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New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

ifixit.com

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Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#151

4. Excludes motor vehicle manufacturers, manufacturer of motor vehicle equipment, or motor vehicle dealers and medical devices or a digital electronic product or embedded software found in medical settings. For all the bravado about standing up to powerful interests, this shows you who the most powerful interests are in that space.

Restrictions on medical devices are very reasonable though. They aren't something people can freely hack on. Errors can cause decisions to be made based on incorrect information, expose people to radioactivity...

Even the GPLv3 makes an exception for this class of device.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely when it comes to tech. It's fairly inconsequential sideloading something to your phone. Medical devices I think should need a someone well versed to work on it. With cars, the current model most states in the US have is a good middle ground. You can do whatever you want to your car, but it needs to pass a safety inspection every 2 years to drive it legally. The inspections in my state are fairly comprehens…

I think we should just have some pretty clear literature that if you modify a device, the manufacturer is not responsible for any injuries it might cause you. Modify a dishwasher and now it fills your kitchen with soap bubbles? Modify a CPAP machine and get killed by it? Not the manufacturer's fault. The US is too litigation happy as it is...

By passing a right to repair on medical devices you also open up the aftermarket for repairs. Would you like to be handed a medical device by your insurance company that has been repaired by an untrained person that considers himself to be a handyman? Or be put in a scanner that was repaired by a service engineer from a broker that is cutting corners to win in the competing market.

Without clear quality and regulatory control there must be an objective method to discern between personal repairs and non-personal ones.

Disclaimer: didn't read the actual right to repair being passed in detail. Not sure if it does discern already.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#153

Not really related but ifixit really is fantastic. I’ve fixed so many things I had no business being able to fix on my own thanks to their guides and videos. I wish more people would turn to their site before throwing stuff away.

Take their guides with a bit of a grain of salt. Having gone through Apple ACMT training back in 2015, many of the iFixit guides have recommendations or procedures that do not follow official Apple guidelines. In most cases it doesn't matter, but it can come back to bite. For example there are torque specifications for some of the screws in the trashcan Mac Pro. I doubt getting the torque wrong would cause any issue,…

I don't give a shit what Apple thinks, and wouldn't bother seeking their opinion. I've replaced probably every part in an old MacBook Air I have and the non-Apple online documentation has been really good.

All that being said, thermal paste is pretty poisonous, I'd never even considered someone would just splodge it on with their finger.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#154
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My claim is that for most users of iPhones, the situation of Apple being in control of their device, rather than themselves, results in a better outcome for that user (and is oftentimes explicitly preferred by that user as a result, and is reflected in their purchase of an iPhone). Okay, but that comes out to the same thing, since I can't buy an iPhone which isn't Apple managed. If Apple offered a choice, that woul…

> Okay, but that comes out to the same thing, since I can't buy an iPhone which isn't Apple managed. If Apple offered a choice, that would be one thing—but they don't. Well, you know this state of affairs well now, so when you buy an iPhone you willingly opt in to these remote management restrictions. There are lots of smartphones you can buy without such cryptographic boot restrictions. Many people willingly choose…

> Many people willingly choose iPhones (even given these constraints), and would prefer a remote party manage their device's security.

I mean, but you're making a big assumption there! I buy iPhones in spite of those restrictions, because the only other options have worse processors and cameras, and because most of the people I know use iMessage.

I'd pay double the cost of a normal iPhone for a Security Research Device, if they were available to the general public.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#155
post #146
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We excluded autos because the Massachusetts auto right to repair bill (most recently updated in November) covers this, and there's a nationwide MOU. Tesla is the only manufacturer that has not signed this MOU. There is a lawsuit around that ballot initiative, and iFixit and EFF just filed an Amicus on Monday supporting the law. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/eff-files-amicus-brief... Sometimes it's better to f…

What you said does not make any sense. What's the problem if the law is overlapping ?

Instead of fighting the auto industry giants over this bill, they left them out - that way they can focus on fighting the info industry giants.

The auto industry giants are still being fought - just not over this bill.

I think that if the laws overlap it will be opposed by multiple industry giants and will be harder to pass. At least that’s what it seems from the post above.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#156

What would be the best argument against this sort of legislation?

You won't hear any here. HN, while libertarian-leaning on many issues, is overwhelmingly in favor of government regulation on this topic. I'll be downvoted, but here's a few real potential downsides (which exist anytime a small group of people with good intentions THINK they understand a complex issue enough to fix it). All regulation has unintended consequences: Ineffective at stopping E-waste - The main reason peop…

This is a bad post.

1. It complains about downvotes, which is one of many reasons your post is grey.

2. The main reason people throw electronics away is not because they break, but because they become obsolete: Big [citation needed] on shorter time scales. For longer time scales it's intuitively true but irrelevant. With Moore's law being toast, most hardware upgrades are extremely incremental. I don't get any more battery life on my iPhone XS Max than I do on the 6+ it replaced, it's not any more responsive, etc. Beige boxes haven't been a thing for decades. But, people holding onto their devices longer would absolutely result in less ewaste.

3. When you tell companies they have to build things a certain way, you remove the option for something better to evolve: That depends entirely on the nature of the requirements. Nobody's talking about the government dictating the whole BOM. No innovation is being stifled by requiring, say, user-replaceable batteries, unless we're talking about innovative ways to pad the company's bottom line. Let's not lose sight of the fact that repair-hostile design absolutely benefits the company and only the company at the end of the day.

4. baring the extra engineering/documentation costs: which are already done internally, so those costs are irrelevant. Every company that does repairs has documented repair procedures for their own people already. They can put PDFs on a freaking website. No idea what you mean by "extra engineering costs".

5. forcing companies to create small quantity B2C supply chains and retail channels for consumers to purchase individual parts on obsolete models would be an absolute nightmare: That's somewhat fair, but there's no reason it needs to be any more of a retail channel than their ship/replace stuff already is. The infra is already in place, they're just shipping out parts instead of full devices. I think the word "obsolete" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.. a 2 years old phone is only "obsolete" by manufacturer fiat, because they can make more money by marketing tiny, incremental upgrades and simply refusing to support the still-useful device.

6. You'll just be cloned by an army of chinese competitors even faster: Not fast enough for this to be an actual concern. Shitty chinese clones happen with a quickness even today, yet for some reason people still spend billions on name brand devices. I do not foresee this meaningfully changing. Trademark/import law is still a thing, after all.

7. incumbent big companies may simply use this regulation as an opportunity to entrench their position in the marketplace: This is a weak meta-situational argument used by all big businesses against any and all business regulations. I do not see why this case is special.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#157
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, Rossmann is a curious character. He openly and variously despises Apple’s hardware choices and policies, yet to my memory, that’s his shop works on. Are the economics of repairing Apple products that strong or is the man is a true masochist?

Familiarity breeds contempt. If you work with the greatest stuff in the world all day every day you'll be able to find a million reasons it sucks.

“First world problems” is also a related concept. Our priorities and judgements are very much borne from the larger context of our individual and group experiences.

Even the very definition of “greatest stuff in the world” is highly dependent on one’s particular circumstance and priorities.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#158
post #155
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you said does not make any sense. What's the problem if the law is overlapping ?

Instead of fighting the auto industry giants over this bill, they left them out - that way they can focus on fighting the info industry giants. The auto industry giants are still being fought - just not over this bill. I think that if the laws overlap it will be opposed by multiple industry giants and will be harder to pass. At least that’s what it seems from the post above.

Divide and conquer. Attack each enemy on a separate front.

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO it comes down to this: do we advocate for laws that give companies the ability to decide what is right/safe for the public, or do we advocate for laws that reflect trust in the individual? This is a really great way to put it, and it applies broadly to so many fundamental disagreements in the tech world. I firmly believe it’s better to trust the individual—so I think users should be able to sideload iOS apps (o…

Absolutely when it comes to tech. It's fairly inconsequential sideloading something to your phone. Medical devices I think should need a someone well versed to work on it. With cars, the current model most states in the US have is a good middle ground. You can do whatever you want to your car, but it needs to pass a safety inspection every 2 years to drive it legally. The inspections in my state are fairly comprehens…

> With cars, the current model most states in the US have is a good middle ground. You can do whatever you want to your car, but it needs to pass a safety inspection every 2 years to drive it legally.

Only 4 US states have biannual safety inspections. Another 11 have annual inspections. The other 35 states + DC do not have safety inspections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

Re: New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill

#160
post #63

4. Excludes motor vehicle manufacturers, manufacturer of motor vehicle equipment, or motor vehicle dealers and medical devices or a digital electronic product or embedded software found in medical settings. For all the bravado about standing up to powerful interests, this shows you who the most powerful interests are in that space.

We excluded autos because the Massachusetts auto right to repair bill (most recently updated in November) covers this, and there's a nationwide MOU. Tesla is the only manufacturer that has not signed this MOU. There is a lawsuit around that ballot initiative, and iFixit and EFF just filed an Amicus on Monday supporting the law. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/eff-files-amicus-brief... Sometimes it's better to f…

What about "digital electronic product"? Doesn't that exclude phones and laptops?
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