- 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
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25% off at the link below. (upbeat music) 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 and 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 manufacturer patent infringing parts. What they should have, is the
right to access OEM components and resources to make
repairs to consumer's devices when required. And the craziest part of
this controversial stance is how uncontroversial it all really 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. - [Man] 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 beep 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 $1000? 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, longtime 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 tinfoil 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, Veritassium 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 fine companies that produced better bulbs. I've run 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 an 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 worked 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 AppleCare 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 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 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,
well covering their costs, and more about nudging customers towards a shiny brand new device since they're already in the store anyway and it only costs a few
hundred dollars more than repairing the screen, didn'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 GEEP, is currently in a legal battle with Apple over about a hundred thousand 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 GEEP here. They violated their
contract, and we have no way of knowing if the
refurbishing that they did was up to Apple standards, which
could damage Apple's brand. But it does raise a larger question. Why is Apple paying to
shred a hundred thousand 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 apples 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 environmentalist 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 Rossmane,
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 electronic 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 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 only fans April fool's 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 gonna to,
we're not doing any beep. This video is brought
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towards your account. If you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy one of
our previous experiences with right to repair inconveniences, when we broke our iMac
pro and Apple refused to fix it for us. 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.
Is samsung doing this? Whole not allowing repairing
Check out Fairphone
Thanks for the brief summary of what this video is about. The extremely vague and click-baity title/thumbnail made me uninterested in actually clicking the video.
Who you vote for matters regarding this, freedoms all across the board are on the line.
Apple is the greatest villain
I will be donating too
So, I'm a phone repair technician, and I can confidently say that Samsung are by far the most repair friendly of any "mainstream" smartphone brand. Its actually one of the reasons I choose them, because I know that I can fix it quickly and easily with proper parts if I do something stupid.
They have websites dedicated to purchasing parts, which are fairly priced. The devices themselves are very modular, for the most part, allowing common issues to be sorted quickly:
Screens tend to come with a frame, so the replacement process is very simple, transplanting the boards and battery into a new frame.
Charging ports and headphone Jacks where available, are modular apart from on select models allowing for easy replacement.
Their batteries fall down however, as they are held in by a frankly unreasonable amount of adhesive, in a pocket of the frame that is not designed to allow access to any pry tool - this makes it easier to risk bending or slicing the battery.
Their wearables and tablets are easy to repair as well, which is not the case with Apple or Huawei.
The way he highlights the removal of right to repair as a removal of individual liberty is spot on!
IMO "right to repair" should be that you can do what ever the fuck you want with your product (which you already can) and shouldn't be "OEM is supposed to supply me with endless schematics, parts and tools". Do whatever the fuck you can with your device, but don't expect replacements, schematics, diagnostic tools, etc just made available to you.
At most there should be possiblity to apply to become a verfied shop and then you can get parts in reasonable quantities on requests. Right now some dude in a shed using AliExpress parts, claiming to use OEM components is just an asshole in a shed. People supporting such bullshit scam artists is just pathetic.