PART 2/2:

> Perfect is the enemy of the good. If your phone is a brick and an improper fix makes it useful at a much lower cost than a whole new phone, that's all that matters. Sorry, but your comment just sounds super elitist. Even if only 50% of devices are successfully repaired because they're being done "improperly", that's still a 50% reduction in ewaste.

This is nothing to do with perfect. This is serviced to an acceptable standard. I don't mean to sound elitist, but I make no apology for defending my workers who are like highly trained mechanics that will properly assemble / repair your car. Joe's corner mechanic using cooking oil in your car engine rather than 20-5W is not an acceptable repair IMO. But if cooking oil gets you 50% success in repair and you're happy with that, well all power to you. I don't think most regular people would agree though.

> Then don't. I don't see why the manufacturer should be on the hook to repair a counterfeit.

I should have explained more: These counterfeits in particular (and many of them for modern products) are sooo good WE couldn't tell that they were counterfeit initially. It manifested as a % increase in the number of failures in the field. We thought it was a genuine QA issue and wasted 100s of hours of engineer and QA time and easily tens of thousands of dollars trying to figure this out.

We eventually developed a special jig to tell the difference to deny warranty claims. But issues like this is why manufacturers are and will continue to go hard on protecting their supply chains which normally also means the device is harder to repair especially for an outside party to repair.

Btw, The open documentation of everything for right-to-repair, while laudable, it is something for a fantasy world. Companies will fight tooth and nail to stop that information getting out and the politicians will oblige them. Also, you just gave the counterfeiters the keys to the kingdom for making fakes and fake repair parts. You're not going to "legislate them away" because they're not in the US or any country with decent courts, laws and IP protection.

Closer to home, I am trying to develop my own hardware products. I am a one person team. Now you are going to force me to publish a big chunk of my IP? You've just killed me by counterfeit and giving the keys to the big companies who will squish me. You think I have the money to litigate against a big company? It just means I won't bother. You've just entrenched the big companies even more.
Fighting both of these issues requires barriers like lasering off part numbers, spare parts with encryption keys etc. because the problem is THAT big. No it's not a perfect barrier, but just like parking your car in a bad neighbourhood: park next to a better car and have a steering lock so that when the thief comes a long they go for the easier target. It's a stupid cat and mouse game, but it is what it is.

> I disagree 200%. I've repaired countless phones, TVs, computers and other devices for myself and friends and family, all without help of legislation that would ensure the availability of parts and instructions, and the right to repair would only expand this trend. Most people wouldn't do this themselves even with the right to repair, but they are almost certainly within 2 degrees of separation of someone that would.

Again laundable and more power to you but you are super unique and niche. Also I personally don't want your repaired-with-vegetable-oil car engine thank you. Further, you fundamentally cannot repair something for infinite time and the technology for something like a phone moves so fast that that prospect is silly. You are merely delaying the item making it into waste. It's going to end up in landfill eventually. It's MAYBE possible that you will reduce the amount getting in there, which is nice but it doesn't address the fundamental gap in our waste management of e-waste where the ONLY (IMO) proper solution is material recycling to fully close the loop. Yes it will need to subsidised (maybe in an ideal world eventually that won't be needed). But, to me, paying that subsidy is preferable to adding to our debt of biosphere destruction.

Btw, all that stock the manufacturer had to keep for repairing stuff for right-to-repair ... you know where any excess is going when it's not needed AND the accountants can write it off? Straight to landfill. To me, refunding the customer seems preferable.

So again, right-to-repair MIGHT reduce e-waste, it will certainly not eliminate it.

>You're also looking at this very myopically through a specific tech industry lens and ignoring one of the main motivations of the right to repair: super expensive farm equipment. John Deere has a stranglehold on farmers who tend to be very DIY, and this has been driving up their costs and sometimes even driving them out of business because they can't access service or parts at affordable prices, and they can't repair the devices themselves. Breaking this stranglehold would be huge.
This is why I caveated my initial post with "won't ever work for something like a consumer phone". Is John Deere one of the main motivations now? That's not what I've observed in media. Maybe that's where it started, but it has grown to encompass many more devices like a mobile phone.

I have many four letter words for John Deere and it is not an industry I have worked in. But again I think a solid, compulsory, no carve outs, warranty would help immensely. Personally I think 25 years is fair for a tractor. Maybe slap in a SLA too like 1 week maximum time to repair. Do that and now you've just made all the issues, with spare part costs, reliability, distribution, inventory, a 3rd party repair network, fabrication by authorised 3rd parties etc. you've made it ALL John Deere's problem. All those managers, lawyers and bean counters will suddenly be driving the engineers and ops people in a direction that (IMO) is fair to the consumer. And don't worry they'll be just fine. They'll rejig those spreadsheets and solve the problem VERY quickly.

They will kick and scream but you've given them very little leeway AND you've given politicians and advocates an easy moral argument: "We think 25 years is fair, especially since there are tractors that are 100+ years old that STILL work just fine."

Edits: Formatting