Right to Repair

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Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.

I Fix It Repair Manifesto

Summary article from I Fix It

Summary video by Marques Brownlee

Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman

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Why Is It So Expensive To Repair My Devices? (www.digitalrightsbytes.org)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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You've dropped your phone and the screen shattered. Now you're facing a costly repair until you can get a new phone. Swapping out one piece of glass or a button doesn't seem like it should be that expensive. Why does it cost so much to fix your stuff?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Labor. And the fact that people are buying things that were made off of the backs of literal slavery.

I repair machines for a living, and people are buying these $100 machines, and expect a 3 hour repair session to cost them $50. It doesn't. Even with parts available and free, at minimum I'm charging them $100. I should be charging them even more.

Most people are far too uninterested and willfully ignorant to repair their own things, sadly.

Oh, and this is in a field where all of the machines are basically open source. So there's no single company behind it all, controlling access to things - but in a field where there is healthy competition.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Additionally, hardware is often sold at a loss to tie you into a manufacturer's ecosystem. What a pod coffee machine loses at point of sale they bet on regaining as you buy their consumables. The same goes for printers, phones (with a slice of app sales going to the store), video game consoles, and I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

[–] Fiivemacs 4 points 2 months ago

Uggghhhh. Totally agree.

I use the sales buzz words like 'easily replacable' and 'bonus refills' and whatnot as a literal warning to avoid that product.

If I can't use universal replacements, the product isn't worth it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

All of this, and disincentivizing repair over purchasing new product. They have buckets of those screens at a cost of a couple of dollars to the company, but of they jack the price up enough you'll start thinking to yourself, "repairing this is going to cost almost as much as just getting a new one," and thus you rationalize the purchase and the vendor sells more product.

It's strategic pricing, and IMO it's so unethical it should be illegal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

No, the screens are absolutely not cheap. They are usually the most expensive part of a phone. No idea where you get that "couple of dollars" from. Hell, I usually source used screens because new would simply be too expensive. Even with literal defects in OLEDs you can still get a decent price for them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Capitalists greed

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I imagine, machines like smartphones are often integrated to the point of requiring almost no human labor during production. So they're cheap. Repairing them, however, requires human labor, so it's expensive.