Right to repair, my problem with it

[themadhippy]

Think about the childen! Yes, really: what if a child opens the device after seeing this video

with that sort of attitude there wont be any need for the right to repair as there wont be any engineers around in a generation or two.I know im not the only one,who at an early age wanted to know how things worked and was taking  the back of stuff to see the "magic"

[Shock]

Mandating longer warranties is the way to go. It will change the whole ecosystem. We need to be thinking in terms of 5, 10 and 20 years and beyond products. Sustainably needs to be taught to generation A and B at an early age. They will be affected directly by our and their management of the environment, food production, energy and waste. They need to be innovators of change rather than vapid social media personalities.

[langwadt]

Mandating longer warranties is the way to go. It will change the whole ecosystem. We need to be thinking in terms of 5, 10 and 20 years and beyond products. Sustainably needs to be taught to generation A and B at an early age. They will be affected directly by our and their management of the environment, food production, energy and waste. They need to be innovators of change rather than vapid social media personalities.

are you willing to pay for it? is everyone else?

[Brumby]

Showing a teardown of the device ... ... ...


And what are the comments on many sites discussing this?

The manufacturer is expecting it to break.
It's dangerous!
Think about the childen! Yes, really: what if a child opens the device after seeing this video...

Apparently many users do not even want repairability.

No.  Those responses are the nanny state thinkers and armchair warriors when they have nothing better to do.

The better time to get their opinion is if the device HAS a fault and they are faced with the repair bill.

[themadhippy]

Mandating longer warranties is the way to go. It will change the whole ecosystem. We need to be thinking in terms of 5, 10 and 20 years and beyond products.

supposedly in the uk we have 6 year warranty against manufacturers defects,good luck trying to get them to accept that or admit its there fault it broke and not down to  wear and tear or abuse,

[bdunham7]

Mandating longer warranties is the way to go. It will change the whole ecosystem.

Warranty does not mean repairability.  Even many simple products now are entirely unsupported in any technical way and the only thing the seller can do is a unit replacement.  I just repaired a $400 mini wine cooler for a friend--the so-called manufacturer (actually an importer) offers no service, parts or information and suggests buying a new unit if anything fails.  A new generic 120mm fan (and a drop of oil would have fixed that) and it is good to go--except the power brick gets too hot.  It likely needs some capacitors, but it is glued together....

There's no technical reason this needs to be this way.  Most of the parts that are likely to fail on this unit are not uncommon or strange and any idiot with a screwdriver set should be able to replace most of them.  Power bricks can easily be made to screw together, with a sticker over the screw holes.  Warranty policy won't help any of these issues.

[Brumby]

Mandating longer warranties is the way to go....

are you willing to pay for it? is everyone else?

We are all going to pay no matter what direction things go.  It's simple economics.

Yes, your old TV from the 60s or 70s could be more readily repaired - but they cost a greater percentage of the average wage back then than today's offerings.  The market has also changed significantly as well.

I think it's a case of Back To The Future. ..

[Psi]

Selling spare parts of an appliance can be a lot more profitable, margin wise, than selling the original device.

Even if it cost 3 times the retail price to buy all the parts necessary to build the entire product those spare parts would still be reasonably priced for a repair.

Normally the part needed for a repair is a very small percentage of the total product so paying a bit more for it is not really a problem.

Obviously there is a point where the part is overpriced and the manufacture is trying to force you to buy a new one rather than repair the old one.  However i think there is quite a bit of room between these two points for spare parts to be priced fair while still giving a good profit margin to the manufacture that is higher than the margin on the original product.

I don't see supplying spare parts to be something that needs to be "paid for"

[ataradov]

Having to manage a warehouse of those spare parts and logistics of shipping them one by one is a nightmare.  And you will not get too many retail shops wanting to carry all the parts for all the devices in a world, so it would be on a vendor to ship them and then deal with the customers that screwed up something because they tried to do something like in a TikTok video.

It is way more complicated than it seems.

And in some cases parts are not even available in one place, they go into sub-assemblies, which are shipped to other locations for final assembly.

[bdunham7]

It is way more complicated than it seems.

Operating systems, open heart surgery and rocketeering are also very complicated, but they are solved problems in a mature field.  No matter how horrendously complicated you try to make parts and service, it has been done successfully for many years by all sorts of companies.  The economics may fail at some point using old methods, mostly due to the ongoing costs of having people available.  And some products are indeed just not reasonably repairable.  But the example I am talking about would cost a pittance to make parts and information available.  However, they've chosen not to and the obligations of a warranty seem unlikely to change their minds.

[Brumby]

The bottom line in the fundamentals of Right To Repair don't really insist on the enforcement of parts being made available.  It's more in the direction that access to parts should not be blocked.

Allow suppliers the freedom to sell components, assemblies or whatever and let open market economics dictate what is available and for how long.  If a manufacturer or other party has an interest in the intellectual property for something, then, by all means, add a royalty into the pricing - as long as it's not onerous.

Even Louis Rossmann has said (and I'm paraphrasing) he'd be happy to pay $20 for a $5 (retail) chip to do repairs rather than having to harvest it from a $100(plus) product - which he has done.


Some people are reading "Force the manufacturer to carry repair inventory" into the argument - which I can see is one direction this can go - but it's the practice of blocking access which needs to be outlawed, at the very least.

[Psi]

A forced spare parts system, if one existed, would encourage manufactures to use off-the-shelf parts wherever available. If no off-the-shelf part currently exists, they would want to get a company that specializes in those type of parts to add one to their publicly available range. Not necessarily a stocked range, but something that could be ordered by anyone. (I'm thinking about generic things here, pulleys, belts, wheels, generic gate ICs etc, not ASICs or anything IP related)

If there's a market for a part someone will buy 5000 from that manufacturer, or whatever the min order run is, and then resell them.

It means that the manufacture has only a very small number of spare parts they themselves need to supply.
It's only really things like ASICs or other stuff that has IP or for which blocking competitors from using it is desirable.


I think we can all agree that using a standard or protocol is better than inventing your own one in 99% of cases.
It should be the same for parts.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Having to manage a warehouse of those spare parts and logistics of shipping them one by one is a nightmare.

DigiKey and Mouser seem to have no problems doing this. I can (and have) order a single resistor from them.

[ataradov]

DigiKey and Mouser seem to have no problems doing this. I can (and have) order a single resistor from them.

Yes, but this is their entire job.

If I make a tea kettle or a microwave oven, and I make some non-standard part for them, then I will now have to turn into DigiKey and start doing retail shipping of individual parts. And all of a sudden I have to handle personal information for a lot of people (which in EU will require to have another position filled). And before all of that all I had to do is ship a container of assembled and packaged products to retail distributors.

Or I will have to somehow make an agreement with likes of DigiKey to distribute my part. But DigiKey will not do it for free, and likely require ongoing payments for warehouse storage for items that don't move a lot.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Or I will have to somehow make an agreement with likes of DigiKey to distribute my part. But DigiKey will not do it for free, and likely require ongoing payments for warehouse storage for items that don't move a lot.

I think this model could work. Parts are small, and the costs of warehousing them shouldn't be prohibitive. Manufacturers could work with DigiKey to set up BOMs for their products to make it easy to find and order parts needed for repairs.

[themadhippy]

How did we cope in the past,no online global markets,just your local specialist shop that actually repaired things, who would order the broken bit in for you if  they didn't have one on  the shelf.

[ataradov]

How did we cope in the past,no online global markets,just your local specialist shop that actually repaired things, who would order the broken bit in for you if  they didn't have one on  the shelf.

Things were WAY simpler in design and capabilities. You don't want to go back to that.

[Alti]

Things were WAY simpler in design and capabilities. You don't want to go back to that.

Even the solutions to problems of today, including RTR, has to keep up with increasing complexity. If a washing machine 20 years ago consisted of 100 parts and current models include 500 parts then I cannot imagine this "Digikey" RTR in the next 20 years. Looks like this has to be modularized somehow, otherwise this is going to be insanely complex (think Moore's law). Now, the modules as such won't fall under RTR and we end up at the same point of unrepairability, but this time on module level.

[Psi]

A manufacturer getting custom parts produced by another manufacturer isn't a problem so long as anyone can go to the same manufacturer and also get a run of the same part.

If you take most products and break them down, the number of custom parts is quite small.
Most of the custom parts are enclosure related.

[Brumby]

Even the solutions to problems of today, including RTR, has to keep up with increasing complexity. If a washing machine 20 years ago consisted of 100 parts and current models include 500 parts then I cannot imagine this "Digikey" RTR in the next 20 years. Looks like this has to be modularized somehow, otherwise this is going to be insanely complex (think Moore's law). Now, the modules as such won't fall under RTR and we end up at the same point of unrepairability, but this time on module level.

This all depends on what those 500 parts are.  IF we follow the thoughts presented by Psi, there could be a lot of parts that would be considered "jelly bean".  Digikey (et al) might already have a lot of these already in inventory.

This then extends into a narrow and misdirected thinking of repair.  Modular repair is only one option.
 Component level repair is an alternative that reduces inventory.

[Zero999]

Mandating longer warranties is the way to go. It will change the whole ecosystem. We need to be thinking in terms of 5, 10 and 20 years and beyond products.

supposedly in the uk we have 6 year warranty against manufacturers defects,good luck trying to get them to accept that or admit its there fault it broke and not down to  wear and tear or abuse,

Do you have any proof of that?

The last I heard was UK consumer protection laws state something vague like the product should be of reasonably quality and last for a reasonable length of time, given its price. In theory the idea is if you buy a top of the range produce, it should last much longer than a cheap on. In practise it's ambiguous and difficult to prove anything.

[themadhippy]

Do you have any proof of that?

Its buried somewhere in the 2015 consumer rights act,but as you say is all rather vague

Modular repair is only one option

But what is a module? for example are the  whole innards of a toaster,elements thermostat,lifting mechanism etc a module that you replace so the only original parts are the enclosure and the mains cable?

[DrG]

US patent office weighs in on the issue https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-23311.pdf

also see https://www.ifixit.com/News/54317/section-1201-exemptions-for-2021-repair-consoles-medical-devices

[Zero999]

Do you have any proof of that?

Its buried somewhere in the 2015 consumer rights act,but as you say is all rather vague

Where? I've not seen any reference to fixed warranty periods in UK consumer law.

Incidentally, UK consumer law applies in addition to any warranty. Suppose an expensive product only has a warranty of 6 months and it fails after 7 months. It's still theoretically possible to get a repair, replacement, or refund from the seller, irrespective of it being outside the warranty period, because it hasn't lasted for a reasonable length of time. Note the customer should always go to the seller, as it's them who they have given the money and have made the contract with. The seller can then make a claim with the manufacturer.

[Shock]

We have similar "fit for purpose" laws here. Not having this or only mandating a year warranty will never work these days as you get the "pump and dump" manufacturers/oems that exploit this. Which also sums up a large part of the problem, it's not the credible brands who are the issue it's their eventual demise being unable to compete on an uneven playing field. Being undercut or up against brands that churn products constantly and throw huge resources into marketing "limited lifetime" or low cost products.

People need to stop worrying about semantics of who pays for an extended warranty. We all pay for everything in the end, but it's moving responsibility to the manufacturer, that is key to prevent a race to the bottom.