New York Senate passes Right to Repair bill (opens in new tab)

IMO it comes down to this: do we advocate for laws that give companies the ability to decide what is right/safe for the public, or do we advocate for laws that reflect trust in the individual?

Depending on the law, it may also require more documentation, ban on total lockdown of devices and obligation to sell spare parts(but you often can buy genuine spare parts through service centers)

Right to fix also doesn't cover warranties, as you will loose your warranty when doing it yourself.

For cars or medical equipment - that's clearly political influence, masquerading as "public safety".

There's nothing stopping me from modifying my car to be very dangerous right now, without even affecting my warranty. The difference - I cannot install a third party keyfob, because the protocol is locked down.

The kind of medical equipment that hospitals require, already comes with multi-decade support. And your CPAP device can be serviced by someone without manufacturer specific training(that costs a fortune, for little practical value).

Given the cost of medical care in this country I think it would be a very good thing if that agreement not to sell parts was against the law. Surely an electric motor to raise a chair up and down could be replaced with the correct part without compromising anyone’s safety.

That said, Safety is red herring that the industries use to justify their anti-consumer actions with zero actual data to back their position.

The Record are cars is clear and estiblished people self repair and use independant repair all the time to fix mechnical safety systems like breaks with no systemic issues or damage to public safety

For medical devices I have yet to see any data the independent repair causes any harm, in fact I believe the the US Government has a study that states Independent Repair of Medical Equipment is critical to maintaining the US Health System, so in the case of Health Care prohibitions on independent repair may CAUSE public health issues by taking critical equipment out of service waiting on "authorized" repair or parts

This "greater safety" concern is nothing but masquerade.

Citation very fucking needed, because exceptions for specific fields of work directly contradict the underlying principles of the GPL, and indeed [0] contains no occurence of the word "medical".

0: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

We need mandatory bootloader unlocking for products that the manufacture finds unprofitable to ship software updates for.

this old phone works really well still. I do not conduct any work related activities on it. But they see it as a attack vector I guess?

Making them doubly non-removable?

All that being said, thermal paste is pretty poisonous, I'd never even considered someone would just splodge it on with their finger.

The first thing to ask if we think that the non removable batteries is related to surveillance is how a non removable battery would help surveillance. And it’s hard to see how it would. The vast majority of people would leave their removable batteries in the phone with it on anyways, since they don’t expect the surveillance. The next level of paranoid people would switch off the phone, in which case it wouldn’t matter if the battery was removable or not. The only crowd it would affect is the people who are paranoid enough that they would additionally also remove the battery. But if they are so careful, if they do have a phone with a non removable battery, then they have a simple alternate solution of simply locking up the phone in a lockbox and not taking it into the room you’re having the discussion (or taking it around with you if you’re worried about tracking).

Insisting on non removable batteries will give you an extremely minor benefit (people who are careful enough to want to remove their batteries for privacy, but not dedicated enough that given a non removable battery, they will still keep their phone around and won’t find an alternate solution).

So really, it doesn’t make sense at all.

Further, there’s a completely explainable, and frankly predictable, trajectory and goal that led to non removable batteries. The same goal that led to other changes such as the removing of the headphone jack, etc.

You have to undersize parts for a watertight fit, which can result in undesirable characteristics when deformation or dropping of a device does happen. There's also an increasing tendency to use the outer shell of a device as a heat-sink/radiator. Adhesives enable this type of design but make it darn near impossible to maintain.

I'm not going to say there isn't a mustache twirler somewhere with surveillance plans of grandeur... but unfortunately the truth may be closer to it's cheaper to buy a tube of glue than to get a tub of small, self-tapping screws.

That's just my 2 cents from having torn things apart and put them back together to varying degrees of success.

There are more realistic things like that, e.g. foil-protected credit card / access card wallets that prevent accidental contactless reading.

There's also lots of interest in tracking device communication and I really expect someone to notice a randomly appearing device where there shouldn't be one.

In the vast majority of cases it is not apple the one producing the chips so it would not really make sense to buy it from apple.

There is even the more severe case where the manifacturer disappeared and no factory with similar technology exists. How is Apple or whatever company supposed to produce that chip?

The essential of right of repair is "do not make second hand markets and resellers illegal".

20 years is a long time and I wonder how much use a 20 year old iPhone for example even has.

Sorry to see that you were, indeed, downvoted.

In the long run, it would probably be ineffective as well. Most of the big companies would probably ignore the law and/or sue the state. I'm sure there'll be first amendment issues citing compelled speech with regards to being forced to produce manuals.

1. It complains about downvotes, which is one of many reasons your post is grey.

2. The main reason people throw electronics away is not because they break, but because they become obsolete: Big [citation needed] on shorter time scales. For longer time scales it's intuitively true but irrelevant. With Moore's law being toast, most hardware upgrades are extremely incremental. I don't get any more battery life on my iPhone XS Max than I do on the 6+ it replaced, it's not any more responsive, etc. Beige boxes haven't been a thing for decades. But, people holding onto their devices longer would absolutely result in less ewaste.

3. When you tell companies they have to build things a certain way, you remove the option for something better to evolve: That depends entirely on the nature of the requirements. Nobody's talking about the government dictating the whole BOM. No innovation is being stifled by requiring, say, user-replaceable batteries, unless we're talking about innovative ways to pad the company's bottom line. Let's not lose sight of the fact that repair-hostile design absolutely benefits the company and only the company at the end of the day.

4. baring the extra engineering/documentation costs: which are already done internally, so those costs are irrelevant. Every company that does repairs has documented repair procedures for their own people already. They can put PDFs on a freaking website. No idea what you mean by "extra engineering costs".

5. forcing companies to create small quantity B2C supply chains and retail channels for consumers to purchase individual parts on obsolete models would be an absolute nightmare: That's somewhat fair, but there's no reason it needs to be any more of a retail channel than their ship/replace stuff already is. The infra is already in place, they're just shipping out parts instead of full devices. I think the word "obsolete" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.. a 2 years old phone is only "obsolete" by manufacturer fiat, because they can make more money by marketing tiny, incremental upgrades and simply refusing to support the still-useful device.

6. You'll just be cloned by an army of chinese competitors even faster: Not fast enough for this to be an actual concern. Shitty chinese clones happen with a quickness even today, yet for some reason people still spend billions on name brand devices. I do not foresee this meaningfully changing. Trademark/import law is still a thing, after all.

7. incumbent big companies may simply use this regulation as an opportunity to entrench their position in the marketplace: This is a weak meta-situational argument used by all big businesses against any and all business regulations. I do not see why this case is special.

Nobody on either side actually believes those things (regardless of how passionately they claim to). They are both fallacious appeals to get disinterested people emotionally wrapped up in the topic.

RE: safety, people getting hurt trying to repair stuff happens already and will still happen post-regulation. Right to repair will not result in more injuries.

RE: landfills, most people don't throw stuff away because it breaks. They throw things away because newer models are more powerful, faster, smaller, more efficient, or aesthetically "cool." Right to repair will not result in less landfills.

We have a part-time legislature. The other half of the year lets our politicians earn a living outside politics (as well as politick--it's an election year.)

Our Governor is powerful. If an emergency arises, I believe the Assembly and Senate can be called back into session. But that's rarely required.

You'd be surprised both how much they're expected to get done in a few months, and also how little some state legislatures actually pass. State and Federal agencies serve a huge role in the US, partially for this reason.

I'm afraid that for some time we'll continue to see old phones discarded in landfills because there will be no technical information available allowing developers to port open operating systems, drivers and apps to them.