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Apple Is Lobbying Against Your Right To Repair iPhones, New York State Records Confirm (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Lobbying records in New York state show that Apple, Verizon, and the tech industry's largest trade organizations are opposing a bill that would make it easier for consumers and independent companies to repair your electronics. The bill, called the "Fair Repair Act," would require electronics companies to sell replacement parts and tools to the general public, would prohibit "software locks" that restrict repairs, and in many cases would require companies to make repair guides available to the public. Apple and other tech giants have been suspected of opposing the legislation in many of the 11 states where similar bills have been introduced, but New York's robust lobbying disclosure laws have made information about which companies are hiring lobbyists and what bills they're spending money on public record. According to New York State's Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Apple, Verizon, Toyota, the printer company Lexmark, heavy machinery company Caterpillar, phone insurance company Asurion, and medical device company Medtronic have spent money lobbying against the Fair Repair Act this year. The Consumer Technology Association, which represents thousands of electronics manufacturers, is also lobbying against the bill. The records show that companies and organizations lobbying against right to repair legislation spent $366,634 to retain lobbyists in the state between January and April of this year. Thus far, the Digital Right to Repair Coalition -- which is generally made up of independent repair shops with several employees -- is the only organization publicly lobbying for the legislation. It has spent $5,042 on the effort, according to the records.
"Apple kicks dogs and steals from your grandmother!"
What a shallow and attention-seeking headline. Ask yourself, how complex is the issue of making a manufacturer publish repair guides so that the public could repair an iPhone? Is it not conceivable that companies might object to some kinds of requirements a law might implement, that would be unworkable?
If a handset company were required to publish guides on how to fix the graphics coprocessor if it broke, would it be sufficient if the instructions said, "buy a new phone"? Or did you mean that the manual should instruct the user on how to remove the SoC, procure a new one, solder it in, preserve/restore all the security features and keys that actually cannot be disentagled from the old SoC and losing the user's data in the process, and then putting it through testing and verification that it works properly? (to give a silly hypothetical)
Exactly what types of broken states of a phone are you requiring a company to publish guides to fix, and make parts available for? Do you even know how many different ways a modern phone can fail? And what level of fix are you requiring they make available, and for what level of user capability? It's going to be pretty much useless if grandpa can't manipulate the microtweezers to fix the parts of the rear-facing camera module, so what then?
Electronic devices have come a lot farther than a car engine that you could demand be user-serviceable, and these laws are misguided attempts to make them so. Don't make a company the villain for objecting to things that are nice in (ancient) principle, but unworkable in reality.