General > General Technical Chat

Right To Repair For Non-Technical People.

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Fixed_Until_Broken:
Ok, I could use some advice here. It's a 2 part question.

The first part is about explaining it to non-technical people. What concepts are obvious to us but hard to explain to random people? What concepts do you think are simply too complex to explain to non-technical-minded people?

Second part If you were making content on this subject where would you post it? Again the goal is to reach people outside the circle of electronics or repair. I can't think of ways to post it without feeling like I am spamming. The only places I get comfortable posting are r/righttorepair or repair groups on Facebook. I am sure other places would work I just know I am missing my target audience with where I am posting it.

If you find yourself going why the hell is this guy asking these questions, I have made some short 15 second videos on the topic. I want to do more of them. The biggest problem I have with the videos is it's only reaching other technically minded people. I can tell from the comment section on them. I am doing short videos (#Youtube shorts lol) to make them really bite-size concepts to plant the seed. I think getting people interested in small bites will lead them to find more info ( or for the algorithms to feed it to them).

Zero999:
How about making it more economical to get things repaired?

Subsidies for repair services would be good in theory, to cut down on waste, but cynically people will find a way round it to make money, which won't have the desired effect.

KE5FX:
"Imagine if the hood on your car were locked shut, and only the dealer had the key."

That used to work until the automakers started removing dipsticks and adding DRM to car batteries, anyway.

SiliconWizard:
The problem is that the right to repair faces major obstacles: one is the price tag - products that are less or not repairable can be designed and manufactured for cheaper, and people are used to this. You can consider the long-term cost, of course, and figure that a repairable device costs less in the end. But most people have difficulties reasoning about longer terms than a few years. A related issue is that many (most?) people are used to products evolving relatively fast (even when the modifications are relatively minor), and I guess many are actually glad their devices stop functioning after a couple years, so that gives them an opportunity to buy new ones.

HobGoblyn:
Imagine you have a car.

You want the brakes checked.

Main dealer costs the earth, so you take it to a good well known local garage with excellent mechanics.

They find the brake pads need replacing, but the car manufactures will ONLY sell the brake pads to the main dealers, so your local garage can no longer change the pads.

Worse still, these particular brake pads have a little chip on them with a serial number on them, that chip is programmed into your cars computer.  And ONLY the main dealers have access to the software to reprogram them.

So even if your local garage had an identical car to yours, that for some reason was spare, they couldn’t take the brake pads off of that car and put them on yours as the car wouldn’t recognise the serial numbers hence  would refuse to start.

Or

Imagine you damaged the headlight, you go to a scrap yard, get an identical one off an identical car, costs you £/$50, your car now refuses to start, as as far as it’s computer is concerned, the headlight doesn’t match what’s programmed into the computer.  If you had access to that software, you could be happily driving in your way.

Now imagine your headlamp broke, you took it to a main dealer, even though you can replace it yourself if they would allow you to, they tell you that to buy a replacement headlamp will cost you £/$1000 just for the part.

Or they tell you that due to your headlamp being broken, your car is now totally useless, unrepairable and you need to buy a new car.

That is the sort of thing that’s happening with mobiles at the moment.

There’s also many YouTube vids of people say going into Apple as their iPhones have broke, and they’ve got very sentimental photos etc on there and Apple saying that it’s beyond repair….,  them sending it to one of the companies fighting for the right to repair, and those companies managing to retrieve all the user’s photos etc that Apple said they couldn’t do. If the likes of Apple had their way, these 3rd party companies wouldn’t exist, hence the many people that use them would have lost their photos etc for ever.

Each newer model phone is deliberately made harder/impossible to be fixed by 3rd parties, not because they lack the skill, but because Apple do what I described in my car analogy, take a part off an identical phone and they deliberately have software that says the serial numbers don’t match hence phone won’t work.

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