That's wonderful !
I do wonder how that's going to work out in practice. Especially with today's highly integrated electronics, there's a lot of stuff which is technically not impossible to repair, but in practice not viable due to the level of skills required and the hours it'd take to do.
Will companies be forced to spend $10.000 to repair a $25 gadget? Is a full refund or a replacement product still an option? If there's a lab anywhere on Earth which is able to do it, does refusing to hire them count as "economic reasons"?
> or because it was previously repaired by someone else
Similarly, I wonder how this works out. What if the previous repair was a complete bodge job which did more harm than good? Are they expected to clean up someone else's mess?
These rules probably make sense if you only repair by replacing off-the-shelf sub-assemblies, but that's not the kind of repair which matters these days. If it's possible to skirt the rules by refusing board-level repairs, what's stopping companies from intentionally creating completely monolithic designs?
If the previous techician repaired your monitor with chainsaws and seawater then they can refuse to repair it as it is not solely because you went to a third party techician.
I think its a great move forward. There were some significant differences. Europe is going down the obligated cost-effective repairs. Inevitably europe will be under constant problems of 'cost-effective' definitions. Not to mention extended warranties. Per country as well makes that a huge mess.
Whereas Canada seems to be going down the road that you're moreso allowed to repair your own. You similarly get access to parts and tools, but no obligation from the manufacturer.
Canada's big one is that copyrights may be violated for any repairs. Canada becomes the pirate/crack capital of the world after this. I love it!
Right to repair activists are a bit less enthusiastic: "Considering the limited scope and ambition, we feel that the opportunity was missed to make this initiative into something that would actually merit the title ‘Right to repair directive’. As things stand, this piece of regulation could be more aptly described as an ‘annex to the existing ecodesign regulations.’ In essence, its main effect will be to somewhat increase the chances that the small number of products that already had to be repairable by law anyway, will actually end up being repaired."
https://repair.eu/news/analysis-of-the-adopted-directive-on-...
What I always want is a guaranteed minimum product life that isn't absolute shit.
"Sure your $2000 refrigerator died after a year, but now you can pay more to make it work again" is a garbage bargain.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230612IP...
[0] https://www.technieknederland.nl/stream/richtlijnenafschrijv... (PDF)
No. That isn't the problem. You do want to have things which are engineered for a specific life time. The alternative is things which aren't engineered for a specific life time and might break any time, even extremely early. You either define how long your product should last or you don't, the former is vastly preferable.
Repairability solves the problem of the minimum life time of a product being determined by a single component.
>"Sure your $2000 refrigerator died after a year, but now you can pay to make it work again" is a garbage bargain.
It depends. If the cost of replacing parts is cheaper than a product which by itself would last the same time it is a good bargain.
In almost any product you have components which are hard to make in such a way that the product lasts over a long time. Some things will naturally wear out and, if no replacement parts are available, make the whole product obsolete.
We're already seeing this with "repair kits": to replace that $0.50 thing that broke, you have to put in a new $100 sub-assembly. USB connector broken? Guess you're getting a new logic board! Battery worn? Sorry, gotta buy a new screen too.
The entire product should be engineered to last roughly the same amount of time, with no artificial wear items. But that's simply not what we're seeing these days.
