yes. it's been obvious for a long time that "but the e-waste" is almost universally deployed as an argumentary "get out of jail free" card that is intended to be impossible to argue against, even when there isn't actually an improvement in the energy/waste lifecycle or when the improvement is overall trivial. it's funny that the tech community of all places have embraced greenwashing so heavily, particularly when most of those same individuals constantly decry greenwashing themselves/think they're on the right side of the issue, but there also clearly is an intentionally bad-faith thing where it's used to shut down debate because "you don't hate the planet, do you!?".

you see it constantly in anything surrounding apple, for example. wireless charging is bad, because using 2.5w more for the 1 hour a day your phone is actively charging is literally killing the planet. meanwhile if you sit on the cord wrong once a year and have to have amazon send a truck out with an extra cable, you have undoubtedly exceeded the pollution by orders of magnitude.

same for batteries etc, if your crappy amazon battery needs one extra replacement over the life of the phone, you have undoubtedly vastly exceeded the e-waste and pollution savings of right to repair. Let alone the impact of the extremely short software lifecycles - those android phones are basically disposable and unsupported the day they launch, and apple devices actually have supremely good lifecycles given their long support, the thriving secondhand market (long life) vs disposable phones that get rapidly cycled through, the parts lifecycle/support, and the refurb/recycling lifecycle etc. But right-to-repair is a fashion statement and people will die on the hill that sending out five amazon trucks of parts for a phone that's unsupported in 6 months and in the trash after 3 years is saving the planet.

AI is bad because e-waste and energy, regardless of whatever value it delivers. Over the next century we will probably save GW of energy due to increased efficiency in basically everything (doubtlessly introducing another jevon's paradox of course, but that's not the fault of the tech, that's a generic complaint against any efficiency improvement). Introducing AI into end-user devices is bad because users might feel compelled to upgrade, which is bad. Training smaller models that don't use so much energy in the long-run is bad, because it uses energy now. Upgrading your graphics card is bad because e-waste - even though you sell it to someone else who continues to use it, and even though the guy with a mattress on the floor and a killer gaming rig that he upgrades yearly has way lower emissions than a family who takes one vacation a year to florida (even driving etc). On and on.

people just want a foolproof "your product is bad" that can't be argued against, and e-waste/pollution is a great card to play, especially when it's selectively applied and you refuse to admit any of the foibles of the products you prefer.

also, people still don't want to admit that rossman's right to repair isn't quite the same thing as the platonic right-to-repair. rossman's interests fundamentally lie with keeping rossman group turning a profit, which isn't quite the same thing as users being able to repair their own devices by themselves etc. people don't like apple selling parts straight to end-users because "repair shops can't turn a profit at those prices" and yeah, having a multinational conglomerate renowed for its supply chain deploying low-cost labor to perform factory-line repairs on a limited selection of devices is going to be cheaper than artisianal craftsman repair, that's just the economics of it etc. Nobody has accused them of having different prices internally/externally, repair shops just can't afford to compete at the same prices that apple charges itself.

Right to repair doesn't guarantee the right of repair shops to turn a profit in the face of a well-oiled OEM repair shop operation/pipeline, but actually it's a good thing to have that brick-and-mortar repair pipeline etc, that's what you want, if you want to keep devices running longer etc. Market competitiveness is not the same thing as e-waste lifecycle, and OEMs subsidizing the repairs/running them at-cost is actually a good thing for pollution/e-waste even if indies can't compete at fair market rates. You just can't actively charge yourself less than the fair market price for the item, but even if you did, keeping devices running is the goal, right? These are contradictory goals, market competitiveness is not the same thing as keeping e-waste out of landfills, and if you really care about the latter it probably will require subsidies on repairs, or taxes on new devices, to overcome the economics of mass-production vs individual-repair.

Same for component-level repair. Obviously that is a thing rossman would like to offer as a business service, but is it a necessary aspect of phone repair given the ready availability of assemblies? If you want to drive down costs, bringing boards (via B2B/wholesale trucking) to a central place and reworking them en-masse is going to be a very efficient way to do it, you’ll even recapture some of those economies of scale vs 1-off artisanal repair. And cost of repair is obviously a major factor in whether people decide to repair vs landfill a broken device. But that’s bad because rossman doesn’t get paid as much if you just swap a PCB - it probably should be an option but it realistically isn’t ever going to be the default, to have an artisan unsolder a bga and put on a new cpu or memory or whatever, and there are strong social arguments (cost) for doing it the other way. It certainly isn’t some showstopper to overall repairability (nobody is resoldering a BGA at home anyway), just not favorable to rossman’s bottom line.

also, right to use third-party parts is not really a right-to repair issue. that is personal preference, but there's also safety (muggings/theft) and resale considerations etc. Certainly there are good reasons to explore flexibility/solutions but again, this isn't a right-to-repair issue when there are reasonably at-cost repairs available and a ready supply of first-party parts etc... if phones aren't going into landfills that solves the problem, right? it's a personal preference about the market economics/principles of a device you own (one I generally agree with, with the caveat there's countervailing concerns too). but that gets wedged into an e-waste issue too!

hell even apple making the tools available is a conspiracy to some people - "apple renting you the OEM replacement tools (which are completely optional and in no way required or forced, you can use an amazon spudger if you want too, and which they will outright sell you if you want to keep them because you're an indie repair shop or whatever) for the cost of shipping is bad because the pelican cases are too big and heavy" is a serious topic of discussion for some people. and before you think that's a strawman... someone defended the idea a couple weeks ago on here lol. like there's just no winning with a bunch of these people lol.

the whole e-waste/right-to-repair has just turned into a massive greenwashing/circlejerk and again, it's these same people who are so concerned about airpods and apple self-service who are so adamantly opposed to "greenwashing" in principle, yet they're basically engaging in a contemporary greenwashing movement themselves backing leaders with fixation on greenwashing their own business requirements as being movement goals etc.

In practice minimizing e-waste/pollution lifecycle basically boils down to keeping devices in service longer and ensuring less unnecessary road-trips over the lifespan of the device. The easiest ways to get there are good parts lifetime, good software support lifetime, accessibility of brick-and-mortar/retail repair service, a thriving secondhand market/value retention to encourage resale, etc. Everything else is optional, and you actually don't need much beyond the apple store/self-service model to accomplish those actual needs.

like, taking my old trade-in iphone and refurbing it and selling it to someone in africa or india is what you want, right? how did that become a bad thing/complaint for the greenwashing movement? shouldn't that actually be required, if the phone has a reasonable degree of serviceability why shouldn't it be mandated that trade-ins be refurbed and get another lifecycle?

Also, the actual nuclear-hot take: even lightning was not really a big deal given how long it'd been in service. Having one specific, long-running cable that is deliberately aimed at being significantly cheaper than USB-C (which it was, until very recently) is really not a big deal and probably the phase-out of lightning pushed a large number of extra trucks on the road, extra cable sales to replace the old ones, new usb-c PD chargers sold, etc. I definitely feel the user-convenience argument, I am very happy to unify everything I can onto USB-C these days, but there was a very real additional pollution cost incurred from the changeover itself, that need not have been incurred. Cables wear and break, especially phone cables that get heavily used etc, and having 3 types of cables instead of 2 (usb-c and micro-b) was not the end of the world. Now micro-B really does need to die though, I am entirely tired of that shit to a degree that I didn't care about with lightning. Reversibility has been here for 15 years now, get with the program, and the durability of the sockets is still awful (although better than mini-B, which also refuses to die).

Like a lot of green movements it just sort of is a mishmash of contradictory and often self-defeating goals, pushed by lifestyle advocates and profiteers who stand to gain by selling associated services etc. I do support the overall goal it just doesn’t feel like the current discourse has anything to do with that, it’s just people attaching their lifestyle choices/political choices to a convenient/favorable wagon. And you can easily tell this by how hostile people get over it all. It was never about the e-waste, it was about “apple bad”. And that always is the first and most powerful beat in every single one of these “right to repair” discussions. Name a single rossman video that isn't at least 30% anti-apple screed by weight lol. Like are there really no other vendors with glued batteries or unrepairable mainboards or no service manuals given to third parties? I think there obviously are... but the Samsung stuff just goes in the trash instead of sending it to a Rossman type place, so you're seeing survival bias at best, outright personal bias at worst. It's an easy, popular, large target that drives massive amounts of clicks given the wild amount of apple-hate that still exists to this day etc. They aren't your friend more than any other corp... but they actually do have a pretty green lifecycle compared to a parade of disposable android phones or $300 craptops. And people just cannot possibly bring themselves to admit that apple stepped in the right direction for a change (see also: privacy). Doesn't make them perfect, but neither are any of the alternatives, and apple generally does better in these areas (e-waste/sustainability/lifecycle and privacy).

At the end of the day people are just so credulous about a pitch that inevitably concludes with the pitcher attempting to sell you something - not just rossman but framework, fairphone, etc. And people are just so sanctimonious about it all, like they just want to dump all over everyone because they bought into a youtube personality who needs to keep doing component-level repairs to stay in business or w/e. And again, I guess what else is new with the greenwashing movement, but these are people that think of themselves as ostensibly being virulently opposed to greenwashing etc. Again, I guess what else is new.