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It's your device, you should be able to repair it

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Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#61
The irony is despite all this right to repair stuff, apple makes some of the more long lasting devices in terms of usability. Their software updates keep coming, their phones are actually surprisingly waterproof (plenty of great rescue stories here). If you have parents who are older, you know how this works - they keep their devices much longer in my experience.

Yes, they glue the crap out of everything, solder stuff down instead of hacking bigger sockets and plug in chips with pins etc so do everything they are not supposed to. But the end result is darn long lasting and useful.

If someone thinks users will trade out for these right to repair devices go for it. Android has TONS of folks playing in that space. But I'd say let Apple try things there way - a phone that just maintains great resale value because it's a bit harder to get screwed buying one - it alerts you if the scammers swap out the battery for a crap one even which used to be one annoying issue buying used iphones that made me stop buying used.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#62
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating Right to Repair efforts in Europe with those in the US. Naturally, the US laws are more deferential to capital interests and is less consumer-friendly, and simply ask that companies don't ban the sale of components to independent repair shops, firmware lockouts of replacement parts that only the manufacturer can provide, etc.

What does the European definition of "right to repair" entail, then?

Not exactly the answer to your question but France recently adopted a repairability score that has to be shown, just like the energy efficency class or nutrition labels.

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

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#63
post #3

Repairability seems like a good goal for sustainability. The challenge on electronics is determining what is a reasonable and useful life for a product. Should an iPhone SE or a knockoff Android last and be repairable for a decade? My worry is the regulation will get this wrong. Moderate rules are probably the best way to start.

Regulation of designs will very likely get this wrong, and very harm the environment and drive up costs.

However there could easily be regulation of labeling that could help.

E.g. mandate display of statistical years of working life, and number of years of software support.

At least this way customers would be able to make a choice.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#64

A bit of a tangent, but I'm really surprised one of the android vendors hasn't focused on the niche of easy to repair phones. Maybe even making them four or five times the thickness of the latest i-sung devices. extra hot swappable batteries and the like. I know the ostensible reasons waterproofing, planned obsolescence, looking cool, and being light weight. Though I suspect the real reason is they're just chasing th…

Fairphone[0] is a European manufacturer which does this (modular replaceable components, 10/10 on iFixit and usable by non-techies). In my experience it's the annual release cycle of Android coupled with the lack of OS updates by manufacturers which contributes to e-waste, closely followed by the lack of battery replaceability. My first smartphone (OnePlus One - 2014) still has the specs to be a perfectly usable phon…

The problem with Fairphone is that it relies on binary blobs which are not supported after a short time. Planned obsolescence is there, even though it is not the company's fault.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#65
post #2

This article moves the goalposts on what "right to repair" is several times. It generally means that manufacturers should not hide schematics from device users or disallow third party manufacturing of first party parts. However, the author states: > The law doesn't yet cover smartphones and tablets that she says are getting harder to fix. One problem is keeping older devices updated with new software. Now "right to r…

These are all absolutely valid and sane points. 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).

And they should be required by law to come with the respective datasheets and specs required to do so.

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

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#66
post #15
post #2

This article moves the goalposts on what "right to repair" is several times. It generally means that manufacturers should not hide schematics from device users or disallow third party manufacturing of first party parts. However, the author states: > The law doesn't yet cover smartphones and tablets that she says are getting harder to fix. One problem is keeping older devices updated with new software. Now "right to r…

my interpretation is that there should be no artificial barriers. 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.

[deleted]

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#67
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that planned obsolescence is not in fact everyone’s business model. 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…

> That isn’t planned obsolescence. 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?

It's only planned obsolescence if the lifetime of a product is artificially shortened by design choices. It's not clear this applies here.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#68
post #23
post #3

Repairability seems like a good goal for sustainability. The challenge on electronics is determining what is a reasonable and useful life for a product. Should an iPhone SE or a knockoff Android last and be repairable for a decade? My worry is the regulation will get this wrong. Moderate rules are probably the best way to start.

We used to have this right, but it feels like somewhere between 2010-2015, companies realized they could make more money by disallowing simple replacements. I used to make some money as a kid by buying batches of broken Iphone 3G/3GS's on ebay, replacing parts on them, and then re-selling them myself. Practically any part of that device could be replaced in less than 30 minutes with $15 worth of tools. I have a 2012M…

Our expectations on the size and integrated nature of these devices seem to be the thing that caused everything to get glued together.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#69
While calling things 'right to repair' is a nice easy wording for the lifecycle problem, it doesn't really show the complexity of the problem at hand.

There are plenty of things you can do as a manufacturer to make things repairable, but there are just as many things that you can't do without creating major issues in other areas.

Say you are a company that has a brand identity strongly linked to a certain aesthetic and a law now bans that because you are no longer allowed to glue on textiles on your product as a neat design choice. (yes, this has obvious/glaring problems on its own) What's the solution here? Ban a certain taste or preference for the certain many in the name of making it better for an uncertain few? This might also impact production processes in this example when you have a 'compromise'; i.e. you are required to sell spare parts because in the mind of policy makers "if they can mount that part in the factory, why couldn't they sell it separately".

Say you have a design that is now optimised for production and the method with which a fabric or textile part is added is by preparing a bunch of glue on the spot where the textile goes, then laying a sheet of textile on top of that, and then using a specifically shaped melting device to melt it into the glue, and another cutting device to neatly cut all the excess off, and all of this while under a specific amount of pressure, maybe some inert gas etc. This is how industrial production works, and one of the few ways it works at all (at scale). But that would not be possible since it isn't repairable enough according to some people in certain echo chambers. So now we would have to ban an entire class of production and design methods... and that's just one example.

The goal is relatively simple, and there will definitely be an impact that is worth attaining. But it's unlikely to be as simple as "provide us all the specs, datasheets and parts".

Just as unlikely that it could be "provide us with the private key to your PKI so we can sign our own firmware". (which ironically is practically banned by the FCC on all devices with wireless communication modules - technically it's just an implementation you can restrict to a data table in a driver for a PHY, but practically this is much cheaper as a manufacturer to just blanket-sign and be done with it, which isn't fun for us hackers, but isn't surprising at all.) And not signing or encrypting things is a whole class of problems on its own. We're basically screwed, and since we're often on shared systems (like telecommunication networks, or physical roads and buildings, or we share the fuels and oils across many consumers) it's not as simple as 'do whatever you want' either.

It's tough.

Re: It's your device, you should be able to repair it

#70
post #53

PCs and even most laptops have been very repairable for decades. You can still run Windows or Linux on a 10+ (20+?) year old laptop without an issue. The idea that a 5 year old laptop would be unusable or not get the latest version of Windows is unacceptable. Yet phones cost similar amounts and have nowhere near the repairability. A decade ago you could argue that it wasn't that important - specs were changing so qui…

> or not get the latest version of Windows

Not sure about this one: the continued support for older versions - yes, but the latest? Nobody can give you such promise (unless they explicitly do, for one reason or another).

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