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UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#101

Post by CivBase »

foobar33333 wrote: post #27
edent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I repaired a new-ish TV - cost me £30. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/10/replacing-the-motionengine-... If you can find me a new TV at that price, please let me know! Yes, getting in a professional at £X per hour means it is probably not economical to repair a cheap washing machine. But if the parts and manuals are easily available, it suddenly becomes a lot quicker and easier to repair it yourself rather than replace…

The problem is you need to be highly skilled to do that repair. So many times I have ordered replacement parts and then either broken something like a plastic ribbon cable connector, or I have installed the new part and it still doesn't work.

> The problem is you need to be highly skilled to do that repair.

You also need to be highly skilled to do a lot of automotive repairs, which is why there is a thriving market of third-party mechanics who will perform those repairs for a fraction of the cost of buying a new vehicle. The same can (and should, IMO) be true for electronics.

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#102

Post by bluGill »

maxerickson wrote: post #66
bluGill wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that cost is molded plastic is cheap only while you have the molds. Once the fridge goes out of production they make a few for spares and then recycle the molds. The solution to this is to address how spare parts must be handled. This is not easy, either you figure expected lifetime of the shelves vs rest of the fridge, and then order enough - but if you get it wrong you are still out. Or you keep the molds,…

I would think producing spares after end of production would be expensive even if you kept the molds around.

One is expensive, but most of the costs is setup/teardown so you just produce a bunch (perhaps 1000) for the warehouse when supply runs low. That is how companies that keep their molds function, but you pay for them to store the mold and have a warehouse with all the supply in, so spare parts are always a lot more expensive after full production has stopped.

Don't confuse spare parts with maintenance parts. If there are wear parts (filters, bearings...) that are expected to be replaced regularly there is a lot more turn over of the parts, and so everything is planned ahead around keeping the right amount of production going. These parts tend to be more industry standard parts bought off the shelf from a supplier that has other customers for the same part so your part order might go to the supplier who just puts a different label on the standard part and ships it to you.

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#104

Post by zepto »

peterlk wrote: post #99
CivBase wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A - A classification system that makes defines how "easy" it is to repair something, but necessarily doesn't mean that you or I can repair it at home.It will be "easy" IF you have the right 50,000 GBP tool. Louis Rossmann did a video tearing apart France's recent implementation of this from the perspective of an Apple repair technician. Despite serialized parts, soldered/glued components, and no available schematic…

I think this pretty well sums up the loophole. You have the right to repair... what? If I buy a macbook, do I get to replace the case? keyboard? These seem pretty reasonable. But what about the right to replace/repair the L1 cache? This is obviously a different story - it would be nice, but the part probably isn't manufactured by Apple (maybe it is on the new Silicon?). My point is that at some point, things start to…

> But what about the right to replace/repair the L1 cache?

Are you suggesting the right to repair should include this?

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#105

Post by slx26 »

blub wrote: post #60
draklor40 wrote: post #7

Only a matter of time before they modify the Law to introduce a catch that makes it practically worthless. A - A classification system that makes defines how "easy" it is to repair something, but necessarily doesn't mean that you or I can repair it at home.It will be "easy" IF you have the right 50,000 GBP tool. B - Modify right to repair as good for the environment rule. There will be an escape clause that says that…

If everybody were such a pessimist, we'd never try to improve anything because there's a risk it might not always work or need adjustment in the future. And a certain someone would also be there telling everyone not to go outside of the cave because there's tigers :)

If everybody was such an optimist... well, they would eventually become pessimists when they realized good intentions alone aren't enough, but there are few optimists with good plans.

Ok, there are also very few pessimists with good plans, but I didn't mean to turn you into a pessimist now ;)

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#106

Post by missedthecue »

smitty1e wrote: post #22

Whither capitalism? Why are companies not marketing along the lines of: "You can tinker with this. Our product does not treat you like the product." I'd pay a 20% premium or so not to be spied upon and enslaved. "Freedom isn't free. There's a heavy [FLOWERBED] fee."

Because most consumers don't want that.

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#107

Post by zepto »

secfirstmd wrote: post #41
hnhg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any citations for your claim about EU innovation being bogged down by regulatory capture? In general, I've found that it's more like risk aversion in VC and other local cultural aspects before anything at an EU level comes into play.

Yeh I agree. I hear this a lot but my experience working has been that the US has waaaaayyyy more redtape and regulation stuff to deal with. Taxes for example or the absolute mess of applying for government grants.

I have experience in both places.

Taxes and government grants are pretty much the main areas where this is true. Taxes especially.

Not so for other things, in my experience.

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#108

Post by zepto »

foobar33333 wrote: post #24
aboringusername wrote: post #13

I think any right to repair needs to solve 2 problems: 1: Fixing bad hardware (schematics and such) 2: Fixing old/buggy/broken software that renders said hardware useless. Without open kernels, drivers, frameworks your "right to repair" is meaningless. When you install a new camera to iPhone and it complains it's not genuine because the software says so, the right to repair becomes less useful as now Apple holds all…

I think the problem with unofficial repairs right now is where the parts come from. If you buy an iphone camera, where does that camera actually come from. I doubt there is an unoffical iphone camera factory. So those parts only have 2 sources, broken and stolen iphones. What ideally would happen is each part on the iphone has a serial number and is registered with icloud. If a phone gets stolen, you get a message wh…

> Apple should be forced to publicly sell this part for a reasonable price for x years.

This means generating a vast amount of e-waste and increasing the cost of units.

Since Apple doesn’t make the components themselves, they would have to warehouse a supply of spares.

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#109

Post by starmftronajoll »

zepto wrote: post #104
peterlk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this pretty well sums up the loophole. You have the right to repair... what? If I buy a macbook, do I get to replace the case? keyboard? These seem pretty reasonable. But what about the right to replace/repair the L1 cache? This is obviously a different story - it would be nice, but the part probably isn't manufactured by Apple (maybe it is on the new Silicon?). My point is that at some point, things start to…

> But what about the right to replace/repair the L1 cache? Are you suggesting the right to repair should include this?

They seem to be suggesting that the L1 cache is obviously a different story. Source: sentence immediately after the one you quoted

Re: UK 'Right to repair' law to come in this summer

#110

Post by zepto »

simion314 wrote: post #75
foobar33333 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already work this way. If you swap almost any part on the iphone it either refuses to work or shows a warning about a unofficial part. My suggestion is simply to make this functionality only target stolen parts instead of just refusing to work at all if the apple store hasn't used their software to bless the new serial number.

Why should Apple decide what part I put in the phone? If the phone is out of warranty then I should be able to use batteries, screens, chargers or software that is not blessed by Apple's grace. When I was a kid we were "repairing" our cheap watches by using parts from broken ones, at most what Apple could do is print a giant warning on the boot screen that the phone is no longer blessed by Apple so people that want t…

> Why should Apple decide what part I put in the phone? If the phone is out of warranty then I should be able to use batteries, screens, chargers or software that is not blessed by Apple's grace.

For a lot of people, this is a feature, not a bug.

It prevents repair shops using substandard components, or even replacing good components with cheaper ones and then re-selling them.

Edit: another much more serious issue, is security. 3rd party components are an obvious target for supply chain attacks.

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