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British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

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Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#61

Post by alias_neo »

jrkfkgmfmr wrote: post #29

I don't want a right to repair if that means a bulky phone/laptop with terrible water sealing. Typing from a 4 year old non-repairable phone (Samsung S8). If you want a repairable phone, good, but don't take away my choice of slim water resistant phones. Get off my lawn HNers keep on complaining about big screens, non removable batteries, and lack of headphone ports, but nobody cares because people actually want thos…

What I want, is to be able to find a repair shop locally that would repair the glass on my Oneplus 8 Pro that I smashed in the first week of owning it. It fell all of 4 inches from the arm of the sofa onto the side table, and smashed because of shitty design wrapping the glass round the edge which was totally unnecessary.

Oneplus will repair it for £200 for the part PLUS tax PLUS shipping PLUS labour and I'll have to ship it out of the country somewhere and wait a number of weeks they won't disclose to have my phone back. Heck, they won't even tell me how much the labour cost _might_ be.

If they'd sell the parts and allow one of the many phone repair shops in the UK to fix it, I could have it within an hour or two for little more than the cost of the screen itself.

This isn't about making your devices shitty, fat and not-waterproof, it's about enabling people with the wills and the skills to buy the tools and the parts to do the job.

Heck, under a good right-to-repair, I could buy the screen myself and fit it if I wanted.

So many people miss the point of right-to-repair. It's not about making things less this or less that, it's simply about giving you the RIGHT to buy the parts you need and the tools you need to repair the thing you own.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#62

Post by pbhjpbhj »

undfg wrote: post #24
oneplane wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is part of the problem: a lot of people just don't care.

That's exactly my point. If customers don't care then who's this regulation serving?

Just because you don't care that the environment is suffering, and resources are being wasted, because instead of fixing things people throw them away doesn't mean that helping to mitigate those problems doesn't benefit you.

Or to use a crude analogy: just because babies don't care about having their nappy (ie diaper) changed doesn't mean it doesn't help them.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#63

Post by tshaddox »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #31
kleiba wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't own a smart TV, so this question is probably a bit naive - but what happens if you don't connect your smart TV to the internet?

Sometimes they will seek out nearby open WiFi networks to join. There’s concern that in coming years with the spread of 5G availability that smart TVs may start packaging a 5G modem and connecting to cell networks, bypassing the need to be connected to a WiFi network.

Why would 5G make that be a more viable choice for the TV manufacturers than existing widespread cellular networks?

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#64

Post by Silhouette »

14 wrote: post #11
shadilay wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a price even if ridiculous allows researches to write papers like "What brand has the most affordable repairs".

also even if the price is really expensive, I would pay it if it meant recovering my lost data on a phone.

Indeed, though effective regulations requiring phone manufacturers and app developers to stop trying to lock your data into their device or software wouldn't be a bad thing either. The ability to back up your own data on your own terms would be a good start. Some recent legal changes, such as the GDPR in Europe, have attempted to guarantee this access when services have your data. But apparently having your own device lock you in is still OK for some reason.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#65

Post by ajkdhcb2 »

jrkfkgmfmr wrote: post #29

I don't want a right to repair if that means a bulky phone/laptop with terrible water sealing. Typing from a 4 year old non-repairable phone (Samsung S8). If you want a repairable phone, good, but don't take away my choice of slim water resistant phones. Get off my lawn HNers keep on complaining about big screens, non removable batteries, and lack of headphone ports, but nobody cares because people actually want thos…

It seems to me that it is a purely propaganda that these things are mutually exclusive. Like how all smartphone manufacturers had phones that were fine with removable batteries, but then suddenly that was gone from literally every brand in the world because it is so powerful for planned obsolescence

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#66

Post by jandrese »

Aeolun wrote: post #41
Someone1234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there's a large subset of people who don't understand what TPM does, so just assume the worst and hand wave about how it [somehow] causes [random bad thing]. In this case I guess TPM causes telemetry?

No, no, don’t mistake correlation with causation. They just always come together. Note: I have no idea what TPM even is.

A TPM is just a bit of memory that is "hacker proof" so you can store a private key with a guarantee that it can't leak out. You can then sign, encrypt, or decrypt using the key.

They were controversial because it was originally thought they would be used to lock parts of your computer away from you, being used to do DRM and the like. At the end of the day the chips were hard to use, slow, and flaky enough that it didn't really pan out. A lot of the braindamage came from a secondary feature where you could theoretically create "secure enclaves" where the entire execution chain down to the bare metal was signed to prevent viruses and rootkits from executing. In theory this is neat, but in practice it's basically impossible on PC hardware and caused a lot of problems. This functionality is the reason BitLocker had the reputation for randomly locking you out of your machine, even though it doesn't use the feature directly. The configuration registers were maybe a mistake.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#67

Post by Synaesthesia »

jrkfkgmfmr wrote: post #29

I don't want a right to repair if that means a bulky phone/laptop with terrible water sealing. Typing from a 4 year old non-repairable phone (Samsung S8). If you want a repairable phone, good, but don't take away my choice of slim water resistant phones. Get off my lawn HNers keep on complaining about big screens, non removable batteries, and lack of headphone ports, but nobody cares because people actually want thos…

we can have both. iPhones are quite easy to repair everything, but iPads aren't. They're glued together, and they really don't need to be. Lot of design decisions that have nothing to do with making the product better but just making it hard to repair.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#68

Post by bitwize »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #59
bluGill wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do that because someone (probably not you) will then unlock the phone and [insert something evil here - perhaps involving the radio]

The radio is a completely separate sub system that is not affected by unlocking the boot loader of the main computer.

That's not always true. If it's possible to shave pennies off the BOM by having the radio driven by, or sharing memory with, the main CPU -- and it is possible -- there will be phones in the wild with that configuration.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#69

Post by Silhouette »

alias_neo wrote: post #61
jrkfkgmfmr wrote: post #29

I don't want a right to repair if that means a bulky phone/laptop with terrible water sealing. Typing from a 4 year old non-repairable phone (Samsung S8). If you want a repairable phone, good, but don't take away my choice of slim water resistant phones. Get off my lawn HNers keep on complaining about big screens, non removable batteries, and lack of headphone ports, but nobody cares because people actually want thos…

What I want, is to be able to find a repair shop locally that would repair the glass on my Oneplus 8 Pro that I smashed in the first week of owning it. It fell all of 4 inches from the arm of the sofa onto the side table, and smashed because of shitty design wrapping the glass round the edge which was totally unnecessary. Oneplus will repair it for £200 for the part PLUS tax PLUS shipping PLUS labour and I'll have to…

If you're in the UK and an expensive phone really did break just from falling 4 inches after one week, I'd be tempted to try returning it to the seller. There must be a credible argument that it's unfit for purpose if it can be broken that easily due to a design flaw. It's not as if you carelessly dropped it from a pocket at waist height onto a concrete floor or something.

Re: British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers

#70

Post by gryn »

fsflover wrote: post #54
nerdawson wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV manufacturers are responding, often clumsily and based on their self-interest (data collection), to what consumers want. Trying to find a dumb TV is like trying to find a car without a built in radio. You're welcome to leave it switched off. Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Some may be slow. Some may have a poor interface. I'd worry about solving for that rather than expecting manufactu…

> Smart TVs are dumb if they aren't connected to the internet. Unless they find an open WiFi network.

or come integrated with an unremovable sim card that connects to a private Corporate APN.
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