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.
Oh, and he runs a professional repair shop...
Rossmann is fighting the good fight and also often doing videos showing how a repair actually works. Most famously a video where he showed that a certain type of common Macbook screen repair is just a simple bent pin that he even repaired for free while the official Apple repair would have cost hundreds of dollars
Yes, he’s a really nice guy and likable and I enjoy his videos too.
But you cannot ignore the fact that he’s highly financially incentivized to hold the positions he does, given he both owns a repair shop and probably makes even more money talking about repairing things on YouTube.
* He is fighting an honest fight for the right to repair
* His business is benefiting from right to repair laws
For example when he supported the right to repair for farming equipment, I hardly believe he did that for his repair shop bottom line
I agree, but what I see as a result is this paranoia that there's a conspiracy and something sinister in absolutely everything.
These are not the actions of someone being protective of their skills to make more money imo.
Does everyone realistically expect Apple to have a Rossmann-level repair person[0] in every one of their 528 Apple Stores to do these "simple fixes" with professional gear.
Or is it actually more economical for them to build the equipment for swapping whole boards so simply that anyone with 30 minutes of training can do it. (This is the gear they rent to you when you want to self-repair btw)
[0] 3+ more likely so that they can have vacations and sick days too
What I am arguing is that there may be a much cheaper ("easier" for the person who knows what to do) way to repair it if you don't care about the warranty but that path can currently be blocked by the manufacturer.
For example: We had a deadline for submitting our final game build last year and my laptop where I had everything setup died a day before the deadline. I went to a local electronics shop, bought a different laptop, removed the SSD from the broken one put it in the new one and was backup and running 30 minutes after returning home.
I would not have cared about warranty there, only about the speed of getting back up and running to meet the deadline.
By doing that, an unnecessary board swap is 'free' to the manufacturer - which makes diagnosing problems in the store far easier - just keep swapping parts till the issue is resolved.
When those boards end up back at the factory, they'll pass the test immediately and be able to be sent right out again for another repair.
For boards that don't pass the test, sort them by the failure symptoms and suddenly repair becomes far easier - "these 50 need a new power supply IC, pay someone $25/hour on the rework station to do that, costing $3/board labour and $3/board in components".
Thinking he has any influence lobbying the EU parliament on right to repair is bogus.
This EU initiative comes from the circular economy action plan, which started in 2015, more than the US or global consumers' right to repair actions. https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy-a...
(Contemplate an "open-source" license where the source is provided upon request, to government-licensed software professionals, and otherwise unavailable. We'd be living in this world if history went only very slightly differently. You can't invent that (FOSS) kind of radical sociology after the regulators catch up to you—let alone expect regulators to invent it for you).
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.
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]
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?
For that matter, if documentation to windows or whatever was less incomprehensible, the random people trying to fix computer would had better chance.
No, not really. Why do you think this story is relevant here?
This is straight out of Lenin's book. How do you do whatever the f** you want when in power? You first redefine language. Then you can do anything. The EU has been at it for quite a while. First we've lost the UK because of this stupid bullshit. Now, the majority of the young population in the western countries like Belgium/Netherlands etc is already majority against the EU. It's only a matter of time it will fall apart. Russian/Middle Eastern corruption and pure homegrown stupidity. This is what is killing the EU right now.
Things use to come with schematics including devices like Crt TVs that had many thousands of volts with a potential to kill a person instantly.
This whole "omg, the potential of poisoning from a battery or electrocution" (how is it any different if you buy that same battery without the device - perhaps we should ban sales of parts too) is a convenient excuse for manufacturers to make things to be disposable. It has the opposite effect, because the useless device will be thrown into trash and then it will become E-waste with a far bigger potential for poisoning water in some third world country than it ever had by being opened by an "unqualified" person.
Everyone should be able to fix their own things, AND have the choice to leave it to a professional. Only a few things are legally required to be done by professionals, things like asbestos removal.
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.
We had many examples in history of gatekeeping a skill, most recently with taxi drivers.
Can you imagine similar restrictions imposed on software engineering jobs, say to require a computer science diploma? Not hard to imagine that in 10 years anyone with half a brain and ChatGPT and YouTube will be able to write general purpose, “does the job, good enough” software.
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.