Right to Repair: The Price Is Not Right

My personal experience with this was with a blender. The mount that held the motor went bad (turns out it was due to <i>incredibly</i> spindly supports that had broken. It probably saved a few cents in material costs but resulted in the whole thing failing years earlier than it probably should have), but luckily, the mounting bracket was available, <i>and</i> at an eminently reasonable price. Unfortunately, during this process, the mounting bracket holding the control board in place also broke (they did <i>not</i> use very high quality plastic), and unfortunately that piece was only sold as an assembly with the entire control board which was priced basically identically to the whole blender. It&#x27;s currently sitting in a cupboard waiting for me to get the energy to get a 3d printed replacement, since I am having trouble throwing away what is otherwise a perfectly serviceable blender except for 1 small broken piece of plastic.<p>Unfortunately, this particular problem is not one that I think can be legislated away (or at least not without the legistlation causing more problems than it fixes). The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.

&gt; <i>But these requirements still ignore one of the biggest problems: the price of spare parts. </i><p>No, that is short-sighted.<p>The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.<p>For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.<p>Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.<p>You&#x27;re not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you&#x27;re vendor-locked, and there is no competition.

Just about every proposed regulation in this article would dramatically increase the selling price of nearly all goods, and dramatically hinder new entrants from selling new products by increasing the burden to get started.<p>If that&#x27;s the set of tradeoffs you want to make, ok, fine. But be up-front about it.<p>Consumer goods, by and large, are not markets with massive profit margins. They&#x27;re markets of incredible scale with slim margins that generate large revenue as a result. You&#x27;re not going to get better, more repairable products out of this. You&#x27;re going to get fewer, more expensive products.

My father owns an electronic repair shop specialized in TV, cameras and Music devices. The company has official agreements with the big brands to offer official technical support for their products, meaning that they have internal access to repair manuals and repair pieces to order from the official brand. Having a spare part more expensive than the product is a usual tactic from the manufacturer to not comply with the current EU law of producing and having stock of that piece for a minimum amount of years.<p>The 99% of the customers that are notified of the price of the piece, drop the idea of repairing it as is cheaper to have a new one. The funny part is that some customers still decides to repair them, and if you try to call the manufacturer to order the repair piece, either they delay months the shipment, or they end up sending the full original product from some old stock as replacement to give to the customer (or to disassemble in the repair shop if the customer still wants his one).<p>If current laws are, how to say this, &quot;creatively (but legally) avoided&quot; by companies, I really doubt that new regulations will help at all.

The article (and comments) don&#x27;t seem to make what I think are essential points.<p>* Free-market competition is essential for price-setting. Aftermarket parts must be allowable. IMO no solution will ever work if the prices are set by a single vendor. People get mad, but<p>* &quot;Parts pairing&quot; and DRM are a real problem. They prevent the establishment of a market for replacement parts. I would like to see a discussion of banning this practice.<p>* Patents preventing the manufacture of &quot;clone&quot; replacement parts is another issue, but even that takes a back seat to software lock (or hardware lock, as a comment below mentions [1]).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39096846">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39096846</a><p>&gt; [...] they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected [...]

Another issue with this is that the part that fails often is poorly designed or not durable in the first place. So you spend money and time to replace it and then it will just fail again. Zero incentive to improve the part by the manufacturer. I think the solution is requiring manufacturers to sell warranties that cover full labor and materials or replacement. Then at least you could see if a manufacturer selling something cheaply has a very high “full warranty” price, it’s likely because it has a high failure rate. This would be the only way to incentivize fewer failures and repairs.

I&#x27;ve experienced overpriced parts. I&#x27;ve also experienced the inability to acquire parts.<p>I was able to completely rebuild my Dyson vacuum cleaner, with Dyson parts for a fraction of a new one. My A&#x2F;C had a control board that went out, and only an authorized dealer could sell a replacement. The catch was, the dealer had to install it. So, since I have the skills, so I thought, I pulled the board, and went to repair it myself. They wanted to charge $1100, when the bad part was $7 dollars including shipping.<p>But guess what, they have a battery backed latching relay to detect if the boards are disconnected. Those MFr&#x27;s. I replaced the entire system after this fiasco. There is an Asian company that made fighter planes that escorted bombers to Pearl Harbor, that now make HVAC systems. I would avoid them.<p>Making your products proprietary is one thing, but intentionally engineering them this way is criminal.

I try to repair as much as I can because I don&#x27;t want stuff end up in the trash. If the parts are expensive, we need a way to source the parts from the non-fully functional units out there. From my experience, most people find the repair a daunting task and won&#x27;t even think about it.

I know that relative to the size of the whole market, the number of consumers interested enough in repairing their stuff to consider it when purchasing is small, but does anyone know of any places that actually include both ease of repair and availability of parts in their review system?<p>iFixit it does it for a small subset of electronics, but I&#x27;d love to be able to find the equivalent for things like power tools, kitchen tools, appliances, etc.<p>Does Consumer Reports check this? I know they do reliability, but do they include repair? I think I&#x27;d be willing to pay if there was a reputable place I could check. Especially if it was possible to see if there are particular brands that are generally good about this (which might help decide in the case that a specific product isn&#x27;t yet assessed).

As long as businesses can pass along the cost of disposal to customers or elsewhere, they have every incentive to fight repairs.<p>Maybe forcing buy-back of broken products at a significant fraction of the original price? Though that&#x27;d incentivize &quot;home appliances as a service&quot; or fly-by-night businesses.

This was expected and foreseen.<p>Devices and appliances are manufactured with huge economies of scale and are, all in all, cheap.<p>Spare parts are going to cost and, especially, professional labour is going to cost. It&#x27;s never going to make much financial sense to repair cheap-ish devices.

Is there any DIY &#x2F; 3D Printed community-made projects around designing household appliances? I&#x27;m mainly thinking about vacuums but even blenders and other things. Im not talking about everything being hand-made but designs can be made with popular motors, blades, and things of that nature. I like the idea of an off-the-shelf vacuum using the most efficient or readily available motors, and bags.

Holy unintended side effects, Batman!<p>I have to say that I did not see this coming when I heard about right-to-repair legislation.<p>It seems like there is one workaround for a reseller; I can just buy Bosch washing machines new, and disassemble them for parts. In the worst case, the most commonly failing part will cost as much as one washing machine. Plus the cost of carrying inventory. Or I guess you could try to do it on-demand, but you&#x27;ve still got a bunch of motor-less washing machines in the shed out back.

The right to repair laws should extend to modularity and standard interfaces.<p>I&#x27;m not a great fan of legislation, but sometimes it&#x27;s the only way to align for-profit enterprise&#x27;s self interest with the common good.<p>An example is the connection between a blender base and the jar. The manufacturers should be required to declare, and provide documentation for, the standard it adheres to, which would of course be available for 3rd parties to manufacture to.<p>Ideally manufacturers would converge on a single, or a few shared standards, and I&#x27;m sure there are legislative ways to nudge them towards that, and discourage the natural tendency toward fragmentation, proprietary differentiation, etc, aka monopoly power.<p>The PC world is a stunning example of the power of standard interfaces between components, and USB is a great example of where government can step in to the process; the EU usb-phone-charger mandate immediately solved, or at least vastly improved, the wasteful, expensive and inconvenient cacophony of proprietary phone chargers for consumers.

I&#x27;ll scream into the void on this one. I loved my Pixel 5, it was the best phone I&#x27;d ever had. Pulling down with the fingerprint sensor in the back was a revelation.<p>I fixit wants 200+CAD to send me a replacement screen. I have been desperate for these to go on sale for a while.<p>It was a hard choice but the pixel 7 I have now, with carrier discounting, will in total cost me 70CAD.

An additional problem is companies simply going out of business. Happens a lot in the middle-segment of electronics.<p>It&#x27;s an unstoppable rat-race of cheap crappy products. The issue is that (too) cheap is the problem but also widely loved.<p>I would love to pay more for long-lasting products that are repairable and well-recyclable but most people don&#x27;t.

Years of observation tells me that this is not a industry issue rather than consumer issue - We have failed to equip normal people with adequate sense of understanding&#x2F;appreciation of non-straightforward things. With more and more customers not even wanting to read a user manual, businesses that give customer option to repair, in general, does not survive. Take X230 as an example, I spent $6xx in 2012 to buy it, equiped with 128GB ssd and 4GB memory and I spend around 300$ to upgrade it 1TB SSD&#x2F;16GB Ram, plus something like $200 over the years for various things like fans, batteries. Even in 2021 I am not feeling it is slow, while I have probably made $1.5M worth of software work with that thing. BTW, none of these repair or upgrades is difficult in any sense. Do I want to buy something like again if it exists, surely I will. But do majority of people care? No. And during 10 years span, an average Apple user likely spent over 10K on laptops, while lenovo gets $600. I just do not know how such business can continue.

I ran into this same thing recently. My dryer needed new electronics, basically the same price as buying a new dryer. My wife had strong opinions about JUST buying a new dryer so guess who has a new washer AND dryer?

Is[n&#x27;t] the choice of language menu also supposed to work on the actual linked article? I think it needs a little repair...

Part of the problem here is we don’t know the margins of this stuff. Just how badly are we being screwed? Probably pretty bad but…<p>Manufacturing cost for a non-OEM part is not representative of total cost to an OEM to provide quality-assured and warrantied spares of said part to customers.<p>Some parts are stored as complete assemblies. A unique screw may not be stocked as a separate item. It’s possible replacing a damaged or missing subassembly puts the whole thing out of tolerances.<p>The majority of these arguments are probably complete bullshit. Repairability is the cost of doing business.<p>This is going to be a pain to enforce. Hopefully enough companies get painful penalties to deter the rest from playing this game.

Stop regulating the market. You are killing them, not helping.

If Right to Repair was about the Right to Save Money rather than guaranteeing basic consumer rights, the advocates should have specified as such.<p>I have no sympathy for misrepresented idealogies, let alone ones driven by greed (in this case consumer greed). Y&#x27;all got your Right to Repair guaranteed, nowhere did it stipulate that had to be below &lt;X&gt; cost.