This is nuts. If people wanted to purchase repairable products, they'd do it. Clearly the market doesn't care, so all this will do is create needless litigation and artificially constrain product design.
Thats the point though. If people actually valued repairability, then they would elevate its importance above other constraints in their purchasing habits.
I'm not following this argument.
My point is I don't get a real vote because there is no option for me to vote on.
> The government certainly shouldn’t foist that minority view on everyone through right to repair laws.
Except it's not just what a small minority of poor people wants if the government can agree enough to pass it. Also, there are actually and real concerns about waste and resource usage that drives the want to repair rather than purchase new devices.
Surely if all the manufacturers acted in their obvious local-maxima best interests and jacked their prices, you'd have no choice but to take out a mortgage to get a phone.
The answer is obvious: the first company to defect and charge $1000 for a phone instead would take over the entire market.
What's the difference between price and features? If repairability is important to consumers, why is nobody "defecting" from the cartel of non-repairable vendors to take over the market?
It's not a complicated argument.
I love it when people end complicated arguments like this. "It's easy you dolt! Just eat your soylent and be happy!"
There is a vast market for repairable phones that run free software and have unlockable bootloaders, but that market isn't significant enough to convince incumbent manufacturers to stop abusive wasteful practices like built-in batteries, proprietary screws, proprietary drivers and locked bootloaders.
In fact, it's the abusive practice itself that constrains the free market.
If the market was truly vast, someone would start targeting it by selling such products.
Very few people care about free software and unlockable bootloaders on their phones. Very few people in the world even know what a bootloader is, and among those who do, very few really care about unlocking the bootloader on their phone.
Should those of us who care about the problem - which is those of use who understand the problem - wait until a literal majority of customers complain to start solving the problem?
Don't use the ideals of a free market to give corporations a free pass to abuse customers. This ideology that regulation is inherently evil and must be avoided at all costs does nothing to help the free market. It only blinds from common sense.
Sell a security camera bundled with cloud storage, fine - shut off the cloud and the camera still works.
Sell a John Deere tractor that can't be serviced without buying parts, patches, and paying for access to the engine computer - this seems problematic.
It’s not a problem unless the seller can exercise some other sort of market power (e.g. they’re the only licensed seller of that particular kind of thing).
How does this compare to the "licensed printer ink only" sort of DRM, wherein companies like Lexmark charged upwards of 10x generic (i.e. cost-of-goods) prices for printer ink? I understand that in legal concept, contracts can be structured however... For consumers at large, however, the burden of savvy-ness starts getting rather high.
For example, I understand paying an expert to help me negotiate the terms of purchasing my home, since the price is high and arrangements (HOA, easements, municipal utilities, etc.) vary wildly. It seems unreasonable to have to hire a lawyer to facilitate the purchase of my printer. Thus, it seems prudent to have certain reasonable assumptions around the exchange of physical goods. Buy it, and it's yours to do with as you will.
The reason this matters is that consumers can be and are sued by the sellers of products for attempting to circumvent such DRM-like restrictions. By ownership of the physical good, shouldn't the consumers have the right to fix it, hack it, or upgrade it, the same as they could with a chair or a table?
I strongly suspect that people _know_ the trade offs they’re making when they buy the cheap inkjet printer with expensive ink, the lowest priced airline ticket, the cheapest bidding contractor, or the unfixable gadget. They just want to eat their cake and have it too. Then the regulators come in and make the decision for everyone, just because a tiny minority of people have buyers remorse.
This likely won't change your opinion either, but it's a good piece that adds color to this conversation about right-to-repair: Motherboard published a video about John Deere's tractor/maintenance lock-in that looks at the issue from the perspective of 6-figure industrial equipment. [1] It's worth a look.