What Is Right To Repair?

[Music] all right 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 safety reasons 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 do 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 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 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 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 there are two versions of what you think should happen at this point depending on who you are there's the user side 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 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 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 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 gonna want [Music] control 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 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 honestly in apple's dream world there probably are no independent repair shops at all right you can't you can't have people getting in and replacing parts in their precious iphones you know they 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 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 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 rossman 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 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 a 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 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 and so they do 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 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 now you could see how tesla might argue that this is it's 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 that's an argument they can make i actually thought about this when simone yetch made her truckload 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 okay so what was what was the reaction uh from tesla when you did all that like did truckload get blacklisted we were kind of building it with this like fear hanging over our head that there was going to be repercussions from tesla that they were going to stop me from getting software updates which would be really bad um or that they would prevent me from supercharging which is kind of one of the like penalties they can give you if you're doing weird stuff right um fortunately none of that happened and i think like yeah the project got so much traction that it would like look really bad for them to go after me but it's also like i i mean i i remember um scheduling a service appointment because i wasn't 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 like and i was so freaked out that i actually didn't go and it's kind of weird that like you're scared of a company punishing you for doing something with their product like you're you should kind of be allowed to do whatever you want yeah i 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 you know for sure i mean i i think it's interesting because it's like the reasoning around locking it down so much is to keep people safe and for people to not do dangerous modifications i think truckless probably like definitely in the realm of dangerous modifications we did it as safely as we could and like we have every cross beam 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 yeah and and you see that they kind of use it as a reason to prevent even very small modifications of 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 so i remember when i got into an accident with a truck in apollo my tesla model s and it was pretty rough like 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 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 [Music] 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 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 it's all the tech is getting better that's also making it less repairable at the same time which makes sense right 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 repair ability 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 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 with tech 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 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 max 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 on 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 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 louis rossman about this this is what he told me 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 have you'd see in warehouses and then they use 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 with your hands you only need small tools yeah 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 girder ray trip 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 the problem is not with it being smaller or harder to repair for me that 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 is it's not about like the large board becoming a tiny chip it's when i knock on texas instruments door and say i you know 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 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 geckos and wall street i don't if lewis had his way everything would just have giant phillips screws in it like something you know where i hang on my wall and that's not the case uh i 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 my 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 to fix it but don't tell the company that made this part they're not allowed to sell it to me that is it's 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 we deserve the right to repair the things we own simple as that and by the way the environment deserves that too like that we only get one planet earth and last time i checked a lot of these companies are painting themselves as a pretty green like apple and tesla last time i checked every john deere tractor is pretty green so we deserve that chance so that's been it thanks for watching hope you enjoyed and big shout out to louis rossman and simon yetch 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 a 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 the next one peace if they it would have been devastating if they turned me off as 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 in 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 she's she's all i got

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,611,597

Rating: 4.9615035 out of 5

Keywords: Right To Repair, right to repair, MKBHD, right to repair movement, Apple, Apple vs, repairing iPhone, iPhone 12, Tesla right to repair, Apple right to repair

Id: RTbrXiIzUt4

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/re_error]

with the tesla example. They put out argument about modifications being forbidden because of safety concerns. Yet they don't lock people out after changing brake disks, which are undoubtedly more crucial than anything else their car might have.

[u/Donachillo]

Lobbyists can come up with a billion reasons that repairing electronics is bad. Yet it seems the rules only apply to users. When the companies try to do shady things under the table and influence the market in illegal ways the rules seem to disappear.

[u/bubblesort33]

Thank goodness this guy did a video on this. Probably the biggest influencer in the tech space on youtube along with Linus.

[u/Grimarne]

People will still buy iPhones - Apple has no need to do anything about it unfortunately.

[u/eenhoornkoekje]

And while watching this video my iPhone decided that the screen needed a purple bar :-(

[u/loercase]

I actually disagree with /u/Marques-Brownlee on a few points here, but he does summarize things well. Mainly, I don't think a Tesla is any more dangerous than any other ICE-engine car. Yes, it's a bunch of electrics and if you don't know what you're doing you could get hurt. However, an ICE engine is literally a contained explosion and is also dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and you could get hurt. We're just accustomed to working on the latter after generations of experience with them.

And as far as tech being more complicated now... well, if you open a phone the parts are still assembled like a bunch of Legos, even today. Unless it's on-die as part of the SoC... it's replaceable.

[u/pebble666]

Checkout fairphone 3+, I have one. Completely modular.

[u/LadderLate]

Don't buy unrepairable devices. Always watch reviews and look at the teardown analysis to see if it's repairable.

These companies only care about money, so hit them where it hurts. Don't hang your hopes on Right To Repair, because you can't force a company to produce repairable devices, they'll just put new traps and obstacles that technically don't break that law.

Only way is to not buy.

[u/Aloe_Hoe]

it's a basic expression of freedom that corporations seek to abolish