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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

https://www.ifixit.com/News/110039/double-trouble-for-repair...

  Come January 1, 2026, manufacturers must also stop using parts pairing to block repairs for these devices. That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone. 

  SB 5680 goes even further for wheelchair users. It covers power wheelchairs, manual wheelchairs, power-assist devices, and mobility scooters. Manufacturers will have to provide not only parts and tools, but also firmware and embedded software, the stuff that’s often used to digitally lock out independent fixes.

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Hopefully this doesn't mean the system can't report a non-OEM part being installed at all. Buying a used product that's been hacked apart would be frustrating.

There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3:

> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss.

So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing against customers right now) has to stop making their products unusable when non-OEM parts are used for a repair.

Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair

Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.

Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.

The problem with non-genuine parts is that you don't know what they are.

Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the design, who figured out how to "optimize" it by removing an "unnecessary" part, which was actually engineered in as a crucial safety precaution. You never know.

You may even buy the same non-genuine part you've been buying for years, from the same seller, and suddenly go from an exact copy to the "competing factory" case.

That's what trademarks are for - pick a part from a manufacturer you trust. Of course the legal uncertainty around replacement parts has made it so no well-known brand makes them for anything but their own products, and the anti-consumer-rights propagandists use this to argue it is an intrinsic property of "non-genuine" parts, and we must be protected from making our own choices.

If what you're buying is specified you get significantly improved visibility on the concerns you described. When it's not specified you're in the same place as before - the factory making them for the Genuine OEM is also trying to shrink the BOM by removing unnecessary parts.

Depends on the part. Non-OEM laptop memory? Fine. The failure/error rate is usually negligbly higher than OEM if at all.

Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner.

I imagine similar differences exist for many other kinds of parts as well.

Also be aware that the in the case of a TPM and fingerprint sensor there are some very important security guarantees that a part must make in order to preserve the security of the system. So it is not in fact scare mongering to try to get this right in the law and commenting about the difficulty of getting this right is not being infected by Apple follower talking points.

The replacement parts have to work, otherwise they are not replacement parts. Neither fingerprint sensors nor TPM chips are magic. There is no difficulty here.

Ok, how would you ensure this is right in the law without creating a loophole?

I think this is already covered by a different area of law: false or misleading advertising prevention.

If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equivalent replacement to the OEM’s TPM, that advertising was false. This isn’t much different from buying a smaller hard drive for a computer: just because it works in the machine doesn’t mean it’s as big as the old one, and if it was advertised as 1TB and only stores 500GB, then the advertising is false.

It should be allowed for a system to warn about using a part that has not been certified to work in this type of situation. There is a middle ground where third party parts are allowed but they have to demonstrate that they meet a certain level of safety to not have a warning pop up.

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.

"How dare you be anything less than blindly enthusiastic about this obviously good thing, you've clearly been tricked by someone evil."

I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to.

https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill... https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repa...

So there's nothing stopping them from having that pop up every single time you turn your phone screen on?

Just above it says:

> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to ... Reduce the functionality or performance of a digital electronic product

Dismissable would have to be defined, but when being annoying about it it should be possible to show that it reduces the functionality. It would be clearly against the spirit of the law, but sure, Apple already risked management jail time by ignoring court orders so they might try stuff here as well.

Sorry, I can't parse the multiple negatives of "hopefully this doesn't mean they can't.." followed by "there's no such restriction".

I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.

If someone damages your property, they must pay for damages.

That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the same car you had before. The parts might be unobtainable. Or the car’s value may have depreciated enough to be less than the cost of repair.

It’s sucky that you are “forced” to acquire new parts or car, but that’s life. They will pay you the fair amount for damages, not necessarily restore exactly to the previous state.

Hm. There is no restriction in the law about showing the OEM status of parts in general was how I wanted my sentence to be understood. A permanent notice and limiting functionality is explicitly forbidden, but it follows that a dismissable notice (or something like a popup notice triggered in a settings menu) is allowed.

Yeah, this still seems problematic in the case of a device being sold and represented as original. Though I suppose this is always a risk we take buying used.

Do you feel the same way about generic drugs being substandard?

Not personally, no, though I am surprised to learn in this thread that it's apparently an issue.

I do know with cars, replacement parts sometimes have fitment issues that cause body shops hassles, driving up labor costs, and having replacement parts devalues a desirable car. (on the other hand, so does ANY bodywork, even with OE parts).

Yes. Insurance companies being able to force you to take a generic when you and your doctor know you need the name brand is frustrating. If you change insurance, you and your doctor must go toe-to-toe with the insurance to prove you need the name brand. And then you're forced to "trial" the generic again. Yes, there are legitimate cases of generics not working right for the person.

> That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone.

I'm curious if that means that it's now illegal for the company to tell you if you have a device with fake parts.

I also don't quite understand the security implications. If you need some attested part, like a TPM, and this and some other thing like a fingerprint sensor fail and you replace them both, you cannot disable the fingerprint sensor since now technically it cannot attest itself?

Presumably, you can have the TPM tie fingerprint data to the sensor.

If you replace the sensor with a "fake" one, old fingerprint data becomes invalid. This would be good enough for users, as adding their fingerprints back would take them minutes at most, while providing no value for attackers.

Why not allow pairing the fingerprint sensor with the SoC fully offline?

Nice! That had gotten extremely ridiculous to the point where I've been actively avoiding new consumer products just because maintaining them is such a hassle.

Here is the bill for consumer electronics: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1483&Year=202...

Text as passed (for pasting into LLM :)): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho...

I wondered what it would mean for small manufacturers and they are not exempt however o3 believes "in practice, your duty is limited to providing whatever service manuals, firmware-pairing utilities, and spare parts you already possess (or have made for warranty work) and making them available at cost, digitally for free."

EDIT: as people below have posted, o3's "at cost" is misleading, the text actually says "at costs that are fair to both parties"

Very interesting, there's a carveout for video game consoles:

> Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to require any original manufacturer or authorized repair provider to make available any parts, tools, or documentation required for the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a video game console and its components and peripherals.

Wonder if Valve/Xbox/Nintendo asked for that, this being Washington State.

Given the support valve provides for the steam deck I'd be surprised if it was them. They seem much more interested in having a viable alternative to keep Microsoft from walling windows in such a way to kill steam than caring that they make the actual devices.

I would 100% percent expect both Microsoft & Nintendo to have had a hand in that though.

I've often wondered how much cross-talk there is between the two companies, given that the Nintendo America HQ is smack in the middle of the sprawling Microsoft campus. There's got to be some, I should think.

I am sure there is some within the bounds of the law, but I don't think this time around that would have happened much. What's good for one is good for all, and they all know that, so why risk collusion by even thinking about it, when all they need to do is represent their own interests and be done.

I wasn't getting at any illegal sort of collusion.

More like, connections which form because people meet each other over time. Or jump back and forth between companies, because their office location doesn't change much. That would lead to a flow of ideas between the two companies in a totally organic and not problematic kind of way. People know each other and talk shop occasionally while at the gym, or yoga or the neighborhood BBQ or whatever.

Minor point but Microsoft does offer replacement parts and repair instructions for some of their Xbox controllers. https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/warrant...

Yes exactly. If anything, I would expect Valve to support this bill based on how repair-friendly they are. I will admit that over the years I've become a huge Valve fanboy because of their amazing contributions to Linux and making the Steam Deck an open platform, but Valve has really done a ton to make the world a better place. Yes it benefits their business too, but they definitely could have gone more evil than they did, so there's still reason to praise them.

Yeah, I figure so - they were just the first company in Washington to come to mind given that I own their product, unlike the others :)

This is a result of there being a general consensus that video game consoles are "a thing" that we are all used to, and that the loosely-coupled movements of right-to-repair and antitrust are not seeking to disrupt the video game industry for fear of distracting from their larger goals.

It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?

(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)

I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.

> can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?

Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.

Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.

And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)

> Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game.

Well, this becomes a bit of a circular argument, but certainly part of the reason for that is the only thing one can do on a Nintendo Switch is game, due to its restrictive software.

And, strictly speaking, this statement is false. The only thing most people do on a Nintendo Switch is play games, but there is a subset of people that hack their switches and install things like Android TV. The thing is basically just an Nvidea Shield, hardware-wise. Not being able to do everything an Nvidea Shield can do is a software restriction.

I do see your point re: Apple's ambitions being far vaster than Nintendo's. But in terms of controlling their own markets, they are still seeking similar levels of control.

Either way, I think that once a law like this is on the books, it will be much easier to attack exemptions in it going forward.

Valve already provides parts and documentation for the Steam Deck through a partnership with iFixit.

Why would anyone believe that spare parts would need to be provided at cost? I’m a proponent of right to repair, but that would be an absurd over-step (and be a strong force to ensure that no spare parts are available to anyone).

The bill actually says “at costs that are fair to both parties,” not “at cost” as in losing money. You’re arguing over what ChatGPT imagined the bill said (and GP posted without verification), not what it actually said.

IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included? With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."

I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time.

The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.

There's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it.

Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).

The cost of a single part is a lot higher than the cost of a pallot of them to a factory on some day 6 months from now.

Manufacturers can already legitimately say the additional price for 1 spare part for a $5 part is actually $250,000 dollars because the last mould has worn out…?

Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.

Tough luck then. The point of the law is to make it easier for people to repair the things they rightfully own. Not kill business by requiring all companies to indefinitely manufacture parts for anything they’ve ever sold.

So then what does it change?

Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.

It makes actively preventing repairs (including via software restriction, which happens today) illegal. It clarifies that it is the responsibility of the company providing the product to in good faith facilitate 3rd party repair of the product by providing parts and documentation fairly. This is sadly not the norm for electronics goods hence the whole movement in the first place.

They might want to talk to their legal departments before claiming such a thing if it isn't actually true. Lawsuits involve discovery.

250k for a single mold if they don't have drawings of the final size of the last is reasonable - high but reasonable. Building molds is still a lot of trial and error that CAD cannot help with. Plus time for one off on an assemble line is not cheap since it is often half an hour of nobody in the factory working except the two people switching out the mold. once you have a mold you can make thousands and so the cost ammortizes out if you need that many.

my company has looked into spending billions for a chip fad of obsolete processes just to get some no longer in prodction parts. So far not worth it.

How does this relate to my comment or any other comment in the chain?

I don’t think anyone suggested manufacturers could get away with lying all the time.

Actually this is probably the best way to ensure that price gouging does not happen. The fixed and NRE costs are already included in the price of the original device. Charging those again for replacements would be double-dipping. And the law still leaves it up to OEMs to decide how to cost the replacement, so there's some wiggle room there. This is an intelligently crafted bill.

I don’t agree that Gillette making a profit on razor blades is “double-dipping” and certainly not in a way that I want to prevent.

The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.

The razor blades thing is a problem specifically with the patent system.

The intent of a patent is that you invent something useful and get a temporary monopoly over it as the incentive for the invention. The premise is that the value of the patent is proportional to the value of the invention, and therefore the incentive we want to create for inventing it. If you invent something which is no improvement over the status quo then nobody is going to pay you a premium for it.

The problem comes when you patent an interface, like the connector between a razor handle and a blade. Because then even if the connector is nothing special, the replacement blades have to use that connector and then you get artificial demand for the connector, not because it's such a great connector but because the customer is in the market for blades for their existing razor. It's a mechanism of cheating the patent system by collecting a premium disproportionate to the value of what you invented.

This is even worse in tech products because a phone costs a lot more than a razor, so if you need a part, the amount they can stick you for because there is only one place to get the part is proportional to the value of a $900 phone instead of a $7 razor. And on top of that, they're not trying to sell you replacement parts, they're trying to turn your existing phone into slag so they can sell you a new phone.

Which is why the most important thing is that you can get repair parts from third parties, who both provide competition for parts and actually want to sell them because their primary business is selling repair parts instead of selling new phones.

One proposal I keep mentioning for copyright and patent reform is they can never apply to data formats or digital/physical interfaces. Also, an exception to reverse engineer those for compatibility. That combination might combat a lot of problems.

Comparing consumables like blades to replacements like screens is intellectually dishonest. Those two are not the same thing and there is no merit to your argument.

To play devils advocate here, maybe the idea is that if the part is not eligible for third party sales by way of patents etc, then the manufacturer should not be allowed to simply charge more for a replacement part that that of a newer model?

That's the only kind of example I can think of.

Pretty much all of that o3 output is wrong. You could at least check its work before posting.

Getting parts at cost?

So I could find some manufacturer using a part I want and order it at their cost rather than having to go to a retailer?

Is there anything that allows a manufacturer to require you send in the broken part after or any limit to how many times something can be "repaired"? Because I'd like to purchase a very large number of NVIDIA GPUs at cost.

The phone part sounds great, the wheel chair portion sounds like it will just make wheel chairs more expensive. Wheelchairs are generally already highly repairable, and this will just reduce the options to consumers

High end wheelchairs are the opposite of repairable. A friend of mine has to use one because of his disability. It was the only model that met his particular needs for his disability, and was around 14k when he bought it.

He can't even change the battery pack without sending it back to the company. The horn shorted out, and if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty. Fuck, one of the wheel spoke things cracked and we couldn't even put a new wheel on it, because they only sell the wheels as part of the lower chassis to the tune of 5k.

It's obscenely expensive to have a disability in the US, and these companies take advantage of people who just want to have basic mobility. It's really disgusting.

> if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty.

The Magnuson-Moss Act pretty surely falsifies that claim by the manufacturer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warran...

It'll just make many good wheelchairs unavailable in WA, forcing consumers to buy out of state, import from a foreign company that doesn't care about state laws, or go with a worse product.

Since these are presumably financed by the government, the first two options may not even be available to most.

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