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I 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

I 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 ago
Hard to repair =/= impossible to repair. Also I've had my S8 fixed twice (motherboard change).
alias_neo 5y ago
What 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 ago
  If 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.
  - alias_neo 5y ago
    I tried, it was from Amazon and neither they nor Oneplus cared how or why it happened, I tried arguing that it was ridiculous that it happened but again, deaf ears, so I just let it be.
    - tremon 5y ago
      Next time, perhaps try a reputable seller?
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      For that kind of money, you might want to get a bit of advice on the right words to use before giving up. The thing about "Your statutory rights are not affected" is that your statutory rights are not affected, whether they care or not. Even if you decide not to fight this one, please consider informing one of the major consumer rights organisations so if there is a design flaw and others are experiencing the same problem the manufacturer can't bury their head in the sand and try to avoid responsibility. Other big tech firms have allegedly done this in the past and bad publicity is often what brings them round in the end.
      - alias_neo 5y ago
        Although I understand, and I have done so in the past and won, after speaking with both OnePlus and Amazon I came away feeling that it was my fault. I had a case on the phone which I removed just an hour earlier because it was dirty underneath, and wit lockdown and working from home I wasn't leaving the house, I saw no need to put it back on, felt like Karma. Yes I believe the design contributed significantly to it breaking, it just wasn't the time for me to add more stress trying to fight it. I'm a strange way, it was a good thing, I'm a perfectionist, and having a broken screen put me off wanting to use my phone, that's a good thing in a weird way.
        Silhouette 5y ago
        That's totally fair enough. You have to pick the fights you think are worth taking, and if it's just going to cause you stress then maybe this one simply isn't. I hope you manage to sort your phone out one way or another.
ajkdhcb2 5y ago
It seems to me that it is a purely propaganda that these things are mutually exclusive. Like how all smartphone manufacturers had phones that were fine with removable batteries, but then suddenly that was gone from literally every brand in the world because it is so powerful for planned obsolescence
- jrkfkgmfmr 5y ago
  Funny how I was replacing my old phones with replaceable batteries every year, yet I am replacing the newer ones with non replaceable ones only every 3, 4 years. Hint: it's not the non-replacable battery why people upgrade phones.
  - ajkdhcb2 5y ago
    Opposite for me, I still hold onto my old phone with replaceable battery for when my new phone dies and i cant swap in a fresh one. Still works after 7+ years
- crazygringo 5y ago
  People want thin phones. A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise. And while you can argue about whether thin laptops are necessary, for people who carry their phones in their pants pockets, an extra couple millimeters gone is genuinely a meaningful difference. There's no propaganda there.
  - ajkdhcb2 5y ago
    >A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise. I doubted this so I looked up dimensions. Samsung Galaxy S6 from 2015 is 6.8mm thick, with removable battery. S10 from 2019 is 7.8mm thick. So your theory doesn't seem to match reality.
    - crazygringo 5y ago
      Wikipedia says the S6 did not have a user-replaceable battery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S6#Battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S6#Battery In any case, it's apples-to-oranges and doesn't mean anything. Cell phones can have functionality added that takes up the difference in thickness -- e.g. keeping the phone the same thickness instead of it getting even thicker. But main point is, they're thinner basically by definition. There are necessarily more layers of materials.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
we can have both. iPhones are quite easy to repair everything, but iPads aren't. They're glued together, and they really don't need to be. Lot of design decisions that have nothing to do with making the product better but just making it hard to repair.
theHIDninja 5y ago
You will still have a removable backplate on your hermetically sealed phone. All Right to Repair means is that companies will be unable to enter part exclusivity deals with manufacturers.

aand 5y ago

Hard to repair =/= impossible to repair. Also I've had my S8 fixed twice (motherboard change).

alias_neo 5y ago

What 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 ago
If 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.
- alias_neo 5y ago
  I tried, it was from Amazon and neither they nor Oneplus cared how or why it happened, I tried arguing that it was ridiculous that it happened but again, deaf ears, so I just let it be.
  - tremon 5y ago
    Next time, perhaps try a reputable seller?
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    For that kind of money, you might want to get a bit of advice on the right words to use before giving up. The thing about "Your statutory rights are not affected" is that your statutory rights are not affected, whether they care or not. Even if you decide not to fight this one, please consider informing one of the major consumer rights organisations so if there is a design flaw and others are experiencing the same problem the manufacturer can't bury their head in the sand and try to avoid responsibility. Other big tech firms have allegedly done this in the past and bad publicity is often what brings them round in the end.
    - alias_neo 5y ago
      Although I understand, and I have done so in the past and won, after speaking with both OnePlus and Amazon I came away feeling that it was my fault. I had a case on the phone which I removed just an hour earlier because it was dirty underneath, and wit lockdown and working from home I wasn't leaving the house, I saw no need to put it back on, felt like Karma. Yes I believe the design contributed significantly to it breaking, it just wasn't the time for me to add more stress trying to fight it. I'm a strange way, it was a good thing, I'm a perfectionist, and having a broken screen put me off wanting to use my phone, that's a good thing in a weird way.
      - Silhouette 5y ago
        That's totally fair enough. You have to pick the fights you think are worth taking, and if it's just going to cause you stress then maybe this one simply isn't. I hope you manage to sort your phone out one way or another.

ajkdhcb2 5y ago

It seems to me that it is a purely propaganda that these things are mutually exclusive. Like how all smartphone manufacturers had phones that were fine with removable batteries, but then suddenly that was gone from literally every brand in the world because it is so powerful for planned obsolescence

jrkfkgmfmr 5y ago
Funny how I was replacing my old phones with replaceable batteries every year, yet I am replacing the newer ones with non replaceable ones only every 3, 4 years. Hint: it's not the non-replacable battery why people upgrade phones.
- ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  Opposite for me, I still hold onto my old phone with replaceable battery for when my new phone dies and i cant swap in a fresh one. Still works after 7+ years
crazygringo 5y ago
People want thin phones. A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise. And while you can argue about whether thin laptops are necessary, for people who carry their phones in their pants pockets, an extra couple millimeters gone is genuinely a meaningful difference. There's no propaganda there.
- ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  >A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise. I doubted this so I looked up dimensions. Samsung Galaxy S6 from 2015 is 6.8mm thick, with removable battery. S10 from 2019 is 7.8mm thick. So your theory doesn't seem to match reality.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    Wikipedia says the S6 did not have a user-replaceable battery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S6#Battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S6#Battery In any case, it's apples-to-oranges and doesn't mean anything. Cell phones can have functionality added that takes up the difference in thickness -- e.g. keeping the phone the same thickness instead of it getting even thicker. But main point is, they're thinner basically by definition. There are necessarily more layers of materials.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

we can have both. iPhones are quite easy to repair everything, but iPads aren't. They're glued together, and they really don't need to be. Lot of design decisions that have nothing to do with making the product better but just making it hard to repair.

theHIDninja 5y ago

You will still have a removable backplate on your hermetically sealed phone. All Right to Repair means is that companies will be unable to enter part exclusivity deals with manufacturers.