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As a hardware engineer: Right to repair is a nice idea and it's heart is in the right place, but won't ever work for something like a consumer phone. Further,

As a hardware engineer: Right to repair is a nice idea and it's heart is in the right place, but won't ever work for something like a consumer phone. Further, IMO, it's really just a band aid for the US's extremely poor consumer protections which manufacturers are hell bent on exporting to the rest of the world. The most effective way to approach this problem is known and proven: mandate long (I think 5 years is fair) 100% repair/replace/refund waranty periods with no cost to the consumer (including shipping). Then the manufacturer themselves will figure out the details on how to meet that. And don't worry they are perfectly capable of it because it's what they do RIGHT NOW. The hardware will become more reliable or it'll be repairable or they'll just refund you or a combination of those. Batteries just need a requirement such as minimum 80% of capacity at 5 years. Overnight they'll become replacable/over-provisioned/better chemistry/better thermals or again a combination of those. I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer. It's a nebulous thing nobody understands or cares about and can be just paid lip service to or effectively ignored. But waranty IS something bean-counters and managers understand. It's: "this thing must work for X time or it costs us money" with the added threat of "lawyers might get involved". It's not perfect, but still far more effective and practical than "right to repair".

rustcleaner 2y ago
Maybe adding a fat tax (say, 50% sales tax of endpoint product sale price) on fundamentally unrepairable products. This is a spectrum: if a company could glue a phone and get a thin sleek sexy glass brick OR it could use some small screws and it won't be quite as slender/sexy... Going with the former on average with every a/b choice in design should trigger the tax and effectively kill your product vs more compliant competitors. I've been wanting to see this applied to anything with a universal machine, where it was made to prevent the owner from modifying software/firmware/microcode. As a customer, I want Stallmanism enshrined in law dealing with both computing and product design.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sambazi 2y ago
couldn't agree more. 'right to repair' alone will only allow for more externalities when shipping a product. mandating a better product will bring repairability with it, because only then will it also be in the manufacturers interest.
kurito 2y ago
> Right to repair is a nice idea and it's heart is in the right place, but won't ever work for something like a consumer phone. Why not? Every major phone manufacturer uses numerous techniques to make devices unrepairable and yet people still find ways to fix them. I'm not a hardware engineer, but I have fixed multiple devices, and I have no special skills or equipment besides standard ifixit toolkits. The only hindrances are introduced by manufacturers themselves. Replacing or refunding devices doesn't reduce e-waste, on the contrary. I can't get behind what you're saying but I am curious to hear your take. Why do you think right to repair "won't ever work"?
- hnaccount_rng 2y ago
  Because you generate, at best, an adversarial situation. The self-repair users are in it mostly for being cheap (or thinking it’s cheaper) and are (largely) unable to do a better-than-trained-technician job of a (probably) complicated job. Both are an annoyance to the producer. And not one where they risk a lot for (this only affects a minority of purchases) On the other hand, mandating long warranty times puts the Producer vs the state. Which is a much harder situation to decide “I’ll just ignore that”. And if you say; that right to repair is also a state decision… it’s only kinda. Because what right-to-repair means (or is thought to mean) differs _widely_. But the nice thing about the warranty thing would be that it would create a large incentive to make it cheaper to repair things. Which probably ends up with the same situation (ie experts, or self-perceived experts, being able to help themselves)
  - kurito 2y ago
    > unable to do a better-than-trained-technician job of a (probably) complicated job Isn't this because manufacturers are actively hindering repair shops? It's both the result and the cause of the manufacturers' strategy. No schematics, devices built without taking repairability in mind and very expensive parts or parts that come with caveats. Making longer warranties is always welcome but it won't help as much, because the vast majority of repairs aren't covered under warranty. I'm guessing that most repairs are due to user error than manufacturing defects thus not covered under warranty. > Because you generate, at best, an adversarial situation. This shouldn't be the case. Reducing e-waste and thus doing everything possible for sustainability should be the priority here. I've found myself many times in a situation where a perfectly working device was damaged, or just stopped receiving software updates and had to be decommissioned because of security concerns, and this is not only limited to phones.
pera 2y ago
> won't ever work for something like a consumer phone Fairphone makes great repairable phones - I own one and couldn't be happier.
- thunfischtoast 2y ago
  Reinforcing this. Yes, it is slightly bulkier than say a Pixel, but for that you get a phone where everything is screwed using standard parts, nothing is glued and the battery can be swapped without any tools. So building a repairable phone is perfectly possible. Yes, it has downsides, but if as a society we really want to go towards less waste, this is the way to go.
- negative_zero 2y ago
  Fairphone is a great product and I have a lot of respect for them trying to do what they're doing. But the sad brutal reality is that it's a very niche in the grand scheme of things and won't change things. I equate it a bit to "The year of the Linux Desktop" happening making everything better. We have to be honest with ourselves about this, recognise how the deck is stacked against us and respond accordingly.
  - pera 2y ago
    Linux won though :) "the year of the Linux Desktop" is a joke that started over two decades ago to dismiss Linux and OSS as a delusion of a few nerds but now we have Android devices everywhere, every server on earth using it, supercomputers/HPC clusters, game consoles, and even on desktop it keeps growing. Those who were in the FLOSS community back in the late 90s and early 00s probably remember how most people literally laughed at you and would call you crazy just for believing that things could be different. The idea of a phone that can have its battery easily replaced is several orders of magnitude less crazy in my opinion.
- seec 2y ago
  The problem with Fairphone is that the price just isn't right. I get that they don't have enough volume but they should find a way to make it viable at a competitive price otherwise it is useless. Who cares that it is easier to repair if you can buy 2 similar phones for the same price? The issue with other phone manufacturers is not that they are inherently hard to repair, even if some phones could use some improvements at the design stage. The issue is that even if you want to repair and have the knowledge/skills to do so, it will be very hard to source correct parts at a worthwhile price. The big brands are knowingly killing repairability by preventing 3rd party parts in the name of "Intellectual property", parts pairing/locking (with serials/chips) and finally not offering parts at a reasonable price even when they are forced to. The Apple repair program is a farce precisely because of that, even if you are willing to do the work, it will cost you just as much as it would in an Apple Store just because they sell the parts at a ridiculous price while making it so that you can't get a replacement elsewhere because the phone will not work or have reduced functionality if you don't get a part from them. It is disgusting predatory anti-competitive behavior and buying Fairphones won't solve much of the problem because peoples will still buy iPhone for obvious secondary reasons.
ossobuco 2y ago
I like less and less this system where we can never aim directly for our goal (reparability in this case), but we must instead trigger some side-effect through complex legislation in order to push our corporate overlords to do what we wanted in the first place, through their greed.
- sushibowl 2y ago
  That system is just called capitalism, no? The whole point is to employ greed as a (powerful) motivator to achieve desired outcomes.
  - ossobuco 2y ago
    I don't see how that's going to work when greed gives a motivation to do the exact opposite of what we want. Mind, the fact that we have to push for repairability is an issue caused by greed in the first place, as logic would dictate that a good product is designed with durability in mind. Why do you think that the factor that caused the issue is going to help us solve it?
- austhrow743 2y ago
  I would think for most people the goal is some combination of spending less money on gadgets and less environmental impact from gadgets, with repairability just being a means to that end. In which case I would think the commenters proposed suggestion is more direct not less.
  - burnerthrow008 2y ago
    > with repairability just being a means to that end. You know those "prepper" types that use "simple technology" so they can be sure they can survive the nuclear apocalypse? They eschew any and all electronics, then build everything using modern high pressure hydraulic systems with very tight machine tolerances and hoses made from materials that cannot be manufactured without an entire modern industrial supply chain? Their whole rig ends up being not only very inefficient but also does nothing to make the apocalypse more survivable. In theory building everything with hydraulics is just a means to end of surviving the apocalypse, but deep down, you know they just liked playing with hydraulics (who doesn't--hydraulic machines are cool!) and backed their way into the justification. The right-to-repairers remind me of those people. They got this idea in their head that repairable electronics equals some combination of eco-cred, lower-cost and fuck-the-man. You can't really reason with them because it's a religious belief. They "just know" that repairable electronics result in cheaper, less e-waste products, and no amount of evidence will ever convince them otherwise. Their goal is not cheaper, more environmentally-friendly electronics. That's merely the justification. The actual goal is cosplaying electronics repair technician.
Timshel 2y ago
Or not we just need more Fairphones and less Samsung.
hyperbovine 2y ago
> The most effective way to approach this problem is known and proven: mandate long (I think 5 years is fair) 100% repair/replace/refund waranty periods with no cost to the consumer (including shipping). FWIW, this is basically AppleCare+, but of course you pay a small monthly fee for it. Phone breaks, you take it in, they fix it within a day or two no questions asked. It would be great if we lived in the world you're describing, but in the absence of that, I'm content with a low-end iPhone + $3.99 a month insurance.
its-summertime 2y ago
Why not both?
gibsonpil 2y ago
> I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer. What kinds of hardware do you engineer exactly? Tons of companies have repair technicians on staff. I'm sure every datacenter in the world has individuals frequently swapping faulty parts out of servers, and those servers are often designed to keep that kind of maintenance from being a chore. It's one thing if you're talking about board level repair, but part swapping is something that end users do by themselves all the time. I've certainly swapped phone batteries before. I've helped friends replace their cracked screens. In fairness however, for products that are being engineered for portability first there is certainly a case to be made for keeping things compact at the expense of reparability. That certainly doesn't explain away the behavior of companies that deliberately hinder repairs by blocking replacement parts, or making replacement parts impossible to obtain. That NEEDS to be illegal, and that is a big part of what right to repair is about.
justinclift 2y ago
> I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer. Yeah, that sounds like the real problem from the engineering side of things. If the business types did decide it was a priority, and told you to figure it out, I'm pretty sure you would. :)
drdaeman 2y ago
Mass market engineering (of any kind) always steers towards producing cheapest products possible as long they're still tolerably functional. In other words, the cheapest crapjob of a bugfest wins as long as its happy path still works well enough that consumers still consume, keeping the money flowing. There are no sustainable mass (large and non-specialized) markets for high-quality high-complexity products, they consistently spawn then get killed by competition from all the cheap junk. How's the proposed 5 years 100% repair/replace/refund warranty is going to fix this core problem, rather than just generate more e-waste that's meant to get even more frequently replaced (as mandated by law, where now you're just told to fuck off) as it fails? Sure, some most glaring issues are probably going to get fixed, but the overall principle suggests that it's more likely cheap junk will get even more cheaper - cheaper to replace - than reliable, with more customer-hostile junk attached (ads to cover the costs, killing interop to sell licenses, etc), continuing the enshittification. I strongly suspect that it'll primarily affect the money flows, not the product qualities.
hot_gril 2y ago
Also I feel like repairing is often not the most efficient way to correct a problem with someone's phone. The "right to repair" movement was focused on one of the least inherently repairable things people own.
mgraczyk 2y ago
I would rather have a phone that lasts 1 year though, I don't want to pay extra for one that lasts 5 years. Why should it be illegal to build phones for people like me who upgrade more frequently than every 5 years (and most Americans, median is 2.5 years)?
chriscjcj 2y ago
Why five years? I have plenty of consumer electronics including phones, tablets, laptops, and computers that keep on trucking well past five years. Why should anything be turned into junk until it's absolutely necessary? The point is, I OWN the device. It's mine. If I can find someone with the expertise to keep it running past its intended life, that should be looked at favorably. But Apple, Samsung, and many other companies are actively preventing feasible repairs based on unreasonable and arbitrary cooked-up "company policies." Attaching serial numbers to parts and making them inoperable until they're blessed by the manufacturer is a racket and everyone knows it. If I can manage to keep my iPad working as a photo frame for another 40 years, how does that hurt anyone?
- negative_zero 2y ago
  > Why five years? I have plenty of consumer electronics including phones, tablets, laptops, and computers that keep on trucking well past five years. Why should anything be turned into junk until it's absolutely necessary? I picked five years half arbitrarily and half what I think is fair. Perhaps what most people think is fair is a lower or higher number. > The point is, I OWN the device. It's mine. If I can find someone with the expertise to keep it running past its intended life, that should be looked at favorably. Why as a company owner should I have to support the chance of you wanting to repair your device in 10 years? I have another big post in two parts where I try to illustrate that it's just not practical technologically and legally => it's why I proposed good long warranties. You just cannot give these companies an inch. Right-for-repair legislation will just be messy and give them too many inches to weasel out of it. > But Apple, Samsung, and many other companies are actively preventing feasible repairs based on unreasonable and arbitrary cooked-up "company policies." Attaching serial numbers to parts and making them inoperable until they're blessed by the manufacturer is a racket and everyone knows it. This will be harsh, and probably unpopular on HN, but in ALMOST all cases these steps are not put in to prevent repairability. Nobody cares about repairability. This is not some romantic fight of the big evil company screwing the little guy out of repairability. Repairability doesn't register on the radar. They don't care. These measures are taken to protect the supply chain against counterfeit parts and counterfeit products because they have a brand to protect. It's as simple as that. > If I can manage to keep my iPad working as a photo frame for another 40 years, how does that hurt anyone? It doesn't. I'm not sure why you think I implied it does sorry. Edits: Spelling and formatting

rustcleaner 2y ago

Maybe adding a fat tax (say, 50% sales tax of endpoint product sale price) on fundamentally unrepairable products. This is a spectrum: if a company could glue a phone and get a thin sleek sexy glass brick OR it could use some small screws and it won't be quite as slender/sexy... Going with the former on average with every a/b choice in design should trigger the tax and effectively kill your product vs more compliant competitors. I've been wanting to see this applied to anything with a universal machine, where it was made to prevent the owner from modifying software/firmware/microcode. As a customer, I want Stallmanism enshrined in law dealing with both computing and product design.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

sambazi 2y ago

couldn't agree more. 'right to repair' alone will only allow for more externalities when shipping a product. mandating a better product will bring repairability with it, because only then will it also be in the manufacturers interest.

kurito 2y ago

> Right to repair is a nice idea and it's heart is in the right place, but won't ever work for something like a consumer phone. Why not? Every major phone manufacturer uses numerous techniques to make devices unrepairable and yet people still find ways to fix them. I'm not a hardware engineer, but I have fixed multiple devices, and I have no special skills or equipment besides standard ifixit toolkits. The only hindrances are introduced by manufacturers themselves. Replacing or refunding devices doesn't reduce e-waste, on the contrary. I can't get behind what you're saying but I am curious to hear your take. Why do you think right to repair "won't ever work"?

hnaccount_rng 2y ago
Because you generate, at best, an adversarial situation. The self-repair users are in it mostly for being cheap (or thinking it’s cheaper) and are (largely) unable to do a better-than-trained-technician job of a (probably) complicated job. Both are an annoyance to the producer. And not one where they risk a lot for (this only affects a minority of purchases) On the other hand, mandating long warranty times puts the Producer vs the state. Which is a much harder situation to decide “I’ll just ignore that”. And if you say; that right to repair is also a state decision… it’s only kinda. Because what right-to-repair means (or is thought to mean) differs _widely_. But the nice thing about the warranty thing would be that it would create a large incentive to make it cheaper to repair things. Which probably ends up with the same situation (ie experts, or self-perceived experts, being able to help themselves)
- kurito 2y ago
  > unable to do a better-than-trained-technician job of a (probably) complicated job Isn't this because manufacturers are actively hindering repair shops? It's both the result and the cause of the manufacturers' strategy. No schematics, devices built without taking repairability in mind and very expensive parts or parts that come with caveats. Making longer warranties is always welcome but it won't help as much, because the vast majority of repairs aren't covered under warranty. I'm guessing that most repairs are due to user error than manufacturing defects thus not covered under warranty. > Because you generate, at best, an adversarial situation. This shouldn't be the case. Reducing e-waste and thus doing everything possible for sustainability should be the priority here. I've found myself many times in a situation where a perfectly working device was damaged, or just stopped receiving software updates and had to be decommissioned because of security concerns, and this is not only limited to phones.

pera 2y ago

> won't ever work for something like a consumer phone Fairphone makes great repairable phones - I own one and couldn't be happier.

thunfischtoast 2y ago
Reinforcing this. Yes, it is slightly bulkier than say a Pixel, but for that you get a phone where everything is screwed using standard parts, nothing is glued and the battery can be swapped without any tools. So building a repairable phone is perfectly possible. Yes, it has downsides, but if as a society we really want to go towards less waste, this is the way to go.
negative_zero 2y ago
Fairphone is a great product and I have a lot of respect for them trying to do what they're doing. But the sad brutal reality is that it's a very niche in the grand scheme of things and won't change things. I equate it a bit to "The year of the Linux Desktop" happening making everything better. We have to be honest with ourselves about this, recognise how the deck is stacked against us and respond accordingly.
- pera 2y ago
  Linux won though :) "the year of the Linux Desktop" is a joke that started over two decades ago to dismiss Linux and OSS as a delusion of a few nerds but now we have Android devices everywhere, every server on earth using it, supercomputers/HPC clusters, game consoles, and even on desktop it keeps growing. Those who were in the FLOSS community back in the late 90s and early 00s probably remember how most people literally laughed at you and would call you crazy just for believing that things could be different. The idea of a phone that can have its battery easily replaced is several orders of magnitude less crazy in my opinion.
seec 2y ago
The problem with Fairphone is that the price just isn't right. I get that they don't have enough volume but they should find a way to make it viable at a competitive price otherwise it is useless. Who cares that it is easier to repair if you can buy 2 similar phones for the same price? The issue with other phone manufacturers is not that they are inherently hard to repair, even if some phones could use some improvements at the design stage. The issue is that even if you want to repair and have the knowledge/skills to do so, it will be very hard to source correct parts at a worthwhile price. The big brands are knowingly killing repairability by preventing 3rd party parts in the name of "Intellectual property", parts pairing/locking (with serials/chips) and finally not offering parts at a reasonable price even when they are forced to. The Apple repair program is a farce precisely because of that, even if you are willing to do the work, it will cost you just as much as it would in an Apple Store just because they sell the parts at a ridiculous price while making it so that you can't get a replacement elsewhere because the phone will not work or have reduced functionality if you don't get a part from them. It is disgusting predatory anti-competitive behavior and buying Fairphones won't solve much of the problem because peoples will still buy iPhone for obvious secondary reasons.

ossobuco 2y ago

I like less and less this system where we can never aim directly for our goal (reparability in this case), but we must instead trigger some side-effect through complex legislation in order to push our corporate overlords to do what we wanted in the first place, through their greed.

sushibowl 2y ago
That system is just called capitalism, no? The whole point is to employ greed as a (powerful) motivator to achieve desired outcomes.
- ossobuco 2y ago
  I don't see how that's going to work when greed gives a motivation to do the exact opposite of what we want. Mind, the fact that we have to push for repairability is an issue caused by greed in the first place, as logic would dictate that a good product is designed with durability in mind. Why do you think that the factor that caused the issue is going to help us solve it?
austhrow743 2y ago
I would think for most people the goal is some combination of spending less money on gadgets and less environmental impact from gadgets, with repairability just being a means to that end. In which case I would think the commenters proposed suggestion is more direct not less.
- burnerthrow008 2y ago
  > with repairability just being a means to that end. You know those "prepper" types that use "simple technology" so they can be sure they can survive the nuclear apocalypse? They eschew any and all electronics, then build everything using modern high pressure hydraulic systems with very tight machine tolerances and hoses made from materials that cannot be manufactured without an entire modern industrial supply chain? Their whole rig ends up being not only very inefficient but also does nothing to make the apocalypse more survivable. In theory building everything with hydraulics is just a means to end of surviving the apocalypse, but deep down, you know they just liked playing with hydraulics (who doesn't--hydraulic machines are cool!) and backed their way into the justification. The right-to-repairers remind me of those people. They got this idea in their head that repairable electronics equals some combination of eco-cred, lower-cost and fuck-the-man. You can't really reason with them because it's a religious belief. They "just know" that repairable electronics result in cheaper, less e-waste products, and no amount of evidence will ever convince them otherwise. Their goal is not cheaper, more environmentally-friendly electronics. That's merely the justification. The actual goal is cosplaying electronics repair technician.

Timshel 2y ago

Or not we just need more Fairphones and less Samsung.

hyperbovine 2y ago

> The most effective way to approach this problem is known and proven: mandate long (I think 5 years is fair) 100% repair/replace/refund waranty periods with no cost to the consumer (including shipping). FWIW, this is basically AppleCare+, but of course you pay a small monthly fee for it. Phone breaks, you take it in, they fix it within a day or two no questions asked. It would be great if we lived in the world you're describing, but in the absence of that, I'm content with a low-end iPhone + $3.99 a month insurance.

its-summertime 2y ago

Why not both?

gibsonpil 2y ago

> I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer. What kinds of hardware do you engineer exactly? Tons of companies have repair technicians on staff. I'm sure every datacenter in the world has individuals frequently swapping faulty parts out of servers, and those servers are often designed to keep that kind of maintenance from being a chore. It's one thing if you're talking about board level repair, but part swapping is something that end users do by themselves all the time. I've certainly swapped phone batteries before. I've helped friends replace their cracked screens. In fairness however, for products that are being engineered for portability first there is certainly a case to be made for keeping things compact at the expense of reparability. That certainly doesn't explain away the behavior of companies that deliberately hinder repairs by blocking replacement parts, or making replacement parts impossible to obtain. That NEEDS to be illegal, and that is a big part of what right to repair is about.

justinclift 2y ago

> I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer. Yeah, that sounds like the real problem from the engineering side of things. If the business types did decide it was a priority, and told you to figure it out, I'm pretty sure you would. :)

drdaeman 2y ago

Mass market engineering (of any kind) always steers towards producing cheapest products possible as long they're still tolerably functional. In other words, the cheapest crapjob of a bugfest wins as long as its happy path still works well enough that consumers still consume, keeping the money flowing. There are no sustainable mass (large and non-specialized) markets for high-quality high-complexity products, they consistently spawn then get killed by competition from all the cheap junk. How's the proposed 5 years 100% repair/replace/refund warranty is going to fix this core problem, rather than just generate more e-waste that's meant to get even more frequently replaced (as mandated by law, where now you're just told to fuck off) as it fails? Sure, some most glaring issues are probably going to get fixed, but the overall principle suggests that it's more likely cheap junk will get even more cheaper - cheaper to replace - than reliable, with more customer-hostile junk attached (ads to cover the costs, killing interop to sell licenses, etc), continuing the enshittification. I strongly suspect that it'll primarily affect the money flows, not the product qualities.

hot_gril 2y ago

Also I feel like repairing is often not the most efficient way to correct a problem with someone's phone. The "right to repair" movement was focused on one of the least inherently repairable things people own.

mgraczyk 2y ago

I would rather have a phone that lasts 1 year though, I don't want to pay extra for one that lasts 5 years. Why should it be illegal to build phones for people like me who upgrade more frequently than every 5 years (and most Americans, median is 2.5 years)?

chriscjcj 2y ago

Why five years? I have plenty of consumer electronics including phones, tablets, laptops, and computers that keep on trucking well past five years. Why should anything be turned into junk until it's absolutely necessary? The point is, I OWN the device. It's mine. If I can find someone with the expertise to keep it running past its intended life, that should be looked at favorably. But Apple, Samsung, and many other companies are actively preventing feasible repairs based on unreasonable and arbitrary cooked-up "company policies." Attaching serial numbers to parts and making them inoperable until they're blessed by the manufacturer is a racket and everyone knows it. If I can manage to keep my iPad working as a photo frame for another 40 years, how does that hurt anyone?

negative_zero 2y ago
> Why five years? I have plenty of consumer electronics including phones, tablets, laptops, and computers that keep on trucking well past five years. Why should anything be turned into junk until it's absolutely necessary? I picked five years half arbitrarily and half what I think is fair. Perhaps what most people think is fair is a lower or higher number. > The point is, I OWN the device. It's mine. If I can find someone with the expertise to keep it running past its intended life, that should be looked at favorably. Why as a company owner should I have to support the chance of you wanting to repair your device in 10 years? I have another big post in two parts where I try to illustrate that it's just not practical technologically and legally => it's why I proposed good long warranties. You just cannot give these companies an inch. Right-for-repair legislation will just be messy and give them too many inches to weasel out of it. > But Apple, Samsung, and many other companies are actively preventing feasible repairs based on unreasonable and arbitrary cooked-up "company policies." Attaching serial numbers to parts and making them inoperable until they're blessed by the manufacturer is a racket and everyone knows it. This will be harsh, and probably unpopular on HN, but in ALMOST all cases these steps are not put in to prevent repairability. Nobody cares about repairability. This is not some romantic fight of the big evil company screwing the little guy out of repairability. Repairability doesn't register on the radar. They don't care. These measures are taken to protect the supply chain against counterfeit parts and counterfeit products because they have a brand to protect. It's as simple as that. > If I can manage to keep my iPad working as a photo frame for another 40 years, how does that hurt anyone? It doesn't. I'm not sure why you think I implied it does sorry. Edits: Spelling and formatting