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A 17-Year-Old Has Become Michigan's Leading Right To Repair Advocate (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Surya Raghavendran of Ann Arbor, Michigan isn't your average 17-year-old. Not only does the high school senior run a small business repairing iPhones when he's not in class, but he's raising awareness about people's right to fix their own devices without paying companies like Apple exorbitant fees. "People should be able to choose where they want to get their devices repaired," Raghavendran told me over the phone. "Right to repair will decrease the amount of e-waste and people will retain their devices much longer with suitable repair networks." Raghavendran is doing more than just talking about right to repair, he's become one of the leading advocates for a right to repair law in the state by pushing his lawmakers to introduce legislation that would protect a consumer's right to repair.
Raghavendran started researching the laws around repairing electronics, and he joined up with Environment Michigan -- an environmental activist group -- and started going to Lansing, the state capitol, to ask politicians what they were doing to protect people's right to repair their own devices. Raghavendran sent an email to state senator Rebekah Warren who called him in for a meeting and told him to start a petition. Since July, he's been asking for stories from the public about why the right to repair is important. The right to repair fight is happening all across the country at the local level and Raghavendran's petition has drawn support from people like like Nathan Proctor, the Director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at US PIRG. Repair.org, a group pushing for right to repair laws all over the country, has draft legislation it wants to get in front of Michigan's state legislature. Proctor has been working with Raghavendran, Environment Michigan, and Michigan legislators to draft right to repair legislation. Proctor wants to pass a right to repair bill that is similar to the one passed in Massachusetts that forced automotive companies to share diagnostic information with third party repair shops. The law passed in 2012 "set a precedent and the industry rolled out the changes nationally," reports Motherboard.
Raghavendran started researching the laws around repairing electronics, and he joined up with Environment Michigan -- an environmental activist group -- and started going to Lansing, the state capitol, to ask politicians what they were doing to protect people's right to repair their own devices. Raghavendran sent an email to state senator Rebekah Warren who called him in for a meeting and told him to start a petition. Since July, he's been asking for stories from the public about why the right to repair is important. The right to repair fight is happening all across the country at the local level and Raghavendran's petition has drawn support from people like like Nathan Proctor, the Director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at US PIRG. Repair.org, a group pushing for right to repair laws all over the country, has draft legislation it wants to get in front of Michigan's state legislature. Proctor has been working with Raghavendran, Environment Michigan, and Michigan legislators to draft right to repair legislation. Proctor wants to pass a right to repair bill that is similar to the one passed in Massachusetts that forced automotive companies to share diagnostic information with third party repair shops. The law passed in 2012 "set a precedent and the industry rolled out the changes nationally," reports Motherboard.
The iPhone X has a logic board that consists of two PCBs sandwiched together with an interposer PCB running around the outside edge, essentially sealing some of the components inside a PCB sarcophagus. This could easily be considered as "unrepairable" by Apple.
If they were forced to give out new assemblies, they could charge an arm and a leg for them. Furthermore, they could easily say that due to the design of the system, replacing the main logic board requires replacing the screen and Face ID sensor assembly as well. This would easily exceed the cost of a new device, but hey- you can certainly order new parts and repair your own device if you want to. It's just gonna cost you.
Of course, I also don't see why they couldn't just seal up the entire unit- sonically weld it together or something, like some of the Surface computers. That way nobody can get into them and the entire unit is considered one disposable assembly. There are no parts to repair because the unit was never designed to be opened.
This is where the "right to repair" is heading- the tech giants aren't going to give up their profits, so they'll just declare all their devices as being literally unservicable and deal with it that way. The ramifications of this will just mean that those few devices that could be opened before (to some degree) will be completely sealed in the future, and the moment anything goes wrong with the device- you just throw it out and buy a new one.
This is a great story and that young man is going to do great things. At 17 sounds like he has his act together and is handling business. Thank you for sharing this.
Then the right to repair imposes a 50% tax on such devices and suddenly screws and connectors appear in the next version.
Yeah, there will always be things that are not repairable. And sure, densely integrated electronics in maximally portable devices are a good candidate. I don't really care if a cellphone is like 3-4 parts... screen, PCB, battery, case. Or that if my earbug headphones break that they have no serviceable parts at all. I can deal with that.
But its a bigger problem than just cellphones; stuff like farm tractors, major appliances, hvac stuff, industrial robots/machinery... where the manufacturers are holding you hostage.
There are market forces and physical realities about cellphones that make repairing them legitimately impractical. The same is not true for this other stuff.
No need, they'll just design the devices differently so there are no parts to replace.
If you believe in the market, someone will want to undercut everyone else and will make a repairable device to do it. If you don't believe in the market, next step is ban the irreparable devices entirely.
I'm repeating myself with this comment, but I think it does bear repeating. The right to repair is not simply the "right to repair", but also the "right to upgrade".
One of the biggest issues with modern consumer electronics has been the shift towards devices in which the owner is actively discouraged from attempting to upgrade when a device reaches capacity or fails to perform adequately, in favour of buying a new machine from the vendor.
This covers a broad range of technology, from laptops and portable computers (where a tech-savvy user might like to upgrade RAM, storage and/or battery units), through desktop PCs, mobile phones, all types of personal transportation, but especially cars, trucks and motorcycles. Indeed, as computing power and technology becomes more prevalent, so the right to repair and upgrade becomes more important.
Manufacturers are going to argue that (for example) components soldered to motherboards are inherently more reliable than socketed or cabled components, since the soldered approach can reduce the chance of "dry joints". But that is a false claim. For a start, manufacturing has reached a level of sophistication where this sort of risk can be "designed out" with good component layout. More importantly, though, shouldn't we be able to choose?
There is a monster difference between iPhones and situations like John Deere tractors (their owners real victims in the right to repair wars)
iPhones are only hard to repair by virtue of the fact that to get them so small and meet their design goals, yeah, they're hard to repair, and the reason 3rd party components are cheaper is because yeah, they are cheaper, meaning not made to the same specifications and backwards engineered, so they may fail down the road because of incompatibility with software upgrades.
But all that being said, Apple doesn't actually stop you from repairing your own phone and all this guy is trying to do is force Apple to make his job easier. I.e., he may be a small business but ultimately this is just another case of one business complaining about the doings of another business.
John Deere tractors on the other hand are not "hard to repair", they are ILLEGAL to repair because John Deere has used insane licensing to make them so. That's where real right to repair laws need to come into force.
If they were forced to give out new assemblies, they could charge an arm and a leg for them.
That's typical of the USA's bold and risk-taking attitude in politics: Let's not even try to solve the problem because we might fail.
He started pestering legislators, met with one of them, started a petition that has drawn support from national organizations.
"Leading" in this context means "exercising leadership", so I'd say yes, he qualifies as *a* leading advocate. "*The*" leading advocate is clearly hyperbole, but that's the way people think about these things. We like to personify abstract issues, to put a single face on complicated political movements. George Washington is the undisputed "Father of His Country", but there were many others who could lay claim to that title with equal justice.
I'd like to turn this around and ask, what is it about this person that makes him undeserving of recognition as a leader?
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I love repairing vintage electronics precisely because you can repair it. When I was unemployed a few years ago, I started up a small electronics repair business, and if I stuck to professional music stuff - amps, combos, effects units and keyboards I could make a small profit at it. Professional musicians love their old kit! Unfortunately integration meant that for younger kit, often the spare was more than a pre-owned replacement from That Auction Site. So, I often got stuck with stuff from the 90s and later, where I would take something apart, find out what the spare would cost and couldn't persuade the owner to part with the funds to have it fixed. I recall when we used to have TV repair shops (those in Southampton might remember S&L TV) they used to charge customers up front before the repair would even be assessed. They couldn't sustain the business model even with that. I've repaired laptops and LCD TVs, but I despaired at repairing iPods and iPads with their layers of glue and too-easily-broken plastic latches. Aside from a not-for-profit venture, or as I do for my own benefit buying stuff that needs a cap job, or power transistors or broken connectors replacing, it's far too often that electronics falls in to the Beyond Economic Repair box.
I thought trump was the fault of the Baby Boomers and the fear of "immigrants taking our jerbs"?