Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws

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?

This is wonderfully accurate. :)

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.

The repairability index that France rolled out this year is great in that regard. Sellers of certain types of devices including smartphones and laptops are required to post a repairability score for the product prominently next to the price tag. This highlights to consumers which products are designed to be usable for longer through repair and upgrade and which aren’t, even if they otherwise look and function similarly.

I have a proposal: if the company sells some urepairable, unrecycleable and toxic piece of shit, then the customer/landfill/the government will post the e-waste to their head office and they are responsible for storing it untill the end of time.

That will get incentives in the right place.

How is this different than saying “if a company wants to make bad environmental decisions, that’s their prerogative”? Sometimes the government needs to get involved to prevent short-sighted behavior.

Manufacturers are not penalised for their technical choices. Making a thinner system seems like a great innovation but society at large pays for that product being non-repairable.

If you want corporations to have free reign on being able to innovate, there has to be some counter-incentive to force them to find innovative solutions around lengthning the life of of the product and its ability to be repaired and recycled.

As it stands today, bad press is the only incentive and its effect is easily mitigated by marketing and lobbying.

It needs to hurt. Innovation is born out of a need to improve. Making manufacturers responsible for their decisions is a way to balance their incentives.

As someone who used to work in consumer electronics, I don't think HN readers understand exactly how harsh tech reviewers come down on devices that aren't as thin as possible. Add an extra millimeter and all of a sudden "tech companies yet again don't understand female audiences as they make yet another monstrously huge device that only men can use." or "this new version is unbelievably thick, and is another failure compared to Apple's amazing version" where Apple's version is 1 or 2 mm thinner.

Laptops, same thing. Even here on HN I've seen multiple people talk about how the only reason they can even carry a laptop at all is because Apple's newest whatever is so amazingly thin and how even a single extra ounce would make the laptop completely unusable.

So manufacturers have a choice. Glue everything together and make it unrepairable, or get dragged through the mud by reviewers and tech enthusiasts.

I don't see how this is not blatantly in violation of anti-trust laws. It seems to me it is clearly harming the best interest of the consumer to have less choice and more expensive repair options due to lack of RTR.

I say this as someone who would still use Apple licenced repair shops. The standard of service quality is high, and the results are dependable and consistent. Why is it not enough to compete on quality, and why do they have to behave in an anti-competitive manner?

Also, I live in a state (Massachusetts) that has passed two right-to-repair laws via ballot initiative.

Both passed over intense opposition from the auto industry; almost all advertising in the lead up to the vote was in opposition.

But it passed in both cases because... it's common sense. If you buy a product, it's yours and you should be able to do what you want with it, whether that means modifying the hardware or running whatever software you want.

I've been trying to import a FairPhone, myself. Why they're making it so difficult to get one in the states is beyond me.

With YouTube tutorials and iFixit instructions all I needed was a screwdriver and parts from AliExpress. I replaced 4 times a screen and 3 times a battery in my wife's BQ Aquaris X until the motherboard gave up. It still probably is repairable, but not as easy. The phone had seen too much water in it's life... I repaired in my time also: Moto G1, Nexus 5X and Pixel 1. It was all not difficult. Now I wonder how it will go with Moto G7 that my wife has when its time will come.

That's one of the reasons I think about Fairphone, but with my experience I bought for myself Pixel 1 with a broken screen, that I repaired myself. Now my phone is all good except software and that makes me think about the Fairphone again. Can't wait until Linux phones will get better, maybe Pinephone 3 will be a good main phone. But I would like to see a small phone, like latest Unihertz Jelly, but without an awful Mediatek SoC.

I have a garbage laptop from 2012 that's still enough for basic browsing. Thanks to a replacement battery and reasonably accessible internals it's still working fine. The case is all busted but whatever.

Customers should be able to legally get parts. If the original company is done making them someone else should be allowed.

I highly doubt repaired devices are massively cutting into sale. Most people don't want to deal with the hassle and would rather have something new anyways.

My iPhone XS Max screen cracked a few weeks ago and I've been debating sending it in for repair. Apple charges $300 friggin dollars to "fix" the display (I think they just send you a new phone).

Looking online, displays only cost around $50-$90. So I've considered doing that instead, but if I go down that route, my phone will no longer support the "True Tone" feature. This is because Apple burned the serial number of the display onto the motherboard, so if you try to replace it, they'll know and will disable features even though they work perfectly fine.

So in addition to the cost of the screen, I'll also have to buy a screen reprogrammer, which is a device that can copy the serial number from my old display and write it into the new display, so that the phone doesn't realize I replaced the screen. The prices I've seen online for these are like $60+, so it's still cheaper than sending it to Apple.

I don't understand how this isn't 100% illegal. How the hell can Apple get away with doing something so obviously malicious and detrimental to consumers and the environment? Those are some Scrooge McDuck levels of ridiculousness.

Yeah, I just recently replaced the battery in a family member's MacBook Air. Surprising that it was even possible to replace (thanks iFixit)! With this model the SSD is also replaceable, thankfully. Of course, once the logic board itself fails, that'll be a whole different story, but at least _some_ aspects of the system are repairable.

Alternately while the page is loading hit ESC and it will prevent the pop-up from opening :)