But where will the good intentions lead?
This may be an unpopular view but my concern with the right to repair concept (which I can’t disagree with in principle) is that the legislators will overshoot and require easy repair as well. That, when implemented and enforced could return us to the time in the 60’s and 70’s when consumer goods such as TVs, radios, kettles, etc were quite easy to repair (and part-time work doing so, whilst a student, nicely supplemented my grants/loans). The problem was that it often needed repairing because the very act of making repair easy resulted in more points of failure. As TV electronics became more integrated and difficult to repair, the number of repairs (per unit sold) reduced. If we had the same reliability as 40 years ago, with the vastly greater number of units sold, all the empty high street units would be full of repair shops.
The current bête noir is often the iPhone and its battery. My experience with mobile phones over the past 30 years has been that the iPhone has been the most reliable and, any time I’ve needed a battery replacement, it’s been no more expensive than it used to cost for, say, a common Nokia.
Taking the automotive sector, most cars are far harder to repair nowadays, but the current situation where routine services are annual/10,000 miles and, even then, little more than an oil and filter change - and no need to tinker between services to maintain performance - would have seemed utopia when I first got a car.
Yes, we need the right to repair, and access to manuals, tools and spares, but not at the expense of increasing the *need* for repair.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
