New Hampshire Lawmaker Kills Repair Bill Because 'Cellphones Are Throwaways'
I wish all the energy being thrown at &quot;repair&quot; laws would instead go into better warranty laws, which I think is the real underlying issue of which &quot;repairability&quot; is only a symptom. An easy to repair device still leaves the consumer paying money, and often ridiculously early (within a year or two even for top end gear). When people spend $500-1k for a smartphone say, I think there is the general expectation it&#x27;ll work for at least a good 4-5 years under normal usage, and that most people do in fact experience that. But a percentage don&#x27;t, and then have to take on the entire cost, or else everyone has to overpay heavily through &quot;extended warranties&quot; which are big profit centers that have no clear pricing, are hidden from the sticker price, and create perverse incentives.<p>So basically it&#x27;s a classic externality problem. Instead the law should simply make sure that &quot;how long a device lasts&quot; matches reasonable expectation. There are many ways to do this, such as saying everything is 6 months minimum for the first $50 and then another month per $15-20 up to a maximum of 5 years, and mandating repair&#x2F;replace will happen within 2 weeks. The specifics could be hashed out, but the goal should be to makes sure that for the price consumers see advertised they are promised it will than work for a knowable reasonable lifespan for zero extra cost. &quot;Extended&#x2F;enhanced warranties&quot; should only exist for special commercial&#x2F;professional use cases, like extreme support periods, specific fast SLA, or advanced RMAs. By law though all standard use should be covered.<p>Then manufacturers can figure out the right mix of strategies to meet those goals. Repairability might be part of that, because they could satisfy their obligations more cheaply. But it&#x27;s not the only way or the necessarily right way in all cases, like sometimes additional QA or better design upfront (reducing failure rate even if each individual failure or more expensive) would be more important. Or just having large enough margins to eat the cost if they can add enough value in other ways. It&#x27;s a bad idea to have government mandate the <i>method</i>, what government should do is mandate the <i>goal</i> and the goal should be that products last, at zero additional cost. That way everything can be compared with no digging.