New EU “Right to Repair” Laws Require Technology to Last for a Decade

independent.co.uk

12 points·thefreeman··2 comments

> "In the repair cafes we see a lot of devices that broke shortly after the warranty expired," said Affelt — a phenomenon that has prompted some environmentalists to accuse manufacturers of designing their devices with planned obsolescence.

As I commented last time this was posted, this is likely a highly biased experience since this guy runs a "repair cafe": IMHO people are most likely to make effort to try to have smaller devices repaired when they are not very old, and obviously people are not going to visit his shop when the device is still under warranty. This does not really inform us about the actual durability of said devices in general.

Personally I think the priority should be on recycling and recyclability. This new law seems to include measures on this but, IMHO focuses too much on repairs without publishing much hard stats showing that this is an actual problem.

As someone who designs electronics sometimes, I would love to know how manufacturers are getting so detailed failure rate data on their components to achieve this lasting just past the warranty period and then breaking thing.

I think its actually just a combination of customers lying, ancedata and confirmation bias that brings about this impression. A repair shop like that is likely not seeing a lot of in-warranty repairs, and with a lot of devices they may quickly fall out of common use shortly after the warranty period, however long it is, so that also may be a cause of this impression. Then again, I have devices from Apple and Samsung that are way past their warranty period and still going strong.

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