User-replaceable has nothing whatsoever to do with right to repair.
Zero, zip, nada.
A right to repair law might mandate that any device with a battery also have the battery sold, by the manufacturer, for a reasonable period of time. That gives you a practical right to repair the device by replacing the battery, and it's well-defined.
"User replaceable" is not well defined. Does it mean you need to be able to do this with no tools at all? If not, what tools make it not 'user replaceable'? That no glue is used? Solder?
My watch is literally a cell phone, and I don't welcome law which might make it bulkier or more awkward, to mollify people who want a plastic hinge to pop out their smartphone battery and swap in a new one in the field.
The battery in my smartphone (and watch!) can be replaced by the manufacturer. Right-to-repair is about making sure that the owner of a device can do things themselves or from a third party, without licensing from the manufacturer: so selling consumable parts to all comers, providing some manuals maybe. It is not about whether you have the manual dexterity or special tooling to perform the replacement! If you want to optimize around that part being very easy, buy a product where it is, like the Dragonbox Pyra.
But there's not much point having the right to repair if products are designed to be non-repairable and spare parts are unavailable.
A battery is a consumable and should be user-replaceable. It might be a bit fiddly, with tiny screws and fragile connectors, but shouldn't require heat guns and chemicals to remove adhesives...
(And if we're about to replace billions of vehicles with EVs, perhaps consuming the entire planet's supply of lithium, we should be thinking very carefully about how those batteries will be constructed, replaced, reused, recycled - and ensuring that we don't let capitalism create EVs that after a few years are almost as disposable as few-year-old iPhones...)
Louis Rossman has a distinction about this - the difference between right to repair and user-replacable. I can't find the video but the argument is this:
Louis does not want to impede on Apple's ability to make devices smaller or more compact, as that is what the vast majority of customers prefer. Louis, as an independent repairman, has spent 10s of thousands of dollars on the appropriate tools to repair these devices at an incredibly small scale. The problem comes when he needs to buy a replacement part he is physically unable to get the part. Apple, in some cases, will forbid the supplier from selling the part to anyone but Apple.
It's not a question of difficulty. Louis is equipped with every tool and all the time of the world, but Apple is directly impeding his ability to repair customer devices by refusing him access to the parts. That is in large part what his bill aims to change - not to force Apple to go back to 90s style clip on batteries.
> Louis does not want to impede on Apple's ability to make devices smaller or more compact, as that is what the vast majority of customers prefer.
The vast majority of apple customers have Stockholm syndrome, or at least don't know what they're missing.
The first gen MacBook pro had a battery that just popped out and could be replaced. It extended the life of the computer, and was practical because you could carry an extra battery for long trips. You could say their customer wanted to lose the battery, but I doubt that's true. More likely, people who dislike the user hostile design stop being customers.
> But there's not much point having the right to repair if products are designed to be non-repairable and spare parts are unavailable.
There is some nuance you are missing here. Mandating some design decisions, such as "user replaceable batteries" limits the products that make be made and sold and unfairly adversely affects users with different priorities (such as water proofness, durability or bulk.)
However, there are design decisions that we should outlaw because they impose an unreasonable burden on repairability. I think it is reasonable to prohibit companies from attempting to detect non-OEM or refurbished components and bricking devices. I think it is also reasonable to prohibit companies from usong IP laws to legally attack refurbished component suppliers and third party repair services.
I think pressure to make devices more repairable could he accomplished by mandatinf inclusion of standardized repairabilitu scores so the consumera have better information available when making purchasinf decisions.
Fiddly doesn't cover devices that need to be environmentally sealed. People want devices that can survive a drop into water or even devices designed to be submerged. Making a device with environmentally sealed, and having hatches, covers, etc., is very difficult. Without making the product really bulky.
My guess is people just want to be able to take their device to a repair shop and have the battery replaced.
My biggest gripe is that you cannot find OEM batteries from the manufacturer. The batteries I have replaced (through some effort) have been generally a disappointment. Particularly laptop batteries. The replacement market for laptop batteries is a scam.
An extreme example of this would be the CPU - should it be repairable as well? What if the SRAM cache needs to be replaced? Should they be forced to backtrack and make that a slotted component in the next generation of motherboards, costing performance for user repairability? Or is the list of components arbitrarily determined by some administration-appointed regulatory agency?
This is taking it to an absurd extreme though, which is not really how laws work. We would be better off with a right to repair on some sort of reasonable macro scale and letting a few court cases figure out where the line is, because its definitely not nano scale chip features.
My point is that no congresspeople would sign off on a law that would stifle innovation to such a degree. Customers should be given the tools to make better decisions regarding the repairability of products if they so choose to factor that into their purchasing decision, but if it means outright stopping purely positive improvements like faster CPUs then it's both harmful to consumers and not a law that would pass congress.
A lesser extreme is the southbridge/northbridge and how CPUs are becoming SoCs. If that fails, you pretty much have to buy a new CPU, when previously you could technically replace it if you wanted. Would have such a version of the R2R law prevented this?
A reasonable compromise would probably be to require that discrete parts be available for sale, hopefully with some reasonable price standard, not requiring that devices be designed to have more parts. If it's economical for the manufacturer to move to a SoC, fine. They should at least let people buy them. Any R2R law should incentivizes manufacturers not to make disposable unrepairable products, because business is about making money, generally opposed to acting responsibly in the best interests of the public and the world. Again, opinion.
The R2R proposals, at least in the form that Louis Rossmann is pushing for, doesn't prevent anybody from making hard to repair or non-repairable products. Nor does it require companies to make trade secrets publicly available. As far as I know, it doesn't even force companies into creating any documentation that enables a third party to repair their products.
There is obviously that "loophole" where a company can still deliberately make a product difficult or impossible to repair just by virtue of that product's design. However, if the law is implemented, any covered devices that can be repaired, regardless of how hard it is to repair, will be repairable by third parties without having to deal with legal gray areas just to be able to acquire tools, parts, and information that they will need to do those repairs.
User-replaceable battery means that entire product categories like wireless earbuds e.g. Airpods cannot exist.
A better solution is that the manufacturer must provide battery replacement services at a cost specified at the time of purchase and only allowed to increase at the rate of inflation.
> User-replaceable battery means that entire product categories like wireless earbuds e.g. Airpods cannot exist.
Acceptable, why turn an entire device into ewaste for a single component dying, especially one with a known limited service life, like a battery.
10 year warranties minimum on all electronics. Regardless of size and fragility. Any electronic device that can't last 10 years in service is unnecessarily contributing to ewaste and should not be allowed.
User replaceable batteries to avoid using battery life decay as a means to drive sells of "new" versions, something that causes e-waste.
To be honest, don't stop at batteries. Any component in a device that can not last 10 years while retaining atleast 75% of its "ability" must be user serviceable, no exceptions.
User serviceable is defined as any service a user can perform where the OEM will replace the device at no charge (not even shipping) if the device breaks during or because of the user servicing it during normal warranty.
Replacing a device under warranty resets the 10 year timer. To discourage OEMs halfassing it for 5 years and hoping for low warranty claims.
We can not allow companies to treat the earth like a garbage can.
So basically, drive the cost of all products up to the point that only rich people can afford them, and disenfranchise an entire slice of the population.
If you want to have the ability to purchase ten year warrantied devices, that is a separate issue. And no one, no one, is going to 'reset' your ten year warranty at the time of repair/replacement. Never going to happen.
How long do the batteries in those things last? If it makes it to 2 years then they're doing much better than any of my wired ear buds where the wire's or contacts usually break and are probably responsible for less waste.
Mine are about four years old, I got them not long after they came out. I’ve upgraded my iPhone but I’m still using the AirPods. Battery capacity is probably about 60% of new.
They’re easily the longest lasting in ear headphones I’ve used.
It would take some legislative creativity but why not put in some exceptions for tiny, or waterproof products etc. There are always exceptions in the real world. I fix all my phones but am fully willing to accept that I might not be able to cleanly install a gasket like the factory and lose some protection after I open it.
Specify a minimum 'size' of battery that must be replaceable. Size might be physical dimensions but I have don't know enough to specify a meaningful metric.
Um, user replaceable means just that -- the user can replace it, nothing of warranty and nothing about an OEM replacing if you broke something while replacing it.
Zero, zip, nada.
A right to repair law might mandate that any device with a battery also have the battery sold, by the manufacturer, for a reasonable period of time. That gives you a practical right to repair the device by replacing the battery, and it's well-defined.
"User replaceable" is not well defined. Does it mean you need to be able to do this with no tools at all? If not, what tools make it not 'user replaceable'? That no glue is used? Solder?
My watch is literally a cell phone, and I don't welcome law which might make it bulkier or more awkward, to mollify people who want a plastic hinge to pop out their smartphone battery and swap in a new one in the field.
The battery in my smartphone (and watch!) can be replaced by the manufacturer. Right-to-repair is about making sure that the owner of a device can do things themselves or from a third party, without licensing from the manufacturer: so selling consumable parts to all comers, providing some manuals maybe. It is not about whether you have the manual dexterity or special tooling to perform the replacement! If you want to optimize around that part being very easy, buy a product where it is, like the Dragonbox Pyra.