Is there a future where we stop buying so much garbage?
replies(5):
For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.
Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.
There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).
So repair shops fill the gap for all these smaller companies and factories to get support higher than the on staff maintenance. Not everything is fixable though. They may use unique hardware signatures on drives or FPGA's or PAL's with security bit enabled. That has been true for a while though. Even in consolidation there is still plenty of business and repairs to be made.
Conversely the medically industry might be a good example. Anyone making medical equipment has to provide documentation on it. Which makes them far more repairable and easily diagnosable.
TV's especially are peak commodity. They are so cheap that the skilled labor cost to fix them isn't economically. They also are not easily transportable so repair and resell is a rough business for them. Things like laptops and phones though seems much more reasonable. Plenty of people do that professionally or even as a hobby. I like a large portion of repairs on those types of devices can be fairly economical and Chinese part makers provide plenty of affordable parts. It would cost OEM's extra to keep these parts in stock, but it's not a terrible hard task. Providing schematics also isn't a huge ask. Most are reverse engineered anyway.
When it comes to security I think this is fairly simple. Provide a blank security chip and create a secure method to connect and program it. Apple does this with its self repair when it comes to matching hardware UID's in the firmware so all the functionality is unlocked. Companies like Apple and Samsung can keep their Knox and Secure Enclave/exclave. Data can be seen as something that is not repairable in most cases. But they can provide the parts the secure a device again and leave it as a blank slate.
The biggest problem with Right to Repair is pricing. Right now Chinese makers can whip out parts for really cheap. Comparing to official parts from Apple or Google or Samsung when they did sell them and they are way higher and sometimes prohibitively so. Would be better to treat it like auto parts. Where you can get the OEM part or the third party part and both can work. Some things like security would need to be first party, but that would be a great deal. So it's doable, but would require a LOT of political will against tech companies. So it's just a really tough sell to get to that point.