[HN Gopher] Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repa...
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Microsoft and Apple wage war on gadget right-to-repair laws
Author : holmesworcester
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-05-21 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| squarefoot wrote:
| Then let's vote using our wallet when shopping for example for a
| laptop or a phone. Companies such as Purism and Pine64 already
| offer alternatives, the former in the higher end market, the
| latter in the more affordable one. Their devices are as much open
| as possible, and repairable. Hacking them is not only accepted
| but actually encouraged.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Why Google? They sell very little hardware, and they could even
| benefit from the repair market. It is also one of their best
| weapon against Apple, in the same way that privacy is one the
| best weapon Apple has against Google.
| johncena33 wrote:
| Worst of it is Google was not even in the title of the article.
| The title was editorialized to include Google.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Why is that the "worst of it"? Google is mentioned eleven
| times in the article and not in a "pro right to repair" kind
| of way.
|
| > But it was Google that surprised advocates with the vigor
| of its opposition.
| dang wrote:
| Please stop.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240646
| dang wrote:
| I've taken Google out of the title now in an attempt to mute
| this tedious off-topic tangent. Not your fault; I'm referring
| to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240366.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/gBwWE
| glenneroo wrote:
| Alternately while the page is loading hit ESC and it will
| prevent the pop-up from opening :)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Reduce reuse recycle is _fundamentally against_ the business
| model of BigCorpos. Of course they will fight tooth and nail
| against legislation that impinges on their business model [1]. It
| goes to show how good Apple 's PR department is that people view
| them as an eco-oriented company (hint: they're literally in the
| "producing consumer e-waste market"). But I mean people these
| days also think Microsoft are open-source friendly good guys,
| sooooo
|
| [1] Besides enabling reduce and reuse, right to repair also goes
| directly the business interests of these companies, because 3rd
| party repair shops exist under RTR instead of 100 % of the repair
| revenue going to their franchises or them directly.
| skohan wrote:
| I don't see how this is not blatantly in violation of anti-
| trust laws. It seems to me it is clearly harming the best
| interest of the consumer to have less choice and more expensive
| repair options due to lack of RTR.
|
| I say this as someone who would still use Apple licenced repair
| shops. The standard of service quality is high, and the results
| are dependable and consistent. Why is it not enough to compete
| on quality, and why do they have to behave in an anti-
| competitive manner?
| com2kid wrote:
| As someone who used to work in consumer electronics, I don't
| think HN readers understand exactly how harsh tech reviewers
| come down on devices that aren't as thin as possible. Add an
| extra millimeter and all of a sudden "tech companies yet again
| don't understand female audiences as they make yet another
| monstrously huge device that only men can use." or "this new
| version is unbelievably thick, and is another failure compared
| to Apple's amazing version" where Apple's version is 1 or 2 mm
| thinner.
|
| Laptops, same thing. Even here on HN I've seen multiple people
| talk about how the only reason they can even carry a laptop at
| all is because Apple's newest whatever is so amazingly thin and
| how even a single extra ounce would make the laptop completely
| unusable.
|
| So manufacturers have a choice. Glue everything together and
| make it unrepairable, or get dragged through the mud by
| reviewers and tech enthusiasts.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| > I don't think HN readers understand exactly how harsh tech
| reviewers come down on devices that aren't as thin as
| possible.
|
| I don't think it's reviewers being harsh in their judgements
| independently so much as most press of that kind has a
| symbiotic relationship with manufacturers. They need new
| products with new USPs, however trivial, to feature to
| justify their existence. More product updates mean more
| marketing, a faster purchase cycle, more decisions for
| consumers to make and therefore more interest in reviews.
| com2kid wrote:
| Having sat in on meetings where mechanical engineers
| reported the results of working massive overtime to shave
| each fraction of a millimeter off, I am confident in saying
| that the relationship tends to resemble an abusive one.
| (FWIW this was wearables, not phones)
|
| To be fair, as a customer, thin and light weight is nice,
| and given the choice between a phone with a replaceable
| battery and one that is more mainstream, well, my One Plus
| doesn't have a replaceable battery.
|
| Motorola tried making cashing in on pent up demand for
| Android phones with batteries that could be swapped out. It
| didn't work out too well for them.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| >and all of a sudden "tech companies yet again don't
| understand female audiences as they make yet another
| monstrously huge device that only men can use."
|
| In relation to the thinness, it's the other way around, I
| guess? Last time I checked most women's clothes don't even
| have pockets (someone should start a movement for that, the
| right to have pockets in your pants). My wife's got a
| massively oversized phone with a big battery pack on the
| back, while I don't even tolerate a case because it's bulky
| in my pocket.
| hawski wrote:
| I really like Thom Holwerda's from OSnews take on the article.
| Especially the "glorified toaster makers" part.
|
| https://www.osnews.com/story/133436/microsoft-and-apple-wage...
|
| > What's good enough for the car industry, is more than good
| enough for these glorified toaster makers. Cars are basically
| murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant
| on, but Apple and Microsoft make complicated toasters that you
| need to really screw up in order to hurt anyone with. Computer
| and device makers must be forced to make parts and schematics
| available to any independent repair shop, just like car makers
| have to do.
|
| > So many perfectly capable devices end up in dangerous, toxic
| landfills in 3rd world countries simply because Apple, Microsoft,
| and other toaster makers want to increase their bottom line. It's
| disgusting behaviour, especially with how sanctimonious they are
| about protecting the environment and hugging baby seals.
| ible wrote:
| Other issues aside, "A is just a complicated B, so apply the
| same rules to A as B" is not a formula for good decision
| making.
|
| It's a common way to make bad mistakes though.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The OP has a spesific and accurate statement about danger to
| life and limb. A generic sounbyte does not make a convincing
| counterpoint
| labster wrote:
| A Rectangle is just a complicated Square, so let's just
| subclass. That should work out okay.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle-ellipse_problem
| scrutinizer80 wrote:
| This is wonderfully accurate. :)
| holmesworcester wrote:
| One note: the article misses the connection between this and the
| current lawsuit between Epic and Apple. These companies are
| opposing right-to-repair in part because it undermines the
| ability to maintain control over what software people run on
| their devices, and where they install software from.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| Also, I live in a state (Massachusetts) that has passed _two_
| right-to-repair laws via ballot initiative.
|
| Both passed over intense opposition from the auto industry;
| almost all advertising in the lead up to the vote was in
| opposition.
|
| But it passed in both cases because... it's common sense. If
| you buy a product, it's yours and you should be able to do what
| you want with it, whether that means modifying the hardware or
| running whatever software you want.
| 3GuardLineups wrote:
| inb4 all the Apple shills who will claim they only ever want
| a product in a completely sandboxed environment where the
| device manufacturer holds their hand every step of the way
| katbyte wrote:
| I live Apple and I want them to verify hardware, but I also
| want to ability to go "yes I k know this isn't an apple
| screen/battery or said display has changed - use it anyways
| or register it"
| oneplane wrote:
| I suppose there are differences here, for example the root-
| of-trust of a car still isn't accessible to you; you can't
| run your own ECU firmware unless you jailbreak your ECU.
| Luckily, that is generally not the main 'feature' of the car,
| and for most people a car isn't a brain-extension with
| private and personal aspects.
|
| Keep in mind that this doesn't mean you shouldn't own or
| repair your stuff, but there are significant differences
| between products, and those differences aren't always clear.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But it passed in both cases because... it's common sense.
|
| Yeah. I don't even understand why we have to argue in favor
| of stuff like this. Somehow we ended up living in such a
| fucked up world where the things we purchase don't actually
| belong to us and we actually have to fight tooth and nail to
| make it sane again.
| fish45 wrote:
| I just replaced my phone battery using an iFixit kit a few
| minutes ago. It's probably extended the life of my phone by a
| year.
| keanebean86 wrote:
| I have a garbage laptop from 2012 that's still enough for basic
| browsing. Thanks to a replacement battery and reasonably
| accessible internals it's still working fine. The case is all
| busted but whatever.
|
| Customers should be able to legally get parts. If the original
| company is done making them someone else should be allowed.
|
| I highly doubt repaired devices are massively cutting into
| sale. Most people don't want to deal with the hassle and would
| rather have something new anyways.
| bogwog wrote:
| My iPhone XS Max screen cracked a few weeks ago and I've been
| debating sending it in for repair. Apple charges $300 friggin
| dollars to "fix" the display (I think they just send you a new
| phone).
|
| Looking online, displays only cost around $50-$90. So I've
| considered doing that instead, but if I go down that route, my
| phone will no longer support the "True Tone" feature. This is
| because Apple burned the serial number of the display onto the
| motherboard, so if you try to replace it, they'll know and will
| disable features even though they work perfectly fine.
|
| So in addition to the cost of the screen, I'll also have to buy
| a screen reprogrammer, which is a device that can copy the
| serial number from my old display and write it into the new
| display, so that the phone doesn't realize I replaced the
| screen. The prices I've seen online for these are like $60+, so
| it's still cheaper than sending it to Apple.
|
| I don't understand how this isn't 100% illegal. How the hell
| can Apple get away with doing something so obviously malicious
| and detrimental to consumers and the environment? Those are
| some Scrooge McDuck levels of ridiculousness.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, I just recently replaced the battery in a family member's
| MacBook Air. Surprising that it was even possible to replace
| (thanks iFixit)! With this model the SSD is also replaceable,
| thankfully. Of course, once the logic board itself fails,
| that'll be a whole different story, but at least _some_ aspects
| of the system are repairable.
| hawski wrote:
| With YouTube tutorials and iFixit instructions all I needed was
| a screwdriver and parts from AliExpress. I replaced 4 times a
| screen and 3 times a battery in my wife's BQ Aquaris X until
| the motherboard gave up. It still probably is repairable, but
| not as easy. The phone had seen too much water in it's life...
| I repaired in my time also: Moto G1, Nexus 5X and Pixel 1. It
| was all not difficult. Now I wonder how it will go with Moto G7
| that my wife has when its time will come.
|
| That's one of the reasons I think about Fairphone, but with my
| experience I bought for myself Pixel 1 with a broken screen,
| that I repaired myself. Now my phone is all good except
| software and that makes me think about the Fairphone again.
| Can't wait until Linux phones will get better, maybe Pinephone
| 3 will be a good main phone. But I would like to see a small
| phone, like latest Unihertz Jelly, but without an awful
| Mediatek SoC.
| johncena33 wrote:
| I have submitted this yesterday [1]. The submission didn't make
| the front page. The title of the article is "Microsoft and Apple
| Wage War on Gadget Right-to-Repair Laws". When the title was
| editoralized to insert Google, it made to front-page. Can someone
| explain why the editing of the title?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27225003
| dang wrote:
| It's largely random which submission of an article ends up
| getting traction. That's true across every topic, so I doubt
| that inserting Google into the title made the difference.
|
| As for why - perhaps the submitter felt that it was misleading
| for the title to pick on just MS and Apple when Google is also
| implicated in the article? That's a legit reason to edit a
| title on HN--it's one of the unlesses in " _Please use the
| original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait_ ".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| johncena33 wrote:
| Amazon was also included in the article. I don't see Amazon
| on the title. And the submitter even put Google in front of
| Microsoft. The submitter not only added Google, also changed
| the order.
|
| Probably not random. Since there is always _at least_ one
| anti-Google article makes to front page every day. And the
| quality of discussion on Google related is probably the
| lowest on HN. The mod team didn't seem very eager to
| moederate Google related threads so far.
| dang wrote:
| Well, I'm not going to make a kitchen-sink affair out of
| the title by stuffing Amazon up there as well, so I've
| reverted to the article title above. Now would you please
| stop posting this tedious off-topic stuff?
|
| Everyone who has preferences for one $Bigco over another
| thinks that HN and HN mods are biased against their
| favorite $Bigco and biased in favor of whatever $Bigco they
| don't like. You could substitute any other $Bigco for
| Google in your comment and it would be exactly what other
| commenters claim. This is tedious, as I mentioned; it is
| merely a projection of the commenter's own preferences.
|
| It's the same phenomenon by which zealous sports fans think
| the refs are totally biased. It's actually a cognitive bias
| rooted in the fact that the bad (what you dislike) stands
| out more than the good (what you agree with)--i.e. people
| heavily weight what they dislike, and underemphasize, or
| simply fail to notice, all the countervailing data points.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&qu
| e...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&qu
| e...
| least wrote:
| My main complaint against right-to-repair laws is mostly to the
| extent that some people push for. I am not against manufacturers
| being forced to provide things like schematics or parts to third
| party repair shops. I don't think that companies like Apple
| should be able to decide who is allowed to or not allowed to
| access parts to repair their devices. I also don't think that
| Apple should place DRM on its parts to check in the software
| whether or not what is being used is a genuine part or not. A
| part is either within spec to work correctly or it's not.
|
| I am, however, against the idea of companies being forced to
| design products around being easily repairable. If a company
| wants to make a super thin device with basically no easy way to
| take it apart, that's their prerogative. If a company wants to
| solder on components to the device like RAM or the storage or the
| cpu or gpu, that's their prerogative. There are tradeoffs to both
| approaches to designing the products and you'll find in many
| markets you will absolutely find many options on the market to
| suit your own needs or wants. The government doesn't need to be
| involved in this respect.
| taotau wrote:
| Totally agree with your viewpoint. These sort of laws should
| focus on the realistic ability to repair an item, not the
| practical costs of doing it.
|
| Many of us here would have been called in to upgrade a family
| members SATA hard drive, which was black magic to them, but
| trivial for us. Same applies to soldered on RAM. DRM issues
| aside, its a trivial job to upgrade for someone who knows what
| they are doing. As long as the software doesnt refuse to
| recognize it.
|
| And it makes much more sense for governments to legislate
| around theoretical concepts like DRM, rather than trying to be
| a technical standards body detailing how you should structure
| electronics. They are bound to always be behind on technical
| matters.
| wvenable wrote:
| I agree. I think the market has shown that if not artificially
| hampered by the lack of schematics, parts, and DRM that even
| the most unrepairable seeming products can still be repaired.
|
| A motherboard with soldered on components like RAM or CPU are
| still more likely to fail because of a bad capacitor or some
| liquid damage on the traces.
| nrp wrote:
| The repairability index that France rolled out this year is
| great in that regard. Sellers of certain types of devices
| including smartphones and laptops are required to post a
| repairability score for the product prominently next to the
| price tag. This highlights to consumers which products are
| designed to be usable for longer through repair and upgrade and
| which aren't, even if they otherwise look and function
| similarly.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's a good approach. What would be even more interesting
| is to evaluate how reliable parts are. Spinning hard drives
| were often the first thing to fail for instance, due to the
| mechanical stress. Same thing for ports.
|
| Soldered-on RAM and flash, while almost impossible to
| upgrade, is way more reliable. No vibrations means way less
| mechanical stress.
| endemic wrote:
| How is this different than saying "if a company wants to make
| bad environmental decisions, that's their prerogative"?
| Sometimes the government needs to get involved to prevent
| short-sighted behavior.
| verall wrote:
| Because of the layer of indirection, and potential for missed
| out innovation. Yes, nonrepairable devices are worse for the
| environment, but we had early poorly-repairable ultrabooks
| that helped create a market space for later more-repairable
| ultrabooks.
|
| I think most people just want to ban the worst anti-repair
| actions, like trying to disable the device in the event of
| repair attempts or preventing the use of otherwise compatible
| 3rd-party hardware with key signatures or proprietary
| authentication mechanisms.
| hervature wrote:
| It's different because they are recognizing that the issue
| isn't binary. It' not "bad for the environment" vs "good for
| the environment". It's recognizing there is a gradient of
| solutions ranging from "slowly increasing car efficiencies
| over time to allow for change" and "outright banning fossil
| fuels starting tomorrow". It's recognizing that
| "repairability" isn't the only thing to be optimized for.
| saurik wrote:
| ...but the other thing being optimized for is "thinness"?
| As a society, you are saying sometimes we should just
| accept that things will be bad for the environment, maybe
| even horribly so and at a massive scale... because,
| otherwise, they can't be thin enough?
| LegitShady wrote:
| > am, however, against the idea of companies being forced to
| design products around being easily repairable. If a company
| wants to make a super thin device with basically no easy way to
| take it apart, that's their prerogative. If a company wants to
| solder on components to the device like RAM or the storage or
| the cpu or gpu, that's their prerogative.
|
| Totally agree. But they should be publicly labeled as extreme
| polluters whose devices aren't repairable and who design
| devices that way intentionally.
|
| They should be free to do it, and then free to be denounced for
| it.
|
| >The government doesn't need to be involved in this respect.
|
| The environmental aspect of unrepairable devices should
| probably be regulated like any other industry who makes the
| decisions to pollute because they want to.
| enaaem wrote:
| You get a strange situation where a custom gaming pc will be
| labeled greener than a thin laptop with integrated
| components. Although the GPU alone uses more material and
| electricity than the whole laptops logic board.
| pcurve wrote:
| In spirit, I agree with you. I should be able to choose. My
| concern is, would average folks know about the trade-offs at
| the time of purchase?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I have a proposal: if the company sells some urepairable,
| unrecycleable and toxic piece of shit, then the
| customer/landfill/the government will post the e-waste to their
| head office and they are responsible for storing it untill the
| end of time.
|
| That will get incentives in the right place.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| But Microsoft loves open source... They sure would love right to
| repair too.
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