3 ms·

Hot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification requirements, at least for mas

Hot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification requirements, at least for mass-market goods like phones and TVs. For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer. But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.

nicce 1y ago
I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.
nerdsniper 1y ago
I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is). However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private. The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients. Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer. Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
- txrx0000 1y ago
  I share this sentiment for the most part. The only nuance is we probably shouldn't give away core technologies that are closely related to cutting-edge weapons, which would spark an arms race. Let's accelerate competition for everything else, though.
Aurornis 1y ago
For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that. Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred to another.
    - kragen 1y ago
      What kinds of application-specific things would it do? Have a weird pinout? Have slightly different voltage thresholds? Have a strange sequencing between different power supplies? None of that is rocket science; you could program an off-the-shelf microcontroller to do any of that (maybe with a breakout board and a couple of bodge wires).
txrx0000 1y ago
Hotter take: consumer devices should always have publically available schematics. It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.
varispeed 1y ago
Schematics cannot be copyrighted and are extremely useful from R&D point of view. Competition can absolutely copy it verbatim with no consequences. Only thing that can somewhat be copyrighted is exact layout (the same way a photograph would be copyrighted), but that is tenuous. For complex products that is maybe no big deal, but for smaller businesses, having all details laid out is a gift for cloners to get a cheaper device to the market based on original designs - when it would be not feasible otherwise to reverse engineer it.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  Yeah, that's why I specified mass-market products as a target for such a regulation. The big guns certainly don't have anything that cloners could want to use, their "secret sauce" is in the display technology (for TVs) and their userspace applications (for phones) and neither would be exposed by an extensive right-to-repair legislation. Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > Schematics cannot be copyrighted Schematics are absolutely copyrighted. Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic. However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk. In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
  - 1y ago

nicce 1y ago

I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.

nerdsniper 1y ago

I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is). However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private. The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients. Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer. Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.

txrx0000 1y ago
I share this sentiment for the most part. The only nuance is we probably shouldn't give away core technologies that are closely related to cutting-edge weapons, which would spark an arms race. Let's accelerate competition for everything else, though.

Aurornis 1y ago

For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that. Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.

mschuster91 1y ago
> It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred to another.
  - kragen 1y ago
    What kinds of application-specific things would it do? Have a weird pinout? Have slightly different voltage thresholds? Have a strange sequencing between different power supplies? None of that is rocket science; you could program an off-the-shelf microcontroller to do any of that (maybe with a breakout board and a couple of bodge wires).

txrx0000 1y ago

Hotter take: consumer devices should always have publically available schematics. It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.

varispeed 1y ago

Schematics cannot be copyrighted and are extremely useful from R&D point of view. Competition can absolutely copy it verbatim with no consequences. Only thing that can somewhat be copyrighted is exact layout (the same way a photograph would be copyrighted), but that is tenuous. For complex products that is maybe no big deal, but for smaller businesses, having all details laid out is a gift for cloners to get a cheaper device to the market based on original designs - when it would be not feasible otherwise to reverse engineer it.

mschuster91 1y ago
Yeah, that's why I specified mass-market products as a target for such a regulation. The big guns certainly don't have anything that cloners could want to use, their "secret sauce" is in the display technology (for TVs) and their userspace applications (for phones) and neither would be exposed by an extensive right-to-repair legislation. Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
Aurornis 1y ago
> Schematics cannot be copyrighted Schematics are absolutely copyrighted. Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic. However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk. In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
- 1y ago