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British right to repair law excludes smartphones and computers
- FridayoLeary 5y agohttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57665593 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57665593 This doesn't sound very exciting to me. From experience spare parts from the manufacturer cost a fortune.
- metalliqaz 5y agoEven if they are overpriced, I still want them available. If for no other reason, to ensure that battery replacement is possible. My last two phones were fine when I retired them, except for the battery. In the laptop world, I have kept some of my old devices in service for a long, long time by getting cheap battery replacements on ebay.
- hunta2097 5y agoApple solve this by making spares super expensive and only available from partners. The legislation needs to stipulate what a "component" or "part" is, i.e. not the entire motherboard.
- xroche 5y ago> Apple solve this by making spares super expensive and only available from partners. This is even more hilarious: they sell you a "spare part" which is the logic board, for nearly the price of the laptop. But they (1) do provide spare parts and (2) sell them at a ""reasonable price""
- shadilay 5y agoHaving a price even if ridiculous allows researches to write papers like "What brand has the most affordable repairs".
- black_puppydog 5y agoDear god that's a stretch of the word "researcher" if ever I've seen one. Yes, that article would take some "research" (as in, finding stuff) but nope, the person writing it wouldn't be a "researcher" for it. They'd be a journalist. At 9to5 or such probably.
- milesvp 5y agoI’m not sure it is. What verb does someone do when they collect and collate data about products at consumer reports, tom’s hardware, or even the low bar of linus tech tips? I’d say while the primary role may be journalist at most of these types of orgs, there is definitely a role for people who focus on the research side of things, and if you’re actively running experiments and benchmarks, you are definitely moving out of the realm of simple observation. I certainly would like to benefit from the data of which phone is cheapest to repair. iFixit already does the research to grade repairability of devices.
- 14 5y agoalso even if the price is really expensive, I would pay it if it meant recovering my lost data on a phone.
- Silhouette 5y agoIndeed, though effective regulations requiring phone manufacturers and app developers to stop trying to lock your data into their device or software wouldn't be a bad thing either. The ability to back up your own data on your own terms would be a good start. Some recent legal changes, such as the GDPR in Europe, have attempted to guarantee this access when services have your data. But apparently having your own device lock you in is still OK for some reason.
- undfg 5y agoThat's okay - if people care about this they will stop buying Apple products.
- oneplane 5y agoThat is part of the problem: a lot of people just don't care.
- nradov 5y agoIs that a problem? Should customers care?
- oneplane 5y agoI don't know for a fact if in isolation this is a problem or not a problem. But from the perspective of the compound problem of getting repairability on track, this is an element within that compound that is lacking the drive of customer attention.
- Silhouette 5y agoGiven the awful environmental cost of "disposable tech", everyone should care about reducing waste and extending the working life of our hardware if only for that reason. Of course it's also bad for society that we have so little effective competition in tech markets now that users think substandard products and user-hostile behaviours are normal. The race to the bottom is bad for everyone, and everyone being sold those products is being abused in the name of profit, whether or not any given individual is aware of how much it is happening to them or understands that better alternatives exist.
- undfg 5y agoThat's exactly my point. If customers don't care then who's this regulation serving?
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoJust because you don't care that the environment is suffering, and resources are being wasted, because instead of fixing things people throw them away doesn't mean that helping to mitigate those problems doesn't benefit you. Or to use a crude analogy: just because babies don't care about having their nappy (ie diaper) changed doesn't mean it doesn't help them.
- danpalmer 5y agoIn my experience with Apple parts they are roughly in line with my expectations based on a) the price of the computer, and b) not being designed for any part to be replaced independently. These aren't great factors of course, but I'm not sure the problem is expensive parts. I've usually found logic boards to be ~1/3-1/2 of the price of the machine, which considering they have the RAM/SSD soldered on, feels like ~1/3-1/2 of the value of the machine to me. Similarly, screens are often in the same sort of ballpark and I'd say that matches my expectations. If you start from "how much does a motherboard cost" or "how much does a screen cost", that's going to miss a lot of the legit costs of additional components, higher quality components, or laptop form factor costing more.
- salamandersauce 5y agoYeah, but if the only problem with your motherboard is a $3 IC that got fried and everything else is fine does it make sense to have to buy an entire new motherboard?
- smnrchrds 5y agoIn my province, landlords cannot terminate a periodic tenancy except for a small number of causes, but they are free to change the rent price to whatever they want once a year. Result: if the landlord wants you gone, they just tell you your 2k per month rent is increasing to 20k per month and voilà, gone! No user protection is effective unless it comes with some sort of price cap. This is why GPL requires the source code to be made available "for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source". Otherwise, a company could use GPL'd code in their product and say they are more than happy to give you a copy of the source code for 100 billion dollars.
- nradov 5y agoAs a practical matter some motherboards are now so tightly integrated that component level repair is no longer feasible.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoChina makes spares of EVERYTHING for pennies.
- mnouquet 5y agowhich is gonna be useless if the part require write-only firmware which you cannot extract from the original part, eg. macbook's SMC.
- tudorw 5y agohopefully the beginning of this movement not the end, good to see the need for this recognised in legislation, as someone who would like to see more progression along this route this is a meaningful event.
- hprotagonist 5y agotranslation: this "right to repair" law appears to exclude everything you'd actually want the right to repair. Rather a lot of the right to repair fight in the US comes down to ECUs and data formats and readers for things like OBD ports on vehicles, or firmware for your farm equipment, or lots of other things that certainly have computers in them.
- tuukkah 5y agoHere, a computer might be interpreted as a laptop or a desktop, not an embedded system "with a computer in them". Anyway, the list is very short and exclusive (for now?): "For now, the right to repair laws only cover: Dishwashers; Washing machines and washer-dryers; Refrigeration appliances; Televisions and other electronic displays"
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoIME washing machines, dishwashers, washer-dryers all have relatively good repairability and good parts availability already (fridges too, though I've less experience of that). You even see them being scored on repairability or repair costs. Have they addressed a problem that is largely absent? It's hard to choose to repair when a secondhand replacement is as cheap though. Replaced a plastic pipe, and a hose on my dishwasher, delivered cost ~£50; same as a newer secondhand dishwasher. But at least I've kept it out of the waste stream for a couple more years. Source: fixed all the white goods in my house several times over. I don't have anything recent though, so more recent products might be worse. There is a lot of part reuse, which is good.
- alias_neo 5y agoI live in a London new-build flat. Mine and several of my neighbours washing machines gave out at the same time, all in the same month, all roughly 3 years in. These came with the flats of course. I would repair it, but having watched a YouTube video on how it's done, the cost in tools, parts and effort (it's a full disassembly) to make the relatively simple repair I cannot justify over buying a better model of my choosing.
- oneplane 5y agoI want to be all positive here and say "maybe it is just a stopgap while they work on solving those issues in a later stage"... but I'm most likely completely wrong.
- swiley 5y agoI remember thinking that about the iPhone. I regret giving Apple the benefit of the doubt.
- oneplane 5y agoI'm partially in the same boat there... but I also see that most other brands do the same thing in perhaps a different variation. Generally most of them just shift the problem around; i.e. for Samsung devices you can sometimes have good access to OEM replacement parts, but support and lifecycle in general is so short that it doesn't really matter in the long run. Or sometimes you get both but the performance is bad. Or you get both and good performance but the price is bad. Or everything is 'just right' about the product, but then the platform is lacking and there is no buy-in from the larger community or consumer market. Sometimes it seems there is no 'total' solution, except in a few niche markets.
- emouryto 5y agoWell, smartphones must be updated to include better spyware. And newer computers are also better locked down to allow better surveillance. So, the older ones can't break down fast enough! You don't want a repairable computer so creeps install, like, a Linux distro. You want disposable TPM machines with Windows 11 Home Edition and unstoppable "telemetry".
- Someone1234 5y agoI feel like there's a large subset of people who don't understand what TPM does, so just assume the worst and hand wave about how it [somehow] causes [random bad thing]. In this case I guess TPM causes telemetry?
- Aeolun 5y agoNo, no, don’t mistake correlation with causation. They just always come together. Note: I have no idea what TPM even is.
- sascha_sl 5y agoIt's what Apple calls a "secure element", essentially a mini-HSM or multi-feature smartcard. "Put keys on it and it lets you use it with a PIN and rate limit" seems to be the main use case (they can implement FIDO2 with that too for instance). These things are very useful for authentication and have been on business laptops for this very reason forever.
- jandrese 5y agoA TPM is just a bit of memory that is "hacker proof" so you can store a private key with a guarantee that it can't leak out. You can then sign, encrypt, or decrypt using the key. They were controversial because it was originally thought they would be used to lock parts of your computer away from you, being used to do DRM and the like. At the end of the day the chips were hard to use, slow, and flaky enough that it didn't really pan out. A lot of the braindamage came from a secondary feature where you could theoretically create "secure enclaves" where the entire execution chain down to the bare metal was signed to prevent viruses and rootkits from executing. In theory this is neat, but in practice it's basically impossible on PC hardware and caused a lot of problems. This functionality is the reason BitLocker had the reputation for randomly locking you out of your machine, even though it doesn't use the feature directly. The configuration registers were maybe a mistake.
- ivoras 5y agoIt's all fun and games until your fridge gets reclasiffied as a computer.
- mycall 5y agoMore like computer with heavy duty cooling system.
- Hamuko 5y agoAren't there already fridges that run Android?
- RussianCow 5y agoI’ve seen at least one fridge running Windows 10.
- jacquesm 5y agoYes: https://gadgets.ndtv.com/others/news/samsungs-t9000-smart-refrigerator-runs-on-android-includes-apps-like-evernote-and-epicurious-320610 https://gadgets.ndtv.com/others/news/samsungs-t9000-smart-re...
- jaywalk 5y agoSamsung fridges haven't run Android in a while though. They run Samsung's own OS called Tizen.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat's 'cool' (pun intended), they'll be hacked while still in the cardboard shipping container. Tizen is about as leaky as it gets. Anyway, GP asked if there were fridges running Android, yes there are. Even if they are not being sold by Samsung in the present, it is a safe assumption that not all of these have died in the line of duty. "Aren't there already fridges that run Android?" Can be confidently answered in the affirmative.
- jrkfkgmfmr 5y agoI don't want a right to repair if that means a bulky phone/laptop with terrible water sealing. Typing from a 4 year old non-repairable phone (Samsung S8). If you want a repairable phone, good, but don't take away my choice of slim water resistant phones. Get off my lawn HNers keep on complaining about big screens, non removable batteries, and lack of headphone ports, but nobody cares because people actually want those things.
- aand 5y agoHard to repair =/= impossible to repair. Also I've had my S8 fixed twice (motherboard change).
- alias_neo 5y agoWhat I want, is to be able to find a repair shop locally that would repair the glass on my Oneplus 8 Pro that I smashed in the first week of owning it. It fell all of 4 inches from the arm of the sofa onto the side table, and smashed because of shitty design wrapping the glass round the edge which was totally unnecessary. Oneplus will repair it for £200 for the part PLUS tax PLUS shipping PLUS labour and I'll have to ship it out of the country somewhere and wait a number of weeks they won't disclose to have my phone back. Heck, they won't even tell me how much the labour cost _might_ be. If they'd sell the parts and allow one of the many phone repair shops in the UK to fix it, I could have it within an hour or two for little more than the cost of the screen itself. This isn't about making your devices shitty, fat and not-waterproof, it's about enabling people with the wills and the skills to buy the tools and the parts to do the job. Heck, under a good right-to-repair, I could buy the screen myself and fit it if I wanted. So many people miss the point of right-to-repair. It's not about making things less this or less that, it's simply about giving you the RIGHT to buy the parts you need and the tools you need to repair the thing you own.
- Silhouette 5y agoIf you're in the UK and an expensive phone really did break just from falling 4 inches after one week, I'd be tempted to try returning it to the seller. There must be a credible argument that it's unfit for purpose if it can be broken that easily due to a design flaw. It's not as if you carelessly dropped it from a pocket at waist height onto a concrete floor or something.
- cunidev 5y agoNot even mentioning the hardware bits, I have been collaborating with postmarketOS for a while now, and believe that the main thing we need to make those devices longer-lasting would be an unlockable bootloader by law. This sounds so logical (why cannot I run, by voiding the warranty, any code I want on my machine, whatever it is?), yet apparently so hard to make openly illegal, since the problem is barely acknowledged in general.
- bluGill 5y agoYou can't do that because someone (probably not you) will then unlock the phone and [insert something evil here - perhaps involving the radio]
- jolmg 5y agoAre you missing an /s or are you saying that it shouldn't be done because it would enable e.g. use of radio hardware that goes against radio regulation? If you're really expressing concern, what do you think of e.g. modem modules for regular computers or SDR hardware?
- bluGill 5y ago> Are you missing an /s or are you saying that it shouldn't be done because it would enable e.g. use of radio hardware that goes against radio regulation Great question. I'm intentionally not answering it because I am not sure what I think. There are valid points on both sides. In part what I think depends on how evil evil people get.
- baybal2 5y agoCan anyone research by whom, and in what reading was that exception added?
- Proven 5y agoIt should exclude everything, because the legislation is nonsense. a) People have always had the right to do whatever they want with their property b) They didn't have the right to perform unsupported repairs and use unauthorized parts if they wanted to keep the warranty. This was always known, or could be known, to all buyers at the time of purchase. Now you get the fake "right" to screw up a product and then send it for free servicing or parts replacement because it's under warranty. What happens next? Of course, the manufacturer will raise price or exit the hostile, centrally planned "market". Where do political parties find all those idiots to vote for such destructive legislative acts?
- swiley 5y agoCan have people turning off the panopticon/propaganda screens.
- roody15 5y agoBuilding a surveillance state. Want direct data devices locked down and proprietary (TPM and apple T2). Want devices directly tied to the user. Want to prevent “hacks” that detect snooping or other low level background “proprietary” services that may be running. My two cents. We are rushing to emulate china.
- swayvil 5y agoOh yes. The oligarchs over here look at China and think, "That's a pretty good system".
- mnouquet 5y agoIt is actually a pretty good system for the CCP "politburo".
- thescriptkiddie 5y agoUpwards of 90% of the population of China are CCP members.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago"Mr Xi oversees the party and its 92 million members — that might sound huge compared to Australia’s population of 25 million, but it is less than 7 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion people." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-01/ccp-100-years-chinese-communist-party/100222794 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-01/ccp-100-years-chinese... Honestly, that article has some shit "play with your emotions!" bits in it too but there are facts to be gleaned.
- justshowpost 5y agoIts actually much less innocent than it looks like. Add an additional 100-150M for Communist Youth, a subsidiary organization and 150-250M for Mao Judend, a subsidiary for kids. Its called totalitarianism for a reason.
- vinsci 5y agoThe right to modify needs to be protected, just as the right to repair anything without exclusion.
- chadlavi 5y agothank goodness those never need repairing and aren't essential, heavily-used pieces of hardware /s This is as toothless/pointless as passing a law that says you have the right to a discrimination-free workplace, except that racism and sexism are ok. These exclusions make the law useless for most people.
- varispeed 5y agoWhy journalists don't call it as fraud? They spent money on drafting this legislation and this is not fit for purpose. But by the looks of it, big money must be behind it so it ticks the box, but does not actually change anything.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> Why journalists don't call it as fraud? Because it's not fraud. Fraud requires obtaining a valuable security by deception. That's not what's going on here. So it's not fraud.
- varispeed 5y agoFraud - wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain. It's very much what's going on here.
- chrisseaton 5y agoThere's absolutely no way you could convince a judge that this was fraud. You can't just pick some legal term that sounds familiar and say that's what's going on. These terms have very specific meanings based on extensive case law.
- cmendel 5y agoRight, so not to put words in varispeed mouth. But their claim is that Right-to-repair that doesn't give you the Right to repair what they want the right to repair is deliberately deceptive and, thus, fraudulent. The damages would be that the product that they wish to repair are irreparable.
- chrisseaton 5y agoI don't know what to tell you apart from that's not what 'fraud' is in practice. Things being not what you want and someone having spent money does not equal fraud. You can't just pick a legal term and interpret it as literal English without any knowledge of the actual precedent around it. I don't know if you think the entire legislation is the words 'right to repair'? It obviously isn't - it's far more nuanced than that.
- willvarfar 5y agoDoes it covet “smart” appliances too? Computers are everywhere and in everything, often whether they seem to be needed or not.
- zaysan01 5y agoI just want to be able to put a new battery in things like my phone, and sonicare.
- deregulateMed 5y agoThe article mentions Apple likely did behind the scenes lobbying, but is there any proof of this?
- yarcob 5y agoIt's a pity that this law has apparently been so watered down, and basically just cements the status quo. Spares for dishwashers and washing machines are already available, and 10 years doesn't really sound that long for big appliances. I don't see whether the law addresses the problem of overpriced spares. For example, I don't see why an original Miele heating element for a washing machine costs 100€, while an unbranded compatible part costs less than 20€.
- aeorgnoieang 5y agoI can understand (in a very vague, general sense) why spare parts might be relatively expensive – it's probably fairly expensive to make, store, and maintain a distribution network for the parts, i.e. the price isn't just for the price of the part, but the entire system (e.g. customer support) to send it to a customer in response to their request. I'm _sure_ there's also an 'original manufacturer' premium too, and maybe that _is_ in fact most of the difference compared to 'unbranded compatible' parts.
- magneticism 5y agoAuto manufacturers manage this quite well. Some more than others, but if you bought something like a Honda or a Toyota back in the '80s or '90s, you can still find affordable OEM parts for it today, and the manufacturer will still service things like electronics clusters. Why not expect something similar from a much simpler and less dangerous $1-10k appliance?
- thatthatis 5y agoSpare parts are expensive because they’re priced to willingness to pay which is usually “if it’s significantly less to repair than replace, repair”. $100 part + $200 labor is cheaper than a new $500 machine. Repair let’s tend to have much much higher margin for manufacturers than the original machine.
- at-fates-hands 5y ago"From Thursday, manufacturers will have to make spares available to consumers, with the aim of extending the lifespan of products by up to 10 years, it said" Whoah. Can you imagine trying to make sure your iphone 4 still worked today? I'm all for right to repair, but that seems a bit excessive, no?
- aembleton 5y ago> I'm all for right to repair, but that seems a bit excessive, no? No. We need to be able to repair devices so that they continue to function for longer without throwing them away.
- thysultan 5y agoOh you mean that, yeah that's not a computer, that's an electronic heat generator.
- Sophistifunk 5y agoThis is a brilliant move to sever the powerful farmers from the impotent programmers and electronics repair shops on this issue. Expect to see this repeated around the world.
- cutler 5y agoTokenism at it's finest. Just when you thought it couldn't get worse after Brexit and the election of Boris Johnson as prime minister. I don't know what the Conservatives managed to slip into people's breakfast cereal but they're riding high in the polls despite food shortages due to exiled lorry drivers and the exposure of deception by the Minister Of Health during the COVID crisis.
- JetAlone 5y agoI hope this one's a slippery slope and they do extend it to cover all devices or something.
- adminscoffee 5y agokinda silly considering those two are some of the most polluting
- cannabis_sam 5y agoThe current British government is a pathetic joke, why would anyone expect them to handle even the simplest things competently, let alone something complex? Unless your problems can be solved by shouting “Vaccines! Vaccines” Boris Johnson literally has nothing to offer you (unless you’re a tory donor or his mistress of course).