Planned Obsolescence and the Right to Repair

That is part of Sloan's market strategy was creating a company that every year would release cars that had updated styling and features in order to entice not just first time car buyers, but people who had already, you know, purchased a car in the past. And that got me to thinking that I should really talk about planned obsolescence in general and examine the facts and consider the myths, and also chat a bit about the right to repair movement and recycling, because all of this is kind of

connected together. We're talking about casual consumption of electronic goods, almost a disposable approach to them, and electronic goods are not necessarily the best thing in the world to treat as disposable, so let's just start off by defining what planned obsolescence is really all about. Now. Generally, people talk about planned obsolescence as a strategy in which the maker of a thing, whether it's a physical good or an app or whatever, builds into that thing a predetermined end

of life. In other words, you've already determined how long this thing is supposed to last. And the purpose of planned obsolescence is to not just sell one thing to each cut stomer one time, but to sell many of that same thing to every customer over time. It's the same reason why a lot of software companies will migrate toward a subscription based revenue model, because it's more profitable to get customers to regularly give you money than to bank on selling them a lot of the same thing

to a huge customer base. Like if I'm selling a software package for two hundred dollars, I'm going to get you know, X number of customers, and chances are they're not going to buy another product for me for a while. If I offer a subscription fee for a much lower monthly plan, I might get people locked into that system for years and thus make way more money off of them in the long run than I would if I had gone with the big ticket item up front. This

can actually manifest in lots of different ways. Now, typically I get the sense that the popular perception of you know, planned ups lessons is that companies make stuff that's just designed to stop working after a certain number of hours of operation. So, in other words, the manufacturer isn't making products that are meant to stand the test of time. Rather, these are products that will at some point break down

and either require repairs or a replacement. Now, repairs were great if you happen to be the not only the company that's selling the thing, but you're also the company that provides maintenance and repair services. Car dealerships often fall

into this category. You can purchase a car at a dealership, and then most dealerships have service centers as well, or they have you know, an agreement with a service center, so the dealership can continue to make money off of a sale if the salesperson can convince the customer to bring the car back to the dealership's service center for regular maintenance or repair work. But not all technology has

the value you of a car. Obviously, there's a lot of tech out there that's fairly inexpensive to make, and companies might price that technology. It's such a relatively low cost that a repair might set you back the same amount or more than buying just a new version of whatever that tech is. For a lot of us, I figure the reaction to that as well, I might as well buy a new one if I'm going to be

spending that kind of money. Heck, the new thing of a jig might have more features than the old one, or it might look a little different, you know, more stylish, and so we toss aside whatever old thing of a jig we have and then we go out and buy a new one. Or maybe you would actually like to do repairs yourself. That's something we're going to chat about

more towards the end of this episode. But some companies have been known to make it challenging or maybe even impossible, for the end customer to really repair the technology they purchase, whether it's through using proprietary screws that need up specific tool to remove them, or actually sealing components into compartments with glue and rivets and solder or other fasteners, making it impossible to open without risk of causing further damage.

Companies have used a few different ways to obscure or impede repairs. M apple or You could also get to a point with stuff like cars where it just becomes harder to make repairs because it's hard to even determine what is wrong with the thing without a special diagnostic device like a computer. This is the case with a

lot of modern cars. You might be able to lift the hood and look around a little bit, but some vehicles have various covers or engine configurations that make it really challenging for the average person to access specific parts of the motor, let alone do any work on it. Again, this limits what you can do with tech once it starts to fail, and all tech does fail time, because well, entropy is something we just can't avoid. It's it's a fundamental law of the universe, particularly when it comes to

cheap technology. This sort of disposable approach has a lot of negative drawbacks, including what to do with old tech that no longer works. I mean, a lot of technology contains stuff that's pretty toxic, so throwing it out in the garbage could lead to it ending up in a landfill somewhere, and then harmful stuff like lead or mercury could leach into the environment. Because of that, that's not great. So we'll touch a tiny bit on electronics recycling in

this episode two. But I have done full episodes about e waste recycling, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it. And there are often ways to make older tech obsolete that are not necessarily obvious on the face of it. So let's talk about smartphones, for example. That's an easy one. One of the big trends we see in technology is that as devices or components within devices get more powerful, the software developers end up making software that eats up that extra power. Nicholas Worth wrote

about this pro problem back in the ninety nineties. He wrote a paper titled a Plea for Lean Software, and his point has essentially boiled down into what we now call Worth's law, which is that software is getting slower, that is, it's getting more resource hungry at a rate

that's faster than hardware is getting faster. So while subsequent generations of hardware are getting more powerful, the requirements of software are outpacing that progress, and the end result is that we often feel our shiny new devices just aren't keeping up as much as we expected them. To. We're basing our perception on what the new device should be able to do based on what we have right now,

and that's just not how stuff works. Unfortunately, gamers who want to be on the bleeding edge of computing capability experience this a lot. A top gaming rig would cost thousands of dollars. It requires a powerful central processor or CPU, and quite likely multiple powerful graphics processing units or GPUs. Plus, you need a power supply that's capable of providing the juice that these components need, and you need a killer cooling system to make sure the whole thing doesn't overheat.

And just as you get all of this stuff set up and running, the latest games, developers start making games that are so resource hungry that even with your killer rig, you might have to knock a few of the game's settings down a couple of notches just to make it run smoothly. Meanwhile, you're already anticipating the next big development in hardware that will let you move all those sliders all the way to the top. That's going to set you back a few more thousand dollars, which is brew

roll with smartphones. We see this happen a lot as newer models use better processors, and typically new processors are usually more powerful and hopefully more efficient, So in other words, you're not seeing battery life just plummet from one generation to the next, or phones get way bigger because you need a bigger battery in order to make them last long enough. Processor technologies follow pretty close to Moore's law, and we typically interpret that as meaning that a processor's

capabilities effectively double every two years or so. Not the same processor, but rather new processors on the market end up being twice as powerful as the processors that came out two years earlier. That's generally what we mean. More's laws more subtle than that, but we won't go into it. Battery life does not follow this same trajectory. It's again a law of physics. We're talking about electro chemical reactions, and so there's not a magic way to make batteries

just last longer. It requires more incremental improvement. So if we only concentrated on making processors more powerful, they would just pull more juice per hour than older processors, and soon we would have smartphones. They would only have a couple of hours of useful battery life. So there is a balance to be made here. Meanwhile, smartphone apps still

follow Worth's law. The apps drawn more processor power or the interact with more components, and smartphones like GPS receivers or accelerometers or the camera or microphone or some combination of all of these and more, and the smartphone operating systems themselves evolved to support these apps and provide more functionality. Well, older smartphones just can't keep up with this all the time, and so you will often see companies make a cutoff

for operating system updates. Older phones might stall out at a certain OS version and be unable to install more recent update of the operating system. So you could have an Android smartphone that's maybe a few years old, and it's running a version of Android that's several generations old at this point because Google has determined that the hardware

you're using simply cannot meet the needs of later operating systems. Meanwhile, the app developers are focusing on what they can do with the most recent OS version, which means you might not be able to run a new app with all of its features, or you might not even be able to run the app at all if you're using an older phone. And since apps are what makes smartphones smart.

That ends up being a big problem, and so now the incentive is there for you to upgrade your phone even if your old phone still works, so that you can, you know, just use your smartphone the way you want to and you're not stuck on older versions of apps.

And that's particularly important because sometimes these older versions of apps end up being tied to servers that could go offline, or they might swap over to a new process, and then you have an outdated smartphone that has a bunch of inactive apps stored on it and it becomes practically useless.

On a related note, battery life decreases over time and use, so older batteries just don't hold as much of a charge as newer batteries, and they drain faster, which means that your older battery operated devices will need recharging more frequently. Apple famously tried to address this problem by purposefully throttling the processing speed of older iPhones. The processors would work more slowly so that they would consume less battery power, thus extending the usefulness of a battery at the cost

of smartphone performance. But Apple didn't, you know, tell anyone about it, and a lot of users figured out that their devices were slowing down due to age. That's what they assumed. It's just, oh, this is older, that's why it's getting slower. And in a way that was kind of true, but not in the same way that these users thought. They just thought, this thing is getting old. I need a new one, So they opted to buy

a new, later generation iPhone. But in iPhone, users figured out that their phones were being throttled and they had no choice in the matter, and that led to a big class action lawsuit. As users said, had they known what was going on, they would have opted to replace the battery in their old iPhone rather than buy a brand new iPhone. And I should add that Apple does not make it easy for you to do this. You really can't replace a battery in your iPhone, at least

not without violating your warranty. But under certain circumstances, like if you enroll in Apple Care Plus, then Apple actually will replace an iPhone battery free of charge. I say free of charge, really, I should say that price is

included in your enrollment into Apple Care Plus. So for those users, the people who had enrolled an app Care Plus, they could have chosen to have a new battery put into their older iPhone and it would have extended the life of that device, but they weren't told about what was going on, so instead they opted to buy a

brand new phone, which was way more expensive. In Apple reached a settlement agreement, actually to settlement agreements for two different class action lawsuits brought against the company about this very issue. The first settlement was for five hundred million dollars, a princely some and the second was for another one

d thirteen million dollars. In both cases, prosecution argued that Apple was deliberately hiding the fact that it was throttling processing output and that the battery was degrading over time, and they knew that most users would opt to upgrade to a newer iPhone as long as they didn't realize that there was an alternative path they could have taken. Now, that pretty much hits the planned obsolescence definition right on the nose. So it turns out there are a lot

of different approaches to planned obsolescence. While the phrase might make you think that the company is purposefully making stuff that just won't stand the test of time, as in the company is choosing to create substandard products, knowing that these products will break down and the customer is likely to come back and buy another one. Really, that's just the tip of the iceberg, and it's usually not even

the case. If a company's reputation gets tied to the idea that the stuff they make breaks easily, that's not good for business. And the rest of this episode, we're going to take a closer look at some historical examples of planned obsolescence and what was going on from different perspectives, and we'll also get into the right to Repair movement and what it might mean to the tech industry moving forward, assuming the movement actually achieves its goals. But first let's

take a quick break. We're back and on December twenty three, nineteen twenty four, a group of elite entrepreneurs met to establish some shady guidelines, which was pretty ironic because they were all in the lightbulb business. That's sort of a pun I guess. Anyway. The leaders represented some of the largest light bulb manufacturers in the world. There was General Electric, the grand daddy of big tech companies in the United States.

There was the company Phillips from the Netherlands. As Rum, a company from Germany, had a representative present, and the French had their place too, with executives from the company de Lump, and together they created a powerful idea which we can represent as a very large lightbulb turning on behind their heads, or at least we could if this

were a video and not an audio podcast. Their idea was to form a new company, an organization that would core innate how light bulbs should work, as in how bright they should be and how long they should last, as well as which company would be allowed to sell its products in certain specific regions. It was collusion of the highest order, and it violated pretty much every antitrust law you can think of. And it became known as the Phoebus Cartel. Cute huh, because Phoebus is another name

for Apollo, the god of the sun. Before the cartel, manufacturers were making light bulbs that could last between fifteen hundred and two thousand hours of operation. But the cartel collectively decided that their light bulbs should have a life expectancy of one thousand hours of use. A ha. These companies were producing a technology that already had a limited lifespan just because of how it works. You know, the filaments and light bulbs, the part that actually gives off light.

They eventually burned through and break, and that's what makes incandescent lightbulbs die. Clearly, this group of people were all agreeing to a worldwide limit on the useful number of hours a light bulb would operate in in order to sell more light bulbs. Right, they were making a predetermined end of life cycle for light bulbs, and by making everyone agree to this limitation, no manufacturer would be able to defy the others and start selling bulbs that had

longer lifespans, which would ruin it for everybody else. Now you can see the appeal of that narrative, right, rich fat cats are cynically limiting a technology just to sell more light bulbs, while simultaneously creating pressure to prevent any other company from offering up a superior product. You could just hear the thumbs twiddling, you know, the mustaches waxing,

and the chorals chortling. Heck, the cartel would even test lightbulbs from each manufacturer, and if any of those lightbulbs proved to have a lifespan that as well beyond those one thousand hours of operation, the cartel would find the responsible manufacturer keep those light bulbs lives shorter or else. But if we want to be a little more fair, we should take into consideration another factor. As light bulbs age,

they would give off less light. Incandescent bulbs, they are less luminously efficient in other words, And so the counter argument was made that by limiting the lifespan to one thousand hours, it was more about maximizing luminous efficiency. It was to make certain that the light bulbs were providing enough light throughout their lifespans and not just turning into

increasingly dim light sources. So there was an argument being made that the restriction of the lifespan was more about improving the quality of the performance of light bulbs rather than speeding up the need to replace those light bulbs.

It was a compelling enough argument to lead the u K's Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission to give the companies some slack with that regard, though there were many other things the Phoebus Cartel did that did not get a free pass, but those are more market focused than tech focused,

so I'm not going to go into them. The cartel itself, by the way, dissolved in the late nineteen thirties, not because of government pressure, or at least not the kind of regulation pressure, but because of a little thing called World War two. Now, I suspect that the decision to arrive at one thousand hours of useful life was guided

both by practical considerations and good old fashioned greed. So I suspect there is some truth to both of the scenarios I mentioned, or if you listen to ridiculous history scenarios, and considering that some of the other moves that the cartel made, like namely price fixing, you definitely cannot count greed out because that was the primary motivator for those decisions. But there are at least some people who are a little more charitable toward the idea of limiting bulb lifespan

in an effort to favor better luminous efficiency. So we'll move on. The next big example is the one that I mentioned earlier and talked about a little bit in my episodes about General Motors. This was the GM under Alfred B. Sloan, the man who took a big mess of companies that were acquired by GM founder William C. Durant, and then he organized all of this mishmash into individual business units looking over specific makes of car, and each of those units had a great deal of autonomy between them.

He was also a consummate capitalist, and I don't necessarily mean that in a flattering way. He had a habit of focusing on profits and ignoring people. But you can learn more about that in the GM episodes. One of Sloan's many contributions to the automotive industry was the introduction of stylistic changes to various car models year over year. In the early days of automobiles, the dominating manufacturer was

the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford's company produced the famous Model T. Ford and first introduced that Model T in nineteen o eight, and it remained in production until nineteen twenty seven. By n this was a mass produced cars, so on a huge scale. Ford dominated car sales in the United States for like decades now. Allegedly, Ford himself once said that there was no use in overtaking and passing a Model T on the road, because you would just find yourself behind a different Model T. That's how

commonplace they were. He also reportedly said that a customer could get a Model T and whatever color they wanted as long as it was black. While the company would offer Model T s and other colors up to nineteen fourteen, between nineteen fourteen and nineteen Ford only churned out black Model T cars. This meant that Ford's factories could build nearly identical cars, one right after the other, using mass

production techniques, thus increasing efficiency and keeping costs down. And it also meant that Ford could sell these cars at affordable prices. They were meant to be practical, durable, and reliable. That's how he made so many early sales. Now there was a big emphasis on uniformity and consistency, in other words, because those are things that make it easier to mass produce something. And Alfred Sloan saw an opportunity to appeal to people on a different level over at General Motors.

He thought it would be a good idea to change up the style of a model of car on a regular basis. At a glance, you would be able to give a ballpark estimate of the year when a certain model came out due to distinguishing features that were on that car. You know, maybe the headlights are in a slightly different spot, or maybe the car has a different kind of grill on the front of it, or maybe you put a pair of big old tail fins on the back of the thing. That's the sort of thing

that Sloan was thinking about. Harley Earl, a man whom many historians credit as the first professional designer to work in the automotive industry, worked was Sloan to make this vision a reality, and Earl would sculpt models out of clay and then mold them in different ways to create new features, and as tastes changed, he could reflect that in different car body designs, and now cars could appeal to people by embodying certain design trends. This approach meant

that cars now had a sort of planned obsolescence. As time passes, fashions change and older cars will pass out of fashion. Out of style, they'll become unfashionable, and that creates a psychological lever that GM could lean on to convince people to come in trade in their older cars

and buy newer ones. The older cars might still work perfectly well from an operational point of view, but they could be seen as being old fashioned, and that was enough to push some people to upgrade to a new vehicle. It was still important for GM to make cars that were perceived to be reliable and powerful. If the cars were known to break down quickly, that kind of reputation

would hurt sales. So while you could keep driving the same car for many years, assuming you took good care of the car, Sloan's goal was to make you feel like a kind of a social pariah if you did that for a really long time, Like, Oh, that poor so and so they can't afford a new car. Look at them driving that old, you know, Chevy or whatever it might be. Sloan's approach accelerated car pun the role

of a car as a stat symbol. GM offered several different makes of cars, and each make targeted a different economic demographic. So on the cheaper end was the Chevrolet line and on the opposite side of the spectrum was the Cadillac. But no matter which make of car you talked about, that strategy of planned obsolescence was at play. You can see Sloan's impact in consumer products across the board, and not just in tech, though it tends to be

particularly evident in the tech world. It's why Apple releases a new iPhone every year, or more to the point, it's why companies like Apple hold really big exclusive press events to hype the release of a new model of iPhone every year. And to be clear, Apple does this with lots of its products, not just the iPhone. It's just the iPhone event tends to get the most attention.

So let's think about that yearly schedule for a moment, and also think back to how phones were marketed in the US when the iPhone first launched in two thousand seven. So at that time, Apple had signed an exclusive agreement with the carrier A T and T here in the United States. Now, the reasons behind that agreement are fascinating, but they also go beyond what I'm going to talk about, so I'll save that for some future episode. You're welcome.

But back in those days, it was pretty common practice in the United States for carriers like A T and T to offer subsidized phones in return for signing two year contracts where you agreed that this was your carrier for two years. You were locked into a carrier. That made the initial purchase price of phones a little bit more affordable, at least initially, so rather than shelling out a thousand dollars for a phone, you might spend a couple of hundred by signing onto a two year agreement

with the carrier. Typically, those agreements would limit your options when it came to upgrades. Normally you would have to wait out the two years to get to the point where you would renew your agreement or sign whatever newer version of the agreement the carrier was offering, and then you could upgrade to a new phone at a reduced cost, or sometimes the phone would be included as part of

the agreement. But Apple was releasing a brand new iPhone every year, and each new iPhone would have new features and new styling, so the phones were following Sloan's approach to product design. A new iPhone wasn't just flashy technology, it was also a status symbol, and a lot of folks would choose to upgrade to the new version, even if it meant they had to pay more to do it because they were only a year into a service agreement with their carrier and they could not yet qualify

for a subsidized phone. Now, this happened for a few years, but gradually US carriers kind of phased out those two year contract plans, which also meant that the subsidized phone model began to disappear. Customers had more freedom to choose whichever carrier they wanted to without getting locked into things. But it also meant that they often had to pay full price for phones for those who had been upgrading to a new iPhone every year despite the limitations of

two year contracts. This was actually probably a welcome change to the rest of us. It was a bit of an adjustment, not a bad thing, but it did take some time to adjust to it. The brilliant thing about Sloan's approach, the thing that Apple often relies upon, is that you're encouraging customers to crave the new. There's this built in desire in the market to get the coolest new toy with the latest features and the latest options.

Companies don't have to trash the older technology. They just help the new things that the latest version can do. And it might mean that companies take steps to roll out new features very carefully. So in some cases a company might be read to implement a brand new feature, at least from a technological level. However, the hold back they'll make a market based decision to wait and sit on that technology for a little bit in order to maximize sales. You might say, well, we could install these

three new features in our next phone. But if we only install one of them, and then the phone after that we add a second one, and the phone after that we add the third one, we are able to keep boosting sales year over year. If we do all three right now, we might not have enough of an improvement to get that same boost next year. So it becomes this kind of game of chess. So why would you put in all the bells and whistles if you can hold back a few of them and then make

many more sales in the next update. Now is this insidious? I don't really think so. I mean, from a business perspective, it does make a lot of sense. From a consumer perspective, I say, what this should do is teach us that jumping on a brand, a new technology, or even just a new model of an existing technology, might not be the best option right out of the gate. We might need to use some self control before we buy the next shiny thing. Of course, this approach requires moderation as well,

or else you would never buy anything at all. If I need a new phone and I know that I'm three months out from the release of something that I think is really worthwhile, then I can wait that out. But if I'm perpetually waiting for a phone that blows me away with all the features, I'll probably be worried that I'm going to experience buyer's remorse if I jump

in right. So, in other words, if I buy something and I don't feel like it's really what I was waiting for, then maybe the next thing that comes out the next month makes me feel badly about it, and so that can actually become a bit of a crisis. It can It can prevent you from taking action because you're always worried that once you take action, you're committed, and then the next day you find out there was a better option. But yeah, that desire for the new

is something that's really ingrained in the tech world. Companies don't have to make products that will break after a certain amount of time. They don't have to have that kind of planned obsolescence because with lots of tech, just the desire to have the latest thing is enough all on its own. That means the companies just have to focus on offering up products that are different enough from

the previous generation to spark our desire. When we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about this and then we'll learn about the right to repair. But first let's take a quick break. So if manufacturers are actually giving the people what they want, that is updates to technology that flesh out what it can do, at least in the ways that consumers desire, then we can't really put all the blame on manufacturers for planned obsolescence. We are

somewhat responsible for it too. It's good to keep in mind, and if we recognize that part of us, we can try to make a better balance of when we actually need something new and when we just want something new. I struggle with this all the time, whether it's a new flagship phone. I mean, when Android comes up with a brand new flagship phone, I feel the temptation to jump on it. Not literally jump on it, but you

know what I mean. However, in most cases, the phone I have at the time tends to be perfectly fine for my needs. The last time I did upgrade a phone, it was because the microphone on my phone had broken. I could use Bluetooth devices and talk on the phone, but I couldn't use my phone as a phone just on its own, so I did have to upgrade then. But I tend to stick to getting a new phone just every few years as the older one starts to lag behind, especially when it comes to what apps you

can run. And the same is true for game systems. I've gotten a lot better about that too. It used to be that as soon as a game system came out, I felt the urge to rush out and buy it. I usually didn't because I usually didn't have the money, but I always wanted to. However, now I actually prefer to hang back, both so that any bugs in those

early versions can be worked out. I mean, I do not want another Red Ring of Death situation ever again, and also so that game developers can release more titles for the system. It's not much fun pouring a bunch of money into a technology and then having to wait around for it to become useful. But now we also have to talk about the issue of right to repair.

So earlier I talked about the ways companies make it challenging or impossible for the average person to repair stuff, and initially my reaction to that kind of thing is this is how they get you. They want you to get back to them and bring all the stuff to get it fixed by them the cells. But there can be other reasons for this that, while you may or may not agree with them, can be a little more subtle. So,

for example, let's take Apple again. For most of the company's history, Apple products have been largely inaccessible to those who wish to do their own repairs, at least to do so without violating a warranty. But one of the big reasons for that is that Apple has a specific vision as to how consumers are supposed to experience Apple products. This was a philosophy that Steve Jobs had pushed pretty hard. The goal was to create a controlled experience from beginning

to end. The company would have an enormous amount of authority in deciding this, from hardware configurations to the kinds of software that would be allowed to run on the device. We see this reflected in the iPhone app store, where developers have to get approval from Apple before their apps will actually appear on the market. This level of control helps a company deliver con extant quality to users. The challenge is then selling users on the idea that the

company's approach is what the customer actually wants. Jobs was amazing at this. He could bring a device to a crowd and by the end of a presentation have that crowd convinced that Apple's product is exactly what the crowd wanted and needed. But Apple relinquishing control in any way wouldn't make that more difficult to do, because a third party might not perform up to Apple's standards and it would reflect poorly on Apple. But that also meant that

Apple products were difficult to modify. Early consumer computers came out as kits, and the people who bought those kits would typically put them together themselves. You could also pay

to have some of those kits come fully assembled. You would have to pay extra for that, but a lot of early computer owners actually enjoyed the experience of building the computers from the kits, and this meant that really enterprising hobbyists could even make little tweaks to the design to change the performance of the end machine a little bit. This was the early era of the hacker, as people figured out how these systems worked, and then they modified

those systems in different ways. And it was pretty common practice along many different computer manufacturers to have components that you could swap out, like RAM chips. So if you wanted your computer to have more memory, you could open up your computer case and install more RAM, assuming your computer's motherboard and processor could support the additional RAM, but

Apple typically made this really hard to do. If you wanted an Apple computer with more RAM, you were going to have to pay extra to buy a computer model that was a step up from whichever one you were looking at. And that also extends to making it really hard to repair Apple computers if something were to go wrong. And thus we get to the birth of the genius bar.

So we get companies creating complicated electronic devices, many of which have proprietary fasteners and such holding them together, and the message that the customer is to bring any of those devices that aren't working, you know they might need some repair. You're supposed to bring those back to the company or maybe an authorized service vendor. Critics of this approach say it's anti competitive and it hurts the consumer. Ideally, the consumer would have an open choice as to whom

they could bring a broken device for a repair. So if I were particularly talented at repairs, I would be able to open up a shop and work on all sorts of devices. I might offer more competitive rates than what people might find going through the original manufacturer or enrolling in an extended care or warranty program, and these ideas are the underlying principles of the right to Repair movement.

There are a lot of organizations that advocate for the right to repair, and they work to lobby governments to ask legislation that would mandate it. Primarily we see the movement in the United States and even more prominently in the European Union. This is also tied to the problem of electronic waste. As I mentioned earlier. According to the Public Internet Research Group, which I should add is not an unbiased source of information, but according to them, Americans

throughout four hundred sixteen thousand cell phones a day. I find that number a little hard to believe. Maybe it's true. I didn't find, you know, other sources that back this up, but I did find other sources that had similar eye popping statistics. Only a fraction of the electronic devices we throw away, ever, end up in recycling centers. I mean, that's mostly on us. If we just toss it in the garbage, then that's where it's gonna go. It takes

effort to find good recycling centers. Not all of them are ethical, by the way. It takes some research. So considering all the stuff that's in electronics and valuable metals. I mean there's like gold and copper in this stuff. It's a real shame to just throw them out. And then you consider the environmental impact and it gets worse. Right to Repair groups want to see companies include access to stuff like repair guides, so make it possible to understand how these things work and how to fix them.

Make it repair tools accessible if any proprietary tools are needed, and also make us accessible parts needed for repairs. Sell the parts individually as well, so none of this would be free. You know, the companies could still make money. They could actually offer repair kits that you could purchase.

But imagine that instead of having to bring back your smartphone to some store or send it off to a manufacturer through the mail, you instead could order a repair kit, and if you have steady hands, maybe you replace that crack screen or that dead battery by yourself. That's the appeal of the right to repair movement. But as electronics get more complicated, it's more challenging to meet that kind

of standard. Some devices are complex enough that it requires a person with specialized knowledge and skill in order to tackle the problem, and a lot of us, myself included, would probably find ourselves popping into an independent repair shop to have our stuff fixed rather than take it on ourselves and risk breaking it more. Look, all I'm saying is I know what my track record is for taking stuff apart versus putting it together again, and that ratio

is way out of balance. We're seeing this movement embrace not just consumer goods like smartphones, but really big stuff like farming equipment and tractors. Farmers have criticized manufacturer John Deer for including essentially the equivalent of a digital lock and those limit who can actually make repairs to a machine. For farmers who depend upon these big vehicles for their livelihood, that represents a lack of freedom and lack of options,

and it really does feel anti competitive. It's saying you have to go to people of our choosing if you want to have the thing you bought repaired. And this also gets into that weird area we find ourselves in in the digital age. In the old days, you would buy something and you would just think this is mine, right, Like you bought a watch, that's your watch. You could repair that watch however you liked. But these days things are being sold not just as a product, but as

an ongoing service. And it's not so much that you own the thing, it's that you own access to that thing, and some ownership is retained by the original manufacturer. This is an idea that I'm not super keen on because it does put a lot more power back in the hands of the manufacturers and and takes a lot of power away from consumers. Well, in the United States, twenty states have filed legislation in an effort to address these kinds of issues, and in the EU some progress on

this front has already been made. This month a series of regulations that apply to manufacturers that make appliances like washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, I think computer monitors too. It goes into effect and those regulations state that companies need to offer products that have replaceable components, and moreover, that anyone would be able to make these replacements using common tools. You shouldn't need anything special in order to do this

repair work. So, in other words, companies are not supposed to solder stuff together or otherwise make it impossible or difficult to access components without causing further damage. And you shouldn't need a number seventy three spanner up to iconological wrench or something in order to work on it. The EU has yet to pass regulations that would cover stuff like cell phones, computers, and tablets, though, and that is a big problem because these are some of the most

common and harmful forms of consumer waste. People go through these types of devices on a pretty regular basis, and some of the member nations of the EU have gone on to move ahead and pass their own regulations since the EU as a whole has been a little slow on this. So, for example, in France, a new piece of information will be included with consumer electronics. It's essentially a repair index, is a score that ranges between one

and ten. The index gives consumers the idea of how easy or difficult it is to disassemble a device, whether or not you can find information on how to repair the device, you know, if it's readily available or not, whether or not you can find spare parts for that kind of device, how expensive those spare parts are. So you know, the the more difficult it is to repair something, the lower that score is going to be for that

particular item. Now, where we go from here will depend upon how governments either past legislation or they opt not to plus how they intend to enforce legislation. Companies have very little incentive to offer up, you know, repair options to the end user because those can end up hitting revenue down the line. Now, personally, I would love to

see a lot more options for repair. I'd like to see an approach similar to what it was like to buy a car twenty years ago, because yeah, you could bring your car back to the dealership for maintenance, but chances are you might find a great mechanic who is more convenient to where you live, or maybe they have more competitive rates and that might end up being your first choice instead of bringing it back to the dealership, or maybe you invest the time and energy to learn

how to do the repairs yourself. I think the options should all be there, and I definitely think that's an improvement over the status quote we have. Now. Well, that wraps up this episode. I hope you enjoyed learning about planned obsolescence and the right to repair. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. The best way to reach out is over on Twitter. The handle is tech stuff h S. W and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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