JJ: So when you go in at a state legislative level, what do you concretely ask for? What is that language in the bills that you put forward?
GG: It’s actually pretty much consistent. There’s really only one active sentence, and it says that, “Hey, Mr. Manufacturer, if you want to do business in our state, you must provide all the same materials for purposes of repair that you’ve already created for your own repair services.” That’s pretty much it.
I feel like this is not enough. The counter would be to make the product not repairable at all and offer no repair services whatsoever, which is sometimes the case already.
I don’t know if that’s true. Like if Apple had to fully replace every single iPhone that had any sort of issue, that I don’t know that AppleCare would be a product that they could actually offer, at least a reasonable price. And I know that a significant number of people use apple specifically because they know that they can pay more once and then just go to an Apple store to get literally anything fixed.
If Apple is prohibited from having any tools to fix their own devices (in the world where they just choose to have them non-repairable), then could they actually maintain their business while having to throw away devices constantly?
Apple sells an high end experience, not repairability. They don’t care about generating e-waste. AirPods for example are notoriously unrepairable. It’s just a matter of profitability. They’ve put in place a parts pairing technology to maintain a stranglehold on parts availability so as to circumvent legislation on repair. The obsolescence is planned. From the article:
JJ: So what does that malicious compliance look like? It’s a rhetorical support for the right to repair, but when it actually pans out, it doesn’t look like what you’re actually calling for.
GG: Yeah, the best example right now is what we call “parts pairing.” That’s been a problem all along, and we thought we had it nailed down in our template legislation, which we wrote back in 2015, that you can’t require specifically that you buy a part only from the manufacturer, and only new. And Apple got around it. They just said, “Well, we’re going to make sure that if you order a part from us, it’ll only work if you give us the serial number of your phone, and we preload that serial number into the part that we ship you, and that’ll work, but nothing else will.”
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