It also depends on who is asking the question. A right-to-repair advocate would ask "Do you support this law that will lower the cost of repairing old phones?" and most people will agree. Then an industry group asks the same people "Do you support this law that will raise the cost of making new phones?" and get a different answer.
Anti-right-to-repair lobby out in full force to stop it—and they’re winning. And yet you’re still blaming the average Joe based on hypothetical questionairre framing.
I realize you’re making a hypothetical point about the importance of question phrasing, but I really don’t see how this law would raise the cost of making new phones.
Doesn't making "repairable" things imply having to add design constraints, which would translate to increased costs of research/development/production?
Anyone who thinks that’s what this is about has not been following Right to Repair. While it would be great if things were designed with repairability in mind, the ask from Right to Repair is that no one be impeded from accessing manuals, components, and software needed for repair.
This specific bill was just about access to repair information and the ability to use third-party repair facilities. However, the Right to Repair organization specifically lists on their policy goals (https://www.repair.org/policy):
> Products should be designed to have their lifespan extended by regular maintenance and repair.
> Design: Integrate Design for Repair principles into eco-design product design practices.
And I have seen Right to Repair efforts that demanded repairable devices, even if that meant more bulk or more cost, or other tradeoffs.
Framework and similar efforts have demonstrated that it's possible to build a repairable device that people actually like, without compromising too much on other factors. But until those substantial engineering efforts had been put in, this seemed like a fundamental tradeoff between two sets of somewhat-incompatible properties consumers may want, and should be able to choose between. (It's still a tradeoff insofar as devices providing repairability don't provide all the features available from other devices.)
What I've heard from the many people who talk about right to repair on YouTube (channels like LTT, EEVBlog, and of course Louis Rossmann), is that they aren't asking for laws to restrict how products can be designed. A law like that is highly unlikely to pass and would seriously anger a lot of people if it did.
It looks like the reason for this mismatch in opinions is because repair.org is not associated with Rossmann. To me, their existence is going to hurt the chances of right to repair, because people will point to their goals as a reason to not consider the part/version of right to repair that should be much less controversial (in a relative sense. any regulations are controversial just due to being regulations)
Right to repair means that if the company A making the product buys a component from another company B, then A cannot forbid B from selling the same component to a repair shop. It does not mean that Apple is no longer allowed to glue their battery into the iPad.
So that means if Apple buys their chips from TSMC, then TSMC can now sell Apples chips directly to whoever wants them?
It’s not surprising it’s a dead bill. That leaves a nice opportunity for TSMC to capture a bunch of Apple’s margin without having had to do any of the chip R&D.
No. TSMC does own that IP. This is about instances where the IP is owned by company B.
I don't know how the legislation would work in a case like that. Most likely Apple would be required to sell replacement parts to everyone, rather than only to its licensed repair shops.
In any case this is a theoretical point, it's usually some stupid little chip on the motherboard that got wet and rusty, not the CPU. Or the screen broke. Or the battery is too old.
No, it just means making it possible to buy parts, repair manuals/schematics for products and preventing manufacturers for refusing warranty coverage when a repair is done correctly by a third party or product owner. We have right to repair for cars, and have since the 1970s, and without it... the car economy would be more frightening than it already is.
I think it is reasonable to imagine some manufacturing processes that are single shot construction. Gluing pieces together rather than screws/fasteners comes to mind.
Yes, but this bill wouldn't have affected any of that. Manufacturers could have continued making their devices difficult or even impossible to repair, they just would have had to make their own parts and repair manuals available to third parties.
