[darkmighty]

It's not about telling companies how to build products. It's literally about the right to tinker, hack, repair, etc -- which could be heavility discouraged with EULAs, ToSs, or even legal action.

And in many cases the OEMs have all the parts to fix things, will happily want to fix things, but won't sell them except through their overpriced 1st party service -- or even build into the hardware repair-detecting and disabling countermeasures (like Apple or John Deere does with some hardware iirc).

It seems like asking for the very basic right.

Even from the industrial side, reversible manufacturing is usually the best way to design a product -- it wouldn't surprise if some manufacturers (particular for products that don't have enough competition) go out of their way to make their hardware difficult to repair -- e.g. using glue instead of screws, complicating assembly, etc. An easy, reversible assembly process should be expected to cost less; using screws is much easier to automate, debug and qualify than glue; and so on.

Asking for the right to repair, and availability of parts/manuals when reasonable, seems like a very healthy, pro-efficiency, pro-competition move.

[FireBeyond]

> but won't sell them except through their overpriced 1st party service

I had a control board go bad on an $800 washing machine. The manufacturer wanted $829 for the control board (just the part).

[jake_the_third]

Would you mind naming them? I'm in the market for new appliances and don't want to support scumbags.

[larkost]

Some of the arguments have been on telling companies how to make their products. An example from the article would be making sure that large appliances can be dissembled non-destructively. Another example has been the suggestion of requiring that cell phones be assembled with screws rather than glue.

I am not necessarily advocating for either side, just observing that this is about limitation on design as well as rights.

[SllX]

You know something, even if some of the proposed legislation does amount to a limitation on design for mass market products, I think that’s actually fine.

They’re not specifying a type of screw. They’re just saying to use screws instead of glue, make a product possible to disassemble and reassemble without causing it to necessarily break on disassembly.

I’m not hugely in love with the idea of placing legal limitations on designers, but we’re taking about mass market consumer and commercial goods, generally measured in at a minimum, thousands produced and hopefully sold. They’re manufactured in factories that at their best are barely better than sweatshops in countries where the workers have fewer rights and lower wages and sold to people with more money, rights and priveleges. Jony Ive might not be happy if he has to modify his designs to meet a legislative mandate, but I just don’t care. The factories aren’t going to care, they’ll accommodate any change they have to. The factory workers aren’t going to care if they using screws or glue. Customers are going to care then if they can replace their widgets for a lot less money than it takes to buy a new widget. I know I’ll care about that, and I’ll look back with disdain on those few times I simply couldn’t get something repaired and had to replace it.

The market being full of disposable shit sucks. I have plates, ceramic dinnerware, silverware, glassware, cast iron pans and pots that I would like to some day pass on to my descendants because why not? They can sell it on to someone who needs it more, use it themselves, maybe if one breaks it can become part of a mosaic or something nice. I can’t think of a single electronic I own that might, might, serve some useful purpose, and even appliances with the additional and often unnecessary silicon in them are iffy.

If right to repair laws can change the status quo, I am all for that. If that means I’m not doing my part to inflate the economy with higher numbers by wasting more money to more companies to inflate their numbers for shit that will break in an unreasonably short amount of time relative to my lifetime, I think I can live with myself.

[hakfoo]

Repairanbility also has second-order effects: you can usually easily scrap the unit for parts, supplying the aftermarket repair industry.

I can recall when I cracked up my Nokia 1020. The local repair shops would replace an iPhone or Galaxy S5 screen for like $50 in an hour, but the 1020 was a nearly $200 proposition with a week's wait-- because nobody had a scrapped screen to offer.