The boring truth is that American consumers simply don't care about repairing their electronic devices. They're too rich and labor is too expensive here. You would have no problem with repairing just about any phone in China. I suppose the lax intellectual property laws help as well.
Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
71–80 of 156 posts
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#72My main complaint against right-to-repair laws is mostly to the extent that some people push for. I am not against manufacturers being forced to provide things like schematics or parts to third party repair shops. I don't think that companies like Apple should be able to decide who is allowed to or not allowed to access parts to repair their devices. I also don't think that Apple should place DRM on its parts to chec…
I almost agree with you, except in the instance where a modification might result in dangerous erroneous behaviour of the product - like self-driving cars for instance.
That argument applies exactly the same to everything which already exists, and we already have liability and lawsuits and insurance for that. I can monkey with a lawnmower and have it kill an unwitting innocent user. There is really nothing magically different about a self-driving car in that regard. It's the same as a regular car. A self-driving car is just another piece of equipment that somebody owns and is responsible for it's actions.
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#73I really like Thom Holwerda's from OSnews take on the article. Especially the "glorified toaster makers" part. https://www.osnews.com/story/133436/microsoft-and-apple-wage... > What’s good enough for the car industry, is more than good enough for these glorified toaster makers. Cars are basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on, but Apple and Microsoft make complicated toasters that…
Other issues aside, "A is just a complicated B, so apply the same rules to A as B" is not a formula for good decision making. It's a common way to make bad mistakes though.
That's a terrible and misleading paraphrase of the above post, whose main point was contrasting the extreme risks inherent to auto repair to the mundane risks of computer repair. Which makes some specific arguments brought up against right to repair like battery replacement being too dangerous for independents/end users seem unconvincing. Perticularly because vehicles themselves have dangerous batteries.
Here's an allegation of that argument being brought up by Apple.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2019/05/01/apple-iph...
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good approach. What would be even more interesting is to evaluate how reliable parts are. Spinning hard drives were often the first thing to fail for instance, due to the mechanical stress. Same thing for ports. Soldered-on RAM and flash, while almost impossible to upgrade, is way more reliable. No vibrations means way less mechanical stress.
>Soldered-on RAM and flash, while almost impossible to upgrade, is way more reliable. It depends, software bugs or different workflow cam cause your storage or battery to fail faster, then you need to throw away the entire device because things are impossible or expensive to repair.
Good point.
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#75I really like Thom Holwerda's from OSnews take on the article. Especially the "glorified toaster makers" part. https://www.osnews.com/story/133436/microsoft-and-apple-wage... > What’s good enough for the car industry, is more than good enough for these glorified toaster makers. Cars are basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on, but Apple and Microsoft make complicated toasters that…
Love this take on it. That said, there's a California State Bill SB-605 "Medical Device Right to Repair Act" that's going through the motions at the moment. Medical devices are not "basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on" . I'd like to hear what peoples' take on Medical Devices is?
The FDA's report on third party servicing says this:
> The currently available objective evidence is not sufficient to conclude whether or not there is a widespread public health concern related to servicing, including by third party servicers, of medical devices that would justify imposing additional/different, burdensome regulatory requirements at this time. Rather, the objective evidence indicates that many OEMs and third party entities provide high quality, safe, and effective servicing of medical devices.
https://www.fda.gov/media/113431/download
From my personal experience poking at a CPAP machine, there's nothing magical about it. All the sensors and active elements I could track down are available from the respective manufacturers in large quantities. The CPU is a freaking off the shelf STM32F4 with the jtag header still on the board. This is not some impossible to debug hyper-integrated design.
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#76My main complaint against right-to-repair laws is mostly to the extent that some people push for. I am not against manufacturers being forced to provide things like schematics or parts to third party repair shops. I don't think that companies like Apple should be able to decide who is allowed to or not allowed to access parts to repair their devices. I also don't think that Apple should place DRM on its parts to chec…
I have never understood the demand for "right to repair" laws any ways. Don't you know the terms of repair before you buy the device ? Simply don't buy an iphone if you want to repair it yourself. If there is enough market for repairable devices someone will make them eventually otherwise you are only imposing a huge compliance cost on everyone else and slow down innovation for many companies.
Is there a huge compliance cost for something like providing schematics for your devices?
I agree that people should do their due diligence when purchasing their tech products, but I am strongly against a company doing something solely for the purpose of impeding repairability.
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#77My main complaint against right-to-repair laws is mostly to the extent that some people push for. I am not against manufacturers being forced to provide things like schematics or parts to third party repair shops. I don't think that companies like Apple should be able to decide who is allowed to or not allowed to access parts to repair their devices. I also don't think that Apple should place DRM on its parts to chec…
Honest question: aren’t schematics trade secrets? Won’t public schematics make it easier for others to copy? That seems like a big deal to me. If I were designing a new piece of technology, I wouldn’t necessarily want to publish my schematics.
I ask this as somebody who would love to have the schematics of all my devices. I would love to know why this actually isn’t a big deal.
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#78Why is Microsoft against this? They don’t really make much that needs repairing. Is Xbox that big of a market for them?
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good approach. What would be even more interesting is to evaluate how reliable parts are. Spinning hard drives were often the first thing to fail for instance, due to the mechanical stress. Same thing for ports. Soldered-on RAM and flash, while almost impossible to upgrade, is way more reliable. No vibrations means way less mechanical stress.
Flash doesn't fail due to mechanical stress, it fails due to wear cycles which are limited in every case. In every PC or laptop I can replace the flash storge except in the newer devices of the famous fruity manufacturer. And RAM may be reliable but when it's replaceable it means I can upgrade it and use the device for longer instead of having to buy a new device.
I always massively overspec flash. With wear leveling writes cycles are measured in bytes divided by the size of the drive (roughly) so if you typically have about 900gb of data and a 2-4tb drive you will have an extremely long flash life span.
You generally don’t want to run flash near full. That shortens it’s life.
Re: Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
#80I really like Thom Holwerda's from OSnews take on the article. Especially the "glorified toaster makers" part. https://www.osnews.com/story/133436/microsoft-and-apple-wage... > What’s good enough for the car industry, is more than good enough for these glorified toaster makers. Cars are basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on, but Apple and Microsoft make complicated toasters that…
Love this take on it. That said, there's a California State Bill SB-605 "Medical Device Right to Repair Act" that's going through the motions at the moment. Medical devices are not "basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on" . I'd like to hear what peoples' take on Medical Devices is?
Medical devices differ more in the level of design review and testing than in the designs per se - many of them are fairly straightforward. As long as 3rd party repair a) doesn't cut corners and b) knows how to do full verification testing, it should be fine.
The latter part is interesting, as public side of FDA filings doesn't have all the V&V filings. I suspect that's why FDA is less sanguine about re-manufacturing.