Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair

in Germany, the Telco's gave up locking the phones in 2017. Because it was to expensive. I can not remember if it was a hard lock - as in any other sim card is blocked or just their additions to the OS. bought a phone in 2017/early 2018 - Xperia 10, where on the boot screen a Deutsche Telekom logo appears but otherwise the OS unaffected by vendor edits/additions. But updates are really slow since they go through Telekom instead of directly from sony which is already slow.

After a few uses, the chain tightening bolt broke into two pieces.

I begged them to send me just the bolt, but NO. They said I'm not entitled to repair it. I was even willing to pay for it, but I couldn't find it below 15€ on the internet.

So I sent the whole chainsaw to the repair service on their dime and they sent me a brand new one. They probably tossed the perfectly fine old chainsaw into the dumpster. Because of a 0.10€ bolt.

The corporate throwaway culture is incredible.

It consists of three parts: a 2-piece plastic case, and a single circuit board with around 25 smt components. The user can replace the battery.

I'm not going to publish my schematic or board design because I already open sourced my code, and the device is designed to be stupidly easy to manufacture for my own sake. Basically I don't want people to start making their own. A competent EE could figure it out in a day or two, but a anyone with that ability could design their own in the same amount of time.

If something on the board goes bad, I'm not going to offer guidance to repair it. It isn't worth anyone's time. That said, I do offer a lifetime warranty/buyback option since the unit cost is less than $10.

This is a bit of a contrived example since there is literally only one part that can fail, but the point is that there is a very fuzzy line around how far we can go with repairability. Should I be forced to provide a full schematic/board design (giving away my IP essentially)? Should I be forced to provide 'parts' (there is really only one part, and that is the product itself)?

I'm sympathetic to the 'right to repair' movement, but I'm curious how it would be implemented across such a broad spectrum of products. Perhaps it could just be a transparency rule: planned obsolescence (unrepairable) items should be marked as such and an e-waste tax added. If you want to avoid that marking you have to offer to trade broken parts for new for 5 years after first sale at cost.

> How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not?

You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.