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

bbc.com

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

#81

Post by procombo »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #52
david_allison wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can anyone enlighten me about 5G? To me it seems to be absolutely nothing more than a marketing tool meant to sell a new generation of phones and phone plans. The fact that it is pushed so fervently just sets of red flags galore for me. 4G is plenty fast and works well for me. I see nothing gained for my phone by going from 100Mbps to 1Gbps(?). Nothing. But its pushed like the second coming of Christ.

Having a new technology to bring to the market is good for the industry. Service providers, hardware providers, salespeople, etc. Most consumers love the hype!

I needed a new test phone the other day so I bought a new iPhone 11 at a Verizon store. The salespeople could not wrap their head around my choice because it doesn't support 5g. I gave them some great reasons and they relunctantly took my money.

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

#82

Post by jahewson »

balozi wrote: post #26

A persistent question in my mind is why do customers buy unrepairable products, from smart phones and high-tech tractors. Why is the market failing? Or is it working perfectly?

I think it would help to ask: repairable by whom? And at what cost?

Apple will replace an iPhone screen for ~$100. I’m fine with that. But my washing machine which is repairable and has parts and schematics available from the manufacturer will cost me > $400 in labor to replace a $20 part. Plus it’s > 10 years old so I know more parts will fail. I’m just going to buy a new one.

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

#83

Post by kingsuper20 »

oneplane wrote: post #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 a…

>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 making creating major issues in other areas.

Absolutely.

Also consider the movement up the foodchain of product development. How do you 'repair' something that's a SoC with a few wires to the outside world. Mechanical items, car parts for example, tend to move towards more complex unserviceable items...there was a time when mechanical fuel pumps were taken apart and rebuilt, headlights were a standardized $5 part rather than a major part of front-end styling.

I see the concerns of people although it usually all involves some particular product family that they have a special kink for.

I would guess that the endgame consists of items that cannot be serviced in any way (in order to push down manufacturing cost usually) combined with a figleaf of published information in order to satisfy the text of a 'right to repair' law.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

fsflover wrote: post #79
colejohnson66 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they don’t become bricks. They still work just fine. In fact, on some more recent unsupported devices, you can still redownload apps (but only up to the latest version supporting your device). Did the Apple II become a brick when Apple stopped supporting them? The IBM PC? Why is an older iDevice a “brick”, but not BlackBerrys or Nokias?

Security issues are found in browsers every day. You get no updates anymore and you are not allowed to update yourself. If you care about (not) leaking any of your data, this is effectively a brick.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by corty »

tjoff wrote: post #74
Guest42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding software, I think that pushing updates that essentially kill devices should fall under right to repair. I generally delay my ios updates out of concern whether space and ram will get eaten up. There probably won’t be an os update that enables a new app or feature I’m looking for. I’m not one to run unknown software and with the walled garden can’t really download any executables anyways. Also had win 10 upd…

Win10 was released 2015-07.

The expected use time of a dishwasher is 10 years. Which is a machine with mechanical parts and a lot of wear and tear, corrosive chemicals, decaying seals, etc. A computer with fewer movable parts and a higher price should last longer. That software manufacturers don't support that notion is a problem that needs to be dealt with.

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

#86

Post by joshspankit »

judge2020 wrote: post #49
lsllc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anything publicizing "right to repair" in mainstream media is a good thing. Agreed that for HN denizens, it's nothing new, but most people are just unaware of this topic. Glad to see the BBC running this.

Maybe, but it’s all over the place and thus might cause confusion for readers who will later see 'right to repair' and think it means that Apple should be forced to send iOS 14 to their iPhone 4S.

Exactly my point as I read down this thread:

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.

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

#87

Post by ska »

fsflover wrote: post #77
ska wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would say it is artificially shortened by design choices. It is a perfectly capable device, the harware is still fast and secure. However, I am just not allowed to fix the software, even if I have enough resources for that. This is exactly why we need free software.

> I would say it is artificially shortened by design choices.

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.

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

#88

Post by OkGoDoIt »

Koshkin wrote: post #70
leoedin wrote: 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).

I can easily install the latest version of windows 10 on even a 10 year old computer. But more importantly, I can still install Windows 7 on a 10-year-old computer if I want to. And it will still work, and most programs will still run on it. Or I can install an alternate operating system like Linux.

Whereas with my iPhone, I literally can’t install an old version of the operating system or an alternate os, no matter how old or new the device. And if I do happen to have a device that still has an old operating system, most apps refuse to run because the API surface area changes constantly. And if you have old versions of apps, they mostly all phone home to check versions now and won’t run until you update them. It’s a never ending cycle and you have no control over it.

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

#89

Post by II2II »

css wrote: 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…

Perhaps the author kept moving the goalpost since we have lost so much over the years.

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.

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

#90

Post by joshspankit »

dnh44 wrote: post #80
ryandrake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that when a security vulnerability is made public, patching the operating system with an update is a form of repair. The device is as broken as my Gen-1 iPad that can no longer browse the web safely. If the manufacturer stops releasing such updates, AND actively prevents the user from developing and applying their own updates, then they are preventing repair.

To be fair that first gen iPad is too slow to browse the web at all unless it's a really lean site like HN.

But if we (users) choose to only browse lean sites with our first-gen iPads, why should we (society) say “stop doing that”?
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