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The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

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Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#131

Post by Loughla »

guywithahat wrote: post #117
walterbell wrote: post #3

https://www.ifixit.com/News/110039/double-trouble-for-repair... Come January 1, 2026, manufacturers must also stop using parts pairing to block repairs for these devices. That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone. SB 5680 goes even further for wheelchair users. It covers power whe…

The phone part sounds great, the wheel chair portion sounds like it will just make wheel chairs more expensive. Wheelchairs are generally already highly repairable, and this will just reduce the options to consumers

High end wheelchairs are the opposite of repairable. A friend of mine has to use one because of his disability. It was the only model that met his particular needs for his disability, and was around 14k when he bought it.

He can't even change the battery pack without sending it back to the company. The horn shorted out, and if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty. Fuck, one of the wheel spoke things cracked and we couldn't even put a new wheel on it, because they only sell the wheels as part of the lower chassis to the tune of 5k.

It's obscenely expensive to have a disability in the US, and these companies take advantage of people who just want to have basic mobility. It's really disgusting.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#132

Post by tialaramex »

onli wrote: post #126
dmonitor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this doesn't mean the system can't report a non-OEM part being installed at all. Buying a used product that's been hacked apart would be frustrating.

There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3: > an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss. So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing aga…

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair

Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.

Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#134

Post by senbrow »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #16

It appears that the Washington bill excluded power tools whereas the Texas bill did not, which means that in Texas I should be able to swap dead lithium cells out of my expensive power tool batteries.

To those who want to do this: make sure to swap out all cells in a battery at once to be safe, ideally using new cells that are all from the same manufacturer and same production run.

Mixing old cells with new can lead to a runaway thermal event in the worst case (i.e. unstoppable cancer-causing fire).

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#135

Post by tialaramex »

rkagerer wrote: post #79

Axis locks out certain useful features in their IP cameras unless you install an Axis-branded SD card. Since Axis doesn't actually manufacture SD cards, they are obviously rebranded high-endurance cards from one of the major fabs (possibly with some minor firmware parameter tweaks). Except, they cost twice as much and aren't as generally available. Would this law have any bearing on that business practice?

Interesting. I know at work we use a lot of Axis cameras, but I don't know if we use those features (which ones?) or whether we bought their SD cards.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#136

Post by beau_g »

vel0city wrote: post #68
abeppu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included? With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."

I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.

There's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it.

Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#137

Post by zaphar »

onli wrote: post #126
dmonitor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this doesn't mean the system can't report a non-OEM part being installed at all. Buying a used product that's been hacked apart would be frustrating.

There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3: > an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss. So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing aga…

Also be aware that the in the case of a TPM and fingerprint sensor there are some very important security guarantees that a part must make in order to preserve the security of the system. So it is not in fact scare mongering to try to get this right in the law and commenting about the difficulty of getting this right is not being infected by Apple follower talking points.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#138

Post by rconti »

onli wrote: post #126
dmonitor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully this doesn't mean the system can't report a non-OEM part being installed at all. Buying a used product that's been hacked apart would be frustrating.

There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3: > an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss. So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing aga…

Sorry, I can't parse the multiple negatives of "hopefully this doesn't mean they can't.." followed by "there's no such restriction".

I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.

Re: The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State

#140

Post by rkagerer »

tialaramex wrote: post #135
rkagerer wrote: post #79

Axis locks out certain useful features in their IP cameras unless you install an Axis-branded SD card. Since Axis doesn't actually manufacture SD cards, they are obviously rebranded high-endurance cards from one of the major fabs (possibly with some minor firmware parameter tweaks). Except, they cost twice as much and aren't as generally available. Would this law have any bearing on that business practice?

Interesting. I know at work we use a lot of Axis cameras, but I don't know if we use those features (which ones?) or whether we bought their SD cards.

Without the Axis-branded SD card, they axe or deteriorate access to the cameras from mobile devices.

Namely, you cannot add the camera to a site for access from Camera Station Edge. This applies to both the desktop and mobile flavors of the software.

On the desktop version of Edge, there's a little-known hack you can make to a config file to override the behavior. But this means you need to drag a computer to the physical site for the initial provisioning.

There is no such override available on the mobile app.

(Also depending exactly how you provision, the Storage, Motion Detection and Continuous Recording toggles will be disabled when viewing the device in Edge).

It's a weird place to gatekeep, and reeks of pure sales / marketing driven impetus.

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