New York gets right-to-repair law – after some industry-friendly repairs to the rules New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has approved a comprehensive right-to-repair law for tech products – the first of its kind for a US state – though not before some changes were made to the fine print. The Empire State's Digital Fair Repair Act, giving owners of some tech gadgets – and independent repair shops – the right to …
Thank you for your interest in DIY replacement parts for your iPhone.
Please present your proof of purchase in New York state at our Proof Of Ownership office in Ballston Spa. Office Hours are 10 to 3 , Wednesdays.
Don't forget to to brink your pink copy of the P337 Date of Purchase form you collected from the Date Of Purchase Evidence office in Hicksville. (11-2pm Thursdays)
Your parts will be shipped from our Xi Xiang fullfillment centre by yak, and will be available to collected when the office on Gayville opens.
Do please collect within 24 hours or they will be returned.
So, when are you going to pass a bill that actually allows that ?
But it does! The nice governor now makes it possible for future purchasers to buy a complete kit of parts! So that'll be $1,399 plus taxes for everything you need to replace your broken iPhone! Except any ability to transfer data from old to new, because that's disabled. For your security. However, you may be able to be taken advantage of by one of our asset/data recovery services for only $399.
LR's vid makes it pretty clear that the revisions have pretty much disabled any real right to repair, as intended by industry.
They could hardly mandate it for the day the law is signed. A court might probably strike down enforcement of it as being unreasonable if they tried to make it effective immediately and a company has a new product already scheduled to be launched next month.
Six months gives them enough time to reschedule their launch if necessary or make arrangements to not sell in NY at all if they can't/won't comply with the law.
But also gives them time to make arrangements to make it be able to service their existing parts, even if not immediately. As I read the article, anything already in production/sale remains unrepairable by the existing repair shops/users.
So you still can't repair things you already own. And if you want to be able to, you need to buy a new one. Trebles all round!
For much tech, I doubt even repair shops will want to go below reasonable 'assemblies' such as screens, motherboards, batteries etc.
This is the inherent conflict in the "right to repair" movement. Half the people want it to be reasonable for third party repair shops to get access to those assemblies at reasonable price to fix the handful of things that are economically diagnosable/repairable in e.g. modern smartphones.
The other half are "purists" who insist all parts should be available, and want to be able to buy any individual chip or surface mount component on any board in a device forever, even if replacement of such a part is completely ridiculous from an economic perspective. Because "hobbyists", and people with silly ideas that a smartphone should be able to be repaired even 20 years after it was sold if that's what the owner wants to do (nevermind that cellular standards will have moved on and it will be as useless as a 2002 cell phone is today)
I’ll get flack for this but let’s get some perspective into the “right to repair” movement.
First, most people do not want to repair their own kit (in fact, they shouldn’t try). The focus needs to be on giving the right and ability to independent specialists, who will have the competence to get it right.
Secondly, we mustn’t get blind to how much more reliable modern kit is, than in the past. Modern manufacturing methods, whilst making it harder to dismantle kit, also make the need to dismantle much less. I recall when domestic TVs needed to be easy to repair because they needed to be. I still recall, back in the 1970’s, how hard it was to repair the new Sony colour TVs, as everything was so integrated and tightly packed, compared to, say, ITT or Ferguson sets. However, it wasn’t a major problem as we rarely needed to repair the Sony sets, unlike the others. Even selling them, the non-Sony TVs almost always needed a service call to set them up in the customer’s home, so we needed access to their guts; not so with the Sony Trinitron TVs, where the customer could take them home and they would be fine without adjustment.
Kit needs to be repairable, but what may be straightforward for a competent technician may not be so for a “normal” user. Making repairs easy for the normal user may end making more, and easy, repairs necessary. It may also result in no reduction in waste.
My personal view that won’t be popular with campaigners…
> Reliable
I had to wait a week* for one of these reliable phones' batteries to run down so that it could be rebooted because the reliable lock screen had been reliably taken over by its reliable camera app. Mr IT here couldn't do anything about it because it's so reliable it doesn't need to be opened or have its reliable battery removed.
[*] This part is the lie of course. The battery isn't remotely reliable enough to last a week.
>I had to wait a week* for one of these reliable phones' batteries to run down...
Last year had a couple of ipads which failed on boot or charge, found leaving them for a nearly a month allowed the battery to run down sufficiently for things to reset and for them to charge and boot...
Don't agree. While it's entirely possible that new kit COULD be massively more reliable, it's just not. Bought a TV in the last few years? I know I did. I bet it died on ya, didn't it? I bet it took an age to get it fixed. And all that time, the warranty clock was ticking-down. TVs, computers, phones, white-goods, music equipment ... basically anything that requires power to run ... the quality has fallen off a cliff in recent time, IMHO. I don't think it's even built to survive the warranty period any more, I reckon they rely on people saying "Huh it died I'll buy a new one anyway". It's just maddening.
Actually, no. The only two items I remember failing during a warranty period are a bread maker about 10 years ago and a filter/espresso coffee machine about 5 years ago. Both were no longer available from the retailer and I got a full refund in both cases, no questions asked, well within the two warranty period. Neither,, of course, were IT related or even electronics as such. The heating element failed in the coffee machine and the drive mechanism for the mixing paddles in the bread maker. All actual IT or electronics equipment I've bought in the last 10 years or so is either still working or replaced because I needed something better.
Oh, just remembered. My Rasberry Pi 4 died on me. It still seems to boot, but keeps corrupting the filesystem. And no, it's the microSD card. I tried a couple of others. I'm currently running Kodi on an ancient laptop plugged into the TV via VGA and it's sort of limping along, dropping video frames 'cos it can't quite keep up. Better under Linux than Windows, I tried both. Most likely because the CPU/GPU can't quite cope of X265.
re: " basically anything that requires power to run ... the quality has fallen off a cliff in recent time"
"Durable goods" are now defined as appliances with an expected lifespan of three years . . . or maybe it's five, but I think it's three. Either way, it's a far cry from when a brand of clothes washers used to spotlight its repairman being in utter despair because there was no work for him because the machines were so darn reliable. The high cost of cheap stuff. At least most "white goods" appliances are in steel containers that can be recycled.
Yes, I can see you'll get some flack for what is a balanced viewpoint.
Reading the article, it does make it clear that it's not only DIY repairs, but also independent repair shops that will benefit.
But it IS a step in the right direction - even if it doesn't go as far as it really should. IIRC, car manufacturers are (in the EU and UK) required to sell parts to anyone for a minimum of 5 years after the last of a model was sold. And a few years ago the EU firmly struck the ban-hammer on tied dealerships etc. when they removed the block exemption from car manufacturers who had also used the "but user/public safety & complex products" argument for their restrictive practices. I can see a similar thing happening for electronics at some point as long as people keep pushing in a civilised manner.
Yes. And now all that legislation has been passed….do cars last *longer* or *shorter* than they used to?
It makes people feel good for “doing something”, but it’s actually a step in the wrong direction. We’ve ended up with cars with thousands of replaceable parts, that are almost never economic to repair after 150k miles in the U.K.
So, it didn’t work.
Cars last far longer.
Back in the 1970s, most cars were end of life at around 100k miles.
These days, all cars are expected to reach 100k miles without any significant expenses - most of them are warranted that long!
The expected end of life is closer to 200k-250k miles - seems to be roughly one clutch replacement. The handbook on my 2015 car lists the "major" service tasks out to 250k miles.
You're suffering from survivorship bias.
Some vehicles will last longer, and you can keep a car running far beyond that. It's very expensive to rebore or replace the engine block so is only worthwhile for a "classic" (definitions of classic may vary)
Cars WERE generally up to that level. However, now we have "CVT"s and "dual clutch gearboxes" and "high pressure turbos on tiny blocks". Headlamp assemblies that are over $2000 are not unusual. How long will an "active electronic engine mount" last compared to a rubber bush? Does it matter if a starter is only $200, if you have to have the whole drivetrain out to change it? ($2000 labor)
Automakers are actually quite decent at making them reliable - the new trick is fitting the reliability ONLY within the realm of warranty while making it as difficult and uneconomical to service as possible.
> Back in the 1970s, most cars were end of life at around 100k miles.
"Citation needed"... :-p
I had a Mercedes Benz (W123 diesel) which was built like a tank and lasted way over 100k miles with near to no mechanical problem. Please buy a Mercedes Benz today and try do do even 10k miles without becoming your car mechanic's best buddy.
Besides if you travel to Africa you'll see a lot of old European cars from the 70ies/80ies which have started a (very rough!) second life over there, once their European owners decided they were too old for them. I'm pretty sure this won't happen with the newer ones...
Now I agree that service tasks have been much simplified in recent cars, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they last much longer. It's just that they have tuned the longevity of the parts to the expected commercial lifespan of the car. Parts of older cars had shorter wear lifespans, so after a while you would always be changing one of them, which would lead car-ignorant people to think their car was progressively breaking down. No, it was just the normal wear & tear. You do change brake pads, don't you, it doesn't mean your car is dying, does it.
Let's see how many of our fancy 2020 cars will be still in the streets in 2070... I won't be there to see it, but I'm be ready to bet none at all.
Some cars last incredibly long, as long as you manage to keep the rust at bay.
I bought an '86 Mercedes G-class diesel in 2005 and sold it to a friend i 2014. He still uses it. That car will be 40 years old in 3 years.
Of course, you need to be good at bodging to have a car that age, but it's doable. I have my doubts that a Tesla (or a VW ID.3 for that matter) will be useable after 40 years.
Other stuff that can last for ages - I have a Radionette raido cabinet from the 1950s. Still works and sounds great. The radio part is a broblem, since the radio is FM/AM only, and we are now mostly DAB here. There's only a local radio station with questionable programming available on FM.
The 80's Mercedes were wonderful, an excellent example of how to build a tough vehicle that is easily repairable. At one point in the late 90's, my family had over 750,000 miles on the vehicles in the driveway - a 60's Chevelle (200k+), two 80's Mercedes (200k+ each), and my brother's Jeep (early 90's, ~80k). The Jeep had the most problems.
The real wonder was how easy those Mercedes were to repair. Oil drain plug was precisely forearm-length back from the bumper, with filter easily changeable while standing next to the vehicle. Changing brake pads was done with a hammer, nail set, and channel lock pliers. Water pump replacement? Four bolts to take off the fan, with the water pump right behind it, an hour's job for an amateur.
Contrast our (now long former) '98 Dodge Stratus, which required jacking up the front end and taking off the driver's tire just to replace the battery. (Look it up - that is NOT an exaggeration!)
I go beyond that. There is an obsession with the ability to repair, at the expense of original build-quality. Have people actually watched Louis Rossman’s videos on *the repairing*?
The vast majority of the repairs he does, and always has done, consist in about of 5-10 points max that go wrong. Very often caps or simple dud traces/solder joints in the shitty onboard power supplies. If smartphone manufacturers fixed the top ten cost-engineered known failure-modes, it would at least double the average device lifetime, and cost a few dollars tops. There’s the big win.
The really simple thing which could be done, is just increase the mandatory guarantee to five years. One line of law.
Yes, I know commenters would want it to work for longer. But increasing the guarantee to five years would immediately more than halve the e-waste stream, due to the design changes it would cause. And once the principle is established, ten year guarantee is within reach.
Actually the hook they use is that it's usually limited to the original buyer.
Mine had a 100,00km / 7 year battery warranty. Great you think, but the habitual new car buyer flicked it at 15,000km/1 year, and thus scrubbed the warrantee.
That said, currently at 160,000km, and it's only fault is that the spring that keeps the charging flap closed doesn't stay put. Just about at 7 years, and battery is just about down to 50%
Of an electronic device will last 5 years, chances are it'll last 20 years. The main problem is software updates though. Seems that after an electronics device is more than a year old, suddenly every software update drags down performance. I'd like to see updates be required to not drag down performance. A simple security fix should not slow a phone down. Updates always seem to start killing performance right about new model time too.
"A simple security fix should not slow a phone down."
Unless it's "fixing" predictive branching, rowhammer or whatever hardware CPU vulns have been discovered over the last few years that apply to ARM etc. Other than that, yes, those "slow down security fixes" do seem to coincide with when the OEM decides it's time for us to upgrade.
We already have 6 years in the UK, but after a certain period of time you have to prove that the device has a manufacturing fault and it was not caused by yourself.
I have successfully got replaced or refunded products that I bought well over 4 years ago. Manufacturers of course don't want you to know that and their customer service will use all sort of deflection and disinformation methods to make you abandon your claim, but if you are persistent and (if it comes to that) treat with court action they give up and accept the claim.
My new Samsung 75" TV's screen failed after just over a year, but luckily still in warranty. I thought they'd replace the whole thing, but they brought just a new screen, took the back off the old one, swapped over the 3 circuit boards and put the back on the new one, then took the old screen away for recycling. Apart from getting the screens up and down up the stairs (on its long end with less than an inch to spare), the whole operation took less than 10 minutes, so full marks to Samsung for repairability.
My new Samsung 75" TV's screen failed after just over a year, but luckily still in warranty.
In the UK at least, the Sales Of Goods act states that items must be 'fit for purpose'. I've had full refunds on electronic goods that went south several years after purchase without requiring a warranty from the manufacturer. If I buy a TV I have a right to expect it to keep working for five years or more and will take it back to the retailer and if necessary threaten them with Small Claims Court action if they try to give me the run around. I've never actually had to start proceedings. It seems standing at the customer service desk with a copy of the relevant legislation and a stubborn attitude is enough to make them give me my money back.
YMMV of course.
Disgree with both you points, the first because you've completely misunderstood.
"RIght to Repair" is about you having the right to decide how/if/where your kit is repaired and absolutely nothing to do with YOU repairing the kit yoursefl unless you so want to. Read up on any number of companies that severely restrict your ability to have your kit repeaired in various ways (John Deere tractors is probably the worst company out there in this regard).
As to your second point, even if it is true, so what? Just because an item is (possibly) less likely to fail, are you really saying it doesn't matter if it can't be easily repaired? And you only need to look at the design and build of the most recent iPhones (compared to the previous model) to see how it is possible to make a modern device more repairable.
Took the words clean out of my mouth. TOTAL AGREEMENT here.
To the first anon up-chain, I have this rant:
"The focus needs to be on giving the right and ability to independent specialists, who will have the competence to get it right."
Louis Rossman? He *IS* one of those independent specialists, who is unable to repair some boards because the manufacturers:
* Deliberately will not sell him the ONE CHIP that would fix a thousand dollar board
* DELIBERATELY makes it difficult to get board layouts/schematics for their products
* DELIBERATELY created a 'certification' program for independent repair companies that makes it a nightmare to comply with.
In order to perform the work under Apple's independent repair certification program, they demand irrelevant information about the customer and/or the device, will not allow the shop to keep a supply of spares in stock (increasing the turn around time to a minimum of a couple WEEKS because each part has to be ordered!), still will not sell anything but assemblies to the shops (NO power management IC for you!), REQUIRES the shop to allow access to the store at random for compliance audits with a single mistake ending up getting your certification revoked, and adds enough administrative overhead that it's just easier for the shops to say "fuck it, we'll keep doing what we are already doing" in regards to harvesting (hopefully) good chips from unrepairable donor boards, finding leaked schematics and circuit diagrams from possibly shady entitles that may or may not be valid,
And even then, there are times where the shop will have the horrible task of telling the customer "sorry, your device is fucked because we can't get the $20 chip that would fix it because the manufacturer of the chip is barred from selling that chip to anyone BUT the manufacturer of the device", or being able to perform data recovery because the storage is soldered on the board and can't be removed. (that's ignoring the TPM and device encryption, which is a separate rant all together)
"Specifically, the law requires manufacturers to reasonably provide documentation, diagrams, parts, and tools for consumer electronics sold in New York to device owners and repair shops so that they can diagnose and fix their broken stuff by themselves."
The article seems quite clear that the focus is on owners and repair shops. The original poster appears to agree that the ability needs to be given to independent repair shops, they're mainly querying the wisdom of including owners as making equipment repairable by somebody with little competence could easily lead to equipment that needs more frequent repairs. And I'm guessing that's something that would please businesses providing independent repair services, who seem to be the most vocal campaigners for the right to repair.
For my part, I think manufacturers need to be more open with repair resources (manuals, tools, spares, etc) and credit to NY...
Current "reliable" products have planned obsolescence built in, so that after a set number of years the device becomes unusable.
For instance a chip gets current close to its maximum specs and after a couple of years simply dies. Then you could repair the device by replacing the chip, probably also by changing supporting parts so that it doesn't get under strain. But you can't.
Some companies also use materials that degrade with time - have you notice how mice of well known manufacturer get sticky after a year or two of use? The coating degrades and there is nothing you can do about it, apart from scrubbing sticky layer with some alcohol every week or two and once you get tired of it you have to buy a new mouse, because manufacturer says there is no problem.
Secondly, we mustn’t get blind to how much more reliable modern kit is, than in the past. Modern manufacturing methods, whilst making it harder to dismantle kit, also make the need to dismantle much less.
Not all electronics from the past are less reliable than modern technology. I found a Nokia 1600 and a charger recently when clearing out a cupboard. That worked fine with a SIM card in it and I was able to call myself. I suspect that’s only going to stop working when they turn off the 2G networks. When I travel I take a Sony radio (SW100) from 1984 that still works perfectly. My bedside radio is a Philips from 1986, both of those have digital tuning, covering LW, MW, SW & FM. I had a comparably expensive DAB radio for less than two years when that died. Another cheaper one lasted a similar amount of time and my Mum told me at Christmas that her one from John Lewis had stopped working suddenly one night in the middle of the Archers. She resorted to the very old one that was now supposed to be retired and had to return the DAB one to John Lewis.
In some cases, parts cost is already silly. You can buy all the "spares" required to repair anything on a particular brand of laptop. So many part that you can actully buy everything you need to build an entirely new laptop. The total cost of all those spares, bearing in mind it's now a self-assemble device with pretty much no warranty, is about 60% to 100% than just buying a new laptop.
Back in the day, I was given a broken Commodore Vic 20. I then bought a "spare part" replacement '64 system board for about 1/10th the price a Commodore 64 full system. It made upgrading a Vic20 to '64 highly economic at the time. Yes, the PSU, case and keyboard was fully compatible between the Vic20 and '64 :-) Nowadays, spares are an income stream and often unique to model,
What I want is a bulkhead light fitting where, when the lamp dies, you swap out the lamp. Y'know, like any ordinary light. Not what has become the norm, that when the lamp dies, you have to power off the circuit and replace the entire fitting, and then repair and redecorate and make good the wall/ceiling. Turning it from a user maintanance task like getting a new toilet roll, to an electrician repair.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsIFxyOLJXM
Shame on El-reg. Not only for commentary like "so you may end up being offered a large bag of parts rather than individual pieces", which is just wrong. The bill allows manufacturers to ship sub assemblies aka daughter boards, which is what many of them are already doing with some of their own diy repair services.
The story has also done exactly what (in the linked video) LR said the media would do by celebrating it as a win for the right to repair movement rather than the status quo that it is.
About the only positive change this law will have is that independent repair shops should be able to buy the sub assemblies directly rather than having to go through grey channels. Who knows if that will be enough with security keys still being restricted by the manufacturer which may still mean that you've got to buy multiple sub assemblies due to them being cryptographicilly tied if a single part of one dies
I feel your pain.
Had a failed (sticks in fully up position) headlight motor on my car, quoted price for a COMPLETE NEW light assembly from (unfriendly_car_parts) was £450.
This is for a fairly old otherwise mechanically sound car, nothing fancy like HID or suchlike.
£450 because a single connector pin inside the lamp has gone intermittent.
Cheaper to scrap the entire vehicle when MOT finally comes in, than risk a fine.
As it is, I can make do by simply leaving it in that position on the opposite side, its perfectly safe to use like this.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
