What you’re proposing is much more reliant on apple than right to repair would be.
so If I am clumsy and accidentially break my display of my macbook (entirely my fault), apple should replace it for free?
And again "deal with it", it's up to them how. A replacement would obviously do it, but so would a repair, the whole point is each manufacturer could optimize for what they think is the best approach. Some will in fact go for easy repairability part swapping, so basically making each individual repair as cheap as possible. Others will work to increase their QA to reduce overall incident rate, so despite each individually costing more the overall rate would still be acceptable. There will be efforts to leverage the value offered by more compact systems into higher profit margins which then can help offset repair/replace costs too. Etc, everyone will do their own thing, and consumers will see in the sticker price all of that internalized for each company and know that no matter what they buy they can expect it to be taken care of for a reasonable period of time without any "extended warranty" shenanigans (extended warranties should only be necessary for professional/enterprise customers who really need a support cycle completely divorced from standard consumer usage and they can negotiate that and any SLAs themselves).
So no, we dont need "problems dealt with at zero monetary cost", we need hardware we can fix ourself. If you dont have a right to repair it yourself, you're at the mercy of the hardware provider, even if the screen only costs 1/10th of the quoted price, and you could do it yourself.
I made an edit, I think I misunderstood you and I apologize. It may be for example that there should be provisions requiring that accidents are still covered within a time period "at cost" though not for free.
But if you want "hardware you can fix yourself" as a feature in and of itself, then I think you should just be asking that of the market and buying accordingly, I don't think it's a universal. And I want the option to sacrifice that for other values when I deem it appropriate. For example, I use my smartphone for significant amounts of financial transactions, administrative access, and it has an enormous amount of highly personal information as well. I value it being highly sealed off (and would like it to be even more so, I'd be happy with a phone that's not just IP68 but good to 10 or 20 ATM too). How do you propose to legislatively require a "right to repair" there while not having that break the hardware trust chain? How does it interact with value of sealing and form factor? It seems to me that everyone has different needs there, which in turn suggests to me that it's not something to legislatively require but rather leave it up to the market. On the other hand that someone should be able to buy something and have it last a reasonable time period and if broken it should be replaceable/repairable at cost seems like it should be part of the price. Am I totally off on that to you?
FWIW I don't think the same applies to software, in that case I think it should be required by law that owners may load their own private keys in addition to whatever the manufacturer offers. But right now I really think the option to buy into features like a hardware trust chain where I need never worry about anyone but the minimum of the original manufacturer (who is part of that by definition anyway) is desirable. I don't see how to avoid that meaning that 3rd party unauthorized repairs get closed off in turn. It's a tradeoff.
He wanted to pay for the repairs, and Apple refused.
He then tried to buy the parts separately, and apparently if you got them from Apple, it would cost more than the computer was worth.
He eventually managed to source the parts through various people at a reasonable cost and repair his broken iMac with Louis Rossman.
Here are some of the videos (I'm sure I missed a couple, but it's a very interesting series of videos)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE
Insurance is for accidents; warranty is for their failures. And they have had a number of problems with pretty much every generation of product that would fall under warranty - delaminating screens (got it), broken speakers (got it), antennagate, etc.
That overheating problem was well known, and it took a long time for Apple to recognize the problem and issue a repair order. It was long enough that the AppleCare expired for those who got the MBP right after release, like me.
Because the problem was really bad (logic board replacements had the same issue, and the problem would recur within a couple of months) that a lot of people who had bricked MBP's disposed of them, sometimes at a heavy loss.
I was lucky I didn't throw my bricked MBP in the bin, so when the repair order finally arrived months after my MBP bricked, I was able to get it fixed. I had switched to Windows in that time, and I ended up unloading it to a friend of mine (with full disclosures of its lineage).
If Apple had it's way in future in a similar scenario, I could not fix it locally and cheap or the working parts could not be reused to fix other people devices.
I had a laptop that broke before(my fault), I went with it at shop and the motherboard needed to be replaced, I did not want to spend money on that but I could sell to them my remaining working components if I wanted too(screen and RAM) I did that and I still have somewhere the CPU,motherboard and the rest of the components.
isn't this a "guarantee for faulty goods"?
"Under EU rules you always have the right to a minimum 2-year guarantee at no cost, regardless of whether you bought your goods online, in a shop or by mail order." https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
If a hard drive breaks at random, good luck proving it's not built as designed.
Hard drives is a bad example though, given how many hard drive manufacturers offer a 5 year factory warranty themselves (or this used to be the case anyway).
And if it's by design, that's a class action lawsuit.
> The quality of goods is satisfactory if they meet the standard that a reasonable person would consider satisfactory [...] The quality of goods includes their state and condition; and the following aspects (among others) are in appropriate cases aspects of the quality of goods [...] durability.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/9/enacte...
We have words for this - It is called "WARRANTY".
Warranty however does not fix post warranty-period defects and this is where "right to repair" enters. Am I wrong about this?
It also lead to lower or possibly lowest price of electronic products in US compared to rest of the world. Once regulations for better protection is in place and price also will adjust.
That's exactly like saying that letting chemical manufacturers just dump waste products directly into a river "lead to lower or possibly lowest price of chemical products". The whole issue with externalized costs is that they are in fact still real costs, except that it's not reflected in the price people see and thus there is no pressure to work on lowering it. Someone is still paying, often even the same people buying (directly or indirectly), but the signal is diluted.
It's not as if failed electronic products don't impose costs on the US too, it's just that the failure rate isn't included in the price but instead falls arbitrarily and inefficiently on individuals and society. Including it in the price won't necessarily change anything at all for some companies, it will simply reveal what was there all along. Companies that can deal with it cheaply thanks to superior practices will rightly be able to offer better value then those that cannot, and that's exactly what we want!
Manufacturers should stand behind their products, AND I should have the right to myself or hire a 3rd party to repair the devices I own with out facing legal repercussions in the form of IP Limitations, or prohibition on obtaining parts, manuals, schematics, etc. nor be prohibited from disseminating information on how to repair devices, creating tools to repair devices (including circumventing DRM protections), etc.
This is what Right to Repair is for, it is a separate issue from what you are looking to accomplish
And repairability forces tradeoffs of its own in other product qualities that people care a great deal about. The frustration people feel over the USA's crappy warranty and consumer protection policies is real and well deserved, but the repair thing is red herring from actually fixing that. In general legislation should focus on goals not means, means change rapidly and different people will desire different tradeoffs, that's what markets are actually good at figuring out. They don't have goals themselves, but they're good at optimizing towards goals and then dynamically adjusting over time.
I don't think the "right to repair" groups are all astroturfers and PR campaigns themselves, as well as companies that stand to profit I'm sure there are a few tinkerers who genuinely want it and a much bigger group that just hasn't thought deeply about it, but it's still frustrating to see all this energy finally boil up and end up in something that could be actively harmful to some stuff people like and misses the chance to actually internalize another set of costs and make everything work better. "Right to have dealt with for a time proportional to price paid" doesn't at all roll off the tongue as well but it'd be much better law.
Edit: I hope people will not get too bogged down with lack of implementation details here, this post is not a research paper and I could have been more precise (and maybe doing such a thing would genuinely be a worthwhile exercise). Objections have been raised about accidental breakage for example, and I got confused by one reply, while I think the price should remain external for that one but can see an argument that the availability for an extra time period should not. Ie., if you break it then the manufacturer isn't on the hook for the cost (though you can insure) but the manufacturer should still be required to deal with it at cost for an extended time, maybe even after the main coverage period ends. The main take home I wanted to argue was that "repairability" is just one tool in the box, and at least in the legislation attempts I've seen there doesn't seem to be acknowledgement that features like security, worse active matter to dead matter ratios, and durability can all be negatively impacted by "repairability". Implementation details would absolutely have to be carefully examined and argued about, but I stand by the goal being that products "last a reasonable time" and should never be a lottery for the public.
None of us should have to wonder about invisible failure rates and repair/replace costs of any sort when browsing the aisle in a store or pages online, that should be the responsibility of whomever is making it. They're the ones best placed to price it in, and to work and innovate to make that price lower or the value higher in whatever way they deem fit.