151–160 of 175 posts
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Here's an interview I did with National Review where I discussed this topic. I'll include the exercpt that applies to your concern below. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/a-computer-repair-exp... "So one example of what Right to Repair is not: The European Union, I believe, was looking to mandate that Apple use USB-C instead of Lightning, because USB-C is a standard and Lightning is not a standard. I don’t want…
With respect, I think you're being disingenuous here and I think you know it. No one is telling customers "your phone is now a brick" when their charge port breaks and "right to repair", as a whole" does not have a fine handle on what's being advocated for. If it did, there wouldn't be so many different variations of understanding for "right to repair" actually is. The number of variations for it in the various bills…
Saying "and you know it" isn't an argument, it's what people fighting back and forth in drama TV say.
> No one is telling customers "your phone is now a brick" when their charge port breaks
I did not say they tell customers your phone is a brick when their charge port breaks.
AASP did say, that when your headphone jack(attached to charge port) breaks, your only solution is
a) Send it back to manufacturer b) 2 week turnaround time c) All data GONE d) You spend half the cost of a new one, to get someone else's refurbished phone.
Citation: https://youtu.be/OR5ZUl0Q-NI?t=100
Brick could technically be one way to put it, since they will not fix your phone.
>and "right to repair", as a whole" does not have a fine handle on what's being advocated for.
It actually does. The bills in almost every state in the U.S. are virtually identical. What are the differences between House Bill 1212 in Washington and S4104 in New York that make it impossible to tell what is being advocated for? What are the inconsistencies?
These are bills in different states on opposite sides of the US, with totally different legislators; and each bill makes it clear they are advocating for the same thing.
What causes confusion over what Right to Repair is asking for is the opposition. They will make things up, like claim I am asking for source code, or demanding everything be modular. None of this is in any of the bills. No one cares though, because no one reads them.
>especially considering that you've made misleading claims in your videos and ignore when people call you out on it.
No citations. I'd respond to your assertion of a misleading claim if I knew what it was.
>That, to me, is not the way to grow support for people's rights over the products they own. The only way to do that is to be blunt and honest about what the situation is on both sides and what the motivations for the two sides are. They are not irreconcilable.
This seems to have gained a lot of steam. There are a small minority of haters, but that is what it is. You'll get that with anything that you do, and there is no movement that avoids this.
>and there are very few people, and I'm excluding you in this, who aren't trying to push their desires for it for anything but selfish reasons. I get that you're kinda the de-facto figurehead of the movement but let's not pretend that your reasons for supporting this are altruistic and that you're not pushing for this because you run a business that needs this to go through.
So now we have moved onto, "I don't have an argument so I am going to call you self interested." :( This one is less fun.
I have 1.58 million subscribers on YT. I hate using this word: it makes me sick.. but it is the case. I am "famous." If I say, "man, if only I had a schematic for an 820-00170" on stream, it gets emailed to me by someone from a hushmail address. If I say "man, I'd love to fix X, I just can't get this chip. Damn. If only I knew someone at TI.", I get a box with no return address in the mail with a spool of chips, and a handwritten thank you note for the content. This will happen from now until the end of time, because once you reach 1.58 million people, at some point, one of those people works somewhere or knows someone who can get you what you need.
I'll be fine. My business will go on just fine. I'm good.
You know whose repair businesses won't be fine? The repair shops that AREN'T run by C-list youtube celebrities. The businesses that are genuinely at the mercy of what they can buy from ebay or mobilesentrix.
I chose to get to this part last, because IMO it is deflection without substance. How does whether I benefit from something matter when arguing whether it is a good thing for society? It's like saying "Look at how selfish he is, PRETENDING he is altruistic when advocating for clean drinking water legislation. He's not doing it because he cares about making the world better. HE JUST WANTS CLEAN DRINKING WATER FOR HIMSELF TOO! BECAUSE HE DRINKS WATER! Yeah, can't trust him."
This is nonsense. It is natural, if the world is made a better place, that you as a citizen of the world are one of the beneficiaries of this improvement.
My customers benefit from saving money & time, and having choice(including the choice to get access to the parts/manuals to do the repair WITHOUT INVOLVING ME from this same legislation). Other shops benefit from having tools, diagrams, etc to do their job. I benefit from job security in the event that "fame" isn't enough going forward to get me what I need to do my job.
I like seeing people follow in the footsteps to success I was lucky enough to achieve. YT can be said to be a form of advertising, but stuff like this https://repair.wiki/w/A1707_2016-2017_15%E2%80%9D_Touchbar_M... I write in my spare time because I like knowing that someone else might be walking that path I took to success a little easier with less roadbumps in it. There is a happy feeling I experience knowing I am improving my small corner of the world.
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He goes over some fun and inspirational stories about that yes. But it's much more than that: "In a lot of people's minds power over others equates to money and profits. Hey, is it your computer, or is it some companies' computer?" He talks about companies trying to control and inhibiting repair and modification and compares it to the liberating and creative experience that he had and how that lead to him building th…
in other words, the Right to Repair movement is doing for hardware what the Free Software and Open Source movement is doing for software.
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> No one is telling customers "your phone is now a brick" when their charge port breaks Apple is. They'll "repair" it for you (they go out of their way to make sure that nobody else can - if not with the charge port then certainly with some of the other components) for a price. But they typically do this by replacing the item and destroying the old one. And the difference between that and a true repair matters from a…
This is not true. Apple does not say your phone is a brick and they don't destroy old devices. They disassemble them and re-use the working components to build remanufactured devices for warranty use. They literally have multi-million dollar machines that are built specifically to be able to take apart old iPhones component by component to allow them to be reused or reintegrated into the manufacturing process for war…
If a customer has a basic problem, and you tell them that
a) You will not fix their phone b) You will not recover data from their phone. c) Your only option at Apple is to have them send your phone off to neverneverland, and get someone else's refurb for half the price of a new one
Did you tell them that their phone was now a red colored rocklike substance that can be used to build a house? No, bt that doesn't mean the person who left that store being told their phone was a "brick" was lying to you. You're effectively telling them their old phone is bricked. The fact that this was done for a long time over basics such as a charge port is sad.
Let's not even get into the fact that boards that had been inside iPhone 6+ and flexing for years were being used in refurbs. People who paid the replacement fee were given refurbs that were close to failure, and once warranty ran out, bye bye.
Whether or not a robot is going to go through your recycled device to give Apple a refurb to sell isn't what matters to the customer. When a customer who has a basic headphone jack issue gets told "there is nothing I can do for your device other than send it back to the manufacturer and get you a replacement in two weeks for $349 when your phone's resale value is $300" when a headphone jack goes bad, instead of "yes, let me perform a 15 minute repair using a cheap flex cable that a toddler could do", that sucks. Right to Repair isn't about forcing the manufacturer to fix it, either. It's about making sure the parts are made available, so that either a repair shop, or the consumer themself, can do that job rather than have their phone go off to a robot.
I was a young person during the tube era. My dad was one of those guys with a bag full of tubes. The reason he was carrying them around was that NOTHING WORKED. The 'right to repair' was actually, a horrible 'burden of repair'. It's great that it helped Woz made Apple but it was also an era of buggy whips whose passing I do not lament. I would not support anything that added a microgram to my iPhone or MacBook or giv…
Luckily, nothing I've advocated for will do that!
Keep your A1989 Macbook the way it is. Change nothing, but this one thing: when it stops charging, let Louis(or you) buy an ISL9240 from mouser.com. And let people buy a schematic from Apple, instead of waiting for it to get pirated to vinafix, or leaked to me by a fan who works at Apple.
That's it. That's all.
No change to your device's functionality, no change to your device's weight, no change to your device's software.
Does this sound fair?
I really do want to engage with people who have concerns about what Right to Repair might do to their devices. I want to learn your concerns. I want to learn how to ensure Right to Repair bills, as they are drafted, never inconvenience you or lower the quality of the devices you use. I want to learn how to create messaging that makes it clear that this is my goal.
Serious question, and I'd be honored to get a reply.
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One thing we tend to forget is that not everybody lives in the US, there’s a lot of places where repairs are a thing and techs do magic with almost nothing but they need to resource to piracy for information and to black market for replacement parts.
While this is definitely true, I think it's less of an issue than we might think at first glance. There's nothing currently that would prevent a repair shop from repairing a device or sourcing parts from other devices. Even if we're talking about Apple devices or even Sony devices, there needs to be a balance between repairability and access. Back when the Apple II was released, the internet didn't really exist so so…
It can be done, but it is a huge waste.
Take the A1989 Macbook. Let's say you bring it in because it stops charging. It's 2019. It's dead. Let's pretend I am a normal repair shop, and not someone with youtube fame that can find someone at intersil/renesas that can get me chips.
Let's say the ISL9240 charging chip dies.
I can, in theory, do my research, and find out that the iPhone XR charging case uses the same chip. I can buy that charging case for $100+, disassemble it, locate the ISL9240, remove it, reball it, and replace it on the customer's logic board.
but......this is insane.
a) I have to waste a battery charging case, including the lithium battery.
b) I am adding $100+ to the repair cost since I have to stock & sell this case now just to get a chip.
c) I have to do research to figure out what other device on the market uses this chip, on top of the work of figuring out what is wrong on a complex 5+ layer PCB.
The viability of this repair, for a shop that needs to get their customer in & out in a day or two for them to remain satisfied, goes out the window almost immediately.
>Even if we're talking about Apple devices or even Sony devices, there needs to be a balance between repairability and access.
What does this actually mean? What is the downside to this chip being made available for sale, so that when the device fails it can be repaired? What are we balancing here?
>Now, someone with enough social followers can create a PR nightmare for a company based on something that's totally out of that company's control so it's no surprise that no one wants to open up that Pandora's box.
It is 100% within the company's control whether or not they want this part to be available; the reason it cannot be sold to anyone is because they make it that way.
>I'm fascinated by the fact that people like Louis Rossmann are both the perfect example of why Right to Repair should work while at the same time being an amazing example of why the current versions of R2R can't work.
Where is the argument in favor of why this cannot work, and how I am example of it? Where is the citation? How is it for decades parts and chips were made available with zero problems and now it can be asserted that this "can't work" with no explanation?
This increasingly feels like someone's throwing poo at the wall in the hopes of finding something that sticks.
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The Commodore 64 was much more akin to the Raspberry Pi's. You didn't have to be rich to have one.
From wikipedia, the introductory price was: > US$595 (equivalent to $1,596 in 2020) Slightly more than a Pi. I could not afford one back then, particularly when you factored in the floppy disk drive prices.
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none of which will help, because the big companies will just buy up all the competition. and not all regulation hinders competition, anti-monopoly regulation protects competition. and so does right to repair btw, because now i can run a repair business that competes with the manufacturer in fixing their devices.
I find it hard to believe that there is such a thing as a long lasting natural monopoly. The only monopolies that seem to last are the ones that are rooted in state coercion. Besides that, when I talk about "getting rid of regulation", I of course mean to get rid of barriers to entry. It may be feasible for large companies to set aside a couple of millions for a dedicated compliance department. Small startups do not…
We know what Wozniak would say, as he's a tinkerer from a time when computers were "human-sized" and able to be tinkered with. I think realistically the only thing we can demand is user-replaceable battery. Everything else is doomed to end up on a single chip integrated. And that chip either works, or doesn't. It's not about profit, it's about integration and miniaturization.
This sounds like Apple apologism. Repair shops certainly have the capability to fix these devices but are hampered by actively Apple who would obviously prefer you go through them for repairs which are nearly as expensive as buying a new phone which is the whole point.
I don't mind us demanding Apple to be more flexible in authorizing and training third-party technicians, providing them with parts.
But I don't need every idiot to have a repair shop. I don't need this to be a "right". You still need to meet some minimum bar of competence in my book.
Am I the only believing it should be a free market, where each company follows the strategy it prefers? Let the market decide if repairability is desired or not. If customers really want it, certainly there will be companies offering it. Much better to have millions voting with their money and purchases than a few bureaucrats deciding how they believe things should be.
What's in the best interest for consumers isn't always what's in the best interest for corporations. Hence why governments sometimes need to step in with legislation.