Right to repair sold to the highest bidder
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@TimeBandit Of course; most companies will tend to point at the repair, even when it had nothing to do with the failure that you want covered under its warranty. You have to fight them to get them to admit that the warranty is still good.
I'm all for having the feds put the screws to these companies and try to get some better oversight in the way they manage their warranties.
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@anotherusername
The companies only use the highest quality snowflake certified frobnicators. Which get quite triggered when exposed to atmosphere by anyone other than the certified repair technician.
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@izzion said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
@anotherusername
The companies only use the highest quality snowflake certified frobnicators. Which get quite triggered when exposed to atmosphere by anyone other than the certified repair technician.That reads very oddly when
frobnicators
is read asfornicators
...
Had to re-read the first sentence...
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@dcon Either way you're fucked.
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@anotherusername said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
@TimeBandit Of course; most companies will tend to point at the repair, even when it had nothing to do with the failure that you want covered under its warranty. You have to fight them to get them to admit that the warranty is still good.
I'm all for having the feds put the screws to these companies and try to get some better oversight in the way they manage their warranties.
Sounds like a good field for that automated suing app mentioned elsewhere.
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Motorola does the right thing
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Cue the screeching about Motorola price gouging consumers with their repair kits in 3...2...1...
Edit: damn, that's what I get for clicking reply to thread off of post 1 without checking first.
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Take that Apple/John Deere/etc
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It's for your safety
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@TimeBandit They're some good arguments, honestly.
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@pie_flavor said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
They're some good arguments, honestly
Which ones?
The rogue washing machine?
Runaway appliances are another threat, Pierce suggested. Clothes washers, she explained, used software to disable the spin cycle when a safety latch on the washer lid was opened. Owners or independent repair technicians could disable that, leading to injury or death for curious children
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@TimeBandit Yes, continue to roll your eyes, it worked last time. What precisely is wrong with what you quoted?
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@pie_flavor we have independent car repair, we should ban those !!!
Do you have any idea how many people are killed each day because an independent mechanic fixed a car wrong?
Those are way more dangerous than washing machines, and not only for children.
And washing machine that have software are pretty new. How many children got harmed with the old not-smart models?
Edit: fixed a typo
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@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
How many children got armed
Gun control threads are .
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@HardwareGeek said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Gun control threads
Guns are safe, but washing machine are dangerous
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@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Runaway appliances are another threat
Is your [appliance] running?
Yes.
Then you'd better go catch it!@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Clothes washers, she explained, used software to disable the spin cycle when a safety latch on the washer lid was opened.
Why the #*(&$%*@% is a safety function like that software controlled, when a simple electro-mechanical switch can disable the motor with 100% reliability? Besides, modern HE washers lock the the lid so that it cannot be opened without pausing the cycle and waiting for everything to stop moving, not just during the spin cycle, but at all, at any point in the cycle, short of using a pry bar.
@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
independent repair technicians could disable that
Sure, because independent repair technicians want people to be injured by the things they repair.
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@HardwareGeek said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Sure, because independent repair technicians want people to be injured by the things they repair.
Yesterday the Indians made your PC catch fire. Today they'll do the same to your microwave.
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@HardwareGeek said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
modern HE washers lock the the lid so that it cannot be opened without pausing the cycle and waiting for everything to stop moving
On a 5 minute timer even when it's still in delayed start grumble
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@HardwareGeek There's also the question why on Earth would someone even do that?
I mean, if it was something you could do just by pressing a button, okay, but I'd still question the motivation of anyone actually doing so. But for this you'd have to change the software and re-upload it.
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@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
@HardwareGeek said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Gun control threads
Guns are safe, but washing machine are dangerous
Guns don't kill people, washing machines kill people!
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@HardwareGeek said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
when a simple electro-mechanical switch can disable the motor with 100% reliability?
Those aren't cool and trendy.
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@pie_flavor said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
@HardwareGeek said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Sure, because independent repair technicians want people to be injured by the things they repair.
Yesterday the Indians made your PC catch fire. Today they'll do the same to your microwave.
Just remember the moles are out to kill us.
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@pie_flavor said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
What precisely is wrong with what you quoted?
That people stupid enough to disable safety features having their offsprings die is portrayed as a bad thing.
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@Gąska said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
@pie_flavor said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
What precisely is wrong with what you quoted?
That people stupid enough to disable safety features having their offsprings die is portrayed as a bad thing.
Business idea: make say a cooking pot with a "safety screw" that will prevent the release of the abortifacient contained in its lid into the food. Or do babies have to be born first for you to be fine with them dying in such a way?
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Finally
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@izzion said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
And, conversely, how much diagnosis / teardown time really went in to getting to the problematic connector for the small shop. My suspicion is, if he was honest with himself over how much time that had cost, he wouldn't have done it for free, but would have billed the hour. Having worked at a small shop in the past, I can attest to how easy it is to spend significant amounts of time on "minor" repairs that you don't feel is fair to bill to the customer... and then all the sudden you're billing 2 hours for 8 hours worth of work and wondering why the boss is making noises about how they can't afford the staff (or, if you're the proprietor, wondering how the food's gonna be on the table this month...)
This is why no sane businessperson does computer service in the consumer space. The electronics are disposable commodity items and any reasonable repair bill will be >50% of replacement cost when all factors are billed for.
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@Polygeekery said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
The electronics are disposable commodity items and any reasonable repair bill will be >50% of replacement cost when all factors are billed for.
Considering the price of Apple's devices, they're probably an exception
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@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
If it's a problem he already saw before, he knew exactly where to look.
Experience takes time and it should be billed in some way.
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@Polygeekery said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Experience takes time and it should be billed in some way.
He seem to be doing fine with the money he's making
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@admiral_p said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
make you pay quite a lot for stuff as trivial as formatting and reinstallation (which can be basically done unattended).
It still takes time and there is still a cost associated with this.
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@remi said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
Their "duty" and their "interest" are two very different things. And I don't think Apple makes any kind of significant money on their repair shops (even assuming they gouge customers, how often do they go to a repair shop, compared to how often the average Apple customer simply buys a new device?). I wouldn't even be surprised if they lost money on them, counting in the cost of real estate in what are usually prime locations etc.
I guess Apple doesn't care that much about the repairs that someone else could make, at least not in terms of lost revenue. What they probably care about is the potential of loss of image, i.e. they want to ensure that none of their devices run in a half-broken-held-together-by-gaffer-tape state, which is what opening the repair market to everyone would do. Remember that they purposefully position themselves as a luxury good, so they don't really want a steady stream of degrading models trickling down in increasing states of disrepair, they want people to either have a fully working device, or lust for when they might buy one. There is no middle ground for luxury products.Their repair shops and sales floors are the same space, so those who come in for repair are fairly likely to see the new shiny and buy a new device and trade in their old ones.
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@TimeBandit said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
@Polygeekery said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
The electronics are disposable commodity items and any reasonable repair bill will be >50% of replacement cost when all factors are billed for.
Considering the price of Apple's devices, they're probably an exception
Considering how they build them, not necessarily... (do they still solder their SSDs to the motherboard?)
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@Polygeekery Are you getting into the necro business?
Anyway, after re-reading what I wrote at the time, I agree with you and it mostly goes along with what I said, i.e. that they might actually loose money on the repairs but they don't care. As you suggest, having a repair shop might just be a trick to get people back into their shop. They don't even need to have that strategy made explicitly anywhere (in training repair people or whatever), the simple fact that the two facilities (repairs & sell) are in the same place is enough for it to work.
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@dcon said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
do they still solder their SSDs to the motherboard?
Of course, it's supposedly to enable them to make them thinner
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@Polygeekery of course, which is why I'm not saying they should do it for free.
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@remi said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
they might actually loose money on the repairs
No. They just tell the customer "we would have to change the motherboard (because the SSD is dead, or the CPU, or anything really) and It would cost almost the same to buy a new shiny one"
If you like to get fucked hard, buy Apple™
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The truth is that the consumer industry is ripe with cost cutting, planned obsolescence etc.
Many other industries (the automotive industry for example) offers much longer warranties over an item that is bound to see much more stress and wear and tear than an electronic widget. In the US, most brands still offer one-year warranties (we have it a bit better in the EU, it's two-year minimum, and even then, Apple tried to pull off a stunt which went basically as "we're an American company and we only offer one-year warranties"). This over items that we commonly expect to last at least four or five years. Increase minimum mandatory warranties, and you'll increase upfront cost maybe. But considering that careless users will not be covered (because physical damage is never covered) it's still best for everybody.
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@Gąska said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
A law like this would essentially kill GPL. If I can distribute - and even sell - patches to other software on my own terms without permission from original developer, there's no need for me to stick to their license terms about distributing modifications.
Yeah, but Stallman would have achieved his goal.
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@Captain I don't think a guy who created GPL has a goal of killing GPL.
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He sure does. GPL is a stop gap.
Remember why he wrote it: he tried to fix a printer driver but Xerox didn't give him the source code.
So he started a quest to ensure that in his little pocket of the universe, everybody always had the right of repair.
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@Captain oh. I see.
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If you're Canadian, please sign this petition
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@TimeBandit I'm somewhat scared of what kind of washing machine modification this guy might come up with.
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@Gąska Almost certainly less frightening than a modification Colin Furze would come up with.
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@HardwareGeek What about Tim Taylor?
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@Captain said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
GPL is a stop gap.
Remember why he wrote it: he tried to fix a printer driver but Xerox didn't give him the source code.This. I'm quite surprised this took so long to come up, even though the discussion had almost gotten there by, like, the 10th post or so.
I'd read the[1] "GPL is teh EVIL" thread just before coming to this one, and I found it really strange that seemingly the same[2] persons claiming "The moral/ethical claims of FOSS are a sham" would be going all "Right to repair is a fundamental right and companies denying it are the EVIL" [3], when the GPL / FOSS movement is in fact exactly about this, just with a focus on software rather than hardware.
[1] one of the? Don't remember which thread it was, I could go try to find it but . Anyway, it contained this link: http://marktarver.com/problems.html
[2] Disclaimer: I didn't do exact statistics about who claimed what where because again , but that was my impression.
[2] Yes, this is paraphrased with hyperbole; but it's the gist I got from the discussion, anyway.
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@ixvedeusi said in Right to repair sold to the highest bidder:
I'd read the[1] "GPL is teh EVIL" thread just before coming to this one, and I found it really strange that seemingly the same[2] persons claiming "The moral/ethical claims of FOSS are a sham" would be going all "Right to repair is a fundamental right and companies denying it are the EVIL" [3], when the GPL / FOSS movement is in fact exactly about this, just with a focus on software rather than hardware.
It makes perfect sense when you remember that people here are overwhelmingly software developers. If you asked teachers if teachers deserve higher salary, almost all would say yes.
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@Gąska Actually, a good number of teachers would tell you that keeping salaries low is how you make sure that only the right sort of people become teachers.