3-6 Repair Rights: Fighting Planned Obsolescence

Alright, here's a question: once you buy something, do you own it? Like, do you really own it, like you can do whatever you want with that thing? It sounds like a simple question, but there actually are a lot of limits to what exactly you can do with what you own. So let's say you buy a car, you get the title, it's yours. You own it. You can do whatever, go drive it somewhere wherever you want to go. But you also can't drive over certain speeds in certain places. So that's a limit that we understand; we get it for safety reasons. [ 00:34 ]

Or let's say you buy a printer. You own that photocopier, that printer. You can do whatever you want with it, put it in whatever room you want, put it on whatever table you want to, start printing stuff. But you know what happens if you try to start photocopying money? It just doesn't let you. You can try—well, don't try—but it'll actually stop you. You can't do that. And there are good reasons for that. So there are certain limits that we've actually accepted for things that we own. And so one of those limits that's been talked about quite a bit lately that's worth shining a light on is "right to repair." [ 01:04 ]

So if you own something and it breaks, should you be allowed to repair it, fix it? Honestly, that should be a pretty easy yes across the board. There's no problem with that, and no one's going to stop you if you try to do it. There's no law against it, but it's almost impossible to actually do it. Let's talk about that. [ 01:24 ]

So, right to repair. Now, I actually think it's a little bit of a misleading name or a little confusing just because you actually are allowed to repair the thing you own. There's no law against that, but it's the companies that make the things that we're often trying to repair that are trying to stop you before you even get that far. So here is the main crux of the right-to-repair conversation right now, ready? You buy a thing, right, a piece of tech, a phone. You own it, you use it, and then part of it breaks. Let's say your screen breaks; that's pretty common. [ 02:00 ]

There are two versions of what you think should happen at this point, depending on who you are. There's the user side, and there's the manufacturer's side. So I'm just going to start with the user side because it should be the easiest to understand. You should just be able to pop off the broken screen, buy a new screen, put it on, repair it, and still keep using that thing. Of course, you should be able to repair the item you own. [ 02:25 ]

And there's a million great reasons why. Repair saves the user money, of course. So to stick with the phone example, if just the screen is broken and the entire rest of the phone is still functional, then it's way cheaper to replace the screen than to buy a whole new phone, of course. But also, it saves the environment. So instead of creating unnecessary e-waste, throwing out a perfectly usable thing because of one broken part, we can make a meaningful change to this throwaway economy that so many of us live in. Just keep using the thing as long as it works. And also, the fact is not everybody needs brand new phones. So if you someday want to upgrade to a new phone, somebody else can benefit from that used phone with probably just a few replaced parts. That's way better than throwing the whole thing out. So the fact is, the more easily replaceable and repairable parts that are in our gadgets, the better it is for the user. [ 03:16 ]

For the user. And as you can probably imagine, that means that the manufacturers, the companies that are making these things, are on the complete opposite side of that equation. They're going to want control. [ 03:32 ]

So I'm going to use Apple as the example here, right? So they make this iPhone. Business 101, right, once they sell you this iPhone, sure, you do own it, but their best interest is to retain as much control over this iPhone as they possibly can. Because everything about this transaction is better for them if they have more control. So you can pay and own the iPhone, sure, but if Apple controls the accessory market as much as they can, they can keep selling you accessories and taking a cut of everything made for iPhone. So they can continue making money off of the thing they sold you. This is literally called the MFi program: Made for iPhone. [ 04:10 ]

If Apple controls the services that run on the iPhone, they can make their own work the best, and they can keep selling you even more of those things and making even more money off of that one iPhone purchase. And if it breaks, Apple would also like to be the ones to sell you the repairs by keeping as much control over that ecosystem as possible. [ 04:28 ]

Honestly, in Apple's dream world, there probably are no independent repair shops at all, right? You can't have people getting in and replacing parts in their precious iPhones. You know, if someone does the instructions wrong, maybe they repair something incorrectly and it doesn't work, or they get counterfeit parts and they don't even know they're not using real iPhone parts. Or maybe they use a weird third-party battery that has problems later down the line. Like, it's too much. So if Apple has all the control here, then they eliminate all those possible variables. [ 04:58 ]

But you can't control everything, Apple. That would be a monopoly, actually. So, and you can probably see where this is going. Apple would like to offer you a choice. You can choose to become an Apple-certified repair shop. Only the Apple-certified shops have access to Apple's training, official documentation, and the ability to buy official parts straight from Apple to do the best possible repairs. But you have to pay a fee to Apple to become certified, you have to log everything, and now there are lots of limits, actually, to the types of repairs you're even allowed to make. [ 05:34 ]

It's to the point where it would actually be a bad business decision for a lot of these independent shops that already exist to become Apple certified because it would limit so much of what they were trying to do. Lewis Rossmann, you might have heard of him—technician, educator, guy with a YouTube channel in New York City—he's made videos talking about this. Listen to him describe all the potential downsides of potentially joining that program in one of his videos. [ 05:58 ]

As I mentioned in a follow-up video, this program is virtually useless because they put a lot of barriers in place to keep new people from being able to sign up. It seems like it's intentionally designed to be difficult. The prices for screens were not great for the iPhone 6 and 6s. They're charging more for the screen than a customer can purchase a phone for. And above all, they don't do anything besides batteries and screens. So, charge port? No, batteries and screens. Your microphone or earpiece doesn't work? Nope, just batteries and screens. You have a problem with your MacBook? I'm sorry, we only cover iPhone batteries and screens. It is a virtually worthless program. [ 06:37 ]

Repair shops have to agree to unannounced audits and inspections by Apple to determine if they're using prohibited repair components, which can result in fines. So I would be fined most likely for being able to fix motherboards in my premises by having access to chips that Apple doesn't want me to have access to so you can retain your data when I fix your board rather than have it replaced by Apple and erased. Even if a shop leaves the program, Apple can continue to inspect it for up to five years. Imagine you have a job that requires drug testing and you quit the job, and then they still try to enforce the drug testing for five years. Yeah. [ 07:16 ]

Yeah, clearly there are countless examples of Apple going the extra mile to prevent repairs on the iPhone: lawsuits, terrible contracts. Something else Lewis has actually talked about in his videos is Apple has been known to make small changes to an off-the-shelf part that they put into one of their products and then make a contract where that company that makes that thing cannot sell it to anyone other than Apple. And that might seem crazy at first—it kind of is—but when you think about it from the perspective of a smaller manufacturer, Apple descends upon your campus and goes, "We'd like to order 20 million of this chip, but you can't sell to anyone else other than us." Well, with an order size that big, business sense says, "All right, fine." They'll just do it. [ 08:00 ]

Now, I'm just using Apple as an example here because they're easy to understand, but there are a lot of other examples. It's not just Apple. Famously, John Deere, yes, the tractor company, has taken an extremely anti-repair stance with their tractors. Basically arguing farmers may own those tractors, but the software that runs on those tractors is owned and copyrighted by John Deere. So when something breaks and the software locks the farmer out of the tractor, farmers have taken to hacking their tractors and literally digging into potentially pirated software to get around those software blocks and avoid dealing with the company so they can repair it themselves. It's been a whole mess. [ 08:41 ]

And even Tesla has notoriously very hard-to-get parts, and they just hate people messing with the insides of their cars. They constantly lock out attempted salvaged cars from the supercharger network and from software updates. They'll literally blacklist certain VIN numbers to prevent them from getting any more software. [ 08:59 ]

Now, you could see how Tesla might argue that this is a safety thing. It's for safety reasons. "We don't want people getting in those cars and making modifications because they could hurt themselves." In an old car, sure, pop open the hood, change some oil. But in a Tesla, it's way more complex. We don't want somebody messing with the battery and hurting themselves. So that's an argument they can make. I actually thought about this when Simone Giertz made her Truckla video, where she modified a brand new Model 3 to a level I've never seen anyone else go to. She turned it into a pickup truck and made an incredible video about that process that you should watch if you haven't already. [ 09:35 ]

So what was the reaction from Tesla when you did all that? Like, did Truckla get blacklisted? We were kind of building it with this fear hanging over our head that there were going to be repercussions from Tesla, that they were going to stop me from getting software updates, which would be really bad, or that they would prevent me from supercharging, which is kind of one of the penalties they can give you if you're doing weird stuff. Fortunately, none of that happened. And I think the project got so much traction that it would look really bad for them to go after me. [ 10:14 ]

But it's also like, I remember scheduling a service appointment because I had some software issues, and the service tech, before I came in, called and was like, "Hey, I know who you are and I know what you've done to your car." And I was so freaked out that I actually didn't go. And it's kind of weird that you're scared of a company punishing you for doing something with their product. Like, you should kind of be allowed to do whatever you want. [ 10:48 ]

Yeah, I guess the other side at least has one good reason, which is safety. So, you know, you had a lot of help and you had a team that was really skilled around you, but most people aren't going to be able to do really high-quality modifications to their Tesla. For sure. I mean, I think it's interesting because the reasoning around locking it down so much is to keep people safe and for people to not do dangerous modifications. Truckla is probably definitely in the realm of dangerous modifications. We did it as safely as we could, and we have every crossbeam in the car, and we had a really, really skilled team. But I get that they're like, "Okay, what if we give people free hands? Like, they can kill themselves on this." [ 11:33 ]

And you see that they kind of use it as a reason to prevent even very small modifications, being like, "Oh, people could do these really dangerous things, so we can't even have them do these really basic things." And I think that's like, it's all about control, and it's about extending the time that you can earn money on a product that you've sold. Because if you control service and all the upgrades and everything, then you can make sure that you can still earn money on a car that you sold seven years ago. [ 12:02 ]

So I remember when I got into an accident with my Tesla Model S, and it was pretty rough. She was clearly going to need a bunch of new parts, new doors, etc. You could tell that just looking at it. And I just remember it got to the point where there was a distinct choice that I had to make between going to literally any body shop in the area who would do their best in a few weeks, or getting it towed an extra hour to that one Tesla-certified body shop. And they would have an extra long wait for official parts, but they would do their best for a perfect repair, literally to Tesla spec, where if a Tesla engineer looked at it, they couldn't tell it's replaced parts. And I chose that one. And that choice was a combination of, clearly, I can't do it myself, it's far too complicated, but also, you know, the car was valuable enough to me that I didn't really want to risk it on a potentially subpar repair to save a few weeks or a few dollars. [ 13:00 ]

But that leads me to my number one overarching thought every time I think about right-to-repair in tech, which is that tech is getting very complicated. [ 13:10 ]

So it is clear that right-to-repair benefits us, the users, you and me. Right, we can see that. And we can also see that the manufacturers are on the other side of that equation. But something else I've noticed just in the tech world—and kind of everything is tech—but something I've noticed is as tech gets better, especially lately, it's getting more and more well-optimized and more tightly integrated. Like, parts are connected to each other more, they talk to each other faster. All the tech is getting better, but it's getting more well-connected and more integrated. And so as that happens, and all the tech is getting better, that's also making it less repairable at the same time, which makes sense, right? [ 13:56 ]

Because if things are more tightly integrated and you're fusing chips onto each other like that, that's just harder to disassemble and reassemble. It's harder to repair. Back in the golden age of a lot of tech products, maybe that's the '80s or the '90s or the early 2000s, they were at that height of repairability. Like if somebody broke a cassette tape player, people literally went in there with a screwdriver and could take it apart and get a part and replace it and put it back together, and you're good. I actually literally managed to pull exactly that off in Retro Tech Season One. [ 14:25 ]

Now, today, if part of your gadget breaks, say your phone's glass cracks, look at your phone. Like, most people don't know actually how to replace that themselves, but it's technically repairable. So if you go to the right place or the right people, they can remove the screen, replace it, and get it working again with new parts. So right now, right-to-repair is in this little hotspot bubble in the middle where tech keeps getting better and better and more and more well-integrated, and at the same time, it's getting harder and harder to repair. [ 14:58 ]

What does that future look like? It's kind of a crossroads. Does the future of tech trend to get so good that it's trending towards impossible to repair? Like, look at these new M1 Macs, Apple's best Macs ever by far, right? I daily drive the M1 MacBook Pro at this point. They also just announced this ridiculously, stunningly thin 11-millimeter M1 iMac. And these machines are so good because the M1 system-on-a-chip is more tightly integrated than ever. Like, there is no Intel CPU that back in the day you could pop out and upgrade. There are no RAM sticks that you can just pop out and upgrade. There is no GPU that you can pop out and replace. Everything is built into this same chip, sharing memory, and it works amazingly well. [ 15:42 ]

So does the future of even better tech and faster tech mean a future of almost impossible repairs? Like, that was my sticking point when I'm looking at right-to-repair in tech. Like, that was hard to resolve in my mind. So I asked Lewis Rossmann about this. This is what he told me. [ 15:58 ]

It's a good question. I think that there's two different categories here. So there's the first category of repairs that are more difficult because of technological progress, and the second category are repairs that are more difficult because the manufacturer, just for lack of a better way to put it, just wants to be. So for instance, like with laptops, you used to have a fluorescent backlit screen. You know, like the fluorescent lights that you'd see in warehouses. And then they used the LED. And that'll, instead of, they used to have an inverter board that was probably the size of this remote control that was sitting inside of every laptop. It was really easy to replace. You unplug a wire, you plug it back in. You can do this with your hands. You only need small tools. [ 16:33 ]

Then when the LED backlit screens came out, which would use less power, they're brighter, better color, it was a small chip on the board that was soldered, QFN. And then it got even smaller. It was a ball grid array chip, where the chip has nine little solder balls or 25 solder balls under it, and you need a microscope and fancy equipment to solder it on there. I'm not suggesting with right-to-repair that we should go back to the Stone Age and use devices with black and white screens. [ 16:59 ]

The problem is not with it being smaller or harder to repair. For me, that's my responsibility to figure out how to fix it as the technology gets better and smaller and more integrated. What the problem is, it's not about the large board becoming a tiny chip. It's when I knock on Texas Instruments' door and say, "I'd like to buy a thousand of this chip," and they say, "We can't sell it to you. The manufacturer told us we're not allowed to sell it to you." [ 17:24 ]

So, one of the big criticisms of right-to-repair is, "You know, I don't want to own a phone that looks like Gordon Gekko's in Wall Street. If Lewis had his way, everything would just have giant Phillips screws in it, like something where I hang on my wall." And that's not the case. I would obviously prefer the ability to replace the battery in my device without having to use a heat gun and unglue it. That would, you know, that's my personal preference. But I don't want right-to-repair legislation to push my personal preference for design on consumers or on companies. I just want it to be, if you're going to glue something into the device, whatever it is, I'm willing to jump through all those hoops to fix it. But don't tell the company that made this part they're not allowed to sell it to me. [ 18:04 ]

That is a good take. I like that take. Ultimately, tech is going to continue to evolve, and to us, of course, it looks much more complicated. But also those who repair tech will also continue to evolve and continue to meet that particular challenge. So really what we need at the end of the day is well-written, well-considered legislation that does not allow that anti-consumer, anti-competitive, anti-repair behavior that we've seen from so many companies. And that can preserve that ecosystem of right-to-repair, and then we can move forward with a better future. [ 18:39 ]

We deserve the right to repair the things we own. Simple as that. And by the way, the environment deserves that too. Like, we only get one planet Earth. And last time I checked, a lot of these companies are painting themselves as pretty green, like Apple and Tesla. Last time I checked, every John Deere tractor is pretty green. So we deserve that chance. [ 19:01 ]

So that's been it. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed. And big shout out to Lewis Rossmann and Simone Giertz for taking time to chat. They're very busy people. And also, we're working on an episode of the Waveform podcast in video form that expands on this a lot, that talks to more people and has sort of an all-encompassing right-to-repair video. So I'll have all the links below, including the link to the Waveform channel. And let me know what you think in the comments. What do you think about this movement? Again, that's been it. Talk to you guys in the next one. [ 19:30 ]

Peace. It would have been devastating if they turned me off of superchargers. Like, then you can't... what are you gonna do? Like, find some refrigerator outlet on a gas station and plug it in? Especially because, side note, her range is completely busted since I modified her because it changed the aerodynamics so much. And I also swapped out the tires for custom tires that are really, and wheels that are really heavy. So I mean, her range is like 60% of what it used to be. So she needs a lot of charge. You still daily drive it, though? Yeah, no, I mean, she's all I got. [ 20:14 ]