I’ve been stock-piling electronics that either people throw away, or things I bought 2nd-hand only to find they are broken.
Looks like the right to repair law is in very slow motion. Not yet enacted be the European Commission. And once it is, member states have like 2 years to actually enact it in their law. Probably even more time before consumers begin to see results.
(edit) I think some US states were the first to enact right to repair laws. So some consumers could perhaps pretend to be from one of those states to demand things like service manuals. But parts and repair is likely more out of reach ATM.
What makes you think after the bill is passed, you will suddenly be able to repair everything? I highly doubt companies will start churning out replacement parts for all their older products. More likely it’ll just apply to nea product going forwards
If I had the technical ability to repair them myself, I wouldn’t be waiting. It’s not like the act of repairing them breaks the law, it only breaks warranty with the manufacturer; and these are all out of warranty already.
I only have broken electronics in storage because there’s only 1 day out of the year around here to recycle them. And I have to pay for it! :/
The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.
If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.
I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.
If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.
While true, I highly doubt this will apply retroactively. Manufacturers wont be forced to make parts available for existing/old tech; devices sold going forward will be required to maintain a supply of parts.
This will also apply to repair technicians not being able to get parts for old tech; so waiting to pass it off to a repair center won’t solve this either.
All that is to say; if you can’t find parts to repair it yourself now, there’s not a lot of point stockpiling dead devices waiting on the law to change, as they won’t really be affected by that change.
Right to repair won’t be retroactive. The cellphones will still have been epoxied around a battery designed to fail after two years. Hardware that can be repaired won’t be supported by new software, and the new replaceable parts will not fit into products that were built before the right to repair was enshrined in law.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good step in the right direction, and I applaud your effort to reuse and repurpose. Anything kept from the landfill is a win. But you can go ahead and start repairing stuff now. Void warranties, because the warranties are already proven to be worthless. Jailbreak old devices, unlock your tractors, and use open source everything. Better still, stop buying products that can’t be repaired.
The infrastructure established by the right to repair laws will not likely be that sharply keen to deny rights on old products because there is a cost in making that separation.
Think about why Dell computers snap apart easily. The EU forced Dell under environmental law to make their PCs come apart easily for disposal. Dell resisted at first but did not want to give up the EU market. So they complied. Dell also decided that it costs more to have a separate infrastructure for US consumers, so Dell made all their PCs snap apart wherever sold globally. So rights will manifest unintended benefits.
I’ve already accidentally exploited this. I /thought/ a right to repair law was already enacted, so I requested replacement rubber o-rings citing the not-yet-enacted right to repair law. They sent me the rubber rings (which cannot be bought in stores) at no cost.
I think France has subsidised some repair shops and incentivised consumers using them instead of buying replacements. So if some particular manufacturer tries to get persnickety about the timeline, 3rd party repair shops may be willing to step in.
Yes… That is absolutely the legitimate reason I have all those old mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics gathering dust. Just waiting for a … did you say a law?
What particular items are you stockpiling that you think a law will suddenly let you repair?
The only thing I’m aware of are iPhones with their DRMd screens.
I bought a DJ mixer, which turned out to be dead. I popped it open and could not see any obvious issue, thus fixing is beyond my expertise. So I plan to get out of warranty repair at a reasonable price.
I bought a projector and the DCD chip turned out to be bad. DCD chips are about as costly as a whole projector. So I expect the right to repair law to force the replacement part to be reasonably priced. I have the same expectation for the boiler mentioned in my other comment.
I have 2 vaccums with broken proprietary nossle/hose and one has a broken plastic part. Both manufacturers ignored my request to tell me of a local parts reseller. I doubt they will be able to ignore that request after the right to repair law passes.
I found a vaccum with missing proprietary floor rolling attachment (so it only functions as a hand-held vaccuum). No idea if the part I need is separately sold or if the price is reasonable. But the right to repair should ensure that repair becomes viable if it’s not already.
There are a lot of things I bought 2nd hand for which the manuals are either on tor-hostile websites, or jailed in various enshitified 3rd party manual repos. I hope the right to repair can be used to force the manufacturer to send me a paper manual that avoids the enshitified web. Not sure if that will be a reality as we get more and more to a point where people have lost the right to be offline through legislation that assumes everyone is happily online with no issues.
So I plan to get out of warranty repair at a reasonable price.
Right to repair means the parts can’t be drm’d to legally prevent you from repair, not that all out of warranty products must be cheap to repair.
I expect the right to repair law to force the replacement part to be reasonably priced.
Again, not part of right to repair. The parts are expensive because you are buying a single out of production Dcd. The projector manufacturer doesn’t control those costs. The Dcd isn’t drm’d. It’s not covered by right to repair.
Right to repair is about DRM. The reason some repairs are unnecessarily expensive is because the manufacturer prevents repairs using DRM. A vacuum manufacturer will not be required to sell you cheap parts. They will only be unable to stop you from repairing it yourself.
Right to repair means the parts can’t be drm’d to legally prevent you from repair, not that all out of warranty products must be cheap to repair.
You may be confusing US variations of right to repair, or perhaps you are just judging by the “right to repair” title. US states are ahead of the EU and have different motivations. The EU goes much further than mere new design requirements. It is not doing this to be nice to consumers. It’s part of the “green transition”. If parts prices are priced out of the market, it defeats the purpose of the right to repair. The EU is actively trying to reduce unsustainable consumption of new products and prevention of e-waste.
Here is a jan.2022 clip from the EU Parliament briefing:
In its resolution of 4 July 2017 on a longer lifetime for products, Parliament proposed a number of actions to promote product reparability, including: measures to make repair attractive to consumers; requiring products to be designed for easy and less expensive repair; extending the guarantee if repair takes more than a month; discouraging the fixing-in of essential components such as batteries; urging manufacturers to provide maintenance guides at the time of purchase; developing the standardisation of spare parts and tools necessary for repair; encouraging manufacturers to develop battery technology to ensure that the battery’s lifespan better matches the expected lifespan of the product or, alternatively, to make battery replacement more accessible at a price that is proportionate to the price of the product.
Parliament raised the level of ambition in the current term by adopting two resolutions that call on the Commission to establish a consumer’s right to repair, with a view to making repairs systematic, Right to repair cost-efficient and attractive. Its resolution of 25 November 2020 on a more sustainable single market for business and consumers and its resolution of 10 February 2021 on the new circular economy action plan both called for the adoption of a set of measures, including: mandatory labelling on the estimated lifetime and reparability of products, such as a repair score and usage meter for certain product categories, and ensuring that consumers are provided with the information on availability of spare parts, repair services and software updates at the time of purchase; giving the repair industry, ‘including independent repairers, and consumers’ free access to repair and maintenance information; encouraging standardisation of spare parts; setting a mandatory minimum period for the provision of spare parts that reflects the product’s estimated lifespan, and reasonable maximum delivery times; and ensuring that the price of spare parts is reasonable, and that independent and authorised repairers, as well as consumers, have access to the necessary spare parts without unfair hindrances.
The projector manufacturer doesn’t control those costs. The Dcd isn’t drm’d. It’s not covered by right to repair.
The Right to Repair is not limited to DRM issues. From the briefing:
New implementing acts on servers and data storage products, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, electronic displays (televisions and monitors) and lamps require manufacturers, for instance, to ensure that spare parts are available for a certain number of years after the last item has been placed on the market (e.g. ten years for washing machines and seven years for fridges); to deliver the ordered parts within 15 days; and to make maintenance information, including manuals, available to professional repairers.
I have yet to see a DRMd washing machine.
Of course manufactures can control the costs by shifting the cost onto the purchase price. If they must offer reasonably priced spare parts for ten years, then they might have to factor that cost into the sales pricing. And fair enough, because consumers should be discouraged from buying new stuff anyway.
That’s interesting! But none of it covers making manufacturers out of warranty warranty parts cheap. Everything in those paragraphs are directed towards future products. Some aren’t even required but “urge”, which means nothing.
It has not been established on when the law will take effect. If it takes effect the day before the last sale of a dishwasher, then they could have a ten year obligation starting instantly. Or not. Those points have not been pinned down in anything I’ve seen. This law has been discussed in the EU for the past 10 years now. It could be retroactive, if lawmakers decide to do that. If the last dishwasher was sold 5 years ago, they could have a sudden obligation to provide parts for the next 5 years forward.
The wording of the quotes above only say future designs. They say nothing about past products. It would be an extremely radical change in the law system to enact a retroactive law.
Of course when talking about designs, that’s about the future. After a design has been implemented, it’s too late. You can change a past design but it would only be for a future production because a design has already served its purpose after implementation. Apart from that, you would need a time machine.
But the right to repair in the EU is not just about designs. Design is only a small part of it. If a dishwasher were to end production 1 year before the right to repair law is enacted, that last dishwasher is already under a statutory warranty for another year, and likely under a commercial warranty for a year or three more. So spare parts would already be in production just to satisfy warranty obligations. There would be nothing radical about extending that since it would not have stopped production anyway. It would be foolish not to take that opportunity. And with manuals… who loses manuals? Consumers do, but not likely producers. Mandating that literature be made available for old appliances would be reasonable, at least in electronic form. The EU would be foolish not to make literature disclosure retroactive. Some EU countries will even enact retroactive taxation. If they will do that, anything is possible.
Not specifically waiting on right to repair, but older electronics have four things going for them:
- Very well documented: or you can just ignore the pieces that aren’t documented after so many years. This means they tend to work forever with Debian / Slackware / OpenBSD.
- Cheap / easy to find parts: the esoteric stuff falls by the wayside over time.
- More reliable: by virtue of the stuff that was going to die due to defects, dying in the first 18 months of use; and
- Generally easier to work on.
So all of my laptops all cost well over $1000 new (EDIT: I’ve never purchased a laptop new in 25 years of using laptops exclusively). But wait a couple of years and suddenly they’re the price of a couple nice meals. Wait a bit longer and you can do a curbside pickup. And when something breaks, I can fix it myself with cheap replacement parts instead of waiting on warranty repairs. Also, going back to the documented thing – used MacBooks used to be great for Linux, but then the butterfly keyboard and T2 chip became a thing and I know to avoid them because that keyboard was never solved and ended up being replaced after multiple class-action lawsuits.
Time works to our advantage in many ways.
I did for a while. Then I started repurposing some of them and found it’s a lot harder to make things work and they’re a lot slower when it does then relatively cheaper but MUCH faster and more capable newer hardware. Tech moved to fast in the early days to make the older stuff really worth it by todays standards.
I am writing this from a 2008 machine.
Bad software forces people into the market for new hardware. I can run the most recent version of Debian on this old hardware with 4gb RAM just fine. I will never for the rest of my life have to buy a PC or laptop because I keep finding abandoned PCs and laptops that are faster than what I have (faster than what I need). Microsoft will exploit these consumers for decades to come. Glad I am not feeding the ecocide.
A 2008 machine and a 1996 machine are going to be drastically different in capability. Even the 2008 machine will be reaching certain limitations depending on what you want to use it for, and what the specific machine is.
More power to you for trying to recycle and refurbish older tech, I think that is a very positive thing! But I don’t think replacement parts will magically become available if they aren’t already, only currently available parts might become more affordable or available to the public. What I’m saying is, don’t expect an LGA 1151 motherboard to come into production again.
When it comes to parts/repair, (most) Computers are a bit of a different beast than other electronics. They’re specifically built/designed to use standardized connections and form factors that allow you to swap a large variety of parts from a wide range of manufacturers as desired. You often don’t need or even want original replacement parts as you upgrade to better/faster hardware piecemeal.
There’s few other product categories that achieve the same level of inter-compatibility or upgradability.
Compared to something like a smart phone for example; where parts have to be made for that specific devices make/model, and are often explicitly designed to make this impossible/impractical for any third party to do via thing’s like serialized part-pairing, while companies also restrict the supply of OEM components to end-users or ‘unauthorized’ repair centers… This is where right to repair laws really come into play.
I have 2 full case pentium 1s I’ve tried to use for emulation htpc’s and simple kids computers. They can’t emulate much above a snes are shit for video play back and way to big for simple router functionality. Even when I could get them to work nothing even semi modern would run at any reasonable speed and when it did it’s still a giant machine case with the needed associated fans and cooling not to mention the power draws. 1 mini pc with 10 year old specs does all of it so much faster without any of the hassle and for way less power draws. It’s just simple physics. The hardware has advanced so much more it’s not worth the money. I even spent an extra 100$ on fanless cards that fit but I can’t get fully functional drivers for. Good luck.
Emulation is an extremely CPU intensive activity particularly when you are emulating a different instruction set at the hardware level. If you are emulating a gaming system rather than just running that gaming system, you’re doing it wrong (from a permacomputing PoV). The simple physics answer is to pick up an snes at a yard sale for $5 and save it from the landfill, instead of blowing a wad of cash on new hardware you don’t need. Then hack that snes to do whatever you need, such as to attach a copy console. I hacked a Wii to act as a media server, so it can not only play the old wii games but also play AVI movies from the LAN via samba.
Your take is like saying: I want to simulate a nuclear fission reaction in my livingroom… these old PCs suck and should be tossed. Of course if you select an obscure and heavy task you are limited in the hardware you can deploy for that.
