> If independent repair was widely available, products would have a longer lifespan, making them more valuable. Manufacturers would be incentivized to raise new product prices, which hurts consumers.
Even if this does lead to a higher price, “could this be cheaper at the cost of being more disposable” doesn’t seem like a good standard for consumer harm. If we’re paying more because we get longer-lasting more repairable products, we’ll still probably end up ahead.
> Easier repair could also lead more consumers to use old, energy-inefficient products, resulting in a higher environmental impact, especially with cars, trucks, refrigerators, or other major appliances.
Just impose carbon taxes to make sure that the ecological damage doesn’t get externalized and then let the market sort it out.
Anyway, every time we talk about replacing gas cars with electric cars, there’s a lot of worry about the embodied carbon of a new electric car. So I guess by that argument, we should prefer to keep old devices running rather than replacing them, or at least people who want to replace the old devices need to prove that the benefit of cleaner running is higher than the cost of replacing the device.
The idea that manufacturers would raise prices simply because a product lives longer flies in the face of Econ 100. Any time you raise prices you increase the opportunity for competition. Any improvement without raising prices gives you a competetive advantage.
It may be that the longer life comes at some cost to the manufacturer. That can safely be added to the price because any competitor would also incur similar costs to add similar value. However, if the additional cost adversely affects the price per unit of life it could very well hurt the manufacturer. A $10 wrench that lasts 10 years could be perceived as a better choice than a $15 wrench that lasts 12 years. And of course it would be a better purchase than a $12 wrench that lasts 15 years for somebody who loses their wrenches about every 8 years.
So single-factor Econ 100 homework might be over-simplified, but the principle should not be ignored.
I would expect that, at least for companies that aren’t woefully poorly run and are in fairly competitive markets, creating more durable/repairable good will result in higher costs. I mean, if they could make a better device for less or the same amount of money, it seems they are just giving up a competitive advantage for no reason, and somebody would eat their lunch, right?
But of course the consumer gets the benefit of a better device. It seems really industry specific how the pros and cons would balance out. If anyone is making predictions for how it would work out for the whole market, I’m pretty suspicious that they are overstating their level of confidence.
It is not industry specific though. One one side is benefit to consumers and on the other is a bunch of industry spun bs muddying the waters and tricking people into thinking there is a downside for consumers because the manufacturer's want to avoid the downside to themselves. It really is that simple.
> With low-cost products, the strategic response for manufacturers would be to lower new product prices and flood the market, thus reducing the appeal of repair.
This isn't a bad thing. Let them sell their products as cheaply as they want, but as long as the repair option is cheaper than the buy new option, most people will repair. Even if it's cheaper to buy new many will still repair if that repair is easy enough. It's a lot easier to stick with something you know works, fits your needs, and is already in place than it is to throw it away and replace it by rolling the dice on some cheap electronic good from china which might not work at all, and may not do everything as well. The lazy/safe option is very attractive to consumers.
> If independent repair was widely available, products would have a longer lifespan, making them more valuable. Manufacturers would be incentivized to raise new product prices, which hurts consumers.
That doesn't make much sense. If everyone can just keep using their valuable old thing, companies will have to bring down the price on the new thing to get them to buy it. Even people who do buy the new version can sell their valuable old one to someone else who now doesn't have to buy the new one. In the face of reduced demand for a new product, raising the price for it would be crazy.
our home used the same phone for 20+ years. Now they are stocking stuffers every year.
And it's not because they got dirt cheap. Somehow somebody convinced us that life with an old phone is unbearable, even if it still works the same as it did on day one.
Apple turned phones into status symbols and some people really will look down on you if you don't have the newest iphone or worse, any model at all of an android device. Apple also made batteries irreplaceable and forced iphones to slow down as they aged which I'm sure didn't hurt. Not everybody is buying into it, but I've seen both adults and children genuinely struggle with the social pressure they faced to have only the newest and most expensive iphone at all times and it was just depressing.
When I was a child, nobody cared what phone you were using. You generally didn't care either as long as it could be used out of earshot of the rest of the family. For all the problems cell phones cause us, at least it's been a long time since kids had to suffer the pain of having to stand in their family's kitchen for every telephone conversation with friends and romantic partners.
>With low-cost products, the strategic response for manufacturers would be to lower new product prices and flood the market, thus reducing the appeal of repair.
>Manufacturers would be incentivized to raise new product prices, which hurts consumers
So to sum it up, right-to-repair could lead to lower or higher prices, which are both bad!
Repairability requires space for interfaces and other things. How does this jibe with SOC trends? Is this going to interfere with miniaturization and very dense/small devices? I’ve not followed the trend very well, sorry if it’s a stupid question.
"voting with your wallet" is a dream that simply does not work in practice. Especially in situations like cell phones where you have extremely limited options. Companies have simply refused to provide a product that delivers the features customers want because they make more money by denying you those features and they know that customers can't afford to go without something and will be forced to settle for whatever they decide to offer.
If something will make a company more money, then they will always do that thing. If not making products repairable makes them more money they will never do it until they are forced to by law, which is exactly what has happened. In fact, companies make so much money refusing to make repairable products that they've invested huge amounts of money into technology and laws that make it illegal or impossible for users to repair their products which is what brought us to the point we're at now where consumers had no choice but to petition the government to intervene.
And yet, I can still buy a "not smart" phone. Because enough people have voted with their wallets. There is a market worth $millions there and vendors willing to meet the demand.
I'd guess that just means that non-smart phones are cheap enough to manufacture that they can make more money selling them than they would by refusing to. Especially since a lot of people who buy a non-smart phone already have a smart phone as well. They're so cheap I can get a flip phone for less money than an iphone case.
Given that "the electrorate" and "consumers" are two huge groups with huge overlap, one could argue that political action is, in this case and in the ideal case of any representative democracy, an expression of consumers' will.
We have a bunch of problems (pollution, climate change, privacy...) where the incentives "in the moment of action" (buying, subscribing, choosing a mode of transport) are not great, and so individual responsibility as the sole recipe for change has failed miserably. It's okay for people to say "hey let's collectively through out the oreos."
> Given that "the electrorate" and "consumers" are two huge groups with huge overlap, one could argue that political action is, in this case and in the ideal case of any representative democracy, an expression of consumers' will.
This is an excellent point. Political forces are market forces.
How do you know how repairable something is at the time of buy?
It would be nice if companies were required to provide information about their products' wear parts, their expected lifetime, whether they're replaceable and what tools are necessary to do so, etc.
You ask the seller or you research the product. Or more probably buy whatever is on the shelf and has the right price. Surprises are left for later on but people will learn again how to deal with that. Repairing was common not to many years ago and we were no more geniuses back then than we are now.
Hyundai left the U.S. market in part because a disastrous reputation made sales difficult.
When they returned, they knew they had to overcome their existing rep. They offered warranties that meant the consumer couldn't lose. Then they proved that their new offerings were industry best at reliability and maintainability. Even today they put their money where their mouth is beyond anything "Detroit" is willing to match. And they have flipped the field. Now it's competitors like GM that suffer rep problems.
Kitchenaid built an amazing rep. More recently they have moved to plastic parts. Their rep will reflect that.
For better or worse, Linux and Windows still feel the effects of decades of reputation.
What incentive does the seller have to be honest? They could easily claim something is "repairable," and then when someone calls them out for using pentalobe screws, glued glass displays, and soldered-in storage and memory, reply "That's repairable, you just need a pentalobe screwdriver set, a heat gun, spudgers, a high quality soldering iron and flux, and a reflow soldering station."
I'd just like to be able to see (before I buy) objective numbers for things like SSD write lifetime, display burn-in rate, and battery capacity degradation next to information about what kind of tools I would need to replace them myself, and maybe how much it costs to have the manufacturer replace them, if they offer that service. That way I can decide that maybe I'm okay with a soldered battery, since it will probably last 10 years with my usage patterns and the manufacturer will replace it for $60.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that companies shouldn't be _forced_ to make their products repairable at the expense of other design considerations, but they should certainly be forced to be upfront about it if they don't.
Blaming it on the consumers is why we have this problem in the first place. Every single phone in the shop is going to have a soldered in battery so how is the consumer supposed to choose? The consumer does not have perfect information either. How are they meant to know the failure modes of a new product line and difficulty of repair. Sure capitalism works if is high competition and all the actors have perfect information but that isn't true. I don't believe in over-regulating but the market isn't exactly working here and car safety standards have shown that it can work if done right.
The larger concern is that the manufacturers would change how you ‘purchase’ hardware - one possible circumvention is that they make it so you don’t purchase your electronics any more, you’re just long term leasing them.
That's fascinating. It assumes that the manufacturer has a monopoly and has unrestricted pricing power. So, if repairs reduce demand, the manufacturer can just raise prices.
That's Apple. John Deere doesn't have a monopoly on tractors.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones. Unless you mean that Apple has a monopoly on iPhones, to which I will respond that John Deere has a monopoly on John Deere tractors.
Apple indeed has a monopoly on iPhones, which is a problem because they have a closed ecosystem that is not interoperable with devices from any other vendor. Once you're in the Apple ecosystem, in order to escape you have to buy yourself a whole new ecosystem.
If you stick with Apple you buy yourself a whole new ecosystem every three years anyway.
I am not a fan of walled gardens and vendor lockin, but come on. Take some personal responsibility for your situation.
Don't complain that it is Nintendo's fault that you've paid a lot of money for consoles, controllers, games, etc. and now you're trapped.
You bought a BMW and all the add-on subscriptions for working radio, seat warmers, race mode. Now you're trapped.
If you think Apple or John Deere or Coca-Cola are a problem, then switch. If you think there are no other options, you are wrong. You are just unwilling to suck it up and do what needs to be done.
Sometimes it takes determination and effort to live up to principles.
You may say thay one person cannot turn the tide. This is usually true. Thank goodness that millions of Ukranians haven't used that as an excuse.
> If you stick with Apple you buy yourself a whole new ecosystem every three years anyway.
Not true. I used my MacBook Pro for over five years and it still runs macOS 10.14 to this day. Unfortunately, it broke about 18 months ago and I had to buy a Windows laptop anyway (because Apple's computers are dumb now).
I hate this computer. Windows laptops are awful - I have purchased a desktop to replace it after less than two years, but I still have to figure out a way to use that from bed, as I have a medical condition that prevents sitting all day.
If I had an iPhone though (which someone offered me, and I rejected!), or a bunch of apps purchased from the Mac App Store, or files in iCloud, then I would have had to buy myself the Windows equivalents. The only reason I could switch so easily is because I wasn't stuck in the ecosystem. (Also, my Mac is still available over SFTP to transfer files.) I just used my Mac as a UNIX system with a great desktop environment and high-quality apps.
Even if this does lead to a higher price, “could this be cheaper at the cost of being more disposable” doesn’t seem like a good standard for consumer harm. If we’re paying more because we get longer-lasting more repairable products, we’ll still probably end up ahead.
> Easier repair could also lead more consumers to use old, energy-inefficient products, resulting in a higher environmental impact, especially with cars, trucks, refrigerators, or other major appliances.
Just impose carbon taxes to make sure that the ecological damage doesn’t get externalized and then let the market sort it out.
Anyway, every time we talk about replacing gas cars with electric cars, there’s a lot of worry about the embodied carbon of a new electric car. So I guess by that argument, we should prefer to keep old devices running rather than replacing them, or at least people who want to replace the old devices need to prove that the benefit of cleaner running is higher than the cost of replacing the device.