there's a troubling trend in the technology industry more and more the
devices we buy are becoming locked down through a combination of hardware and
software that's designed to prevent us and independent shops from upgrading
repairing and in some shocking cases even using them in ways that aren't
sanctioned by the original manufacturer this tight integration has brought us
improvements like smaller and less expensive gadgets but it's come at the
cost of producing more waste making repairs unnecessarily expensive and
inaccessible and even manufacturers trying to use their control over your
electronics to remove functionality unless you agree to pony up a monthly
subscription fee i mean i'm sorry what
making deals and then altering them after the fact how is that even legal it
sounds like some kind of fictional dystopia doesn't it but it's not
it's real and it's right now thankfully we do have a solution called
right to repair but before we can take it from a concept to actual legislation
that protects consumers small businesses and the environment we need to talk
about it and make sure that we are all on the same page after i tell you about
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every time we bring up right to repair i am surprised afresh to see that the vast
majority of the opposition to it comes from either people who haven't had it
explained to them properly or from folks that are on board with right to repair
even though they don't realize it yet so for that reason i think we should start
with what right to repair is not nobody is calling for manufacturers to
be forced with a gun to their head to repair your stuff now many oems these
days do offer voluntary repair programs for their products and sometimes they're
an extension of the warranty like with cos's headphones where they will repair
or replace your headphones for free as long as you pay the shipping fees these
types of repair programs are great for consumers but forcing a product
manufacturer to implement one could add costs that will either need to be
absorbed by the business potentially putting it in jeopardy or passed along
to the customer potentially making the product more expensive in the first
place another common argument is that right to repair legislation would hurt innovation
and on the surface this one sounds reasonable i mean if i'm apple why
should i bother developing a new iphone if i'll be immediately forced to give
the plans for every component to third parties who can then make their own
iphone without the upfront r d this is a
perfect example of a straw man argument most of the electronics repair industry
is small shops performing relatively simple jobs like screen replacements and
keyboard repairs these are things that wouldn't require apple to give up enough
details about these parts for someone to make their own
except when they might do just that leading us perfectly to opposition point
number three if manufacturers can't protect their users against fake or
reverse engineered sketchy parts there is no way to ensure that the customer
experience will be a safe and positive one think of this apple makes the news
every time an iphone lights on fire and anyone who only skims the headlines is
going to miss important details like if the user had a shoddy third party
charger or screwed up a diy battery replacement that's a fair point because
this kind of thing can cause immeasurable long-term damage to a brand
so it sure is a good thing that no one is asking for that either
with right to repair no one should be able to build another company's device
entirely with third-party components or manufacture patent infringing parts
what they should have is the right to access oem components and resources to
make repairs to consumers devices when required and the craziest part of this
controversial stance is how uncontroversial it already is in the
automotive industry we'll talk a bit more about that later on that note
though we have a few videos coming out on some very cool electric vehicles so
make sure that you're subscribed now the last argument against right to repair
yes you in the back of the room go well i don't want to repair my own stuff
ah yes but that's the thing right to repair means you have the right
to repair it you can still go out and buy a new one or you can have someone
else exercise their right to repair it for you just like with your car where a
combination of laws and industry norms ensures that decades after production
ended you can still get new breaks for your 97 datsun but enough about what it
isn't what is it then right to repair
supporters know that there's no single perfect solution that's ready made right
now but what it's about is figuring out
how to tackle the problems that i just outlined with the goal of improving
consumer choice and freedom here's a hot take for you anyone who fully
understands right to repair and opposes it opposes individual freedom it really
honest to goodness is that simple
so then particularly in america we're getting branded anti-freedom is pretty
undesirable how is it that lawmakers lobbyists and
corporations are working so hard at it
did you really have to ask
i mean think about it what do you think is more profitable
selling you a screen for seventy dollars and billing an hour or two of technician
time to replace it or selling you a brand new phone for over a thousand
dollars and don't get me wrong i'm a business owner
i'm not some kind of anti-capitalism activist if my business has an
opportunity to make money long time viewers are going to know i'm
into it but a business model that is designed to force you to buy more is
unethical at best which in my mind is just another word for something that
should be illegal but just isn't yet and before you guys say it planned
obsolescence manufacturers forcing you to buy a new one by breaking the old one
that is not some kind of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that is a real thing
and has been for decades after the great depression it was
discussed that the things that we use should all be made to fail after a
certain amount of time or have specific dates where they can no longer be used
to increase consumerism for the purpose of strengthening the economy i can't
even make this stuff up guys and since manufacturers aren't penalized for the
excess waste that this mentality generates
there's never been an incentive for them to go back to making longer lasting
stuff i mean if you want to see some brilliant examples of planned obsolescence in the
real world veritasium just uploaded an excellent video looking at how the light
bulb industry went out of their way to engineer inferior light bulbs so
consumers would have to buy more of them going even as far as to find companies
that produced better bulbs i ran into this personally just a few
weeks ago when i purchased my new home the previous owner said to me yeah the
clothes dryer it's pretty ugly and it's real old but i had a service technician
come in just a couple of years ago to replace the belt and he basically said
don't you ever throw this thing away they don't make them like this anymore
and that example of right to repair in action is so good because it
demonstrates why the status quo isn't good enough and why we need new laws to
address new exploitative business strategies because here's the thing
nothing prevents me from making the choice to repair that dryer rather than
replace it but in the electronics industry which by the way in case you
didn't notice is quickly becoming every industry the same company can both
profit by selling more goods and have the ability to remotely
those goods forcing customers to buy more of them even if they work just fine
i mean that is a clear conflict of interest if i've ever seen one
so then back to phones for a moment i mean it's not like you can't repair them
at all apple will happily sell you applecare for 150 bucks or offer you
repair services if you opt it out only
like so many things in life the prices for uninsured repairs often don't make
any sense a screen replacement for 300
us dollars and that assumes that you have an apple
store nearby that you can walk into or that you can live without your phone for
a week while it's in the mail given the estimated cost of 70 for the
screen of apple's latest and greatest phone and apple's reported genius
salaries of about 20 to 25 an hour i
think it's pretty clear that this is less about taking care of customers
while covering their costs and more about nudging customers towards a shiny
brand new device since they're already in the store anyway and oh it only costs
a few hundred dollars more than repairing the screen doesn't it now that's where independent repair shops
are supposed to come in and they have done so for years
the problem is that over the years apple has attacked this industry going as far
as rating shops over their stock of replacement parts if it has an apple
logo on it and refusing to provide diagnostic tools that wouldn't be
necessary if apple didn't specifically create barriers that require these
diagnostic tools now to apple's credit they have made
progress in recent years and they've even made parts available to members of
the independent repair provider program but joining the program reportedly comes
with some onerous requirements including submitting to unscheduled inspections
from apple remember though this isn't just about the iphone or apple it's
about consumer choice and freedom and apple deciding to grant its customers a
little bit more ownership of their own devices that they paid for is not
consumer choice and it's not freedom that should be a right not something
that apple grants at its discretion
another goal of right to repair is keeping devices out of landfills we're
producing over 50 million metric tons of e-waste per year and a lot of it is
repairable or even perfectly functional a local electronics refurbisher and
recycler jeep is currently in a legal battle with apple over about a hundred
thousand devices that were refurbished and resold instead of being shredded
according to their agreement with apple now to be clear we're not siding with
jeep here they violated their contract and we have no way of knowing if the
refurbishing that they did was up to apple's standards which could damage
apple's brand but it does raise a larger question
why is apple paying to shred a hundred thousand devices when people could be
using them the answer is right in apple's claim
that part of the 22.6 million in damages
is from lost profit due to gray market sales now i'm not trying to pick solely
on apple here john deere is another company that shamelessly fights against
the interest of their customers and the general public it's just apple's brazen
hypocrisy that makes me keep coming back to them they have a whole page on their
website that is dedicated to how eco-friendly they are but then they
literally spend money to keep working devices out of consumers hands
to be clear apple at least makes an effort through their recycling programs
but any environmentalist can tell you that reduce reuse and recycle are in
that order for a reason recycling
particularly e-waste is not as clean as solution as you might have been led to
believe so with all of this in mind what can we
actually do well right now lewis rossman who has
been a huge advocate for right to repair and operates his own repair shop has a
gofundme going to get a direct ballot initiative published in massachusetts
hopefully this will lead to the push that's needed for right to repair to
become a reality in the electronic space he'll be working with the same firm that
managed to get right to repair pushed to a direct ballot initiative for the
automotive industry which as you'll remember from my examples is a space
where right to repair actually freaking exists
so if you want to support right to repair this is one of the best ways and
the best times to go about it so a link to the gofundme is going to be in the
description down below for you guys to check out i want to see what the LTT
community can do and i'm going to be kicking things off with twenty thousand
dollars from our only fans april fool's gag to get this engine started so let's
go go go boys maybe if you guys contribute enough
we'll actually do some of that crazy stuff no but we're not gonna do that
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if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy one of our previous experiences
with right to repair inconveniences when we broke our imac pro and apple refused
to fix it for us remember guys oh man so many people
thought we wanted them to repair it for free we wanted to pay
they wouldn't do it