacturers.
Amusingly, it was still under extended warranty when the power supply problem first started, but by then the company that sold me the warranty had gone out of business.
And Samsung eventually lost a class action lawsuit about this exact capacitor issue, but when I found out about that it was already too late to file a claim.
So much for the invisible hand of the free market (and legal corrections thereof) keeping things in check.