Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

My point is that no congresspeople would sign off on a law that would stifle innovation to such a degree. Customers should be given the tools to make better decisions regarding the repairability of products if they so choose to factor that into their purchasing decision, but if it means outright stopping purely positive improvements like faster CPUs then it's both harmful to consumers and not a law that would pass congress.

A lesser extreme is the southbridge/northbridge and how CPUs are becoming SoCs. If that fails, you pretty much have to buy a new CPU, when previously you could technically replace it if you wanted. Would have such a version of the R2R law prevented this?

View on HN

A reasonable compromise would probably be to require that discrete parts be available for sale, hopefully with some reasonable price standard, not requiring that devices be designed to have more parts. If it's economical for the manufacturer to move to a SoC, fine. They should at least let people buy them. Any R2R law should incentivizes manufacturers not to make disposable unrepairable products, because business is about making money, generally opposed to acting responsibly in the best interests of the public and the world. Again, opinion.

The R2R proposals, at least in the form that Louis Rossmann is pushing for, doesn't prevent anybody from making hard to repair or non-repairable products. Nor does it require companies to make trade secrets publicly available. As far as I know, it doesn't even force companies into creating any documentation that enables a third party to repair their products.

There is obviously that "loophole" where a company can still deliberately make a product difficult or impossible to repair just by virtue of that product's design. However, if the law is implemented, any covered devices that can be repaired, regardless of how hard it is to repair, will be repairable by third parties without having to deal with legal gray areas just to be able to acquire tools, parts, and information that they will need to do those repairs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com