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Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG | Hacker News Reader

Increased repairability != enough repairability, as per the comments here. Beyond the article, Apple products still aren’t as repairable as the Right to Repair Movement would like, because people still have to peruse thousand-page highly technical manuals and buy specialized equipment if they wanted to fix certain parts of their Apple devices.

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You're conflating multiple issues. Having the right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair. I think we've gone too far down the road of not owning anything we buy, and thus having no rights to use things outside of narrow legal agreements nobody even reads.

Making the device easier to repair is also desirable, both for Apple and for third parties, because these things break all the time and need to be repaired. It saves everyone time and reduces waste.

> right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair

Huh? If the act of repairing is difficult (and extremely, in Apple’s case), then do you actually have the right, or is it only a right on paper? Is Right to Repair nothing more than printing out manuals no matter how difficult the process of repair itself is?

Nobody actively wants it to be difficult, but if you don't even have the actual legal right to modify the hardware or software it doesn't matter how easy it is.

Wait so are we outlawing closed-source proprietary software now?

No, it's an important distinction. Right to repair is more about a company a) not being legally entitled to punish you for repairing yourself , and b) not making design or manufacturing choices specifically to make it harder (e.g. sealing a component against water ingress may make it harder to repair but is an acceptable trade off, sealing it just to make it hard to repair isn't).

The nature of the device itself may make for difficult repairs, but that's a different issue.

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