Internal Documents Show Apple Is Capable of Implementing Right to Repair
I really dislike the &quot;Right to Repair&quot; movement because I see it as a lobbyist (iFixit pushes it heavily for example since they make money off it) &amp; niche driven push that is both wasting a real chance to get at some actual critical problems and generating new ones of its own. The two big issues are reasonable life span as part of the purchase price, and questions about ownership vs security.<p>1. For the first, most people do not care about &quot;right to repair&quot;, what they want is a more roughly a &quot;right to have repaired for a reasonable time period related to the cost of the item in question.&quot; Ie., it&#x27;s a standard Free Market pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either case if it doesn&#x27;t the manufacturer should take care of it at no further direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage of buyers get screwed at odds they don&#x27;t know as well as the manufacturer, unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the manufacturer knows the odds not them). It&#x27;s something that should just be part of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly.<p><i>How</i> the manufacturer &quot;takes care of it at no further direct cost to the consumer&quot; is an implementation question for which there are many good answers that come with different tradeoffs and costs. &quot;Right to Repair&quot; legislates one specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired <i>result</i> and then let everyone experiment and adapt.<p>2. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains vs owner control and it&#x27;s complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair: allowing any independent 3rd party to &quot;repair&#x2F;replace&quot; that <i>by definition</i> means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too. Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up, be social engineered, etc. I&#x27;m not comfortable with it being <i>illegal</i> for me to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device (though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or whatever could help). But that&#x27;s a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some cases.<p>I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say, manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple&#x27;s case, I would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the choice can be made (I&#x27;d also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I&#x27;ve yet to see a Right To Repair that covers any of this.<p>--<p>It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don&#x27;t know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on that, but not in a great way.