This article originally ran in 2018.
This week, California’s governor signed SB244 into law. This law, referred to as the “right to repair bill” ensures that any company providing tech in the state will have to supply tools, parts, documentation, and software for seven years for any electronic device costing over $300.
What it doesn’t do is force manufacturers to actually make their stuff repairable in any meaningful way. For example, it doesn’t require that all the chips be individually replaceable. It certainly doesn’t require stuff to be easy to open. While those might seem like losses for the repair industry, that’s good for regular folks. A phone with 100% repairable parts would probably be about as big as a laptop.
I wrote about the right to repair way back in 2018. I’m including that article, along with its original comments, below. Feel free to jump into the conversation!
This week’s Fun Friday article is a little different. Instead of being rank silliness, it’s about something that some people think is silly, and others think is dead serious:
Should you be able to repair your broken electronics?
The last decade has been incredibly bad for people who want to repair or upgrade their electronics. If you look back to 2008 when a lot of people had desktop PCs, you had a lot of ability to fix something if it broke. A few screws and some parts swapping and you were in business. Your phone wasn’t far behind. Most phones had batteries that were easy to swap. You could also swap keypads and cases very easily on a lot of phones, and for the ultimate in upgradability some phones even let you change out the antenna.
During the Great Recession, when PC sales plunged and cell phone sales stayed flat overall, manufacturers looked for ways to cut costs and make their devices look cooler. The answer came with one four letter word, and not the one you might think of…
Glue.
Not specifically Elmer’s Glue, but glue. PC and cell phone makers started taking screws out of their devices and started gluing them. This made for smaller devices without ugly screws. A win-win, most would say. Everything looked sleeker and worked just as well.
Until it didn’t, of course.
When your phone’s screen cracked, there was no way for average folks to fix it. When the battery ran down to nothing, there was no way to replace it. A lot of people didn’t care; they had gotten used to the natural cycle of upgrading or replacing every 18 months, because technology kept improving. Even the recession did little to stop the cycle of upgrades, although slowly people began to hold onto their devices for a longer period of time.
Stores started popping up specializing in fixing these unfixable things, and they’ve been doing all right…
Until they didn’t, of course.
Some stuff can’t be repaired.
It’s not just a matter of components that are too small for human hands to get at. In the name of privacy, some manufacturers started protecting their devices and making it impossible to repair them without very specific hardware. Then, they refused to sell the hardware. A perfect example is the Touch ID sensor in the iPhone. In order to keep the phone secure, Apple made it impossible to replace a Touch ID sensor without a device that only Apple had. I get it… if just anyone could replace a Touch ID sensor than it wouldn’t be very secure. However, since the Touch ID sensor was built into the screen’s sensor assembly, it also meant that the touchscreen would stop working in some cases, and the Touch ID sensor in others.
Today, there is so much inside your average phone or PC that just can’t be fixed if it breaks. Even if you could get into fix it, it would be pretty much impossible to put things back together. A year or so ago I got a Dell laptop that wouldn’t hold a charge. I was determined to see why. It took me an hour to carefully disassemble the laptop only to find that the battery, swimming in a pool of glue, was practically impossible to dislodge. And then I realized that the clips that held much of the insides together had been destroyed just by removing the components. Cut to the end of the story where I bring the laptop to a recycler, in a bag.
Sound off: is this right?
Some folks believe there should be a law that says that all devices, whether cars, computers, or shoes, should be repairable by anyone who buys the right tools. (And that the tools should be available.) Others say that stifles innovation and creates security problems. Who’s right?
I do get it, you can’t put advanced biometrics in a device and then make it easy to bypass them with just a screwdriver. Also, I love my iPhone X and I wouldn’t want it to be twice the thickness just so I could replace the battery if I wanted. I see both sides. What about you? Leave your comments below!
Hello Stuart Sweet,
I fall into the if it is made I or someone else should be able to fix it with everything available. A few examples of a manufacturer making things difficult for some period of time. General Motors and the Torx Wrench. For a whole year the Torx Tools weren’t available. If you automobile had Torx screws, bolts or other fasteners then you either took it to General Motors or, you should pardon the expression, were screwed!!! Ford did a whole design for the Mustang with the 351 cubic inch CLEVELAND engine instead of the 351 Windsor engine. It had a completely redesigned spark plug. Ford bought out the production of the spark plugs for the whole first year. If you had a spark plug that was a problem you either went to Ford of you could attempt to reuse the spark plug and hoped that it would work a while longer. After the first year the spark plugs became much more accessible. On a slightly different direction Ford attempted to invalidate a Ford Motor automobile due to the fact the the owner didn’t use the Autolite filter for his engine. The gentleman was in the Automotive industry and knew that the filter he purchased came from the same factory with only one difference. The name on the outside of the filter. Ford lost and this became the basis for the use of equivalent parts instead of the parts named by the manufacturer. All three of these things occurred decades ago!
Yours,
caseyf5
DRM is the biggest problem in repairing stuff yourself. You can repair stuff yourself but if you don’t have the software codes than even if you have right parts it still won’t work because the DRM keeps the thing lockdown. The next biggest thing is propriety tools or parts that you can only get from the manufacturer. The last big problem is most won’t let you see schematics like they used to give you when you bought a product in the stone age.