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Comment by yndoendo | Hacker News Reader

Refurbish and repairing viable electronics does not help keep Apple's, Google's or any manufacturer's stock high. Stock spikes high when the news organizations can talk about all the latest hardware and how sales doing well. Why would those companies CEOs want to hurt their golden package before exiting the industry?

One way to start penetrating right-to-repair would be to force device unlocking after ownership, device payed off, and end-of-life classification by the manufacture.

Next step would be for the manufacturers to require publishing open documents for 3rd party support without having to sign a NDA.

Both of those require reverse engineering. With camera technology being so complex, this is the feature that limits alternative OS usage with continual security updates after the manufactures give up.

Maybe rephrasing right-to-repair as "consumer protection" could help push it through better with less tech savvy consumers.

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Consumers aren't the issue. Consumer support for right to repair is broad. The issue is the government doesn't give a shit what consumers think the vast majority of the time, they're bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists.

Consumer support for right to repair is broad, so long as it comes at no cost to them. People don’t want to pay to fix things, and they don’t want to accept any reduction in performance either.

Why would you pay same price for repairing a shoes when you can get a new one for similar price?

So your environment isn't overflowing with pollution and single use junk? So there are more natural resources for your kids to enjoy? So you don't have to keep breaking in a new pair every other month?

But the consumer mind goes like “whatever, my backyard garden looks fine, my lawn looks green, my kids will be fine, besides whatever I throw away helps some third world poor person make a living, so win win, not my problem…”

Would you prefer to walk without shoes?

Btw, having a garden with growing vegetables and fruits is perfect for reduce resource consumption.

The problem I wanted to make is that, consumer who can afford to generate those e-wastes are very far removed from the consequences of their action. When the consequences of my action are not inflicted on me, I have no incentive to stop doing bad things.

Where there is demand, there is supply.

> Btw, having a garden with growing vegetables and fruits is perfect for reduce resource consumption.

In the modern world, with no animals and insects, but full of invasive species, you will find this endevour quiet difficult.

I'm not sure where you live, but we still have insects and animals.

If resources are shrinking, price of products made from those resources should be higher.

Problem is, when stupid design and bad quality of making product steps in. I would like to buy a pair of shoes or smartphone that last ages and are repairable. Usually those products are thrown away because of one faulty piece that is impossible to change for new one that would fix whole product.

> People don’t want to pay to fix things

This just isn't true, as long as there's repair shops out with a sizable customer base. The issue is companies do everything in their power to make it impossible for that service to exist. It also largely depends on the economy; If the economy is great, people throw their old stuff away and buy new stuff. If money is tight, they repair it, and if there's an economic collapse they let it stay broken. I wonder where we are?

> largely depends on the economy …

Unfortunately, it depends on the mentality. My well off friends often pay good money up front to buy the latest and hold onto a device(smartphone, laptop, sometimes tablets etc.) for 5-7 years.

My less well off or broke friends show the opposite, they often go out of their way to take debt(contracts, installments, pay later etc.) and continue upgrading to latest phone/watch/tablet/fitness tracker every year. It feels like that there is some kind of overcompensation combined with FOMO involved.

I don’t want to generalise this, but I had known probably a sub three figure people from my childhood and have seen this same behavior repeated always.

One of my friend in marketing told me that, people buy dreams, and hope that a new dream will help them forget the nightmares/problems, hence all adverts often include happy smiling beautiful people or conveys some form of freedom, prestige, social status …

Just a thought.

Yeah, when we make generalizations like that we have to assume rational actors in the same earning bracket. I was also describing people outside the US where people are a bit less willing to buy the new thing every year if they can't afford it. Ukraine before the war, for example, had a massive economic crash and no one could afford to repair their computers anymore which put most repair shops out of business.

consumers are 100% the issue. consumers choose what to buy, who to buy from, and how often. Why should government need to step in and what is government going to do? Tell people who to buy from?

100%? Does that apply to other things that needed government intervention, like child labor, company towns, etc?

I don't see a problem with making rules for companies to follow. We have a rules that say companies can't advertise nicotine to children or put lead in gasoline. If the rule is good, it should be around.

I try to make stuff last as long as possible - not because it saves the environment or even saves me money. Making old stuff last a long time (seemingly) gives me an endorphin hit.

That being said, I get an even bigger endorphin hit from knowing that people can (mostly) buy whatever they want, even if stupid, unnecessary and wasteful by my criteria.

You can have a model T in any color you choose as long as it's black, can't you? Well it's your fault if you want a red one, you stupid consumer.

> consumers choose what to buy, who to buy from, and how often.

Sure, but when companies can all collectively decide that they're only going do one thing, you either stop consuming entirely or put up with the abuse.

> Why should government need to step in

Because companies won't do it on their own.

> what is government going to do?

Write right to repair legislature. None of these are difficult problems, you just seem to have a libertarian mindset which inevitably means you just play defense for corporations doing whatever they want.

> One way to start penetrating right-to-repair would be to force device unlocking after ownership, device payed off, and end-of-life classification by the manufacture.

This would really not help much, unless there was some type of PC-like ABI driver standard that could ensure that devices could remain supported in operating systems without having to "support" each device individually. And even then...

> Next step would be for the manufacturers to require publishing open documents for 3rd party support without having to sign a NDA.

I think this is even desirable in the PC world. I do not want AMD publishing drivers for Linux; I want AMD publishing absolutely free and complete specifications, possibly even a reference implementation, and mandated by law.

A large part of the problem is ARM itself and the ecosystem around it. Broadcom, Qualcomm and the rest of the closed source driver/firmware mafia who make it physically impossible for anyone to support their SoCs even if they wanted to.

RISC-V can't catch up soon enough.

> Why would those companies CEOs want to hurt their golden package before exiting the industry?

Due to a sense of decency and humanity and a realisation they have more than they could ever spend and could be happy working to leave the world better than they found it?

Wow, I’m sorry, just got woozy there for a moment, must be all the fumes. Nice dream, though.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Literally nothing you said there is compatible with capitalism - which is the predominant religion globally.

> Literally nothing you said there is compatible with capitalism

I can’t decide if you either didn’t understand the point of my comment at all…

> which is the predominant religion globally.

Or are adding to the joke.

Repair and reuse would have kept the 30% appstore cut rolling in.

But that's about to change in Europe and USA due to recent rulings.

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