Suppose you have passed your right to repair. I can design a device so that it takes unreasonable effort and eqipment to repair it. Makes it more expensive to repair than to buy a new one. You would have achieved nothing.
This has already happened - have a Samsung A50 with a broken screen, and you can buy a new screen for £40. However the phone is basically a glue sandwitch, and it costs the same to repair and to buy a new one.
On another note, Microsoft Surface laptop is unrepairable - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
If you pass right to repair without any provisions for ease of repair, it will be a toothless, useless tragedy of a law.
No-one is going to buy a car or tractor that can't be repaired at all. And it'll hit pretty hard if people realise even apple can't replace their screen and they'll need to buy a new thousand-dollar device every time the screen breaks. Apple and John Deere have a huge incentive to make devices repairable, they just want to monopolize that repair business. That's the problem here.
I have taken my A50 to Samsung, and they are not fixing it no matter how much I pay them. On my Withings smartwatch the glass cracked, and was considered under warranty. They explicitly told me it is unrepairable, and replaced the watch with a new one! How the Fk are they unable to replace glass on a watch?
Just about everything has already became either unrepairable, or uneconomic to repair, from fridges to TVs to phones to smartwatches. The are a few exception like vehicles or large equipment, but the events so far indicate that people will buy unrepairable equipment because they have already done so in many industries. Consumers generally have no way to know how repairable something is, especially for a new product.
Lastly, a device does not have to be completely unrepairable - it could require absurdly specialised and expensive equipment, that only the OEM will ever afford, so you will be back at the monopoly problem.
There's plenty of devices that are still (with some effort) repairable. And there's plenty of consumers who take repairability into account when purchasing, like me and probably yourself after your experience with the A50. Also it's difficult, but the A50 is certainly repairable: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Samsung_Galaxy_A50
Couldn't they just use a standard USB micro interface or Qi standard charger?
I have not purchased a Samsung device since.
But this is only because people have no choice but to buy unrepairable fridges and phones. If people could buy repairable ones then that would factor into brand reputation and people would buy the fridge or phone that's got 3% lesser specs for the same price for the peace of mind that being able to repair it in the future brings.
I respectfully disagree, most buyers don't consider repairability. Things just need to last a reasonable time given their initial cost and expectation for level of duty.
If a car could be made that was economically reliable for a 7 year warranty period plus another 3 years (10 years in total) without maintenance, yet be totally unrepairable at the end of its life, would consumers care? Not if it was cheap and had the right amount of cup holders.
I just had a Bosch electric hedger fail on me. I opened it up and discovered the bearings had been sitting in slots moulded into the plastic shell; one bearing had seized and spun causing the plastic to wear/break/melt making the unit unrepairable. I was surprised, since it was a Bosch, and expected better. I then realised I bought it over 15 years ago, and it had worked flawlessly without maintenance of any kind. Therefore the engineering was superb and totally fit for purpose.
UPDATE: I will add that farm tractors are different. These are capital equipment and have an economic life that could span decades.
That is... incomplete. A buyer's lack of conscious consideration of something is not the same thing as placing no value on it. They simply assume it is present and not substantially different than the norm.
I disagree. Now your tool is polluting somewhere in a landfill. With superb engineering this tool would have been repaired and be of use.
My late grandmother bought a fridge in the sixties. She kept it all her life (she passed away 5 years ago), the thing never failed and was as much cold as a new one. Afaik it was bought by someone that thought it looked cool and is probably still working right now.
Of course computers are cheaper, nobody really expects a computer to last more than 5 years, so repair isn't nearly as important.
Back in the 80s and 90s the tech was changing so fast I had to purchase a new Mac every couple years to run the software I needed, but I've not done that for over 10 years now and I don't see any good reason at all why a new PC can't or shouldn't last ten years for the average user.
Aside from gaming and video editing, neither of which I do much of, there's really no compelling reason for me to want a new Mac.
That’s almost word for words what an Apple Genius employee told me the other day when I wanted to repair an iPad. He told me very clearly that Apple doesn’t repair and only replace iOS devices, and I would lose any data that isn’t backed up.
Not just the laptop. The entire surface line is a nightmare to try to work on. Recently, I was doing a "simple" repair on a Surface Keyboard -- just trying to flatten out some dents from the inside, so the power port would fit in right.
It took 4+ hours -- to get it open. After that, it took another 15-20 min to remove the mobo on the inside, 30 to try to fix the dents, 15-20 to put the mobo back in, and another 10-20 to get the back on again.
All for a repair which may or may not actually work, because MS doesn't sell parts.
Thanks for letting me know.
Instead of taking it into the shop down the road that has all the tools and who can do it for $60.
Without Right to Repair, you won't get essential service manuals or schematics, the vendor can brick your device after you've replaced the battery via DRM, the vendor can refuse to provide replacement parts. With Right to Repair, you'll be able to get service manuals, schematics, replacement parts, and there won't be anti-repair DRM - which is why you should support Right to Repair legislations.
However, it has nothing to do on whether the repair should be technically easy. Under the Right to Repair, a device can still be so delicate that it would only ever be successfully repaired by a trained technician with 100 hours of experience with $1000 dollar rework equipment - if it's the case, your best hope is to find a repair shop with skilled technicians and adequate equipment, and maybe you'll get it fixed at a lower-than-official cost - which is certainly a possibility - but without your Right to Repair, even this possibility cannot exist.
If someone really wants to make something easier to repair by everyone (in other words, impose legal restrictions on how a device should be designed), you'll need a different set of regulations to address that. But at the present stage, I recommend to get your Right to Repair first, and understand what does it really mean - similar misunderstandings of Right to Right (= the vendor must make repair easy for everyone) has already been used in many strawman arguments by its opponents in the industry, using excuses such as safety, portability or costs, and in reality none of them really applies.
I never said they are the same, my statement on 'Right to repair' ends with this -
> I feel sad that we need to educate and demand 'The Right to Repair'.
Rest of my comment are about user-repairability and I disagree that it's just a matter of personal preference. In most parts of the world, electronics recycling is unheard of; longevity of a device is improved when there are user-replaceable parts. Even in the countries where there is proper electronics recycling infrastructure - there are numerous complaints on how these products are becoming harder to recycle(especially the batteries) by 3rd party recycling companies.
In short, environmental pollution is not a matter of personal preference and everyone has a right to demand good practices from the manufacturer for the sake of the planet.
Why do you think these things are mutually exclusive? Every time some manufacture has made a phone without a replaceable battery there has been some other manufacture making a device the same or smaller or thinner or lighter that had a replaceable battery and that was splash proof proving this is not some tradeoff that has to be made.
Sure, and that's a reasonable thing to want. That's still not what the right to repair is about, though. It's about preventing arbitrary restrictions on your rights to repair, not about forbidding practical limitations on your abilities to repair (unless of course those practical limitations were created in order to impose arbitrary restrictions on your rights).
If Apple decide to integrate the battery & screen to shorten the electrical paths to that power-hungry component, then the battery becomes effectively non-replaceable. That might annoy you, but it's not a violation of the right to repair.
On the other hand, if Apple do things to ensure that only Apple repair shops can replace the battery (eg via cryptographic signing, secret APIs, or physical keys that they prefer to call screwdrivers) then they've run afoul of the right to repair movement.
There may be times when it'd be good to mandate replaceable parts (environmental motivations come to mind), but that shouldn't be the default -- those restrictions should be applied to individual industries in narrow ways and only as needed.
The right to repair movement is pushing for something that reasonably could be the default, and we would instead make exceptions for things that shouldn't be generally repairable (eg, perhaps modifications to an odometer should be tightly controlled.)
I'm just curious as to how replacing a battery doesn't fall under right to repair. It's probably one of the simplest 'repairs' you can make to a battery powered device.
Pretty much any battery powered thing, aside from a modern cell phone or tablet, my first go to if it won't turn on is either, take the battery out and put it back in, or try a new battery 90% of the time, this works, even for my old phones, right up to my current one, which is the first i've owned without a replaceable battery.
It's been about two years and as seems to be inevitable with phones, my battery's life has deteriorated, previously, when this has happened with phones, i've replaced the battery and gotten another couple years off it. Now...what am I supposed to do?
I can't repair it by replacing the battery. The phone is fine, the screen is.fine, it functions fine. But the battery dies noticably faster and from what I've read, this is directly because of the high speed charger i've been using and my charging habits in regards to these kinda of batteries.
Changing the battery absolutely falls under the category of repair. Changing my battery would restor my phone to a better state than now. Yet by design, I am unable to easily do this.
I think the GP is making an important distinction in the technical aspects of the law in order to ensure that this legalislation doesn't create an undue burden on manufacturers and the government that would get this bill killed easily.
What does it mean for the government to regulate that a device must have a user replaceable battery? Does that mean the device must use phillips head? A clip on pack? What about the battery? Does the battery size have to be standardized? Must it use AA batteries? Any of these will make our current devices inoperable. Likewise if we just take the standards today and encode them into law, we could be crippling devices in the future. I don't think it's a pedantic point - when you say "replaceable", it also means by ""whom"? You the user? You can't assume everyone is as technically sound as you - if grandma can't replace her battery then does the manufacturer fall into hot water?
Next, why stop at the battery? Almost every device has some sort of radio that if rendered inoperable would brick the device, just like a battery. Does this bill now mean that the radio of every device now has to be user replaceable? Standardized? Modular? It's easy to see how such a bill is must more hairer than a law that just says "Provide documentation, and don't add legal restrictions on repair".
Seems pretty simple...
'Manufacturers must not knowingly make batteries inaccessible and irreplaceable without standardly available tools'
Your whole post is just quibbling and semantics making what is a pretty clear issue to be more complicated than it is.
Again, it's been standard for years and years for batteries to be contained below a cover that can be either pulled off or screwed off.
Trying to act like a phone is somehow more complicated and all these factors matter and some poor device manufacturer might sued because grandma can't take her battery out is....
So much disingenuous corporate lawyer babble bullshit.
>Next, why stop at the battery? Almost every device has some sort of radio that if rendered inoperable would brick the device, just like a battery.
You're absolutely right. I should be able to replace the individual components of my phone, the way I can replace components in my computer, car, bike, stove, most of my appliances, my guitar, nearly everything else I own to be honest. I completely agree with you.
Surprise, surprise, that is exactly what you sign up for when you ask the government to get involved. Who do you think is going to write up these laws? What are standardly available tools? Who defines the standard? What defines inaccessible? If you are going to make a law these things have to be defined, or else Apple will just pay $10MM to a lobbyist to make sure that Apple iScrew is a standard. If you make it too strict, some troll will sue will you for everything because grandma couldn't reasonably repair the device.
Right to Repair means manufacturers must release the necessary documentation and technical information required for repairing the product, to remove artificial legal and technical restrictions (trade secret, copyright, authorization, DRM), and possibly to provide replaceable parts, and even to allow third-party modification... So that the end user (or a 3rd-party repair technician) would theoretically be able to repair it independently.
But it has nothing to do with the underlying (not artificial) difficulty of the repair, and rightfully so (otherwise it's out of its scope, and you need a different set of regulations to address that) - Right to Repair asks manufacturers to open up the design, not to dictate how it's supposed to be designed. It doesn't matter if troubleshooting requires an EE degree, it doesn't matter if the repair requires a $1000 machine, it doesn't matter if the device is so delicate that it would only ever be successfully repaired by a trained technician with 100 hours of experience.
Using battery replacement as an example: Right to Repair means you should be able to get a service manual, a new battery, a set of tools, and possibly the technical specification of the battery management protocol from the OEM to replace the battery. But if your phone has been completely sealed for waterproofing by design, it can be extremely difficult to open the cover, remove the battery, and put a new one in without damaging anything - but you still have your Right to Repair, and you should support Right to Repair legislations, since it's still possible for you to find a skilled technician to repair it. On the other hand, without your Right to Repair, you won't even get the service manual, and the OEM can brick your device after you've replaced the battery via DRM.
Just like the Right to Free Speech, the Right to Repair is mostly a negative right, in the sense that it must eliminate restrictions on the (theoretical) exercise of the right, on the other hand, it does not actively empower an individual to exercise the right. The government cannot take my blog down, but I may be unable to get any meaningful traffic from the web.
Personally I doubt that's the _only_ reason things have gone in this direction, but it's certainly one of them.
I bought pretty much the smallest phone with decent specs I could find when I bought my last phone. Most of the new flagship phones were huge. Like things that would not fit in my jeans pocket with my wallet. None had a replaceable battery. Yet, i've had plenty of small, light, sturdy, water resistant phones with replaceable batteries.
I really have a hard time believing that argument i'm sorry. The only real reason I can see not to allow replaceable batteries is to increase profit for manufacturers. Same with every other 'feature' i've seen marketed to people with the same excuse.
It's nonsense. There's alway a profit motive behind things and the bottom line is...
The less modular consumer devices are, the more restricted our abilities to repair, modify and use our devices become, the less user friendly they become. The only ones benefiting from removing modularity, repairability and turning devices into black boxes without standardized parts requiring either replacement of the entire device or specialized repair services are the manufacturers period.
It's not consumer friendly. Anything else is marketing bullshit to make people accept less control over their devices and more profit for device makers.
There's zero legitimate consumer friendly reason not to standardize things and allow easy repair of devices, including replacing batteries, again a long standard feature in consumer electronics.
Just because it takes a couple years for batteries to die now, doesn't mean they don't die and need to eventually be replaced like old alkaline batteries. The time scale doesn't change the fact that eventually, yes they do need to be replaced, like any other batteries in battery powered devices.
-ID, who have a particular vision of what the device should look and feel like. They probably want things thin
-Manufacturing/automation, who wants something production line friendly. They’ll probably be angry if you replace a stamped adhesive sheet with 6 screws
-You and your manager, who want you to keep COGS as low as possible
-The reliability team, who will raise a fuss if you keep failing your drop tests and water/salt spray ingress tests
-HW compliance, who aside from ROHS FCC certs are mostly concerned with battery safety
-Whoever is keeper of the PRD (PM, lead engineer). This is where concerns about user friendliness of the assembly will show up
Given all the other things you need to juggle, and how many of them can be solved with judicious use of adhesives, the line item about user replaceable batteries is going to drop off very quickly at most companies. You can argue that this PRD doesn’t capture your needs, or that incentives are misaligned, and that’s fair. What you’re looking for is a company with industrial designers and product managers that deeply care about repairability and there aren’t many. But the status quo isn’t a nefarious plot, they’re just prioritizing other consumer and company needs over this one particular consumer need.
>over this one particular consumer need.
Sorry, i'm glad the needs of everyone trying to make money off me and everyone adding to the worth of their shares comes before the consumers you're squeezing every fucking penny out of.
>More corporate marketing bullshit
Yes...things looking sleek and shiny as opposed to functional and long lasting is exactly what marketers tell consumers they want so they waste more money lining shareholders' pockets.
No one, except for Apple and Samsung, is making any meaningful margin on consumer handsets. Many people would prefer a cheaper device vs a replaceable battery.
Yet, my new phone without a replaceable battery cost more than my last phone with one.
It's about 40x40x10mm, and I can dive wearing it, as long as I don't get too crazy.
Here's the trick: write the legislation, before this object is invented, which allows it to exist, while still mandating that cell phones have replaceable batteries.
Can't? Great. Let's not make laws like this.
Maybe I am not getting your point but I have my car repaired many times outside of the dealer (windshield replacement, stereo fixes etc). Are you saying this is illegal? What Apple is doing is something else, no?
"While Tesla offers mechanics the ability to pay for access to car manuals (as much as $3,000 a year), Benoit says the company limits access to its diagnostic toolkit to official Tesla service partners and attempting to become one could easily cost six figures and still be unsuccessful."
https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/right-to-repair-legis...
It's not a crusade I have much enthusiasm about, because I admire what Tesla is doing more than most companies. But I think they're in the wrong here.
This is where you're wrong though. Car manufacturers are required to provide all of that in the EU, because it's a prerequisite to having competition in that space.
It was codified around 2007-2011 into EU laws, but most European countries already individually had laws for this.
How do EU laws impact the US here? From what I hear it's only thanks to these laws that some independent repair shops in the US are able to fix certain things at all, because they can receive tools and such by proxy of the EU (and other places).
Is this meant seriously? You don't, you can opt not to buy. Otherwise the customer can demand anything, especially large buyers like public educators.
The thing it gets conflated isn't accidental, since batteries need maintenance and are very often the part that needs replacement most often.
Technically you are correct, but it is naive to think that lock-in ambitions of manufacturers don't touch both topics.
They have every right to demand something be manufactured a specific way. The manufacturer doesn’t have to listen but the consumer has the right to demand. Manufacturing is not some black box process that happens “over there” and you get whatever rolls out of it. Consumers have every right to give feedback to manufacturers and request for the production of products that better suit their needs, and if the manufacturer fails to do that the consumer can go somewhere else. The whole point of this is preference
The problem is that the market will only serve the majority well. Most people don't need general purpose computers. Following your logic, why should a company be required to make a computer accessible to hackers?
I would 100% prefered replaceable battery that does not have to be recharged as often and the damm thing ro fit into pocket.
I can honestly f-ck how thin it is, just make it so that it fits into pocket and is small enough so that my finger comfortably reaches important parts on screen.
And i am not getting any of that.
You can’t expect a mass market product to be designed precisely for you.
Lastly mass market products dont always follow wishes of customers. They often ognore them in secondary properties.
Such arrogance!
People just don't want the same thing as you. It's not a conspiracy. Different people have different priorities.
The primary motivation was to help sell AirPods (which customers then have to discard and buy new ones every year, because of the battery degradation.)
This is just cynical and uncharitable.
The iPhone is massively massively successful, iteration after iteration.
Are Apple doing that by not giving people what they want
That doesn’t seem likely to me.
Despite my... dislike for the iPhone ecosystem and the way apple runs their app store, it does produce a level of quality and safety that most other systems don't. It works pretty well for people who don't want to have to google things.
I think that for some people that would be worth it even if they don't get the hardware they want (so long as it meets some theoretical "good enough" threshold).
The only way to truly tell if that's what consumers wanted would be to go back in time and release 2 nearly identical products. An iPhoneX without headphone jack, non-replaceable battery, water resistant, and an iPhoneX with headphone jack, replaceable battery, same price but not water resistant and see which people choose. I suspect at the time most would have chosen replaceable battery and headphone jack.
Also BTW there are phones that are waterproof that have a headphone jack. Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
Or just recognizing that customers choose from what's available on the market, not from the space of all possible design.
What right does the corporatocracy have to poison the world and create wasteful, planned-obsolescent, proprietary, non-modular tech? What right do Global North countries have to create monopolies for intellectual 'property' that keep people from understanding the basic building blocks of our modern world (and who are therefore easier to rip off/cheat)?
> I don't want my tablet's battery to be user replaceable!
Tell that to the kids in Ghana choking on your (and our) e-waste
This misconception comes up every week on HN. I don't know where it came from, but I wish it would go back there.
Right to repair is important! Farmers have been suing John Deere to make it legal to replace the controllers in their tractors with an open-source board, because the company sells tractors with a license that requires farmers to use their 'authorized' repair networks.
Car companies get into this same game, and pushback is important: the playing field for repair should be level, when you buy a physical object, you should own it, and so on; all of this is good. Apple has lobbied against this sort of legislation, and shame on them.
But from where on Earth do you derive the right to repair your tablet easily and without any specialized tools from this?
How does that follow? What right do you have to demand that things be manufactured in a particular way?
I don't want my tablet's battery to be user replaceable! not as much as I want it to be thin, and solid, and resistant to splashes.
It's great that you want to buy those things. I don't. We should both fight for the right to be legally allowed to repair our gizmos, for the right of third parties to do that work, and even demand that companies which sell a manufactured good also sell the consumable components of that good, for some reasonable period after commencing manufacture.
And we should stay out of each other's way on matters of personal preference, such as whether batteries are glued in place or kept in a bay behind a door.