Cali Right-to-Repair law dropped, cracks screen, has to be taken to authorized repair shop A Californian law that would give people the right to fix their own electronic devices has been pulled by its author less than two months after it was first proposed. "While this was not an easy decision, it became clear that the bill would not have the support it needed today, and manufacturers had sown enough doubt with …
Or they loose a customer for ever once he realize that buying from another brand is cheaper, works just as well and can be fixed at a reasonable price.
When the market goes scarce, when you have less people buying your products, increasing the price is the last thing you should resort to.
Really? I'd have thought Apple would be all over that. Can't have the Apple brand devalued by allowing the unemployed to own then. Hopefully they will introduce a new update that automatically bricks an Apple device if you don't spend enough in the iStore. We can't just have any old hoi polio using Apple products!!!!
I see a fair number of people with iPhones and bad shoes. Usually not the very latest or most expensive, but still.
Getting folk to prioritise fondleslab brand over things like, I don't know, food and clothing, ie, buying it despite its being so expensive that it hurts is possibly part of the marketing "magic".
As sales stagnate in mature markets, this is precisely why Apple's forcing repairs to go to them and pushing up the cost of repairs close to the price of a new model... they win either way.
That would presume Apple actually *fixes* anything. They'd rather tell you to buy a new one, or a so-called "refurb" at a premium price. Oh, and recovering your data? Nah, they won't do that either (and make false claims it can't be done).
Even back in the day of Apple ][. Bought an Atari 800.
Really frowned when Apple let people think that Apple invented the GUI mouse desktop with the Lisa. Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developed that concept earlier.
Give them credit for the music player development with the iPod. Unless they took credit for someone else's work.
"Give them credit for the music player development with the iPod. Unless they took credit for someone else's work."
Like many of Apples "inventions", it was the slick design and pretty user interface they came up with, not the actual technology or device. MP3 players, smartphone s and tablets were around before Apple "invented" them. They are generally very good at making things "just work", be interoperable (with their own product lines) and marketing.
^^^^ This!
My son celebrated a Birthday this week, a relative bought him a big honkin plastic Nerf gun. Same relative that bought him one last year, that one broke with in a day, and it still kicks around my son's room. Where to I dispose of this? Plastic recycling? no, it has metal screws and springs inside? Just in the bin then? Looks like it will be found by some archeologist in 1000 years!
No, more likely they simply discard them at the recycling facility. My city has told people that stuff that they have to intercept at the recycling center costs them a lot of money, and please stop putting stuff like your Nerf gun or a pizza box that's contaminated by grease into recycling bins.
Since they went from people lifting small bins into the truck to "single stream" using a 55 gallon bin that is lifted via automated arms on the truck they can no longer intercept stuff at the curb and refuse/tag the load so the homeowner knows what is and is not acceptable. I could throw just about anything into my recycling bin and they'll "accept" it, but that doesn't mean it won't cause them problems later.
Unless they've specifically said something like that Nerf gun is acceptable I wouldn't assume it is. There are some cases where they HAVE to be able to deal with stuff like this, like staples in mixed paper and big staples in cardboard, which my city says are both acceptable - probably because they know a lot would end up in the landfill since people aren't going to want to manually remove all those staples. They used an example of a tissue paper box that has some plastic wrap glued in around the opening as something that isn't acceptable due to mixed materials, unless you tear out the plastic and throw that away and recycle only the box.
No, more likely they simply discard them at the recycling facility. My city has told people that stuff that they have to intercept at the recycling center costs them a lot of money, and please stop putting stuff like your Nerf gun or a pizza box that's contaminated by grease into recycling bins.
I usually pre-strip things like that (as well as printers, etc) down to readily sorted pieces. Molded plastic goes into recycling (they *should* be able to recycle them that way, if they aren't fat lazy slobs), metal into a pile of metal pieces that eventually get to the scrap yard. Circuit boards I hold and drop off at the electronics recycling bins at a customer site.
The town's "bulk pickup" refused to take my printers, and the local carting company where I used to bring electronics started charging for it. So that's why I strip them down myself.
"like staples in mixed paper and big staples in cardboard"
Paper recycling is a fairly mature technology and they have systems in place to separate out the unwanted bits of metal and plastic that contaminates it. That does come at a cost though. I've seen recycled paper that clearly has small amounts of plastic embedded in it, so I assume that in some circumstances, for cost reasons, the separation is not as complete as in more expensive recycled paper. The same applies to cardboard. Likewise, glass and metal recycling is a fairly mature process too and most remaining containments get burnt off during the melting/smelting process but plastics recycling is still an emerging technology and there are just so many different plastics, often "melded" into single units which can't ever be separated, even by manual workers. Using the Nerf gun, I wonder just how many plastics are used in it's construction? It can be shredded so the metals can be separated, but I don't think there's a good way to separate the different plastics so even pelleltsing it for re-use will at best produce a poorer end product if the differing plastics melt at different temperatures, not to mention colour separation.
And food contamination of plastics, paper and cardboard can only really be dealt with at the user end.
Just put it in the plastic bin. They plastic gets shredded and then the metal is fished out with a magnet. Or take it apart yourself if you're worried about it (They're all dirt simple to take apart, you'll find videos on how to do it for modding purposes on the web for most models). Even better, open it up and find out why it's broken, because there's a good chance it's easily fixable. Spare parts can be had from the usual sources such as AliExpress, eBay and/or Amazon. Hasbro might also be able to help directly if you send them a friendly email asking for a specific part.
They can split out non-ferro metals like aluminium and copper with a high frequency AC magnetic field. This induces eddy currents in the metals which are then repelled from the magnet. Usually done by having a large (electro) magnet spinning inside a hollow roller at the end of a conveyor belt. The non conductive materials fall down into one bin, the conductive materials get flung over the top and land in a different bin.
A simpler approach is just to shred the plastic/metal thing into a coarse powder and shoot the resulting stream off the end of a ramp. This sorts the granules by weight, which is very effective.
(Back in 1979 or so I got a tour of a recycling plant that did just that. PCBs went in one end, piles of powdered stuff came out the other. They particularly wanted the small yellow-ish pile nearest the chute)
Was about to post the same thing re: throw it in the green bin anyway.
It simply isn't beyond the wit of man to be able to split out the plastic from the metal in a broken nerf gun.
I'm not a materials engineer, but as other have said there are various solutions. Top of my head: crush it and use magnets. The remaining plastic and possible non magnetic metal could be dumped into a water pod where the metal sinks, plastic will float.
Seriously, all the local authority / government need to do is actually fucking try. We, the individuals should do are bit, but the system needs to meet us half way.
Where do you live?
If it's England or Wales, the bits I'm most familiar with, the local/regional government no longer have the budget or the power for that kind of thing. They have to outsource it, to ensure "best value" (ie best bonuses for the board).
It's not even allowed to use prisoners as cheap labour, for any labour-intensive parts of the process.
Have another go, based on recent documented facts, rather than some imagined/remembered history books.
And remember that this whole process has to look capable of making a profit *now*, business doesn't care about the three year outlook let alone three decades from now.
Plastic recycling? no, it has metal screws and springs inside?
A recycling centre should be able to deal with metal.
A bigger problem is that there will be parts made from different plastics that have to be recycled separately (if at all), and they will almost certainly not carry recycling marks to allow the types of plastic to be identified.
"One of our chief concerns with this legislation is its potential to weaken the privacy and security features of various electronic products," the letter read, adding: "With access to proprietary guides and tools, hackers can more easily circumvent security protections, harming not only the product owner but also everyone who shares their network."
So...they just admitted NSA/FSB/PLA 61398 can rifle through customers' "secure" and "private" devices? Because I guarantee their oh so secret tools are available to such agencies, and they just said that with those tools the devices are rendered insecure.
Ooops.
"Because I guarantee their oh so secret tools are available to such agencies, and they just said that with those tools the devices are rendered insecure."
Not really. Those "oh so secret tools" are available to staff in authorised repair centres and the related field engineers. In many cases, a carefull hunt around the web will locate them. The "security" they are talking about is that nefarious people might use them to "brand" lower quality, 3rd party replacements, eg putting the "sooper sekrit" ID codes into a replacement board/firmware. Not all manufactures are equally paranoid. Lenovo will let you download the tools the "brand" a replacement system board, but HP require that you log in with your authorised servicer ID to download their branding tools. (yeah, HP use the word "servicer" to describe a technician)
I believe Lincoln said about wartime losses then sacrifices helped ensure "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.
It seems today that "a goverment of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations" is the preferred version.
The founding fathers would be spinning in their graves.
And yes, our shitload of chancers and morons here in the UK are no better.
What *is* the latest state of play with the legislation which was (at least in part) provoked by the antics of "authorised" John Deere service agents and such looking to protect their monopolies in the USA and elsewhere?
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/10/25/18024332/us-copyright-office-right-to-repair-dcma-exemptions
Etc
"With access to proprietary guides and tools, hackers can more easily circumvent security protections, harming not only the product owner but also everyone who shares their network.
So Linux (along with all of its GNU and non-GNU bits), Firefox, and Chromium must be dangerously insecure products compared to, say, Microsoft's products, since the full source code for them is available to anyone.
Security by obscurity is a sham.
"Bad actors could seek to exploit compliance requirements for illegal purposes, such as circumventing digital locks protecting copyrighted content and/or making unauthorized modifications."
Circumventing digital locks should not have become illegal in the first place. Fair use of copyrighted material, in the US at least, often goes beyond what digital locks would allow... it's the digital locks themselves that are the problem, not the opportunity for people to break them.
As for unauthorized modifications-- unauthorized by whom? When Apple sells a phone to someone, it stops being Apple's property and becomes the property of the buyer. The only one who needs to authorize anything is the owner of the property in question, and that's not the company that made the product.
"Manufacturers want to ensure that their products are serviced by professionals who understand the software that operates their products..."
No they don't. They want to ensure their products are either serviced (poorly) at extortionate, non-competitive prices, or that they are not serviced at all, but replaced. This much is abundantly clear. Apple wants a monopoly on fixing Apple products, which they intend to use as monopolists will. They claim it's too hard to fix their products, yet a lot of people (like Louis Rossmann) manage to do it anyway, even with Apple blocking them at every turn. If it's too hard, how do they manage to do it even with all of the roadblocks in place?
If Apple wants to make sure its products are serviced by professionals who understand the hardware and the software in question, that would suggest releasing all of the information in question so that said professionals may access it freely, and making the parts available as well.
If Apple truly believes that their own servicing is so much better than what you can get from third-party repair outlets, why not just let the third parties do their thing so that the customers of these independent shops can see how bad they are? Give them enough rope to hang themselves, Apple, if you're so certain that they would do so. Right now, those shops have you to blame if they're not able to get a given part or fix a given problem. If you think the independent shops, even with your cooperation, will just ruin Apple products that Apple itself could have repaired, thereby forcing such customers to buy anew, isn't that a good thing? No one's going to blame Apple for a phone that doesn't work after some non-Apple repair facility butchered it. It would simultaneously boost sales and sour such customers on the idea of ever going to an independent repair facility again.
If Apple and others were really convinced of any of this, there would be little reason for them not to support independent shops. People will get burned, and Apple can crow about how you can get Apple quality only from Apple. They've got to actually walk the walk, though... no more doing slipshod "repairs" like gluing a piece of rubber to a chip to smash it down onto its cracked solders instead of fixing the cracked solder (and underfilling the chip so it won't crack again). Apple actually has to outperform the competition for this to work, and they're obviously not confident in their ability to do so.
There's something that happens to people when they are elected to a position of power. They begin to think they're far smarter than anyone else, and that their own election proves their superiority. They have heard their own campaign rhetoric so many times that they begin to believe it. Congress was bamboozled by Bill Gates when he claimed that IE was part of the OS and could not be removed. That was an outright lie, of course. Mozilla's Revenge proved it could be done and leave the OS quite functional and stable, and that was written by some guy out there in the community who didn't have access to any of the MS source code. Even if that little tidbit was not known, does it make any sense to believe that MS did not have the power to remove IE from Windows when they had just finished sticking it in there? Congress did! They knew so little about computers that they believed rather obvious lies, and they knew so little of their own ignorance that it never occurred to them. On paper, Microsoft lost, but it was a kind of loss that probably had them popping champagne and celebrating.
Tech salesmen scam laypersons all the time, and the current hype about "the cloud" is only one of many examples. They make a presentation with lots of buzzwords sprinkled in, and it makes no sense to any of the investors. It makes no sense to anyone, because it was all bollocks. None of the investors want to admit they didn't understand it, since everyone else seemed to. So they claim they get it, that it's the best thing ever, and that anyone who doesn't agree is not thinking outside the box, or whatever other buzz-phrase they want to whip out. No one wants to admit they're the one who can't see the emperor's new clothes.
Actual techies in IT see through the BS right away, recognizing that there's nothing new about thin clients or server-side/centralized processing, and they're written off as luddites who don't understand tech by the people who actually don't understand tech.
In a few years, the new thing has become the old thing, so they take the even older thing and put a new coat of paint on it and make another new thing.
That's the latest scheme from Tesla (Also in CA). They'll lease you an Electric Car and then take it back because according to theit cult leader, Elon Musk.. they will be worth more after the lease than before.
Something in me says that he should be travelling the US State Fairs selling some potion or other bit of magic that will cure all diseases.
lots of interesting informations there. thanks.
reminded me of a couple of eg's I had
used to be a technician for a company that supplied CD copiers. one of our customers was a barracks (fair play, not a lot wrong with them). the guy that met us in the copy room, said "don't tell these guys how to work these copiers (I mainly just replaced the bits that went wrong). they are corporals, you know. they're in charge of ships, they win wars, they don't need to be told anything".
also, different place. we had a new computer in the test room. case off. it had a bracket in it. the sales guy was showing a customer around. he gave the bracket a tap and said "look at that build quality, solid". I happened to know, that if he'd done anything more than give it a tap (ie, tried to move it), it would have come out of the machine.
Sadly, the problem is software/firmware. "They" have been allowed to get away with not selling you it, but licencing the use of it, with many, many restrictions and almost zero responsibility, ie an unbalanced and therefore unfair contract which unsurprisingly never seem to get tested in court as the big players always seem to settle out of court with NDAs.
Manufacturer: Servicing and Maintenance
1. All replacement parts for our vehicles must now be sourced AND fitted by one of our authorised repair shops. That is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality.
2. All consumables must also be sourced and fitted in the same way. That is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality.
3. When we say ALL, we actually mean EVERYTHING. That is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality.
4. Prices for spare parts will be borderline extortionate, but again, that is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality.
5. At some random time in the future we will decide that we can't be arsed providing spare parts for your vehicle any more. When this happens, it is because that is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality. Sell it and buy a newer one!
6.Basically, you can wash your vehicle and refuel it (although you may - sorry WILL - need to buy an expensive adaptor so you can fit the gas pump nozzle into the fuel filler.) As already hinted at, that is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality.
7. It's for your own good really as we know best. Have we mentioned that is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality
8. Any unauthorised attempt at circumventing these safety features will result in this company ignoring your vehicle for the rest of time.
9. This is the price you must pay for our brands perceived high quality.
Rest of World: Fuck You!
John Deere already does...
They were already heading in that direction - warranty void unless you had all servicing done at a franchised dealer using manufacturer parts. They made all the same arguments - highly complicated machines, quality, safety, need for properly trained techs, etc.
A good few years ago now, the EU turned around and called bo11ocks to that - insisting that manufacturers could not impose such conditions. I can't recall whether it was the same time that they also required manufacturers to provide sufficient information to allow third parties to properly service them.
We'll be safe from all that EU bureaucratic nonsense after Brexit.
We want our own natural protectors of elected MPs to safeguard us if we need safeguards. People like Gove, like Johnson, like Corbyn, like Blair, like Davies, like Cameron.
"I have a better idea: just put it all into a youtube channel where we get to watch them do their dirty dealing. Then let their opponents fish through it at election time."
I don't see that approach as better (or worse) than the earlier suggestion, just different.
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right?
Some countries already required their political leaders to be willing to publish their tax information from time to time.
"All that extra cost is great for Apple's bottom-line but is literally coming out the pockets of America's consumers"
All that extra cost is great for Apple's bottom-line but is literally coming out the pockets of America's consumers. FIFY!
If you think Apple repairs are expensive in America you should see the additional markup in other countries!
write a single article without channeling their inner Trump Derangement Syndrome ?
Seriously, exactly what mention of Trump tax returns has to do or added to topic of this article ?
P.S. By the way it's democrats who oppose to consumer rights in California and those are exactly same people you're going to vote next time.
Have a think about it.
I cannot believe that this is a legal issue.
Once an item is outside its warranty..if I own it and I can fix it I <expletive> well will!!!
It's when I cannot fix it and nobody else other than the manufacturer is (supposedly) allowed to that you have a problem.
But then...... that's what YouTube videos are for :-)
Well, there *is* one argument on Apple's side (though not the one they put forth according to this article) -- because it is apparently impossible for anyone other than Apple to transplant the screen of one iPhone into another one (due to crypto?), no knowledgeable thief is going to try to nick my phone in hopes of selling it for parts.
I wonder whether there is a path that preserves this property, while still giving third parties some option of repairing iPhones?
The right to repair is much more important with items such as cars. Being held hostage because some manufacturer wants to insist that only they can repair their products and will, therefore, not sell parts to anybody is tripe. The same goes for "trade secrets". Joe the repair guy isn't going to get some service manuals and repair instructions and start competing with Renault. Munro & Associates tear down and sale of reports on the Tesla Model 3 is another example of how industry "researches" each other's products. Would a stack of service manuals have helped? A little, I'm sure, but not having them didn't hinder anything. It does hinder somebody that lives hundreds of miles away from a Tesla service center that would like his local auto shop to repair his car after not seeing a low bollard in a car park and doing a bit of damage to a rear corner. Being able to get repair parts would have the car fixed far faster than Tesla often takes.
As to small tech, it seems manufacturers keep making them smaller and gluing the cases shut. It doesn't do a blind bit of good in terms of preserving secrets, but it does make getting repairs super expensive. It also opens the doors for lower cost products to flourish. Why repair a top of the line Samsung phone (again) when you could buy 3-4 Blu phones for the price?
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