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Why We Must Fight For the Right To Repair Our Electronics (ieee.org)
Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne explain via IEEE Spectrum how people in the United States can preserve their right to repair electronics, and why people must fight for the right in the first place. Here's an excerpt from their report: So how can people in the United States preserve their right to repair electronics? The answer is now apparent: through right-to-repair legislation enacted at the state level. Popular support on this issue has been clear since 2012, when 86 percent of the voters in Massachusetts endorsed a ballot initiative that would "[require] motor vehicle manufacturers to allow vehicle owners and independent repair facilities in Massachusetts to have access to the same vehicle diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturers' Massachusetts dealers and authorized repair facilities." Carmakers howled in protest, but after the law passed, they decided not to fight independent repair. Indeed, in January 2014 they entered into a national memorandum of understanding [PDF], voluntarily extending the terms of the Massachusetts law to the entire country. The commercial vehicle industry followed suit in October 2015. Now we need right-to-repair legislation for other kinds of equipment, too, particularly electronic equipment, which is the focus of "digital right to repair" initiatives in many states.
Similar to the Massachusetts legislation for automobiles, these digital-right-to-repair proposals would require manufacturers to provide access to service documentation, tools, firmware, and diagnostic programs. They also would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair facilities at reasonable prices. The bills introduced this year in a dozen states have some variations. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming, for example, are limited to farm equipment. The one most likely to be adopted soon is in Massachusetts, which seeks to outlaw the monopoly on repair parts and information within the state. If it passes, electronics manufacturers will probably change their practices nationwide. Consumers would then have more choices when something breaks. The next time your smartphone screen cracks, your microwave oven gets busted, or your TV dies, you may be able to get it fixed quickly, affordably, and fairly. And you, not the manufacturer, would decide where your equipment is repaired: at home, with the manufacturer, or at a local repair shop that you trust.
Similar to the Massachusetts legislation for automobiles, these digital-right-to-repair proposals would require manufacturers to provide access to service documentation, tools, firmware, and diagnostic programs. They also would require manufacturers to sell replacement parts to consumers and independent repair facilities at reasonable prices. The bills introduced this year in a dozen states have some variations. The ones in Kansas and Wyoming, for example, are limited to farm equipment. The one most likely to be adopted soon is in Massachusetts, which seeks to outlaw the monopoly on repair parts and information within the state. If it passes, electronics manufacturers will probably change their practices nationwide. Consumers would then have more choices when something breaks. The next time your smartphone screen cracks, your microwave oven gets busted, or your TV dies, you may be able to get it fixed quickly, affordably, and fairly. And you, not the manufacturer, would decide where your equipment is repaired: at home, with the manufacturer, or at a local repair shop that you trust.
I have a 9 year old LCD TV that has failing capacitors in the power supply. It takes multiple tries to power on, where it turns itself off and on and shows weird things on the screen. I know exactly what the problem is and I spent a dollar or two and got the caps I need, although I don't want to actually do the work until after the World Series is over just in case I do something stupid and break it.
But I'm sure Samsung would much rather have me go out and spend $500 on a brand new 'smart' TV that I don't want.
The problem with modern electronic devices is that the repair shop needs to make a substantial investment in equipment and training for the repair staff as well as documentation/parts approved/authorized by the device's manufacturer.
A $10 soldering iron and a tape of resistors from Radio Shack being wielded by a well meaning amateur (er "professional") ain't gonna cut it, like it did in the '60s, '70s and a good part of the '80s. I'm not being facetious - there were a lot of products (TVs, VCRs, Computers, Microwaves, non-mobile/cell phones) were this was a reasonable option. Right now, not so much.
With this legislation there is a great opportunity for somebody to develop a chain of localized repair shops - and, no, I don't consider "Geek Squad" to be a good start at this.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
...that we even need a law to pass for something like this, but here we are.
People might not realize this, but repair shops will be there, doesn't matter if these laws pass or not. They have been playing very important roles for sometime now, like finding out design flaws, being a major part in class action lawsuits for problems that manufacturers fails to admit, and pointing out major issues that big brands keep trying to hide from consumers.
Then, of course - as pointed out in the article - serving as competition to the overly inflated offerings of extended repair and other forms of ripping clients off from manufacturers.
I fixed a couple of my own smartphones, a washer/dryer machine and a vacuum cleaner myself... official options, when they were even available, were all priced too high to justify the fix (being a better option to just buy a new one) for most of those. Then there are grievances of authorized/official repair places taking ridiculous ammounts of time to fix some of them. You end up a victim of the worst monopoly practices.
I just came to the realization that it was worth investing in tools and time to learn just a little bit of how these electronics work, it ends up saving a whole lot of money and time. It's also great to educate yourself better on how these things actually work.
For the LG washer dryer in particular I'd need to either somehow take it to the shop, probably needing to pay for transport and all the hassle that it means, pay for probably a month worth of dry cleaners if it even got fixed, and then pay for the service which would certainly be priced waaay over what it really cost.
All it took was buying the faulty part myself and install it pretty easily. Fixed in a week, and only because I had to wait for the part to arrive. Total time spent actually fixing it? An hour at most. It'd be far more work just to take the damn thing down 16 floors, let alone all the rest.
It's important for the law to pass though because it forces manufacturers to provide schematic and parts for it to be done. Right now, we have to rely on shady sources and grey market pieces.
And then there's the entire eWaste discussion. One piece of electronic that you fix instead of buying a new one is one less device that will end up in a warehouse somewhere to be shipped to some foreign country with no human rights with people living in the middle of trash and pollutants.
The single argument that I always see thrown around against the right to repair is always about intellectual property and whatnot. If you ever hear it, it's bullshit. Restricting access to schematics and parts are not enough to stop competition from stealing tech if they want to, because it's extremely easy these days to just disassemble and copy the design if anyone wants to. There's no secret sauce in consumer electronics these days anymore. In fact, most manufacturers uses very common parts that are often not even made by the main brand anymore... it needs to be done that way because of mass production.
The deterrent for stealing intellectual property has always been lawsuits for violation. Yes, electronics these days are way more complex than the time in the past when electronic makers even included schematics with the product out of the box, but even if complexity has increased, methods of production are more or less the same. Smartphones in particular uses a whole bunch of components that are not proprietary and freely available in the market, and the parts that are proprietary you won't be able to reproduce with simple schematics anyways.
So definitely agreed. Right to repair is ultimately better in several fronts for consumers in general, and it's also a way to prevent brands and manufacturers to stop exploiting costumers.
The fact is, many of these electronics are incredibly tiny, complex, and non-modular due to the small form factors
The other fact is, those tiny solid-state electronics rarely break.
What most often breaks are things that are a) under repeated mechanical stress, like connectors, or b) under repeated high electrical stress, like electrolytic filter caps in the power supply/circuitry. Both are well-repairable.
You wouldn't believe how many "broken" things I have salvaged from various places repaired for the cost of a couple caps (total $ spent usually 1 EUR), instead of the stuff getting thrown into the trash. This is e.g. how I financed essentially all of my computing gear, including the awesome quad-monitor setup!
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
There's a subtle distinction here that's often lost - I see it muddled together a few places in TFA and also in the comments -- between the right to repair a device and the right to demand (?) redesign of a device in a way that makes repair easier.
The former seems quite reasonable, and the auto manufacturers got it done so that dispels the feasibility complaints, even for technology-stuffed modern cars. But I don't see MA (or anyone else) going so far as to say that car manufacturers should be required ex-ante to change the way cars are designed, built and assembled.
For electronic devices, however, there seem like there are real engineering tradeoffs between repairability and legitimate design goals such as parts cost, assembly cost, weight and size. Replacing all the glue holding a tablet together with screws might improve repairability while adding $0.14 to the cost and a few grams to the weight. A removable battery might be the same cost but add 3mm to the thickness. In some cases, it might be heuristically worth it, but I struggle in vain for any intellectually sound way to make those things commensurable.
And as an engineer, I surely shudder in fear of someone with no domain expertise in a problem that I spent years solving second-guessing my tradeoffs. Especially since they have no accountability to produce a workable design that can be actually shipped on time. At the same time, I recognize that the engineers with domain expertise are hardly neutral deciders of what tradeoffs are legitimate and which design elements serve no purpose other than to impede repairs.
So there I have it -- I don't see a scientific way to judge whether it's worth it and my choices for who to ask is either someone impartial with no idea of the specifics or someone that knows but has no incentive to impartiality.
[ Actually, the latter is kind of a pervasive problem. You can have folks with a ton of experience, or you can have folks that are neutral with no preconceived biases. But you can rarely have the same person with both. ]
Then the government should not enforce patents. If the invisible hand decides the copycat bootleg versions are what free market needs, so be it. Right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
the battery on my $650 [phone] is about shot
Well glue is obviously very expensive. I think LG couldn't afford the glue in cheaper models so my $60 phone came with a removable battery instead. They also got some free consultation from audiophiles and gold-plated the charging port contacts. You wouldn't believe how mad those audiophiles were when they realized they're also building in one of those ancient non-audiophile headphone jacks. The joke is on them, though, since they didn't realize I'm mostly going to listen to FM anyway thanks to the enabled FM chip and integrated FM antenna instead of filling up that 128gig microSD card with flac files...
Jokes aside, you're getting fucking ripped off. You probably even know it. But still you're enabling them by actually purchasing that $700 device one your glued-in battery is actually dead. They know they can treat you like that because they know the worst that can happen is you ranting about it on /..
You are part of the problem.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!