A “right to repair” movement tools up
I will admit that I am not a fan of the &quot;right to repair&quot; movement in terms of what I&#x27;ve seen from it so far when it comes to actual legislative proposals, and I also find a lot of the way it talks down to current consumers and market forces distasteful and short sighted. I can absolutely see how in some areas of production narrowly tailored rules might be beneficial in terms of efforts manufacturers make to prevent repair purely for anti-competitive reasons. But there are at least two critical, legitimate benefits&#x2F;tradeoffs (and in turn questions) that more broad based efforts have to address in my opinion. I&#x27;m going to use Apple as an example here given they&#x27;re a legitimate example of both and also big and broadly well known.<p>1: <i>Security</i>. The fact is that there is an absolutely enormous (and growing) amount of value in a fully trusted hardware stack. Apple has taken a lot of flack from &quot;right to repair&quot; over issues like not being able to &quot;repair&quot; the Touch ID, but I haven&#x27;t seen any great answers over how to allow any random 3rd party to repair Touch ID without also meaning any random malicious 3rd party (including legitimate repair shops in some scenarios) could replace it with something hostile too. I <i>actively do not want</i> anyone but Apple to be able to mess with the hardware authentication chain on my iPhone, even though I do support legislation to (and have written to my reps in favor of) require manufactures to allow users to additionally add their own master keys for running software on top of it. Having the option to minimize the number parties who can alter your hardware is something that has value.<p>I think a well crafted system might be able to square this via dual chains that an owner could pick on purchase and appropriate manufacturer liability mitigations. So for example you could choose &quot;only Apple may ever modify the trusted core of this device&quot; or &quot;anyone with the key can&quot; and in each case Apple would utilize a separate root private key. In the former case it&#x27;d be like right now where Apple never shares that, in the latter they&#x27;d offer signed leafs to anyone who asked so any 3rd party could make the repair (and sign off on it) instead. In the latter case Apple would also be relieved of all liability for any damage ever done due to a 3rd party Touch ID repair, though I suppose in practice they might still face legitimate PR damage (but that should be able to be minimized if it&#x27;s clear enough that the owner willingly gave up protections).<p>2: <i>Active&#x2F;Dumb Matter ratios and dynamic flexibility</i>: The other issue is that &quot;repairability&quot; in many of the formulations I see in HN and other tech community discussions comes with a lot of costs of its own that aren&#x27;t address. A trivial, super common example is the battery. It&#x27;s hard to go a single mobile phone discussion without somebody complaining about how they want the trivially replaceable batteries of yore. However, there are fundamental tradeoffs there in terms of actual basic physics. A user swappable battery has to have physical connectors capable of repeated usage. It cannot be soldered on. The battery itself must have its own safe case. The phone case must be altered to allow the swapping which requires structural compromises vs a solid piece. The battery must generally be a reasonably simple geometric shape, rather then whatever arbitrary shape the manufacturer wants to maximize volume in relation to other facts of the internal design.<p>All of which ultimately boils down to lots of extra matter that <i>isn&#x27;t battery or phone</i>. There isn&#x27;t any way around that with current technology. A smartphone using a non-swappable battery will always fundamentally have more single capacity, be lighter, or both, and of course can still just utilize an external battery pack if bulk is not an issue and more between-charge run time is necessary. Swappable has its own use case, but it&#x27;s not a slam dunk at all nor is it a conspiracy nor are regular consumers &quot;stupid&quot; for preferring a different balance of trade offs.<p>This same sort of tradeoffs happens elsewhere, where more integration allows for fundamentally more efficient and superior performing designs at the cost of making it harder to repair. And this too is an environmental issue: across billions of phones, extra dead matter adds up all by itself.<p>----<p>I&#x27;m not saying that there isn&#x27;t abuse, that complaints about John Deere and the like aren&#x27;t justified, or that there is no room for better rules. But particularly with electronics a lot of these questions really do seem like they&#x27;re best answered by the markets, and that legislation should first be focused purely on making those more efficient (by ensuring that externalities from total lifecycle costs are all in the price up front for example). Any legislation directly interfering should be treated cautiously and given a lot of careful consideration. I&#x27;m worried that much of the movement I&#x27;ve seen so far is too focused on its own narrow use cases rather then the general population, and not giving a sufficient level of thoughtfulness to how different areas of the overall world market face different use and threat scenarios. A lot of tech people have a bad habit of calling incredibly smart people &quot;dumb&quot; for sharing different priorities wrt technology, and failing in turn to consider whether their cases can be addressed without it being a zero-sum game. I don&#x27;t want to see the proverbial baby thrown out with the bath water here is all.