we live in a world where anything from a phone to big screen tv can be made anywhere in the world and sold anywhere else. a lot of that comes from reducing manufacturing to as few components as possible leaving only large assemblies as being replaceable. Now these laws need to leave open the ability to use 3rd party replacement parts and re manufactured parts

Let us look at our phones. Even if the case could be opened easily you have at most four to five truly discreet components that could fail and be replaced. Front glass, rear panel, circuit board, battery, and ?. I would love to see failure rates of each component, just want are companies fixing under warranty? Having that published would be very valuable.

Now I took our phones as an example but even laptops are not that far off. Being able to repair is not the same as being able to upgrade and many want the later. However that could put you straight outside of any warranty in the first place. So playing with a modern day no moving parts except at most a fan you have the system case, display panel, battery, and logic board. Even if a manufacturer made it so you could replace memory and drive it could all be limited to only the capacities they sell for that sku. hell they could use non standard connectors internally to thwart it and ease manufacturing.

as for appliances and big ticket house hold items from stoves, refrigerators, to TVs what do we get? what breaks in appliances? burners, circuit boards, compressors, pumps, and such.

note : I work in the automotive parts industry and the right to repair vehicles is very important to us and others. I truly believe the laws are needed but I think people's expectations of what can be repaired in the realm of small electronics is unrealistic as many items are outside of the case four or five discreet assemblies

1. For the first, most people do not care about "right to repair", what they want is a more roughly a "right to have repaired for a reasonable time period related to the cost of the item in question." Ie., it's a standard Free Market pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either case if it doesn't the manufacturer should take care of it at no further direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage of buyers get screwed at odds they don't know as well as the manufacturer, unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the manufacturer knows the odds not them). It's something that should just be part of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly.

How the manufacturer "takes care of it at no further direct cost to the consumer" is an implementation question for which there are many good answers that come with different tradeoffs and costs. "Right to Repair" legislates one specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired result and then let everyone experiment and adapt.

2. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains vs owner control and it's complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair: allowing any independent 3rd party to "repair/replace" that by definition means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too. Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up, be social engineered, etc. I'm not comfortable with it being illegal for me to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device (though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or whatever could help). But that's a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some cases.

I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say, manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple's case, I would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the choice can be made (I'd also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I've yet to see a Right To Repair that covers any of this.

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It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don't know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on that, but not in a great way.

P.S. It upsets me how the industry has succeeded in redirecting the Right to Repair activism from domains where it is actually bitterly needed (like specialised equipment, agricultural machinery and home appliances) to consumer electronics.

Without Right to Repair, you won't get essential service manuals or schematics, the vendor can brick your device after you've replaced the battery via DRM, the vendor can refuse to provide replacement parts. With Right to Repair, you'll be able to get service manuals, schematics, replacement parts, and there won't be anti-repair DRM - which is why you should support Right to Repair legislations.

However, it has nothing to do on whether the repair should be technically easy. Under the Right to Repair, a device can still be so delicate that it would only ever be successfully repaired by a trained technician with 100 hours of experience with $1000 dollar rework equipment - if it's the case, your best hope is to find a repair shop with skilled technicians and adequate equipment, and maybe you'll get it fixed at a lower-than-official cost - which is certainly a possibility - but without your Right to Repair, even this possibility cannot exist.

If someone really wants to make something easier to repair by everyone (in other words, impose legal restrictions on how a device should be designed), you'll need a different set of regulations to address that. But at the present stage, I recommend to get your Right to Repair first, and understand what does it really mean - similar misunderstandings of Right to Right (= the vendor must make repair easy for everyone) has already been used in many strawman arguments by its opponents in the industry, using excuses such as safety, portability or costs, and in reality none of them really applies.

It probably doesn't apply to phones, but the liability is an interesting question, especially for equipment with a lifetime of decades.

Right to repair essentially boils down to the product needs to be repairable in a reproducible way. It doesn’t state how that repair needs to be done or what exactly that means.

The big one is for repair ???????????? ?????? ???????????????????????? and ???????????????????????? ???? ???????????? ?????????? is what is most important. So that a repair shop or savvy consumer could indeed do their repairs without push back from the manufacturer. It also means the specifications for those repairs and parts would be open(ish)

Having to openly document repair procedure and have open part availability is what I think wrongly companies are attempting to protect. Because third parties could manufacturer spec compliant parts that wouldn't void the overall warranty of a product

I think redesign is a non significant factor

EDIT: I just want to note that in the right to repair debate product lifecycle planned obelesance is actually a legitimate argument for right to repair. I don't think devices are built to live longer then a product generations lifecycle (for instance, an iPhone has a typical generation lifecycle of 3-5 years I believe)

Right to repair would reverse that trend at least somewhat

Right to Repair means manufacturers must release the necessary documentation and technical information required for repairing the product, to remove artificial legal and technical restrictions (trade secret, copyright, authorization, DRM), and possibly to provide replaceable parts, and even to allow third-party modification... So that the end user (or a 3rd-party repair technician) would theoretically be able to repair it independently.

But it has nothing to do with the underlying (not artificial) difficulty of the repair, and rightfully so (otherwise it's out of its scope, and you need a different set of regulations to address that) - Right to Repair asks manufacturers to open up the design, not to dictate how it's supposed to be designed. It doesn't matter if troubleshooting requires an EE degree, it doesn't matter if the repair requires a $1000 machine, it doesn't matter if the device is so delicate that it would only ever be successfully repaired by a trained technician with 100 hours of experience.

Using battery replacement as an example: Right to Repair means you should be able to get a service manual, a new battery, a set of tools, and possibly the technical specification of the battery management protocol from the OEM to replace the battery. But if your phone has been completely sealed for waterproofing by design, it can be extremely difficult to open the cover, remove the battery, and put a new one in without damaging anything - but you still have your Right to Repair, and you should support Right to Repair legislations, since it's still possible for you to find a skilled technician to repair it. On the other hand, without your Right to Repair, you won't even get the service manual, and the OEM can brick your device after you've replaced the battery via DRM.

Just like the Right to Free Speech, the Right to Repair is mostly a negative right, in the sense that it must eliminate restrictions on the (theoretical) exercise of the right, on the other hand, it does not actively empower an individual to exercise the right. The government cannot take my blog down, but I may be unable to get any meaningful traffic from the web.

Consumer: right to repair means fixing my broken display will be a DIY job for $50? Sweet!

Repair shop: right to repair means I can source a display from lowest bidder, charge $150 for broken screen, and make $120 in profit? Let’s go!

Apple: right to repair means you must buy $275 display module to fix a broken display.

Apple being world’s most valuable company, is not going to willingly allow consumer or repair shop to get advantage over itself without kicking and screaming.

A smartphone is not a device of yore, where components cost make up vast majority of its price. Instead it is almost pure margin. Every device repaired without handing cash to Apple handsomely is one less device they can sell.

- Right to Repair is NOT about asking people to repair their own devices. Customers should be able to repair their own devices, but they should also have the options to purchase new devices or seek repair services from a third party.

- Right to Repair is NOT just about a few companies. Most major manufacturers in most industries fight against consumers being allowed to repair their devices or seek repair from an independent third party.

- Right to Repair is NOT about making manufactures re-design products to be easier to repair. The onus is on owners and independent repair providers to acquire the equipment and skills required to perform repairs. Right to Repair seeks to protect owners and independent repair providers from legal recourse for repairing a devices.

- Right to Repair is NOT about making manufacturers provide parts or repair services. It seeks to protect consumers and independent repair providers from legal recourse for distributing parts and schematics essential to support repairs. Those parts and schematics may be purchased from the manufacturer, purchased from a third party supplier, developed independently, or sourced from used devices.

- Right to Repair is NOT a partisan issue. Neither the Democrat nor Republican party have strong stances on the subject and lawmakers on both sides have objected and supported it.

- We do not currently have Right to Repair just because independent repair shops still exist. Most shops in the US/Europe can only offer very limited services due to the existing legal landscape. Some of them have to perform questionable or even outright illegal actions to secure the parts and schematics necessary to facilitate all but the simplest of repairs. Right to Repair seeks to undo this problem by granting legal protection for repairs.

- Authorized repair programs (ARPs) are not a substitute for Right to Repair. Such programs do not exist for the benefit of device owners. The FTC has found no evidence that ARPs improve quality or safety of repairs[0]. ARPs usually put cumbersome restrictions on independent repair providers in exchange for meager parts catalogs at exorbitant markups. They exist to extract money and control from independent repair providers and encourage consumers to seek alternative services or replacements directly from the manufacturer.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/nixing-fi...

There are weak versions of the right to repair that are only suited to enable third-party repair shops, e.g. by making schematics and parts available to "licensed professionals". But that is not what is generally desirable.

I agree that the article fails to make this clear.

Right To Repair sounds nice. It alliterates. But of course we have a right to repair our stuff. That goes without saying.

What's really at issue is a duty upon manufacturer's not to obstruct the four R's, to;

- refuse

- reuse

- repair

- recycle

Let's get specific, instead of a wishy "rights" formulation.

No technology must ever by soft-mandated or made a dependency so as to preclude an ethical, environmental or economic choice to not partake in its use, or to substitute other choices.

No technology should be encumbered with locks, licenses or mechanisms that affect the post-sale rights of its owner to repurpose or modify as they see fit (all other safety and contention (RF) issues can be dealt with at a another layer of legislation and enforcement.)

No impediment shall be made to the access, manufacture and distribution of spare parts or consumables, software updates, power supplies, connectors etc

Designs should not, by the use of adhesives, welding, non-standard fixings, unnecessary integration, traps, and fuses, prevent the easy disassembly and reuse of modular components.

> The law doesn't yet cover smartphones and tablets that she says are getting harder to fix. One problem is keeping older devices updated with new software.

Now "right to repair" includes not only designing devices to be easier to repair but also includes legacy software support? Where do we draw this line? If your M1 dies, you can't fab one yourself or run older software on it indefinitely.

Further down, the author writes:

> But markets have now become flooded with products that are less repairable.

> "It requires laws in place that prevent manufacturers from stopping [supporting] a product too early, or making it pretty much impossible to repair it by design."

Now the author has shifted "right to repair" to mean mandatory first-party device support and design requirements around repair-ability.

We must very carefully define our terms here, because requiring someone else to provide on one's behalf presumes a right to the product of their labor.