EU countries must implement right to repair laws within two years

Exactly. This looks like the EU appeasing their paymasters while fooling their constituents with PR.

It seems to be a very effective strategy to coin a phrase, make people believe it's one thing, even gaslight them over their concerns, then turn it in to another in the implementation

Just like Affordable Housing.

I would upvote you twice if I could. Sadly the EU is botching yet another thing.

The problem of the European Union is that it is founded not on the concepts of a federation or union states. And finally merging into one nation.

The European Union is building up on the „ Montanunion (long version: European Coal and Steel Community) and that is the rational why they care mostly about economy and still believe in free-trade[1].

This causes friction between young people which want one entity of state and that cares about the people’s needs. The old just want subventions from the EU and that the economy flows easily.

The focus on free-trade is obsolete nowadays. There is no free-trade anywhere and no fair capitalism (the greed thing which harms our planet). Example: We had weird moments during COVID where we had to ask „if it is fair“ to rescue an otherwise healthy an needed airline? The question should have been if it is needed and sustainable. Of course it was! Where doing similar debates over machine equipment, chip factories, train factories…and the EU says „We can’t merge them because that would be unfair“. To whom? China? India? The US? Who cares. Free-trade is an idiotic concept by capitalists. The priority of every state should be the needs of the peoples.

Anyway. This is some improvement for the people in Europe :)

But how to solve the core issue? I complained a lot.

I think we need a core europe with the states which are willing to unite in long term (likely France, Germany, Benelux, Czech, Spain, Portugal, Poland - that is not an exclusion list). The desires of the population, social system and economy should be similar. So if the people in Slovakia or Hungary change their mind…welcome aboard.

[1] Weird for Americans. Since Reagan the economy (and especially the IT) is unregulated and shall dominate everything. China doesn’t care about free-trade at all, they will come with a list of requirements for an enterprise to build a company in China and transfer knowledge. The adapt the knowledge and kill your industry with state money and initially cheap products. Now your depend their industry. Partnership is something different?

Because it is these professional repairers lobbying for the laws.

This sort of thing always aims to get the law to identify some kind of professional certification needed to qualify, and then that certification gets more expensive and limited (eg. by saying studying a specific course is needed, but only X thousand places are offered per year).

Eventually, people who have done that course and qualification get so expensive that that becomes their only job, and you won't find a handyman-type person qualified to do those tasks.

There are websites that sell many parts for many appliances (espares.co.uk in the UK, for instance, and they also have many user manuals). I already replaced the handle of an old fridge and the seal of a washing machine that way. Even replaced the toner driver of a laser printer once.

The reality is that this "right to repair" is nothing but political fluff and brings very little or might even make appliances more expensive for consumers.

> If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.

Exactly and there is nothing that can be done about that. Most people aren't going to take their washing machine, or what not, apart by themselves even if parts and manuals are available, which they already are. Hence my previous point.

Luckily we have https://elektrotanya.com. All it takes is a little civil disobedience and a few professional repair man to make all those manuals available to everyone in true hacker spirit.

Serious question, how do you think we keep unemployment from becoming catastrophic in this world ?

> If a washing machine costs £220, and a professional repair man costs £70 per hour, nobody will repair out of warranty.

This is because repair doesn't scale with automation the way manufacturing does. Repair is likely to cost far more, unless you do it yourself, and then it costs you time.

> Why can't I as a consumer view a service manual and buy a part?

Have you ever helped a family member with their computer problems, only to notice that they often start as something benign, and the mess you are dealing with is from the family member attempting to fix that benign problem themselves?

Outside of tech, how many people do you know who actually read manuals instead of just going at it?

And most of those "professional" are people that skipped college and mostly highschool.

Having the knowledge to work on anything a job can throw at you and having the knowledge to work on what you have are two very different things.

It feels like manufacturers are steering the economy away from consumers "owning" products outright to a model where we consume them through subscriptions or financing arrangements. In this new model, consumers notionally own the product but pay a subscription for repairs. What are the upsides of this shift? Products become more accessible, as the upfront cost is reduced and spread over a longer period. Products last longer because the vendor has an obligation to maintain them for much longer. This is better for the environment; in a world of finite resources, we want our products to last longer.

However, there are considerable downsides. The very notion of ownership is being challenged. Restrictions placed on owners regarding what they can do with their products can limit personalisation, modification, or even resale, thereby reducing the true sense of ownership. While more money circulating in the economy benefits everyone, allowing us to grow while consuming fewer resources, the wealthier members of society will still be able to afford more upfront and get better products. They are likely to be rewarded with lower subscription costs or higher-quality products.

Consider Sam Vimes' "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, which illustrates this point perfectly.[0]

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

Yeah, hate that. We also have all kinds of subsidies for insulating your house etc. I insulated my house. Only I did it myself and you’re supposed to let a professional do it. A professional that just charges you his usual fee + the subsidy. They are really helpful in filing the paper work for the subsidy (which is substantial) for just a small extra fee.

I believe this is done partially to dissuade bad actors from gaining easy unverifiable access to hardware and software thus rendering anti theft technology ineffective. If you mandate all repairs to be done using a verifiable (and paid for) repair key which you supply to vetted people, it becomes that much harder to replace the anti theft module as a common thief. Even large scale operations would then be harder to run as they would require a fence of sorts to use as a repairman. Of course that fence would then risk their credentials and so on...

Because not everything can be build to not be dangerous. The potential of electrocution, poisoning from a battery are all real. Not real for you because you're probably smart but you have to think about people who have no idea what they're doing and could get themselves gurt

I suspect it's a compromise after pressure from both manufacturers and repair services; manufacturers so that repairs are gatekept, and the cost of repair remains relatively high (because the manufacturers control the supply and cost of replacement parts and tooling, e.g. with Apple providing certified repair places with tools (wasn't that on a lease / rental basis?)); if repair costs remain high because you have to pay someone else to do it, people will consider buying a replacement instead of keeping their devices.

A more probable outcome of a single country doing that is that new products won't be available there

More like 450 million, much bigger market than US for example. Plus even non-members cca adhere to most rules, sometimes make them much tougher (ie Switzerland). Britain may be soon an exception, ie US food lobby right to government got very strong right after Brexit, I guess HFCS or GMOs needs more markets to sell.

Not all of it it as rich as average US, but overall manufacturers can't ignore us.

I saw a similar thing happen with ROHS and WEE. I was working for a hardware manufacturer when ROHS was implemented in the EU and we suddenly had to change all of our hardware to be ROHS compliant.

Because why maintain two manufacturing lines? Either we stop selling in the EU or we make all of our hardware ROHS compliant.

I suspect it really matters how big the market is that implements the regulation. The finance people come in and ask; Is it better to ignore this market or change our supply chain?

By the way, software locking serial numbers of all the internal components was purportedly done for anti-theft reasons.

If you can't swap the screen or battery from a stolen phone to another phone, then there is much less reason to steal phones.

Buuut, another approach would be for Apple to simply pop up a dialogue whenever parts are swapped saying "New Part Detected. Some parts of this phone are registered with another icloud account 'mary21@icloud.com'. Please log into that account now to prove ownership of those parts.".

The fact Apple didn't allow that is a pretty strong indicator that they wanted to have full control of the repair market.

Even if not, it's still possible to break up other devices to scavenge parts to resell, as long as the manufacturer doesn't software lock the parts together.

Could you elaborate on / link to an article regarding the apple military crates?

I tried a few web searches but couldn't find what you're referring to.

The "Military Crates" (100% off the shelf Pelican cases used to transport fragile equipment across the world) contain very specific gear that's simple enough for anyone to use as long as they follow the instructions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdYzVaC6HSQ

It's not like you can reliably tell someone to "just use your hair dryer to loosen the adhesive" and not expect huge amounts of breakage.

The devices in the kit apply exactly the correct amount of heat and pressure and are actually the same setup they use themselves.

I don't see how you'd get out of anything by an EULA.

In Sweden such agreements aren't legally binding at all. I'm sure it's the same way elsewhere.

You have the right to repair what you own. This is aimed at preventing companies from preventing you from doing so.

Parts are already available in many cases and no-one prevents you from sourcing them.

But in reality most people don't do that and don't want to do that. Either they call a repairman or they buy a new appliance, and this law won't change any of that.

No, thanks to ublock-origin

Does anyone else notice that this comment is offtopic and beside the point?

I get two equally sized buttons on desktop, "I accept cookies" and "I refuse cookies". But it's an official EU page after all, would a be pretty bad show if they had one of those dark-pattern cookie banners where "Accept" is a single click but refusing requires to go through pages and pages of checkboxes ;)

This is what it looks like for me: https://imgur.com/2eFW3Ef

Two big clearly labeled buttons.

The Framework laptop seems to be a counter example to your theory, the company seems to be just under 50 people which isn't all that big even for a startup, and repairability is one of their main selling points.

But repairing things can be a way to learn to build them, and usually happens closer to the end consumer, so I think if there is any burden imposed by this that could delay things, this other part is more than enough to compensate.

I sincerely hope that hardware startup that are intent on producing e-waste that cannot be repaired fail thanks to this directive.

The requirement comes because you have to go out of your normal flow to make things not repairable.

Can you tell me one example on how this would make the life harder for startups? The mandate is to produce schematics which the startup obviusly would have and to make parts available. both things that any startup would need to consider as their part of the warranty/repair anayway but now they have to make this availble for third parties and not just themselves.