There's actually several methods companies use to hinder repair on modern, Uh consumer products. Some of these are deliberate and others are a consequence of the natural progress of technology. The modern smartphone is actually a classic example of this, where there's been such technology progression in there. they're getting thinner, they're getting lighter, They're ultra compact with, uh, almost completely filled with batteries.

They've got screens which go right to the edge of them so you can't have like screws in them that you could in traditional consumer products and white goods and things like that. So they have to use glues and other adhesives instead of screws. and this presents a repair challenge. But it's really that's a natural consequence of the modern design of the product.

And that's really not a problem to repair people because they've developed tools and techniques to actually repair modern devices like these smartphones. As difficult as you think they are to repair, they're actually relatively easy to get a part and fix. Some are a bit more difficult than others, but the tools and techniques are available to actually do it, so that's not really a problem. The problems start to come in when the manufacturers make choices in the design of the product.

They don't really have any technological or marketing reason behind them other than to make it essentially more difficult to repair. One of these is using customized parts. And of course, in a modern phone like this, you cannot manufacture them without custom parts. So the problems really start when the manufacturers make deliberate design decisions to build in custom parts into the modern device like your mobile phone.

And of course, they're not possible without a lot of custom parts. But there's many instances where they could have used one of half a dozen different off the shelf components that you or I can just buy on the third-party market. There's lots of component sellers out there that will sell you these, uh, sort of like jelly bean components as we call them and that could be something like a battery charger chip for example. And if that chip fails, if it's a custom device, then you're not going to be able to get that part except from a a different scrap parts unit.

So what the device manufacturers do is they will approach the semiconductor manufacturers who make these chips and they'll go, hey, we want to build a million of these phones. Will you take this off the shelf chip, design us a slightly different variation on that, and sell it to us so that we can use it in our product. But by the way, that's now our own proprietary chip and you can't sell that to anyone else on the regular market like you can with all the other chips in your inventory. And that's where the problem comes in.

They use these custom chips when there's really no technology reason to actually do so, and a really insidious problem comes about with what's called component serialization. and this is where the manufacturers will take, say, the camera module in the phone and they'll build a serial number into that phone, which then the software can read out and that serial number is associated with the software in this particular phone when they manufacture it. So if you go and try and repair this phone, and you get a camera module, either you can buy it off the free market if you can, or you might be able to buy a third-party equivalent. And even if you try and take a genuine part out of another genuine product, you've got a scrap phone and you want to use it, uh, to salvage parts out of to do repairs.

You take that genuine part out, you put it in another genuine phone and it won't work because the serial numbers don't match. It'll pop up an error message saying you know unauthorized repair or not compatible or some other error message. and this is something that they can do in software with almost any part. and it's pretty insidious.

And really, there's no technological reason why they should be doing component serialization like this. And the only conclusion that we can come to from this is that they want to prevent unauthorized repair, They want to charge you an armored leg to fix your product, or they want to sell you a new device. They don't want to give you the choice to go to your local repair person and be able to fix your product at a reasonable price. The right to repair is actually a given in other industries and people expect it and it take for example your if your fridge or your washing machine breaks down, it's a given that you can just call up your local repair person, they'll come out and they'll repair it and they'll have the parts available to actually do so or the automotive industry when your car breaks down.

it's a given that you'll go to your local repair shop and they'll be able to repair your vehicle and have the parts available to do so either part genuine parts from the manufacturer or if they're not available, at least be able to use parts from the Uh, secondhand or scrapped market. If your widget in your car fails, they often give you the choice. it's 500. for a genuine part from the manufacturer and four weeks lead time or something.

Or I can just go to the local Uh scrap yard, get a used one for a hundred bucks which one would you like and people make their choice. And having choice is a good thing. But when it comes to modern electronic devices like smartphones and laptops and xboxes, a lot of people don't have the same mentality that they can just go to a local repair shop and have it fixed relatively cheaply. They often go back to the The or the manufacturer, their authorized repair center like an Apple center and they might be given these outrageous quotes because these manufacturers when they repair something, they often won't do what's called component level repair I.e like trace down the fault to an individual component in there and just swap that.

They'll often just swap the entire board in the thing and that is really costly and also in an environmental problem as well. You gotta produce an entire new board and scrap an entire new board just to fix something that could have been fixed with an individual component that you could have got done at your local repair center for often one-tenth the cost. The interesting thing is is that we come from a society where it was a given that you had the right to repair something, you owned it, you bought it, it was expensive and you would take it to your local repair shop to have it fixed and often Tvs back in the old days. For example, they would have a circuit diagram when you take off the back cover.

There's the circuit diagram in there that would help an independent repair technician to actually troubleshoot and repair that product at a reasonable cost and even computers back in the early days of Apple. For example, when you bought your Apple Ii computer, it actually came with the full uh, service information and all the listings. It was all open source and anyone could repair and tinker with their product. It was just a given, but somehow we've gotten to a point in society where a lot of manufacturers don't think that you actually own the product that you actually buy and you shouldn't be using an unauthorized repair center.

They will support it by often repairing it themselves, but at a much inflated cost and doing just board swaps and non-component level repair. And really, that's not good enough. So we need to tell the manufacturers that hey, I bought this, I own it. I should have the right to have this repaired by anyone I choose at a reasonable cost, or even repair it myself using the countless online video and other guides available these days to repair your own things.

And that's actually a big movement actually repairing stuff yourself, but you should be able to get them repaired at a reasonable cost which often the manufacturer themselves won't offer because they will just do a an entire board repair or something like that. They won't do component level repair and we should be telling the manufacturers hey, please don't do software component serialization and use custom component chips where you don't absolutely have to. Or at least don't go after independent repair centers for actually, uh, advertising and offering services to repair their products, which some of the main major manufacturers have done. They don't want people sharing repair information and it's ridiculous.

There are powerful lobby groups out there that will actually argue against your right to actually repair your own product, and they'll do this based on fairly dubious claims of safety. Privacy concerns is a big one. Traceability and other warranty requirements, where, in uh, reality, there's no actual evidence out there to show there's any difference between an unauthorized repair center and when the manufacturers authorized repair center. They just don't want you repairing your own products.

and it's something that we shouldn't stand for. And the consumer should actually care about the right to repair your own product, because it's a given in other industries like white goods and automotive. So why shouldn't it be the case for your mobile phones and your laptops and other advanced electronic products? It should be absolutely no different. And the first thing is an environmental concern.

Just think of the number of mobile phones that you've tossed out. why shouldn't you, uh, be able to repair your phone at a reasonable cost? So if people go to and support their local repair centers, then they can often get their favorite Uh phone or laptop or Xbox or advanced electronic product actually repaired at and often significantly reduce cost to what the manufacturer will offer. even if they do offer that repair service at the manufacturer level. And even if the manufacturer offers a free replacement phone, for example, you should go.

Well, that's pretty wasteful. What happens to all the embodied energy that went into manufacturing this phone and it's just tossed out? It's just incredibly wasteful. And you when you multiply this by often hundreds of millions or a billion people, that's a lot of wasted uh, technology that's just thrown in the bin when it could have been very easily and very cheaply repaired. Governments can have a say in this, and they do in existing consumer law, which says that manufacturers must keep a reasonable amount of parts available for a reasonable amount of time for repair.

But unfortunately for modern, really advanced, electronic uh products, that's often not very, uh, practical. So it's often the consumers which have to put the pressure on the manufacturers and say, hey, please make these products more repairable. Or at least don't deliberately introduce features into the product that make it difficult for just anyone, including local repair centers to actually repair these products. The more difficult you make that the less we're going to buy your product.

So the consumers really have to put pressure on the manufacturers. So the key to this is to tell the manufacturer no, I'm not going to buy your product. I'm going to buy a competitor's product because they advertise that it's fairly easy to repair, and they actually, uh, support independent repair and hopefully some clever manufacturer will finally learn just like they did back in the old days. If they they include repair information on their website just freely downloaded, then they're going to be more popular.

It's not going to affect their sales, it could even increase them. So supporting right to repair is all about supporting choice about how when and where you can get your device repaired and if the manufacturers won't provide the information we'll go to buy the product from someone who does.