I'd argue this cost has always been there and was never zero to begin with. Mass producing non-repairable, cheap throwaway items is an excellent way for industries to externalize a lot of the lifecycle cost of an item onto society.

So you get to choose at which point you'd like to pay for it. Directly and very visibly in an item's price (maybe even making you reconsider if a purchase is actually necessary). Or later, in taxes or a decrease in quality of life due to the increasing overexploitation of our resources.

> Mass producing non-repairable, cheap throwaway items is an excellent way for industries to externalize a lot of the lifecycle cost of an item onto society.

If you're against the externalization of costs, shouldn't you be advocating for measures that fully internalize such costs (eg. by charging a disposal fee at the point of sale), rather than merely trying to reduce it by making phones more repairable? That way consumers and manufacturers can decide for themselves whether the repairability is worth the extra cost or not.

To live in a world with repairable devices or in one without is a social consensus problem. We either are stuck in one game-theoretic equilibrium or the other. Game-theoretic equilibria cannot be defeated by "letting individual actors decide".

They are solved by social consensus, and in this particular case, by the passage of the right-to-repair law that forces the entire system from one equilibrium state to the other.

What's the "game-theoretic equilibrium" that's preventing repairable phones if consumers demand it? We have repairable versions of laptops and phones but they haven't really caught on outside of niche circles. Maybe people don't actually care about repairability?

There are two kinds of players in the market: a large consumer class, and a small collection of oligopolistic producers. The game-theoretic equilibrium is in the actions of the producers.

Customers have many different criteria by which they judge phones: price, performance, available apps, social desirability, repairability etc. I would say that repairability is of lower importance than other criteria.

Producers know that selling unrepairable phones produce more profits long term. Obviously repairable phones are also a few perfect more expensive. So from the 00s when phones were largely repairable, to today, producers have sequentially produced phones that are less repairable but a bit cheaper. Ad campaigns have been used to make thinner monolithic phones as more socially desirable [1]. This also changes how customers rate the importance of different criteria.

Any new producer who creates a repairable phone not only has to produce a more expensive phone, but also has to create a niche of customers, against the competitor ad campaigns, that value that repairability. Hence, that new producer is not profitable. This is the equilibrium which explains that lack of mainstream repairable phones in the market.

But of course, consumers want repairable phones, but only if everyone else gets them as well - so they aren't uncool. Which is why different consumer groups have advocated to lawmakers, and now we are getting a law that forces everyone to change in tandem.

[1] Not much different from the cigarette ads of the yesteryears.

>Any new producer who creates a repairable phone not only has to produce a more expensive phone, but also has to create a niche of customers, against the competitor ad campaigns, that value that repairability. Hence, that new producer is not profitable. This is the equilibrium which explains that lack of mainstream repairable phones in the market.

But if a repairable phone is cheaper for the consumer overall (the don't have to replace as often), why would this be a problem? Japanese cars outcompeted American cars because they were more reliable, and consumers recognized that. Shouldn't consumers jump at the chance of reducing their overall phone TCO by 50% or whatever?

Good question. (1) People's preferences are a function of time [1]. (2) And people find it difficult to estimate unexpected future costs.

So at buy time, people don't prefer repairability very high, which is some uncertain future cost. Which is why they make the short term decision to buy the cheaper sexier phone. Later on, when the phone starts to break down, they start caring about it a lot more. We know the latter is true because consumer group advocacy is determined by asking people what they want.

Another tactic phone manufacturers employ is that they don't talk about repairability anywhere, so most consumers don't even know phones are repairable. They think you just have to buy a new phone. It's like if your bowl broke, you would just go and buy a new one because you believe bowls cannot be repaired. But if you belonged in the right area/tradition of japan, you would just take the pieces of the bowl and join them together [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference#Temporal_disco...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

>So at buy time, people don't prefer repairability very high, which is some uncertain future cost. Which is why they make the short term decision to buy the cheaper sexier phone. Later on, when the phone starts to break down, they start caring about it a lot more.

You can make the same argument for cars, yet reliable japanese cars won out. Smartphones have been around for 15 years now? I think that's long enough for people to figure out how much repairs they need.

> We know the latter is true because consumer group advocacy is determined by asking people what they want.

And yet their purchasing decisions don't line up with what their survey replies are, by and large. It's not because of lack of choice, repairable phones exist, and have existed for a while now. Fairphone is on its 6th iteration now? Yet its uptake is lackluster. Between stated preferences and revealed preferences, I'm going with the latter.

>Another tactic phone manufacturers employ is that they don't talk about repairability anywhere, so most consumers don't even know phones are repairable. They think you just have to buy a new phone.

If you think consumers can't be bothered to do a "[phone name] repairability" search (despite the fact that they care about such a thing, as you claim above), and need to have the info spoon fed to them by the manufacturers, then maybe they don't really care about it?

> It's like if your bowl broke, you would just go and buy a new one because you believe bowls cannot be repaired. But if you belonged in the right area/tradition of japan, you would just take the pieces of the bowl and join them together [2].

Of course, in our modern economy, it makes little sense to fix broken bowls. They can be manufactured so cheaply and fixing it manually taxes so much time/materials that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Something similar applies to phones, only that replacing a phone also comes with the additional benefit that it has a faster cpu + more memory + better camera. You don't get any of that by making phones repairable.

There's also a cost to making everything disposable and hard to repair. $300 to Apple to fix a button on an Apple Watch is one such cost, but there's also the waste created. Unfortunately those costs are harder to quantify and will take a long time to show up on a balance sheet somewhere.

A lot of us will be happy if a repairable phone costs me twice as much, but lasts 3 times as long because we won't have to throw the entire thing away and buy a new one when a tiny IC, a battery or the display fails. It will also reduce the damage to the environment which is already at the brink. These things are not harmless to recycle, even if they can be.

Add to this, the fact that many OEMs go for exclusive deals with the parts manufacturers where the parts are not allowed to enter mass market. This is to make repairs costly by creating artificial scarcity. What this suggests is that the true cost of repairable devices is not as exorbitant or harmful to the poor as these manufacturers and OEMs project it to be. It's more in the realm of disinformation.

>A lot of us will be happy if a repairable phone costs me twice as much, but lasts 3 times as long because we won't have to throw the entire thing away and buy a new one when a tiny IC, a battery or the display fails.

Isn't the fairphone basically this?

That was a generic statement - I wasn't implying that such devices don't exist. And yes, fairfone is a good example and we need to support brands like those. I'm currently in the process of gradually replacing old devices with repairable ones.

No, we all fully expect it to be expensive. Manufacturers didn't move away from repairable devices for nothing; it's cheaper to manufacture and design something that doesn't ever get taken apart. It also helps ensure that your customers switch to a new product once their old one breaks.

Considering that I've bought $15 Tracphones with a replaceable battery and SD card slot, I think those poorer households will be okay. It's better than the government buying them garbage that was designed to be obsolete from the start.

> No it will have a cost. And that is likely to disproportionally impact the cheapest phones and the poorest households.

I'd actually argue the opposite.

Historically the poor have been the ones who repair their property rather than throwing it out and replacing it. It's far cheaper to repair than it is to replace.

Assuming the poor repair and the rich replace, as is tradition, then I would argue a modest price increase would represent the rich subsidizing the poor.

There are two "types" of right to repair. One is "you can't use the law to prevent me from fixing things", the other is "you have to make them easy to fix".

Based on the article, particularly the part that describes the bill [1], this is the former.

Amending the law so that it doesn't prevent repairing things adds absolutely no cost to manufacturing...

[1] "The bill would amend the Canadian copyright act, allowing individuals or independent repair shops to break digital locks in order to make software fixes."

Yeah, I think this is an important distinction. As much as I personally wish almost everything was designed to be repairable and that parts/instructions were easily available from the manufacturer, I'm actually pretty uncertain that those should be _requirements_. I really just want it to be legal to repair and modify anything. The manufacturer should be allowed to design any way they want (and I will continue to attempt to avoid manufacturers who make repair hard), but the most important thing is that if I _do_ repair it, that is recognized as fully within my rights and that the manufacturer can't use the law to punish me, up to and including modifying software, as long as it's for personal use.

Anything beyond that probably needs to be a signal from consumers that they _want_ (and perhaps be willing to pay a price premium for) repairable goods with available parts and documentation.