 There's a troubling trend in the technology industry. More and more, the devices we buy are becoming locked down through a combination of hardware and software that's designed to prevent us and independent shops from upgrading, repairing, and in some shocking cases, even using them in ways that aren't sanctioned by the original manufacturer. This tight integration has brought us improvements, like smaller and less expensive gadgets, but it's come at the cost of producing more waste, making repairs unnecessarily expensive and inaccessible, and even manufacturers trying to use their control over your electronics to remove functionality unless you agree to pony up a monthly subscription fee. I mean, I'm sorry, what? Making deals and then altering them after the fact? How is that even legal? It sounds like some kind of fictional dystopia, doesn't it? But it's not. It's real and it's right now. Thankfully, we do have a solution called Right to Repair, but before we can take it from a concept to actual legislation that protects consumers, small businesses, and the environment, we need to talk about it and make sure that we are all on the same page. After I tell you about our sponsor, GlassWire, instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off at the link below. So, let's get started. Every time we bring up Right to Repair, I am surprised afresh to see that the vast majority of the opposition to it comes from either people who haven't had it explained to them properly or from folks that are on board with Right to Repair, even though they don't realize it yet. So for that reason, I think we should start with what Right to Repair is not. Nobody is calling for manufacturers to be forced with a gun to their head to repair your stuff. Now, many OEMs these days do offer voluntary repair programs for their products, and sometimes they're an extension of the warranty, like with Koss' headphones, where they will repair or replace your headphones for free as long as you pay the shipping fees. These types of repair programs are great for consumers, but forcing a product manufacturer to implement one could add costs that will either need to be absorbed by the business, potentially putting it in jeopardy, or passed along to the customer, potentially making the product more expensive in the first place. Another common argument is that Right to Repair legislation would hurt innovation, and on the surface, this one sounds reasonable. I mean, if I'm Apple, why should I bother developing a new iPhone if I'll be immediately forced to give the plans for every component to third parties who can then make their own iPhone without the upfront R&D? This is a perfect example of a straw man argument. Most of the electronics repair industry is small shops performing relatively simple jobs, like screen replacements and keyboard repairs. These are things that wouldn't require Apple to give up enough details about these parts for someone to make their own, except when they might do just that, leading us perfectly to opposition point number three. If manufacturers can't protect their users against fake or reverse engineered sketchy parts, there is no way to ensure that the customer experience will be a safe and positive one. Think of this, Apple makes the news every time an iPhone lights on fire, and anyone who only skims the headlines is gonna miss important details, like if the user had a shoddy third party charger or screwed up a DIY battery replacement. That's a fair point, because this kind of thing can cause immeasurable long-term damage to a brand. So it sure is a good thing that no one is asking for that either. With right to repair, no one should be able to build another company's device entirely with third party components or manufacture patent infringing parts. What they should have is the right to access OEM components and resources to make repairs to consumers' devices when required. And the craziest part of this controversial stance is how uncontroversial it already is in the automotive industry. We'll talk a bit more about that later. On that note though, we have a few videos coming out on some very cool electric vehicles, so make sure that you're subscribed. Now the last argument against right to repair. Yes, you in the back of the room, go. But I don't wanna repair my own stuff. Ah, yes, but that's the thing. Right to repair means you have the right to repair it. You can still go out and buy a new one or you can have someone else exercise their right to repair it for you. Just like with your car where a combination of laws and industry norms ensures that decades after production ended, you can still get new brakes for your 97 Datsun. But enough about what it isn't. What is it then? Right to repair supporters know that there's no single perfect solution that's ready-made right now. But what it's about is figuring out how to tackle the problems that I just outlined with the goal of improving consumer choice and freedom. Here's a hot take for you. Anyone who fully understands right to repair and opposes it, opposes individual freedom. It really, honest to goodness, is that fucking simple. So then particularly in America, we're getting branded anti-freedom is pretty undesirable. How is it that lawmakers, lobbyists, and corporations are working so hard at it? Did you really have to ask? I mean, think about it. What do you think is more profitable? Selling you a screen for $70 and billing an hour or two of technician time to replace it or selling you a brand new phone for over $1,000? And don't get me wrong, I'm a business owner. I'm not some kind of anti-capitalism activist. If my business has an opportunity to make money, long time viewers are gonna know I'm into it. But a business model that is designed to force you to buy more is unethical at best, which in my mind is just another word for something that should be illegal, but just isn't yet. And before you guys say it, planned obsolescence, manufacturers forcing you to buy a new one by breaking the old one, that is not some kind of tin foil hat conspiracy theory. That is a real thing and has been for decades. After the Great Depression, it was discussed that the things that we use should all be made to fail after a certain amount of time or have specific dates where they can no longer be used to increase consumerism for the purpose of strengthening the economy. I can't even make this stuff up guys. And since manufacturers aren't penalized for the excess waste that this mentality generates, there's never been an incentive for them to go back to making longer lasting stuff. I mean, if you wanna see some brilliant examples of planned obsolescence in the real world, Veritasium just uploaded an excellent video looking at how the light bulb industry went out of their way to engineer inferior light bulbs, so consumers would have to buy more of them, going even as far as to find companies that produced better bulbs. I ran into this personally just a few weeks ago when I purchased my new home. The previous owner said to me, yeah, the clothes dryer, it's pretty ugly and it's real old, but I had a service technician come in just a couple of years ago to replace the belt. And he basically said, don't you ever throw this thing away. They don't make them like this anymore. And that example of right to repair in action is so good because it demonstrates why the status quo isn't good enough and why we need new laws to address new exploitative business strategies. Cause here's the thing, nothing prevents me from making the choice to repair that dryer rather than replace it. But in the electronics industry, which by the way, in case you didn't notice is quickly becoming every industry, the same company can both profit by selling more goods and have the ability to remotely cripple those goods, forcing customers to buy more of them even if they work just fine. I mean, that is a clear conflict of interest if I've ever seen one. So then back to phones for a moment. I mean, it's not like you can't repair them at all. Apple will happily sell you Apple care for 150 bucks or offer you repair services if you opted out. Only like so many things in life, the prices for uninsured repairs often don't make any sense. A screen replacement for 300 US dollars? And that assumes that you have an Apple store nearby that you can walk into or that you can live without your phone for a week while it's in the mail. Given the estimated cost of $70 for the screen of Apple's latest and greatest phone and Apple's reported genius salaries of about 20 to $25 an hour, I think it's pretty clear that this is less about taking care of customers while covering their costs and more about nudging customers towards a shiny brand new device since they're already in the store anyway. And well, it only costs a few hundred dollars more than repairing the screen, doesn't it? Now that's where independent repair shops are supposed to come in. And they have done so for years. The problem is that over the years, Apple has attacked this industry going as far as raiding shops over their stock of replacement parts, if it has an Apple logo on it, and refusing to provide diagnostic tools that wouldn't be necessary if Apple didn't specifically create barriers that require these diagnostic tools. Now, to Apple's credit, they have made progress in recent years, and they've even made parts available to members of the Independent Repair Provider Program. But joining the program reportedly comes with some onerous requirements, including submitting to unscheduled inspections from Apple. Remember though, this isn't just about the iPhone or Apple, it's about consumer choice and freedom. And Apple deciding to grant its customers a little bit more ownership of their own devices that they paid for is not consumer choice, and it's not freedom. That should be a right, not something that Apple grants at its discretion. Another goal of right to repair is keeping devices out of landfills. We're producing over 50 million metric tons of e-waste per year, and a lot of it is repairable or even perfectly functional. A local electronics refurbisher and recycler, Jeep, is currently in a legal battle with Apple over about 100,000 devices that were refurbished and resold instead of being shredded according to their agreement with Apple. Now, to be clear, we're not siding with Jeep here. They violated their contract, and we have no way of knowing if the refurbishing that they did was up to Apple's standards, which could damage Apple's brand. But it does raise a larger question. Why is Apple paying to shred 100,000 devices when people could be using them? The answer is right in Apple's claim that part of the 22.6 million in damages is from lost profit due to gray market sales. Now, I'm not trying to pick solely on Apple here. John Deere is another company that shamelessly fights against the interest of their customers and the general public. It's just Apple's brazen hypocrisy that makes me keep coming back to them. They have a whole page on their website that is dedicated to how eco-friendly they are, but then they literally spend money to keep working devices out of consumers' hands. To be clear, Apple at least makes an effort through their recycling programs, but any environmentalists can tell you that reduce, reuse, and recycle are in that order for a reason. Recycling, particularly e-waste, is not as clean a solution as you might've been led to believe. So, with all of this in mind, what can we actually do? Well, right now, Louis Rossman, who has been a huge advocate for right to repair and operates his own repair shop, has a GoFundMe going to get a direct ballot initiative published in Massachusetts. Hopefully, this will lead to the push that's needed for right to repair to become a reality in the electronics space. He'll be working with the same firm that managed to get right to repair pushed to a direct ballot initiative for the automotive industry, which, as you'll remember from my examples, is a space where right to repair actually freaking exists. So, if you want to support right to repair, this is one of the best ways and the best times to go about it. So, a link to the GoFundMe is gonna be in the description down below for you guys to check out. I wanna see what the LTT community can do, and I'm gonna be kicking things off with $20,000 from our OnlyFansAprilFools gag to get this engine started. So, let's go, go, go, boys! Maybe if you guys contribute enough, we'll actually do some of that crazy stuff. No, we're not gonna do that. We're not doing any. This video is brought to you by Ting Mobile. 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Remember guys, oh man, so many people thought we wanted them to repair it for free. We wanted to pay. They wouldn't do it.