The matter of right to repair

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    ↩  videogamesm12 I'm sure you know it matters quite a lot to me. The difference between paying over a thousand dollars to have something replaced while under warranty and taking over 2 months to apply a fix compared to purchasing the part myself for under 300 dollars including shipping and having my device up and running in about 2 hours says a lot. Yeah, I support Right to Repair because it saved me both time and money.

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    The UK recently passed a right to repair law, which is a step in generally the right direction. Upon reading the legislation myself, my politics major brain kicked in and spotted some obvious flaws - namely the unjust protection of major technological companies.

    To start with, the parliament have decided to make a list of all items that fall under the new legislation. It is generally a good list, with washer-dryers, dishwashers, televisions and “electronic displays” all available for right to repair. I immediately found it odd that legislation contained the vague term “electronic displays”, and I was almost certain this was a red-herring. Governments across the world have time and time again used vague terminology to avoid public unrest and is borderline political libel.

    It turns out that “electronic displays” does not cover phones, tablets, laptops, or smartwatches - effectively saving Apple from having to comply with this law. That’s right, powerhouse Apple does not need to comply with parliamentary legislation due to the parliament themselves excluding Apple’s major goods from being affected.

    It’s also worth noting that Apple’s year long argument with certain US state parliaments has also essentially led them to be excluded from their right to repair legislation. They must have some damn good lawyers at Apple to be able to manage this 😂.

    It's another situation where the government will do something about it but then tech giants will just throw legal money at the problem to make it go away. The same thing has happened a million times with privacy legislation. One grim possibility is that this could end up hurting smaller companies more than fixing the right to repair issues of large tech companies. However, if we're lucky and the government doesn't budge this time, we might end up with cheaper and easier repairs, and a better tech hardware market in general.