As an example, this (1) is how the manual looks for a ~1970-1974 stereo record player I have. You have diagrams of the boards and lists of parts as in individual caps, etc.

We should strive to move in that direction, not away from it. Permanently locked bootloaders, DRM for componets, etc. are a move in the oposite direction.

To move the overton window even a little bit towards where it was before, the demands have to be disproportionate. I say those demands are still reasonable. We should demand that any device and any component in any device be second source-able (just like AMD was a second source for early x86 chips). And for that matter since I am from Europe, any component should be second source-able from Europe. If IP transfers worked for China, they should work elsewhere.

(1) https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1012672/Pioneer-C-5600dfv....

Devices aren't built around discrete components anymore. That ship has sailed, we waved goodbye, partied on the dock, and took an Uber home. Now we're nursing the hangover. But hey, our phones are now marginally thinner than last year's phones, so that might be worth something.

I don't see how we get back, considering the market just isn't there: it'd rather treat devices as things that we lease for a low cost from a vertically-integrated company.

Your right about most electrical products. That is not the point though. (I know you were just commenting on this article, but I feel strongly over right to repair laws.)

I just want access to parts if they are available. I want access to repair information. I don't care how complicated a devise is--I want to see the factory repair diagrams. There is someone out there who can fab together a computer board if there's a demand for it.

If the company doesn't want to sell parts to consumers so be it, but release the information. Yes--trade secrets make it more difficult, but not impossible.

I would be content (now) with a huge sticker on every product that didn't want to give out information, or sell parts.

Something like, "If you buy this product, the minute the warrany ends, you are on your own. We don't provide any repair information (because you're too stupid to repair, or we are greedy), and never supply parts to anyone. We will never release repair information. So the minute the warranty ends, you will 99.99% of the time gave to buy a New product from us!".

I have a feeling after a few years, companies might put screws back in, and use a bit less epoxy? And poof--repair parts will be shipped overnight, and free?

O.K. right to repair movement is covering more than just electronics.

Like your watch you have on your wrist?

Rolex, and The Swatch Company (own mist watch brands)have pulled all third party parts accounts. Watch companies realized they could use Vertical integration, and "Quality assurance" to bring that watches back to the factory for repair, at factory prices.

I don't want to be in a perpetual lease when I buy a product.

Exact discrete components aren't important becuase your usb IC isn't any more special than another usb IC that follows the specification. Your laptop display isn't special versus the others that use the same internal displayport ribbon cable.

Market aside this is effectively corporations attempting to take a right/freedom away from the people. The market can treat devices however it likes but if it crosses a threshold then applying rules and regulations that restrict it's freedom isn't a new magical concept.

There are plenty of discrete components in a modern phone/laptop/roomba/whatever, that could be replaceable/upgradable by advanced user or entry-level technician, but are not:

- battery

- screen

- storage

- RAM

- list goes on and on...

For example, it's nice that I can drop my iPhone in water w/o worrying (too much) about destroying it. I spent ~$1500 on an iPhone 12 Pro in November & dropped it in a lake in December. Part of the reason it's (more) waterproof if because it's not covered w/ ports/hatches/openings that would allow me swap out the battery/RAM/SSD/something. If I had to choose between having a fully customizable phone & one that doesn't die when it gets wet, I think I'd rather have one that resists water.

Just one person's opinion.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy that customers will buy it. I dont have another choice

That's an important insight.

I only recently realized this too, and conceptualized it as a pipeline:

     RAW    >   PRODUCT  > FINISHED >  A BIT > WASTE
  MATERIALS > COMPONENTS >  GOODS   > OF USE > MATTER

Here's the bad part though: adding recycling to any stage of this pipeline doesn't alter the overall behavior. It only recirculates some of the matter - recycling is never perfect. But as we know, if you recycle less than 100%, and then re-recycle that, and then re-recycle again, it still converges to zero. With an exponentially growing pipeline, recycling is only delaying the crisis a little bit.

Ultimately, we need to remove the exponent (or at least couple it to population growth, in the scenario where humanity expands into space). For now, we need to reduce it. And one of the best ways of doing that is... reducing use. Buying less. The less matter flows through the pipeline, the longer we have before it runs out.

>Now when we say that our economy grows exponentially, it means that the amount of matter traveling through this pipeline is growing exponentially too!

The relationship between economic growth and environmental damage is more complicated than this. Something like transitioning from fossil fuels to cheap renewables is both a case of economic growth, and a reduction waste matter. Similar principles might apply to everyone having an iPod instead of buying new CDs, miniaturization in computing, productive uses of what used to be considered waste, building mass transit infrastructure over cars, etc.

If you want to slow damage to the natural environment, I'm all for it, but if you aim to do that by slowing economic growth, rather than accepting slowed economic growth as a potential side-effect, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Economic growth often means more people can have better lives using fewer resources.

We can and must develop more environmentally responsible sources of matter and energy. Trying to change human behavior with our current regulatory controls have been demonstrably inadequate. There are sources of matter and energy that do not run out, I believe them to be in space.

Say the world (after some unfortunate incident) turns into [say] something like Cuba? In just a few years no one will have a phone.

If there are people out there who buy phones by weight it is to buy phones that are thin and light, and therefore contains fewer materials.

I remember the phones of the early aughts. They were bigger and could only do phone things (and snake), which meant that you needed a computer, maybe a calculator, a form of MP3 player, a camera, maybe some DVDs to watch in the back of the car along with a DVD player to watch them on.

Today you have all of that in a phone.

But you replace them every two years. And the market for them is still growing. And there's now a resurgence of a market for single-purpose appliances that happens on top of the smartphone market - not replacing it.

(It's also possible more matter goes into making a modern smartphone than a bunch of devices it replaced, because of the demand for more exotic and more pure materials in the processes along the way. But maybe it doesn't, maybe an individual smartphone is a net matter and energy saver. I can totally buy that, we've made a lot of efficiency improvements in manufacturing in the past decades. But there are limits to such improvements, and in the meantime, manufacturing as a whole keeps growing.)

Perhaps I've simplified my diagram too much - I should've drawn an additional "bypass" into "WASTE MATTER" from every other node, because every step in the pipeline loses some of its input as waste.

I would love to see the amount of resources that are used to produced each iPhone, because I don't have a big issue assuming that each phone brings, say 3 or 4 percent more utility to its user than the previous model would have.

So, assuming the battery is the most dirty part of the phone, I found the battery size for all the iphone models[0] and even if we exclude the the large ones, the iPhone 11 has a 54 percent larger battery.

The phones were released in 2007 and 2019, 12 years and 3 months apart[1]. That works out to a growth of approximately 3.3%.

So my original assumption was wrong, there has been an exponential growth in materials that nearly matches GDP growth.

[0]: https://itigic.com/how-much-battery-does-an-iphone-have-capa...

[1]: https://www.knowyourmobile.com/phones/every-single-iphone-re...

It’s got nothing to do with planned obsolescence, new devices get new features because technology makes those features possible.

You get non-serviceable devices because users want smaller, faster, better hardware. Any latches, connectors, or sockets are purely subtracting from battery life as that’s the only part of a phone that can be resized, and even that is subject to constraints.

Repairable/serviceable means by definition more expensive and worse feature set.

I just want to make sure you're not confusing "repairability" with Right to Repair... R2R is not asking for changes to product design - only that replacement parts and documentation are made available in a compulsory way.

How long should production lines be kept producing out of date products?

How long should a company like GM that designs its own engines have to continue manufacturing replacement ones? That's not cheap... (etc.)

Thinking about a mature market where we do have right to repair is a good test of these questions and helps reveal the hidden complexities. GM makes replacement parts for a while. A thriving non-OEM market persists long after the manufacturer ceases making more.

This is distinctly different from the status quo in Apple-land, where they prohibit partners like Texas Instruments from manufacturing or selling units to anyone but Apple.

Note also that there is no legislation in front of us with explicit terms set in stone here, so while your questions are good ones to consider when drafting such legislation, they should preclude a right to repair bill passing into law.

I have a 1965 and 1966 Mustangs. Original body panels are difficult to find, but I’ve not found any mechanical part that was the least bit difficult (aided by high-volume production and a lot of parts crossover up through the early 90s Fox body Mustangs).

This may be true, but we shouldn't confuse 'a decision made by a product manager' with 'the customers want this'.

Some design decisions succeed because of the other strengths of a product (and the competition cargo-cult copies them), not because they are good design decisions. Some design decisions are made because they are more convenient for the vendor, not better for the customer. Some design decisions are made because of inertia. Pointing to any particular design trade-off in a successful product, and saying that 'Well, this is obviously what the market wants' is not always a correct conclusion to draw.

USB is unarguably the most successful mechanism for two hardware devices to communicate with each-other in history, and yet you need to flip the cable over three times before you can plug it in. Should we conclude that customers want to play the cable fandango every time they plug one device into another?

I used to know one of the folks involved with the USB standard pretty well professionally. At one point, he told me that this aspect of USB is one thing he wished they could have dealt with differently.

(That said, the fact that the mini and micro versions are more explicitly keyed doesn't make that much of a different and I assume that a USB-C or Lightning-type design just wasn't possible at the time without undesirable tradeoffs.)

Interestingly, reversible USB-A cables are readily available (at least here in Japan). They just have a too-thin "lip" in the middle which is prone to breaking. https://www.sanwa.co.jp/product/syohin.asp?code=KU-RMCB2W

I think it's just that nobody thought of it when the plug was designed, because this wasn't a problem that serial cables etc before USB-A had (and even USB-B is keyed!)

The reality is this, when your device gets old or your screen cracks , Apple will offer to fix it for 70% of a new device price, so you are pushed to buy a new device. I hope this is not controversial and has nothing to do with the water proof preference you have.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...

Maybe things changed a bit but you could not buy screens or use refurbished ones. But all parts should be available for phones and laptops, including screens,batteries, chips, ports. Also there should be a way where parts from broken phones could be reused (I know the argument about stolen phones but competent Apple people can find a way to make it possible so we can reuse components from borken devices and not send them some far away to be "recycled" instead of reuse.

Look at a random PC (or, until recently, a random laptop): it's made from a lot of individual components that can be swapped out or upgraded independently. Storage, RAM, CPU, GPU, cooling, motherboard, WiFi chip, Bluetooth chip, speakers, microphone, screen, all the peripherals - they're all designed to work together as a category, and to be easily replaceable. I can source each one from a different vendor, and they'll still work. Hell, in many cases, you can even fix individual components, with a hot air station and a steady hand. And if I upgrade a component, my old one can often get a second life inside another computer, possibly someone else's.

It's a good thing to have, and there's nothing stopping modern laptops, tablets and phones to have the same level of upgradeability and swapability. Nothing - except that the vendors don't want to[0]. These things run on the same set of hardware standards as larger computers, and on literally the same software stacks. I[1] should be entirely able to open up my phone, desolder its battery and memory, swap them out for newer and better ones, apply sealant, close the case and have the whole thing work. There's no technical obstacle here - the only problem are the business strategies of the vendors.

--

[0] - I have another long rant for the usual "it's customers who chose integrated over repairable" argument, and I'll post it elsewhere in this thread. For now, I'll just say: it's not like anybody is asking customers to choose. These options are not being made available in the first place.

[1] - Or my friend who spent half his life tinkering with electronics. Or the repair shop down the street. A point commonly missed in discussions about Right to Repair (and Free Software) is that it isn't about expecting consumers to do hardware/software work themselves - it's about making it possible for local markets for software and hardware maintenance and repair to exist.

Could it be because it's not financially feasible? If you present the idea of a repairable alternative to an iPad, are any investors going to take you up on it?

I think a big aspect of this whole debate is that manufacturing efficiencies have gone up so much, that it's simply not economically worth it to sacrifice the resiliency and cost effectiveness of making it completely integrated. The cost to launch a new product and manufacturing line is also very high, so that you have to be really sure a sufficient number of consumers will want it.

On top of that, as a seller, you get to keep costs low when you have to spend less on dealing with people tinkering with it and then sending it in for warranty.

Unfortunately, I don't think a "tinkerable" option can compete on price to value ratio such that sufficient people would buy it to make it a feasible investment.

>it's about making it possible for local markets for software and hardware maintenance and repair to exist.

Efficiency is frequently a trade off for a word that I can't think of, but maybe can be described as "security" or "local security". It's similar to not needing a butcher, produce market, shoe store once a Walmart Supercenter rolls into town. I struggle to come up with a legal requirement that would restrict efficiency such that it does not give others (globally) a competitive advantage, but still retains "local security".

I vote yes for right to repair, both with my dollar and my desire to favor the rights of the citizens of this country.

Many of the modern smartphones can still be fixed as are laptops.

However, these repair shops only exist if they have the schematic and parts available.

it's not an efficiency issue. It's planned obsolescence.

I believe all of that is true.

Which is why this needs to be corrected by regulation. If making a more user-respecting and environmentally-friendly products isn't economical enough for the market to do it on its own, the economical landscape needs to be altered so that it is.

> as a seller, you get to keep costs low when you have to spend less on dealing with people tinkering with it and then sending it in for warranty

This must be solvable, because somehow it isn't a problem on the PC market, or on the car market.

> Efficiency is frequently a trade off for a word that I can't think of, but maybe can be described as "security" or "local security".

"Distribution" and "decentralization" are the words you're thinking of. Despite the common propaganda to the contrary, centralization is usually increasing efficiency. That's why the market loves it so much (and why every country ends up with laws to limit it). The cost to that efficiency is usually resilience (failure of any single actor becomes a large-scale issue) and slower innovation (bigger actors take less risks, smaller actors tend to cover more of the possibility space, by virtue of numbers).

> It's similar to not needing a butcher, produce market, shoe store once a Walmart Supercenter rolls into town.

And it is a contentious issue. On the one hand, the food gets cheaper. On the other, the jobs get worse, the local community suffers, and money gets siphoned off the local economy. On an international scale, the same thing is called "globalization", which is both widely praised and criticized. In particular, the current pandemic has revealed the resilience problem of our globalized economy, which is why so many countries are now making moves towards reversing it a bit.

I would find it a lot more compelling to talk about trade-offs than to just throw out uninformed ranting. We used to have laptops like what you're describing, and they no longer sell very well, or are no longer available because they are thicker and heavier than the models that replaced them.

0: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2dyuxa/can_any_engin...

On laptops you have a choice: buy a Thinkpad that is not an ultrabook, but even then you see people prefer thinner and lighter models than ones that are servicable.

And if I have to do that anyway, the phone being less than 100% watertight because the battery is swappable won't be a problem in the first place.

Maybe I am just paranoid, but I would like to know my phone doesn't die on me when it is exposed to rain.

R2R is just seeking to preserve the practical access to repairability for those who want to service their own devices.

This isn't "my approach" – it's the approach that the vast majority of purchasers prefer. And pining for the good ol' days of technical datasheets doesn't help everybody who can't start their cars without the successful interaction of nearly a hundred proprietary microcontrollers running proprietary code speaking over a high-speed data bus.

And here's the annoying thing: I want a car that doesn't have a hundred microcontrollers speaking over a high-speed data bus. I want a car like my old '88 Camry, that I could take apart with my dad and fix almost all of the problems I ran into with the help of a Haynes manual and a trip (or two!) to the junkyard. But the market clearly does not agree with my desires.

So how do you get there from here?

That seems pretty speculative. The market can be manipulated or directed by more than simply consumer choice, e.g. by business incentives of product manufacturers.

I mean, gestures at every consumer-targeted product made since at least the early 'oughts.

People want things that are some combination of more capable, more convenient, more reliable, and less expensive. Different consumers obviously make different decisions, but there's a reason you can't go to a car lot and easily find a car with a stick shift. There's a reason you probably don't know anyone who has a Speed Queen top loader (pre-redesign model of course ;)) in their house, even though it is infinitely more reliable and repairable than the competition. Those offerings are less capable, less convenient, and more expensive than the alternatives, so customers don't want them.

The free market is in short pretty garbage on its own.

Exactly. Only that proves the opposite of what you think it proves.

I think this is a case where actors are acting in an irrational manner (i.e. not adhering to the perfectly rational actor assumption that's required for free-markets to function) and that necessitates government or other intervention to ensure that consumers are protected.

It's depressing because I absolutely agree with you that users aren't purchasing devices with an emphasis on being able to repair them. It is a pain point but not one that comes up at the register and so manufacturers are free to exploit the situation to provide marginally cheaper goods that require full replacement more frequently to ensure consistent sales.

Nobody wants to be like Hoover in the 90's that offered free plane tickets with vacuum purchases[1] and caused such an oversupply in the market that first party vacuum sales dwindled to nearly nothing over the next decade and that's fair. But we need to have a balance where we aren't rewarding manufacturers who build products that frequently break and for the consumer to make another purchase.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion

We don't know that. We might, if the other alternative was available for purchasers to choose from, but it isn't.

That's what's necessary IMO - since if it isn't required for all consumers than there is no motivation to make it available for any customers, we'll continue to be dragged down by the LCD as devices get less and less serviceable. Manufacturers don't like options - options cost money and each additional model you offer drives up how much you spend in storage and production line configuration, so they'll target the majority which probably does want to be able to repair devices but either doesn't realize it's still an option or doesn't have the financial freedom to invest in a higher quality device that has a higher upfront price tag but a lifespan that outlives that difference by leaps and bounds.

Could you expand on the specifics of what changes RTR would necessitate the hardware to have? Let's say beyond the fact that a non-reversible bond/connector would otherwise be the cheapest option (saving perhaps fractions of pennies on the BOM).

It's one thing to have a waterproof phone that you need specialty tools to fix it, it's another thing when manufacturers try to make repairing deliberately more difficult than it should be, such as limiting the sale of OEM components or using security screws.

Either way, your thought what Right to Repair is only one version/proposal of what RtR.

Just look at motor vehicles - people have the right to change their own brake pads yet or even engines! This is arguably way more dangerous than a badly repaired small electronic device!

It's not like anyone asked the consumers. Nor were the options put on the market, for the buyers to vote on them with their wallets. The conclusions are assumed in advance by the companies. Meanwhile, consumers choose from what's actually available on the market - not from the space of all possible products.

> they just simply aren't willing to accept the tradeoffs involved (larger size, worse thermals, higher price, etc).

No customer can truly evaluate the tradeoffs involved. For starters, necessary information isn't publicly available. Companies don't publish reports from their product teams that describe the trade-off space they're working on. Would a user-replaceable battery make the phone thicker? How much? Does the glue actually helps with thermals? What's the price difference? Nobody knows, outside the people involved in these decisions.

Secondly, marketers run interference. Maybe a Joe would pay $100 extra for a fully repairable phone, so that Jane could fix it for him when he unavoidably breaks it in six months. Maybe an environmentally conscious Carol would go for one with user-replaceable battery, because she can only afford a cheaper, mostly integrated device. But they won't, because those issues aren't even on a typical person's radar. Instead, the marketing focuses on vague appeal to emotions, misrepresented specs, outright lies, and bait-and-switch "value-add" services. Most people who know better than to fall for such nonsense will just look at the one clear indicator - price.

The point is: when you have a system connected to a bunch of input signals, you can't say that a particular signal doesn't affect the system, if half of the other inputs are flooded with noise that's 20dB higher than any legit signal would be. You first need to shut off the noise!

> If you disagree, there's an unserved market segment wide open for you!

Not for me. There are too many capital barriers to entry around designing and manufacturing high-end electronics. You can't just start a business in this space and hope to offer a comparable price to established magnitudes.

Now if an established company like Samsung or Apple dared to try this, then we'd know. Maybe it would turn out there's no market for repairable smartphones. But I haven't seen anybody giving it a shot in a meaningful way.

This is a nightmare.

I built my PC, I repair my phone and laptops. I replace joysticks and mod old gaming consoles. I fix my own car.

I don't want the industry following Apple into the depths of hell.

We used to be allowed to record tv shows on VHS legally. Look how far we've slid down the path of non-ownership.

We've given up our privacy, we license media on subscription, and even our employers rent premium and expensive time sharing on "cloud".

Open source has been captured and turned into hidden away SaaS/PaaS.

We're all being gaslighted.

What's changed that prevents you from doing that today? I'm guessing the answer is: "But that's a crappy alternative to what people watching Netflix or even renting DVDs are doing." And I would agree with that. (Though in the case of music, owning versus renting is still very much a legitimate choice at least for me.)

What's changed is that technologies involved in modern video streaming are designed up front to prevent end-users from recording the stream, and are backed by regulations making some of the workarounds illegal.

MAFIAA may not be able to close the "analog hole" completely, but it doesn't stop them from achieving the next best thing - making it so hard to exploit that almost nobody bothers. This is a positive feedback loop, because the market in general doesn't like to serve small niches unless it has nothing more interesting to do. Thus: no VCRs for Netflix.

Huh. Thats news to me. A 0603 resistor is pretty much a discrete component to me. And if it is some other part of the assembly that breaks, the assembly it self is a discrete part (e.g. the microphone of your smartphone might be on a seperate flexboard that costs like 15 euros, which is a lot cheaper than buying a new one).

Yeah things got small. But that doesn't make things unfixable. Missing documentation, proprietary parts you cannot get, gluing in things in without reason, etc. are problems. The size is for the most part managable — and if it isn't, right to repair is also about you being able to go to some repair guy and having your stuff fixed instead of having some Apple employee tell you how you can only buy a new device, and loose all data because they won't even look at it properly. So in short this is about repairability in general.

And if you like to do it yourself, this is totally possible. Even my father managed to swap out that home button for his completely glued Samsung Galaxy S7 edge.

I teach (among other things) soldering at University. Most people can actually SMD solder if you show them how. A student who never soldered before swapped a usb port for an E-reader within an hour of me showing her.

However, I think that you're basically right anyway... because when you pay Apple for a laptop repair, I think there's a good chance that they do a logic board replacement or something similar. The logic board itself is made of components and can be repaired, but it often isn't repaired, just replaced.

It's weird how you defend Corporations' private property while apparently disliking the idea of personal property.

But if you had designed the English language better, not making "It" and "I" so similar, this wouldn't have happened.

For a short time in college I worked fixing stereos at a big-name electronics company's east coast repair facility. You could always tell the gear that people had tried to fix themselves before sending it back to us as a last resort. We didn't begrudge them trying on their own. In fact, it was encouraged because home repairs kept the cost of maintaining the repair facility down.

These days, since everything gets chucked in the garbage when it breaks, I guess that logic doesn't work anymore.

As an aside, the Commodore 64 didn't come with the schematics, but they were part of the Programmer's Reference Guide, which many people had, and could be bought in most bookstores.

There's also a print version of this book that is included with the assembled version of the device: https://shop.mntmn.com/products/mnt-reform-operator-handbook

I might entertain the argument that you don't want to show all internal details of your 6 layer PCB but those are also not necessary for repair. Just hand out the component level schematics.

The fact that manufacturing is cheap now and schematics are not only the key to repairability but also counterfeit Chinese knock-offs is a problem worth understanding.

This is as opposed to the status quo, where manufacturers like Apple and Samsung currently cause their phones to malfunction when replacing parts without proprietary software switches - even when those parts are OEM. [1]

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-rep...

I think you have a BIG misunderstanding here. The schematics do not include any Apple secrets, it is the repair schematic that is only high level stuff AND this schematics are already on the internet so China has it already (so honestly stop bringing the China argument here).

Is the same with diagnostic software, many companies only show you a error LED and you have to send the device to a repair person for that person to use the software and tell your the error message. Making the software(or the Google doc) available that translates and error code numbers into error messages will not make iPhones insecure or allow China to copy them (btw isn't iPhone already made in China> wtf is this About China FUD?, China's Apple factory must have much more info then only repair schematics )

For a 15 year old e-reader I found the repair manual online, which contained a full schematic. For a more recently released e-reader from the same company, the repair manual simply has a disassembly step-by-step. I can only imagine the company found it not worth the effort for technicians to actually repair anything.

You can't even replace an Intel CPU with an AMD one unless your motherboard supports both. Good luck finding a modern laptop with a socketed CPU.

I get where you are coming from, and it would be nice not to be locked down to one vendor, but the cost to enable that is so high as to be not worth it.

I would rather the manufactures have to state their support up front and then you know what you buy when you buy it.

What would prevent a competitor simply copying the whole product and offering a cheaper price because they didn’t have to invest in R&D, and those engineers who spent many years working on a finished schematics will be out of job because the company won’t be able to make a living selling more expensive products?

system76 talks about this in this interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ

Whatever it was that kept this from happening from the advent of electronics up to the invention of the smartphone.

They are not all you need copy a device outright, contrary to what some people in the comments think. But they are sufficient for you to track down faulty components and de-solder them.

I care about consumption (I'm on my 2nd laptop since ~2003), but I don't particularly want to pay $15,000 to replace this one with one that is worse.

That implies intent to deceive, which crosses into personal attack. Can you please not do that on HN? If you feel that someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information in a neutral way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And they want that for every piece and part on the thing.

My dad replaced a defective memory chip on his IBM PC XT.. but the computer cost the equivalent of $12k.

I’d rather throw away a dozen modern laptops than fix one that costs 10x.

They do not cost 10x as much as devices with soldered RAM and SSDs.

When I built PCs in the late 90s, the BOM included motherboard, cpu, graphics card, sound card, nic, sometimes a parallel port board, memory, hard disk, etc. At this point, it was only really feasible to repair modules that failed, few humans with the skill to replace a component would do so due to the economies of scale and cheap price.

Now, it's motherboard, cpu, memory, disk. The cost is much less, but most repairs are replacements of the mainboard or disk.

For most laptops, there's a tiny motherboard with most of the functionality integrated into a few modules. The only things that get repaired are memory and battery.

For the M1 Macbook, you have one of the highest performance devices on the market selling for $899 at 40-50% margin. I just bought similar Dell and HP units in quantities over 50,000 last fall for $100-150 less (probably 6-8% margin to the OEM), with inferior battery life, disk and cpu.

The M1 is a fresh design on a new iteration of an arch by very smart people and its likely that there are far more factors at play than presence or absence of sockets in terms of determining profitability.

What we are trying to do is determine all things being equal how much cheaper can the same machine be with and without replaceable parts. I don't have any numbers either but I strong doubt its 2-10x cheaper.

Look into Apple's M1.

Phones have been system on a chip since the dawn of the era of the smartphone and few computers are. The difference between repairable and not is the difference between glue and screws and sockets vs solder. You have basically misunderstood everything.

Computers have gotten a lot faster, that is why "spend" has kept up.

And you seem to suggest that early smartphones were already as fast as an M1, because they were "systems on a chip". That is not the case. Not all SoCs are the same, more and more things have been integrated over time.

And sockets take up space, making for thicker smartphones. People don't actually want that.

>And you seem to suggest that early smartphones were already as fast as an M1, because they were "systems on a chip"

I never suggested anything of the sort. My point is that smartphones have always been integrated and computers have usually been more discrete. You said the drop in price or increase in value for money has to do with integration. This doesn't appear to be correct because computers have been party to this without largely being integrated in the fashion you suggest.

The M1 is so fast and efficient because it combines even more stuff on a single chip.

Nearly every electronic device I bought in the 1970s did not have included schematics. TI-55, Pong console, digital watches, Speak'n'Spell, transistor radios, Mattell football and baseball handhelds, Simon... and on and on.

Nearly everything then was also not easily repairable, and certainly not by an average consumer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think anyone's saying that "an average consumer" in the terms of "I can't tell the difference between a hammer and a soldering iron" should be able to repair their devices.

But I think that if the consumer can demonstrate some minimum level of interest (education, certification, or at least competence) then they absolutely should be able to repair devices they own.

And, further, that owning devices and software should be the default and normal thing. The trend today of renting/leasing things is clearly anti-consumer.

Sure, but repair shops could exist that would specialize in doing all sorts of repairs.

Take the essential ph-1 as an example. Now that the company is gone, if a device bricks during an update, that's it. Having the firehose file would make it possible to unblock it, but without it, a bricked phone is just spare parts (less the main board).

The main board should be just as repairable as any other device. If that requires changes to copyright law, the DMCA and or even WIPO treaties then that will eventually happen.

It's not that many years ago—certainly well within my lifetime—that 'deep' repairs of this kind were not only commonplace but actually encouraged by manufacturers. (If you want examples then I'll provide some).

By such action, we would only be returning to the status quo as it was some 40 or more years ago.

(To detractors of this comment, I accept and understand that you never lived through that time to see it in action, if you had then very likely you'd have a changed point of view.)

You are implying the two concepts are incompatible. There is no reason why they should be other than a manufacturer's planned obsolescence strategy, which is what the Right to Repair movement is all about and fighting to fix.

If Apple made a repairable iPhone with the same profit margins and specs, I'm guessing it would have to be more expensive. I would have to pay for this, even though I don't want to repair my stuff (I just buy new stuff when it breaks).

Who knows, the amount Apple has spent lobbying may have allowed them to create a more repairable iphone without increasing consumer prices.

Apple makes about 38% on hardware, right?

Suppose I pay $100 “extra” for an iPhone thanks to limited repairability.

Without that $100, Apple would have to find $38 somewhere else.

As I don’t value repairability, all the options seem worse.

Maybe it would make me $100 happier at the cost of $38 to Apple’s “bottom line”. But I don’t think they would like that investment strategy.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-a...

At the same time, restricting how and what customers can repair is good for future phone/etc sales, which I imagine it's why they're doing it.

HN submissions are supposed to be "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", but we've seen dozens of right-to-repair articles by now, and this doesn't bring anything substantially new to the table (unlike the top previous submissions https://hn.algolia.com/?q=right+to+repair).

Glad to see the BBC running this.

There are ways around this with some models, but it's been a long time since it was even "save SHSH blobs and replay them" easy.

For this type of legislation push it is very important to keep the narrative focused on what’s morally and technologically reasonable.

Very few people agree that a manufacturer should be forced to spend time and money on supportting a product for life, many (I hope) agree that we should force manufacturers to give us the ability to repair all functions ourselves (or at least not stand in our way), but almost everyone can agree that you should be able to replace something as trivial as a button, a cable, or a screen.

Absolutely, the more the merrier. Also, I believe that lay people are now becoming aware of the fact, as I've seen many articles both in the daily press and on the television news about it (where I live the Government's current inquiry into the matter seeking public comment has been reasonably well covered).

Additionally, the fact that this submission has 350+ comments at the time I write this is all the evidence I need that this was worthy of submission. Many times, the comments, even if it's a tangential discussion, are much more interesting than the article submitted.

There are weak versions of the right to repair that are only suited to enable third-party repair shops, e.g. by making schematics and parts available to "licensed professionals". But that is not what is generally desirable.

I agree that the article fails to make this clear.

Also had win 10 updates kill a laptop in this manner that was then extended another 7 years by switching to Ubuntu.

Unfortunately courts have yet to get "bitey" on this issue. I guess it needs to hit a few more judges until the hammer comes down hard.

I know the argument here would be "well keep your os up to date", but the point is that the updates themselves no longer work on this laptop for whatever reason; yet microsoft insists on breaking my laptop every tuesday for these "critical" fixes that I never really need.

More probably you are right.

My 8 year old sony laptop had kludges to be supported by windows 8 (which it came with...). Sony quit the laptop game before win 10 and I figured it would be a nightmare to ever get off win8.

Turns out Windows 10 was way easier to install than what was ever officially supported (especially if you wanted a clean install) and there are no issues keeping it up to date.

And even that is dwarfed by desktops.

Well, I would say it includes publishing the software interface of your hardware, and not making it impossible to replace the software. Those are the main roadblock on updating old tablets and phones.

I do really read those lines as fighting closed boot loaders, DRM on real goods, dependencies on the manufacturer's servers, and all kinds of purposeful hindrances that are so popular between the large industries nowadays.

I would really not include the "design for repairability" and software upgrades into the idea. But one does not need to include those to agree with the article.

100% this. Case in point: I have two 'old' apple devices: a 2009 mac mini and an ipad c.2011. Apple doesn't provide updates for either any more. For the mini, that's not a problem: it's running Debian just fine, and kept up to date.

The ipad is a different story. Physically it's still in perfectly good nick: it's a well-built device. Software, though, is a different matter. Progressively fewer websites render properly with the outdated version of safari; the number of installable apps is down to a faint trickle. It's broken. Doesn't matter that it's broken because the software is outdated rather than a hardware component has given up. It doesn't do what it was intended for, and there's no way to repair it.

I've no issue with apple - or any other manufacturer - deciding there's a lifetime beyond which they're not willing to support the device. But they shouldn't be allowed to brick it. At the point it goes out of manufacturer support, there should be the option to 'unlock' and install 3rd party software.

Of course it'll impact Apple's revenues. At least to some extent; plenty people will still want "shiny new". And it'll need 3rd party software to be available. But that's a whole new market opportunity.

More fundamentally, it's simply unconscionable to consign devices to the scrap heap because the manufacturer built a time bomb into the software.

Take that legacy software. For many technologies the software is not distinguishable from the hardware to the end user, yet faulty software could present a security risk or even pose physical danger. At the same time, vendors are dropping support for software at an accelerated rate while making it impossible to use third party fixes or replacements. This is not about having the latest features or being able to run the latest apps. It is about having the device being an asset rather than a liability.

With the way tech is increasingly getting locked down, what if we end up in a future where all the major computer vendors won't sell you anything, only lease it to you under strict terms, which include the right for them to brick it for any reason. Sure, you can still buy parts and build your own computer, but you can't use it for any bank or credit card transaction or government website because it's not SECURE. If fact, even wanting to own your own computer makes you a suspicious person to law enforcement because why do you need it? Are you trying to distribute child porn? In fact, child porn is the reason Comcast stated to justify a new policy that will go into effect soon, which will only allow devices running on trusted hardware/OS to connect to the internet at all...

It is already like this for mobile phones. If I install LineageOS on my Android phone, I will be unable to use various banking and payment apps. My bank's app won't run, their wallet app won't run, the mobile payment app used by nearly everyone won't run. I haven't tested it, but I'm pretty sure I would also be unable to use the official 2-factor authentication app that is used for just about every interaction with any public service and for 3D Secure authentication of card payments.

At least for the 2-factor part, accessibility requirements mean there are other options, including SMS one-time codes and physical cardboard code sheets, but I think it's a matter of time before those are phased out.

If you're not running an iPhone or Android phone with an officially sanctioned OS, you are a second-tier digital citizen at best.

Fundamentally, the repairs and sales are different things. A consumer knows whether they are making a purchase or renting when paying for a product. A consumer is much less likely to know what the extended support (i.e. out of warranty) options are, and they are subject to change as time goes on anyhow. This means that the market is less likely to accept a scenario where everything is rented and more likely to end up in a scenario where nothing is repairable.

That being said, I suspect the right to buy would become an issue if every vendor switched to rentals or subscriptions only.

An act of such naked greed could trivially backfire.

The criteria are:

1- Documentation

2- Ease of disassembly, with a subsection on the necessary tools and a focus on the parts that are most likely to be serviced (for smartphones: battery, screen, ...)

3- Availability of spare parts

4- Price of spare parts relative to the finished product price

5- Extra criteria which depend on the type of item, for a smartphone, software updates are in this category

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...

Granted, these are available from 3rd parties for a rather modest fee.

I really do not want this machine to fail because use it often. It would be lots of work recreate the convenience and familiarity of use if all the failed was a 50 cent button.

(PS it is on the net on my IOT "don't trust the IP stack" "vlan" of my home network [3 dumb router style DD-wrt units] in case it does get hit by a site attacking 10 year old iPads. I have my TVs, DVD players with apps and Guest access on it. May I will get another dumb router for the guests)

If I could be emperor for a day I would just mandate that when they drop support an old device, they have to provide a way for users still owning that device to have unlimited ability to load and run any software on it. That way if you really want to keep using your first-gen iPad then you can support it yourself. But it doesn't seem right to mandate that someone else continue to spend effort supporting idiosyncratic choices of all users.

Everything else I buy for my home (except for things with obvious wear items that physically wear out), I expect to function forever exactly as the day I purchased it, or be repairable. I have hand tools that were made 100 years ago, inherited from my grandpa, which work exactly as they are supposed to. Yet, we're expected to accept that software "wears out" after a few years.

This is a subtle point about older devices that doesn't get enough attention imo.

In order to have an app I purchased with the features I purchased on an older device that I purchased, I must:

- Jailbreak the device

- Extract the iOS app and externally save it

- Turn off automatic updates for apps

- Be signed in to the Apple account that purchased that app

- Have that account be valid and not revoked

At some point, Apple may:

- Remove the app from the App store entirely

- Allow an update to the app that changes or removes the features that I specifically wanted

- Insist that the app does not support that older version of iOS (even if the version you purchased was fine, and only a later version removed support for older iOS versions)

In order to restore access to the app in that case I must:

- Jailbreak the device

- Sign in to that Apple account

- Copy the backed-up version of the app to the device

- Risk losing any data in that app, especially if it was updated and I'm now downgrading to a version that might not support the newer data format

The first let-down was Orphion: when I purchased the app it was amazing, but they used the finger touch API in a way that Apple did not agree with. They were forced to remove that API call in an update, and the app has not been the same since. Unfortunately I did not get a copy of the original version, and so I lost access to that specific experience that I paid for.

If we (society) don’t make the choice to actively support those rights, we are making the choice to let them die on the vine.

"THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA AND DOING THIS VOIDS ANY WARRANTY OR GUARANTEE WE MAKE FOR THIS DEVICE. AND IF YOU INSIST ON DOING THIS YOU WILL PROBABLY EITHER GET HACKED OR LOSE ALL YOUR DATA. SO PLEASE DON'T DO THIS UNLESS YOU ARE 100% SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. AND IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING YOU ARE PROBABLY WRONG."

And if you sign that you can download a tool to jailbreak your iPhone.

Don't hide schematics, don't lock bootloaders, don't use NDAs to prevent sharing driver code, don't prevent component manufacturers from selling to third parties.

Why was that argument irrelevant in the past when the 'right to repair' was was accepted as completely normal† and manufacturers actually encourage it? (See my point to that effect above.)

† That is, to the extent that back then no one would have understood what the phrase meant. Had you mentioned it, it would have been considered either an oxymoron or a non sequitur and you would have received a blank and perplexing stare.

It's not coincidence that we make more devices that are more complex, and do it faster today than we did in the olden days and they are simultaneously more difficult to repair with tougher to source components in low volumes. Everything from the design process to the assembly and repair is completely different today than it was 50 years ago.

At the same time, consumers stopped caring about repairs. Why buy something you can repair if it will be obsolete in two years, and you can afford the replacement?

1. Yes, and that needs to change—and very soon at that. A short while ago I counted over one hundred x86 motherboards that were current and readily available from just one single manufacturer. I spent many hours trying to differentiate the minor—almost insignificant—differences between many of these boards (in fact, most of the differences were essentially trivial).

This nonsense is a deliberate marketing ploy and there ought to be definite penalties against it. It wastes considerable time and human effort that ought to put to better endeavors; confuses buyers as well as those who have to get the equipment working (let alone repair it); and it also screws up the development of software drivers—as no one is ever quite sure what all those minor changes are all about—and manufacturers haven't the time, wit or inclination to resolve such matters let alone spending time on providing upgrades for a PWA/board that has such a fleeting lifespan. No wonder the world is awash in e-junk! [That's just the beginning of that narrative but I'll spare you the rest.]

2. Then there are the thousands upon thousands of bugs that slip through software development and that are never fixed due mainly to the fact that the compilation process obfuscates them all and that there is no law or obligation to compel the developer to provide the source code that would reveal the underlying spaghetti code (this is the modern equivalent of a doctor burying his mistakes). ...Now, how many hundreds of examples would you like me to cite?

3. "At the same time, consumers stopped caring about repairs." That's true but fortunately they've now changed their minds—mostly because disingenuous manufactures have made either substandard equipment or equipment that has been deliberately designed to conform to the manufacturer's planned obsolescence strategy (I suggest you read my comments of several days ago on the Phoebus Light Bulb Cartel (BTW, it's still effectively alive and well)).

The sooner goods that cannot be easily repaired—or that are found to be deliberately designed to aid a manufacturer's planned obsolescence strategy—are taxed the sooner they'd fall into line. The classic example of this caper is the notorious—diabolical—example of smartphone batteries that are deliberately designed not to be changed. No wonder the Right to Repair movement has gathered apace and that new laws to regulate such wayward behaviour are now pending. Smartphone design would change overnight if every smartphone whose battery was not removable was levied with a hefty e-waste disposal tax! The same goes for smartphones whose manufactures deliberately disable the FM radio circuitry (a tax or levy on this can easily be justified from an emergency stance: if cell towers go down in floods, bushfires, earthquakes etc. and the FM radio works then phones would have at least some basic connection to the outside world). Right, that one's a no-brainer that everyone ought to understand!

4. With respect to your comment about JIT, it was alive and well when I was working in a manufacturing plant in Japan around the time that I was referring to.

Incidentally, I have worked in manufacturing and specifically in an electronics prototyping laboratory where much of my time was involved in liaising with production. I know the arguments you are putting very well, and whilst there is validity to some of them, many are just opportunistic and have been done more to benefit a manufacturer's coffers than to benefit users/consumers.

Thank goodness that's about to change.

This is authoritarian nonsense.

Thus we'd never agree and I'd never expect it. So be it.

- Repair schematics and diagrams are not necessarily complete schematics and may be abridged or missing some details

- Modern electronics are significantly more complex than when you were a child, unless you were born yesterday. Schematics for designs are barely useful for assembly today, let alone repair. They are primarily design documentation.

Instead of arguing on the exact definition of right to repair, we should all fight for the right to truly OWN our devices, where OWN := we have the legal right to do anything we want with the hardware AND with the software (because you can't really distinguish the two, now that all CPUs come with embedded TPMs running parallel closed OSes with ring -inf permissions).

You don't de facto have one without the other.

Apple’s penetration into the US market is not because the iPhone matches Android in terms of sales, it’s because iPhones last longer and get handed down or resold. Apple literally continues to sell years old devices.

That isn’t planned obsolescence.

A really simple step in the right direction would be mandated labeling showing how many years of software updates the device will get and statistical expected lifetime.

Yes, it is. Even though Apple devices last longer, after the support is ended, I cannot do anything with them. I cannot update, install anything. They effectively become bricks. If this is not planned obsolescence, then what is?

In other words this was complete bullshit.

It’s true that older devices are less capable than newer ones, and you might not want to browse on an old device.

But they aren’t bricks.

Understatement of the year concerning unsupported, insecure and (unreasonably) locked Apple devices.

2. What 11 year old GNU/Linux phone is supported today let alone ‘forever’?

Linux laptops have a proven track record of being supported for >10 years. Since the GNU/Linux phones also run mainline Linux, they are effectively the same kind of devices. There is no reason to expect that GNU/Linux phones will stop being supported.

> 2. What 11 year old GNU/Linux phone is supported today let alone ‘forever’?

Nokia N900? See also: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

1. No they aren’t. The hardware is different. Laptops are not the same as phones. It’s a false comparison.

They may run the mainline kernel, but they certainly don’t run mainline distributions usefully.

PinePhone isn’t even considered supported for consumer use today.

It’s sold for developers and most users say it doesn’t even work as a daily driver

2. Is the Nokia 900 supported? It’s not obvious. What makes you think it is? Even you used a ‘?’.

3. Why is this relevant?

Anyone who wants one can buy a PinePhone or Librem.

Why would someone who wants a GNU/Linux phone buy an iPhone?

An iPhone 4 with the “last supported OS” is significantly slower than when it had the OS it launched with.

This is true across the board, which leads to this very convenient “they can buy used iPhones, but we don’t want them to use them, so we’ll gently guide them to new devices by making it inconvenient and annoying”

And before someone argues: Yes, much of the slowdown is because of new features, BUT Apple could simply allow users to disable most of them (such as ML-processing photos in the background, or deep-indexing file contents for spotlight. Those are not required for the phone to function as a phone).

If someone wanted to use the iPhone 3GS with the original iOS, not sync to the cloud, replace the battery every couple years, and install a firewall to prevent intrusion via known attack vectors, they could realistically have a perfectly snappy and solid experience in any future decade. Doubly so if they kept a 2.4Ghz AP when the industry is on some unknown future frequency.

However: Apple has taken many steps to prevent exactly that sort of thing, and they will continue to make as many as they can get away with.

This ignores the fact that later iPhones with the newest OS are significantly faster than what they launched with, which contradicts the conclusion that this is intentional.

Large companies simply settle out of court in order to silence the facts.

- If they are wrong and are successful in getting out of it, they might walk away with a judge "confirming" that they did no wrong.

- If they are wrong and the evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive, they might write a cheque and walk away.

In either case the public does not have any convincing argument based on evidence. Therefore we have to go by subtext.

Apple was accused of slowing down the devices intentionally. They admitted the bare minimum (low power mode), then wrote a cheque that made the rest of the accusations go away.

To me, that's as convincing as a verdict by a judge.

We can deduce that there as no evidence of intent, since if the plaintiffs had such evidence they wouldn’t have settled for so little. Remember that this was a class action with a huge class, so the settlement amount is diminimis for the plaintiffs but a decent payout for the attorneys. I.e. they had no case, and Apple paid to end the inconvenience.

This is obviously nothing like a verdict by a judge and provides us no information about the facts whatsoever, because no facts were presented.

The presence of a court case does not provide evidence for the michaelmrose’s subtext.

If it did, you would be able to reference some.

Also, this further confirms that the original claim by michaelmrose that they lost a court case and that the court found intent, was complete bullshit.

I remember when in 2014 I decided to give away my unused iPad 1st gen, just as a e-reader. So I've erased it but no apps were supporting this device already. Even the official Apple Books app.

Yes, techicaly it wasn't bricked, it worked, you still can turn it on and off. But without software it's useless.

4 years was an eternity in device capability at the time the first gen of the iPad was released.

I’m writing this on a 6 year old iPad Pro that I use every day. Everything runs on it, and it shows no sign of being too slow or even needing a battery replacement.

It seems like the problem has been solved.

Or you mean that there was a problem with Apple servers and now it's fixed?

The design choices have to be made to artificially shorten the life, not for any other purpose. For example, I can make a device cheaper and use cheaper materials that wear out faster - that's not planned obsolescence. However if I include a little plastic tab that I know will break before everything else for no good reason other than making it break faster - that is.

I suspect you'll have a hard time arguing compellingly that the purpose of apples closed update system was to shorten the useful life, rather than as a side effect of other product and design goals.

Phones are sort of a bad example, because for a long time the replacement cycle was driven by actual technical obsolescence, arguably only relatively recently has this ceased to be the case.

So what is the reason to prevent updates of software after the support is over? This is a classical software anti-feature.

The reason 1st gen iPads don’t have this is fairly obvious though - the unlocking feature is itself a likely vector for attacks e.g. by law enforcement unlocking tools, etc.

I’m not sure what it would take to enable it to be done securely without destroying the overall security model but it’s clearly not trivial, and would take some investment that certainly wasn’t possible at the time the 1st gen device was released.

Wondering, can that be called a planned obsolescence or not?

This is definitely an issue, but it's not the same issue as planned obsolescence.

Because the design choices are pretty easily argued to have been made for reasons other than reducing user access, but have the side effect of reducing user access. Both size/weight constraints and case integrity drive you to the same sort of thing.

To be clear, I think it's fine to call out a company for planned obsolescence, and I think it's fine to call them out for emphasizing size, etc. over user serviceability. I just don't think it's useful to pretend they are the same thing.

Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence.

It could, but nobody has presented any evidence that Apple is doing this, and their business strategy is openly stated to involve increasing the lifetime of their devices, so that they can deliver services to more users, so this is just innuendo.

Simply compare the cost of official Apple service and corrsponding third-party service.

Here are some reasonable explanations for how third parties cut costs without resort to a conspiracy:

1. Less warranty on repairs.

2. Lower cost substitute parts.

3. Lower quality control,

4. Less training for staff.

5. Lower profit margins, leading to unsustainable businesses.

I don't think it can, for reasons elsewhere in thread.

Arguably it’s the opposite of planned obsolescence - even used phones are not obsolete and are still in circulation.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is Apple’s stated policy - they want phones to last longer so that more people have them and they can continue to sell services to them.

This has nothing to do with the definition of planned obsolescence. It does not matter what people do with the old phones.

I don’t need to reread it. My response applies to design obsolescence.

Relatively few people upgrade every year these days. The fact that the old devices are still desirable negates the idea that people don’t want them because they look outdated. I.e. changes in design are not causing people to stop using the devices.

For design obsolescence to apply to Apple, workable devices would need to be retired from service early because they were no longer seen as desirable.

That isn’t happening.

[Citation needed]

Compare phones sold to phones in service.

Tens of millions vs more then a billion.

Every update I get on my mac, or Iphone slows it down. Bloat and "protecting the users battery" are the root causes, and ultimately Apple is one of the best examples of a company "artificially shortening" things via design choices.

This is completely false.

Secondly, as you must be aware, the reason Apple decreased the performance was to extend the useful lifetime of the battery.

The fine was because they didn’t explain this properly in advance, not because they did it.

They still in fact do alter the device performance to accommodate aging batteries and make them last longer.

This is a really silly issue to raise if the argument is about Apple shortening lifetimes of devices or batteries, since it makes the device usable for longer.

To imagine it requires understanding how technology works.

Batteries are chemical processes - they degrade slowly over time. An older battery produces less power, and so can’t support the same peak performance.

You can therefore extend the useful life of the battery by throttling the CPU performance to within the power envelope provided by the battery.

It’s fairly simple to understand.

Nothing was proven by the lawsuit, since it never went to trial, you know this so it’s unclear why you’d repeat this falsehood.

As for not your suggestion that Apple not slow the devices down to extend the battery life and have users just replace the battery, that seems misguided.

Why would you want users to be forced to buy unnecessary battery replacements and further damage the environment by wasting working batteries?

It’s much better for the devices to be able to continue to use the batteries for longer, don’t you think?

I have owned many and not one has become useless in this way, not has any I have every heard of.

This isn't that simple because it depends on _which_ software. This gets glossed over a lot in these discussions.

An iPhone gets ~5 years of iOS updates. Importantly, these updates are the only place where the only permitted web viewer on the platform gets updated. An android phone gets 2-3 years, if it's very lucky, of android updates. However, the _browser_ you use on that device is updated entirely independently of the OS, and while it isn't obvious how far back Chrome supports, android Firefox runs on android 5.0 devices (i.e. at least 7 years, probably more?)

These are two different security scenarios - an iOS device is fully patched against OS-level exploits for longer. True. But an android device will have a safer browser for a lot longer. In my threat model the latter is a lot more important - I don't think I'm unusual in that my web browser is by far my largest attack surface.

(disclaimer: i work at google, but i work on iOS stuff and like iOS a lot. more than android for sure. but i'm very salty that i can't have a browser updated independently from the OS)

I realize there are other runtimes, but for a general indication for cross comparison this would do.

Any closed platform that becomes unsupported and stays locked down is made artificially obsolete.

I can buy an original IBM PC, write my own software and run it with no limitations, despite it being an unsupported platform for several decades. See the famous 8088 MPH demo for an example of how much can still be done on an ancient platform, way beyond what was considered possible in its heyday. I can even write my own OS and run that. Remember that Linux was originally written by Linus Torvalds because there was no freely available Unix-like on x86, so he decided to write his own.

I can't do that with an original iPhone. You can jailbreak it, but that's not a risk-free process and it still doesn't let you install your own OS or give you direct access to the hardware.

Once a device no longer receives updates or official support, it should be opened for hobbyists to experiment with.

However this:

> Once a device no longer receives updates or official support, it should be opened for hobbyists to experiment with.

I agree with and I’d support legislation to that effect.

The hardware is fine, well-built and solid, probably still has 50% battery life left at this point. It's not the fastest device, but plenty fast for text and 2D graphics, plus some mild 3D.

But Apple has cut off support, very few apps can run on the old version of iOS it is locked to, and there is no real way of installing a different OS or adding a third-party app store or sideloading apps. Even with a paid developer account, you're severely limited.

That is actively killing off a device that could still be viable and usable to a lot of people, thus planned/deliberate obsolescence.

If this problem hadn’t been solved, there would be more of an issue, but my 6 year old iPad Pro runs everything and is still fully supported.

Having said that I actually do agree that unsupported hardware in general should be opened to new OS installs at the end of official support.

It is still a perfectly viable piece of hardware for many uses, no matter how much technology has improved.

That is deliberate, but has nothing to do with planned obsolescence.

Opening up the original iPad to other operating systems and/or DIY software does not mean handing over the signing keys for currently supported platforms. In case of a running iPad, an Apple-authorized update could be pushed to the OS to unlock it and allow it to run binaries directly.

Apple could also document any hardware features that would allow someone to put an iPad into "free-for-all" mode. Presumably this would require opening up the device to attach a serial cable to a JTAG connection or something similar.

There are many options for Apple to open up unsupported devices for hobbyists to tinker on, and it would completely in line in the original hacker-friendly Apple spirit.

Instead Apple refuses to do so, and insist that opening up an 11 year old, long unsupported device, by claiming that it would somehow compromise their current security model.

> In case of a running iPad, an Apple-authorized update could be pushed to the OS to unlock it and allow it to run binaries directly.

Which of course an attacker would be able to do too.

> Apple could also document any hardware features that would allow someone to put an iPad into "free-for-all" mode. Presumably this would require opening up the device to attach a serial cable to a JTAG connection or something similar.

Which of course a police department, the FBI, or the agents of an oppressive regime or anyone who bought a JTAG device off ebay would be able to do too.

These are exactly the reasons they don’t do these things - if they did, they would be opening attack vectors.

Security is hard. I’m not saying it’s impossible to achieve this, but it’s not simple.

Opening up access to install your own software would have great potential to increase the security of the device, not least because you can actually run current and patched versions of any software.

What you're arguing for is security by obscurity.

Nobody is talking about security through obscurity. This is about not introducing easily explored weaknesses into all devices, supported or not.

Open the hardware, use secure software and keep your storage encrypted, preferably on removable storage.

This is complete bullshit.

iOS devices use an SOC so there is no way to ‘tap the memory bus’ without destroying the processor.

iOS decides do in fact resist access even when they are in the hands of an adversary.

Also it seems like you don’t know that the storage on iOS devices is already encrypted.

This is a straw man - nobody said ‘impervious’.

You said this:

> If you have physical access to a device, you can already tap the memory bus or countless other places

It is complete bullshit.

If it wasn’t, you’d be able to post a link to someone doing it.

If you think that is the only way into an Apple device, and that police or even nation states are now helpless against the mighty "hack resistant" iPhone, then you may be interested in this bridge I happen to have for sale.

I presume you know that isn’t an example of someone “tapping the memory bus”, which seems to be still just bullshit.

Yes, security flaws exist.

Generally we close them, not argue for abandoning security altogether as you are doing.

Police generally are helpless against the iPhone.

Nation states may well not be, but it is still going to cost them a lot.

Your argument - that because nation states can compromise the iPhone, we should make it so everyone can, seems very odd.

On the left hand, you make design choices with the goal of limiting the life expectancy of the product, and on the right hand, you just don't prioritise life expectancy over other considerations when making said choices.

Of course the line is thin and the complexity of design trade-offs in all directions makes it pretty hard to pinpoint where evil actually happened... which is why the "right to repair" is so complicated in terms of hardware.

Software though is another matter: no-one can claim it's "too difficult" or "too costly" to provide users with the information that will allow them to use their device with the software they want.

They constantly think it’s always about the customer, it isn’t. The products are almost always optimized for costs, nothing else.

If a manufacturer uses glue instead screws, they don’t do that to make it harder to repair. They prefer glue because it’s cheaper. The same applies for cheap components over high quality ones.

Want to increase the possibility of getting a durable and repairable product? Well, prepare to spend ten times as much.

>they don’t do that to make it harder to repair

you mean cryptographically linking lcd screen to motherboard is done for cost, not to stop third parties from being able to repair it?

Your phone has access to tons of personal data, for some people just about all of their personal data. It's in every user's best interest to have secure hardware since it's inherently mobile and easily lost or stolen, easier than a desktop locked in a house.

But no I'm sure it's just some conspiracy to make iPhones disposable. That makes way more sense.

Maybe people don’t care that much after all.

Then you have Apple who lie they say you can't recover your data or repair your device, yet you go to a repair shop and you get your data back and phone fixed...

would you be fine with your car preventing you from changing your tire? unless you get them to do it and only install their "tires"?

Someone arguing in favor of allowing market forces to solve the problem truly do think it's fine for Apple and John Deere to do those things. The solution for lack of repairability isn't to enact legislation to force them to make their products more repairable, it's to stop buying Apple and John Deere.

To a point, they're right, but relying on market solutions assumes rational consumers, which we have anything but. I think back about 7 years when I bought a Motorola Droid Turbo. Back then, consumers were asking for phones with longer-lasting batteries and screens that wouldn't shatter because you sneezed. This phone was exactly what consumers were asking for, with it's monstrous 3950 mAh battery, and a screen that could survive a 100-foot drop onto pavement (Saw a video of it!), but most people had never even heard of it, and still bought their iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones which couldn't even survive a waist-high drop onto the sidewalk without cracking the screen.

Consumers are not rational, and so the market will never be rational, and relying on market solutions does not always work.

Yes, we on HN are far more likely to demand repairabiliy, but most consumers don't care about the ability to repair their devices. Or at the very least, don't care so much that they'll choose not to buy the latest phone because the battery is not easily replaced.

And it boils down to what are consumers actually buying? If consumers are demanding something and the corporations are not providing it, but they buy the products anyways, the corporation has no incentive to provide it.

There was a lot of uproar when Apple removed the headphone jack when they made the iPhone 7, but that didn't stop consumers from making it the best selling smartphone in the world at the time, with ~40 million units sold. And now guess what? Other phone manufacturers followed suit. I guess headphone jacks aren't that important after all.

The market can demand whatever the hell it wants, but rarely follows through.

You're argument is with the author, and his interpretation, not with "right to repair". What "right to repair" is or isn't , is not decided by the author of this article. There are various organizations that are loosely related with a few shared ideals.

>We must very carefully define our terms here, because requiring someone else to provide on one's behalf presumes a right to the product of their labor.

Not really. Anyone can propose anything in an article, and they must be free to do so. Its upto us as a collective to think over ideas and proposals and then push for policy proposals that align.

Ultimately the terms will be defined in legislation, not on bbc.com

Any right to repair law that doesn't also include provisions to ensure you can run your own code on the device is hobbled. How "repairable" is a device that is cloud based but they disabled the cloud service?

I don't care that manufacturers support the software beyond what they've contractually signed up for, but I do care that I'm not left holding a brick afterwards by design. As long as the capability exists to put other firmware that exists on the device, or write my own, I'm protected from that, at least in the general case. If nobody has provided that firmware and I can't do it myself, that's still a situation I think it many times better than the alternative.

This is really the same thing, i.e. comprehensive hardware documentation. If the hardware is well-documented then third parties can use the documentation to create hardware drivers and continue to support e.g. Android/Linux on that hardware even after the OEM stops providing supported software.

This is true even of iPhones; there is no technical reason you shouldn't be able to port Android or any other OS to iPhone hardware given adequate hardware documentation. People are attempting to port Linux to M1 Macbooks even without adequate hardware documentation, though of course the lack of documentation is a severe impediment and the efforts consequently have yet to produce a usable port.

Or maybe unlocking the bootloader?

>Now the author has shifted "right to repair" to mean mandatory device support and design requirements around repair-ability.

It's part of the conversation on planned obsolescence but you're right that's not strictly part of right to repair.

But these companies have been crowing about sustainability for a while now for PR purposes - now they may be legislated to actually provide sustainability in terms of product support and repairability.

So moto, samsung, et all would be obligated to provided fixes for 5 years after they sold the last unit. If an oem can't meet that obligation just forbid their import.

We presume a right to the product of other people's labor for the privilege of doing business here all the time. See every product in existence.

If your IBM PC dies, you can definitely create a functionally exact clone based on publicly available information, and in fact many have done so, either virtually or physically.

IMHO if the manufacturer ceases to provide support, then it must open up the documentation and design, or allow all reverse-engineering of it.

I'm sure mandatory first-party device support is better for the manufacturer than giving people the idea they should be able to control what software runs on their device. I wonder if that stance is a lack of imagination on the author's part or something more deliberate.

How does this work with physical products such as cars? Is there a statute of limitations for automobile recalls?

The aftermarket has become so big, that you can probably build an entire car of the 50s to early 70s entirely out of aftermarket parts. Even body panels and frame rails are available.

Of course many would try to block that as it cuts into their planned obsolescence roadmaps...

Designing for repairability has costs both monetary and functional. Why should everyone have to pay these costs on the say-so of a few people whose main claim to legitimate authority is their social media follower count?

I believe this push for repairability is bad and that it will lead to bad outcomes for consumers. The market ought to be what tells us what product features are really important.

I have no desire for any developer to have to do more work after the date of purchase to "fix" or "support" software. What I want is all the work to be done before selling the device. Quality control. Is this really too much to ask. I am not interested in purchasing what are effectively "works-in-progress".