Six bullshit arguments against right to repair

One of the weakest bullshit arguments against right to repair is user safety. It's about as much of a stretch to say that "right to repair would endanger users" as it is to say that forks can endanger eaters, because you could put your eye out.

Right to repair is about having the choice to repair something if you need to safely, not about replacing OEM repairs. It never was.

Everyone right now has the right to open up their device without asking the manufacturer for permission. After right to repair they would also still have the right to contact the manufacturer for "professional help and expertise". You trying to fix your smartphone is no different to your grandpa trying to fix the casette player. You might say "Oh, but the casette player doesn't have a lithium-ion battery that could combust", or "it's not nearly as complicated as the casette player". You're right. That's why OEMs should be incentivised not to glue said Lithium ion combustible battery in (or at least make them safer to replace) and provide schematics for repair purposes. The only reason why it's more dangerous to repair modern devices by yourself is because the devices were specifically designed to be less repairable. Right to repair can't and won't make it more dangerous, because the design practices that lead to dangerous repairs would be made illegal.

Space is a non-issue. You can still make your smartphones as small as you like and include convenient pull-tabs for battery removal. Just take Apple.

Right to repair doesn't ask you to lay things out more modularly (although if it does go through, there would be an economic incentive to buy modularly laid-out products), it asks you not to use 5 different types of screwhead, non-removable battery adhesive, and not to serialise components. Right to repair only affects the balance, what used to be profitable will now be less profitable, while some things that didn't use to be profitable could become so.

If you think that making devices more repairable can negatively affect benchmark scores, you should visit a doctor.

Well, if everyone has to abide by the same rules, competition is not affected. Even if it were affected, it's not our problem. If you can't compete while providing ethical, and repairable devices, you deserve to go bankrupt.

If you create a device that can be repaired, you are effectively cannibalising your own sales in the future. Tough luck. But it's fair, because everyone's in the same boat. And if you want repeat customers, why not innovate? Stagnant tech going out of business should be a good thing, isn't it?

Oh and subscription models are their own thing. I think that they are somewhat justifiable in some circumstances… but definitely not in hardware. If you're "selling" subscription hardware, how about we "pay" you with "subscription money" (i.e. you don't technically own it, it's more of a 0% interest loan).

We saw how idiotic the argument that making devices more repairable makes them less efficient. The idiocy doesn't end there. OEMs are producing inferior products to their competition. It's not immediately and obviously inferior, but rather obscurely inferior. You hope that you're going to get lucky and not drop the phone, or hope that the engineering flaw that affects all touchbar-laden macbooks won't affect you, because you're careful… People don't immediately know that a repairability score of 2 means that you really do need to pony up for apple care.

In an ideal world where you can get decent hardware that is not manufactured by a company with a vested interest in milking minor incremental updates, things like "bendgate" should negatively impact the sale price of the device and difficulty of repairing said device should affect it even more. In that world, the concept of needing to legislate the ability to repair a device would be laughable, since it'd be assumed that not producing a repairable device is the same shooting yourself in the foot.

This is one of the few arguments that people mostly get backwards. Why build a better phone, when you can force buying the new phone by making repairing the old one economically unviable. Allow me to illustrate.

You have the option to make a phone better. It takes a significant investment into R&D. But that's fine. What is the real problem is that it's a risk: people won't buy it, if what you offer is either a marginal improvement over what they already have, or it's something that takes time to get accustomed to. On the other hand you can avoid innovating, but incrementally improve instead. This doesn't normally require a huge investment, so it's good in that regard. What's more, since the new model exactly like the previous model except for a few incremental improvements, people who don't already have an older model would buy the new model for a higher price. So let's incrementally upgrade.

The only problem with incremental upgrades, is that people tend to hold on to their old devices. Heck, they might even be able to upgrade their old devices to be able to do what the new device purports to offer. If you could replace the dead SSD on your macbook in lieu of buying a whole new laptop, how likely are you to spend several grand of green, or install an off-the-shelf component? How likely are you to buy a model of said laptop with a larger SSD if you could just replace the SSD with a bigger and better one a few years down the line?

So modularity would incentivise innovation like nothing else. Who would buy iPhone 13 because it's essentially iPhone 12? Well, if people's iPhone 12s didn't die in a tragic accident and replacing the screen didn't cost as much as the new iPhone, the answer is "not many if any". Spurring innovation is an argument for right to repair, not against it.

You would still have proprietary software, the subscription model will become more prevalent, and it alone is not able to avert climate change. However, being able to repair your devices is the largest bang for the buck in terms reduce, re-use, re-cycle. Modern electronics is extremely difficult to produce, and this difficulty is amplified, when what you produce is not a small chip, but an entire aluminium-clad laptop.

Can we, or should we do things other than right to repair to stop climate change? Absolutely. Should we do them instead of right to repair? Not unless you don't really care about the planet.

We should support movements like right to repair. One way of doing it, is by presenting the ideas correctly, and pointing out egregious missteps like the one that prompted this article.

One way to do that is not to direct your ire at freelance writers like Ayush Jalan, but by pointing out their mistakes, and making sure that a civil dialogue can be established. Absolutely support Ayush. If he could survive without Apple/Samsung etc.'s blood money, he absolutely wouldn't have written the shameful article.