TL;DR beware "MOU"s and parts pairing. > “Memorandums of Understanding,” Not Laws > There is a long history of MOUs in the repair world, and, generally speaki

TL;DR beware "MOU"s and parts pairing. > “Memorandums of Understanding,” Not Laws > There is a long history of MOUs in the repair world, and, generally speaking, they all seem to eventually favor big corporations. > At the same time, as repair advocate Louis Rossmann, tech rights expert Cory Doctorow, organizations like iFixit, and Proctor have pointed out, Apple has found a new way to restrict repair, by “pairing” parts with specific phones. This means, for example, that an iPhone screen from one phone will not work if you put it on another phone, unless Apple recalibrates that part. This is a software, not a hardware limitation. I’ve written about this a handful of times, but it is essentially DRM for repair parts. > It is possible that Apple and other big manufacturers believe that by supporting right to repair laws as currently written, their practices won’t actually be affected that much because they can just move toward a system where parts are artificially paired with individual devices (it is not clear, exactly, how the California law will deal with the parts pairing issue).