That sound you hear is Apple and their fanboys seething.
Wednesday saw an open commission meeting by the FTC over Right to Repair. And at that meeting, the FTC voted 5-0, unanimously, in favor of enforcing laws protecting Right to Repair.
If you haven’t been following the Right to Repair movement, the gist of it is this: repair groups want to keep these various tech companies from creating a closed system that makes repairing things impossible. When companies like Apple make a device, they’ll often tell the manufacturers of certain components to never sell said component to anyone but them. This often means that, for third-party repair technicians like Mr. Rossmann, their only means of getting necessary components to repair something is via donor boards/devices. And before you say that Apple will fix it, they don’t; often they charge you the full price of a new device, because they’re simply giving you a new device. It’s why your data is never backed up. Repairing your device is ultimately cheaper for you than the typical process Apple, and by extension most other device makers, use. In addition, these companies also do things like hard-wiring the battery in (i.e. the part of your device that’s most likely to start going bad first, which used to be easily replaceable by the user), as well as no longer provide schematics for devices to make third-party repairs possible or reasonable.
Louis Rossmann has made a number of videos on repairing phones and laptops on his YouTube channel and many of his videos on Right to Repair are linked in the description of the video above. Often there are very silly things that cause Macbook to not work. Not to mention the fact that sometimes, Apple doesn’t like the idea of Linus not paying another $5000 for the prestige of having broken a iMac Pro.
But if you want a primer without watching several hours of videos, he also put out a 60 second video explaining things as simply as possible:
Notably, Mr. Rossmann’s efforts towards Right to Repair got the attention of Steve Wozniak himself, who put out a video in favor of the movement, which Rossmann thanked him for.
Also notable is how the lobbyists working against Right to Repair would smear it. One commercial in particular implied that if Question 1 in Massachusetts passed, you could potentially get raped in a parking lot. A commercial put out by a commission funded by pretty much every major car manufacturer, and then scrubbed from the internet after the Question failed to pass.
This is, in fact, an incredibly important decision. It does not, however, mean that the fight is over. Many states now have to decide the laws surrounding this at the State level. But this is a huge blow against some overall very scuzzy practices used by device manufacturers simply for the purposes of their having you by the neck. The FTC is also encouraging th public to report warranty abuse per the definition of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975; that is to say, if a manufacturer warranty is voided if the product has been altered or tampered with by someone other than the original manufacturer.
Source: Wired
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