Is The Computer World Getting Beyond Repair?

Louis Rossman runs the Rossman Group, a team of about a dozen computer repair people in Manhattan.  Recently he was interviewed on the topic of the "right to repair," a concept that is of intense interest both to technicians employed in the repair industry and to anyone whose computer or phone goes on the blink, and is not prepared to chuck it and buy a new one. 

In the interview, Rossman describes the many ways that companies like Apple make it hard for anyone outside of Apple (and often inside too) to repair their ubiquitous devices.  For starters, a blanket of proprietary exclusion conceals useful information such as schematic diagrams, part numbers and identification, and diagnostic software.  Rossman has developed back-channel connections with engineers who work for the companies whose products he tries to fix, and sometimes can get the information he needs that way.  But he says that repair organizations shouldn't have to resort to legal gray areas such as under-the-table schematics to fix things.

Another obstacle arises when companies intentionally make their designs hard to fix.  Rossman said that some firms go to the trouble of pairing certain hardware chips with the particular computer they are installed in.  The machine would run just as well without this feature, which from the repair viewpoint is a bug.  All it does is prevent anyone from fixing the machine if that chip breaks, because even putting in a new chip won't work because the new chip is no longer paired to the machine, and it won't run.  Designs like this are aimed specifically at making the unit harder to repair.

Rossman devotes a small amount of time to promoting legislation and awareness publicity concerning the right to repair, but he isn't optimistic that huge changes will occur.  In an era when large corporations have skewed the intellectual-property field steeply in their favor, it's hard for small, independent operators like Rossman to gain a hearing.  And Rossman himself doesn't want too much government interference, as he is personally inclined toward libertarianism. 

If consumers were simply more aware of what was being done to make the products they buy harder to fix, they might make better choices, and repairability might become a cultural value like sustainability.  And the connection between the two is closer than you think.  For every computer (or phone, or car) that is fixed and stays in service, there is a new device that doesn't have to be made and sold, and the day is put off when that device ends up in a dump somewhere, as most electronics does despite increasing efforts at recycling. 

The simplistic view of this from the manufacturer's standpoint is that repair, especially by someone other than the company that made the product, simply cuts into sales of new units, and is to be discouraged as a pernicious legacy habit that consumers can eventually be trained to break.  But this is not the only way to go, as the automotive industry has abundantly demonstrated.  The average internal-combustion-engine car needs more maintenance and repair as it ages, and if you get attached to your old car (as I do), the inside of a car repair shop becomes very familiar. 

Perhaps if computers and phones had visible odometers like cars (and buried somewhere in the software, they probably do), it could become a point of pride to show how many hours your machine has racked up. 

But fixing things and keeping them for a longer time than absolutely necessary is to buck a trend that has been going mostly the other way since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when cheap machine-made products helped to bring millions up from poverty into the middle classes, both as employees of factories and as consumers of the products they made.  I'm not in favor of poverty, nor am I calling for a return to the bad old days when a watch was built mostly by hand, and a man expected it to last most of his life for the simple reason that most people couldn't afford to buy more than one watch in a lifetime. 

With Rossman, I'm in favor of reasonable accommodations for small repair firms and even individuals who are willing to crack open a computer or phone and see if they can fix it rather than simply getting a new one.  Such behavior is good stewardship of the built environment, which includes computers and phones.  Waste is not one of the seven deadly sins, but it's not a good thing either.  And when a fiendishly complex thing like a computer, with all its billions of coordinated parts that do amazing things, gets tossed in the trash simply because one of those parts falls down on its job, the world in general takes a hit that is not that noticeable, perhaps, but is significant nonetheless. 

Years ago I saw a TV episode of The Twilight Zone, I think it was, in which the writers wanted to show a man who lived a deplorably extravagant lifestyle.  So five minutes after the man picked up a new car, he pulled back into the dealership and said, "Hey, I want to trade this in on a new model."

When the salesman asked him why, the man said scornfully, "The ashtrays are full!"  (For those below a certain age, most cars used to have ashtrays, and most drivers used to smoke.)

Throwing away a complex piece of electronics simply because one part breaks that could be easily repaired (given enough information from the manufacturer) isn't much better than trading in a car because the windshield is dirty.  While there are plenty of other things to think about these days, perhaps people will use the extra time they have on their hands to take up a new occupation such as electronics repair.  And maybe the rest of us could look into how easy or hard our next piece of gear is to fix, and let repairability be a factor in our choices.  It would make Louis Rossman's job easier if companies recognize the value of repairability and start doing something about it.  And to let things go the way they're headed, which is a world where repairing stuff is unheard of, would be a waste in more ways than one. 

Sources:  The article "A Computer-Repair Expert Takes On Big Tech," appeared on the website of National Review on July 1, 2020 at https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/a-computer-repair-expert-takes-on-big-tech/.  I most recently blogged on the right to repair on Nov. 6, 2017 at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2017/11/for-consumer-electronics-fix-is-outor.html.

For Consumer Electronics, The Fix is Out—Or Is It?

Did you know that Apple can tell if you break your iPhone screen and take it to get fixed by somebody who isn't in Apple's authorized repair network and uses a non-Apple screen to fix it?  Not only can they tell, they can intentionally disable your phone when they find out. 

That's exactly what happened to Antonio Olmos, a news photographer covering the refugee crisis in the Balkans, when he broke his iPhone screen and couldn't find an Apple-authorized repair facility in Macedonia.  But he did find somebody who fixed it with an aftermarket screen, and the phone worked fine until a routine sofware update a few months later.  Then, wham—Apple turned his phone off.  When Olmos inquired, he was told that Apple did this as a "security measure" in case some of the unauthorized parts were defective.  But that wasn't the problem—the phone worked fine until Apple broke it in an act that looks suspiciously like punishment. 

Olmos had enough connections with the media to raise a public stink about the issue, and eventually Apple caved and quit turning off phones that have been repaired by non-Apple facilities with non-Apple parts.  But with his inquiry, Olmos turned over a rock to reveal just one of the many ways that manufacturers are increasingly trying to discourage repairs of their products by anyone other than their own limited number of authorized repair facilities—and sometimes not even then.

In an article on the website of the professional engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, two leaders of the "right-to-repair" movement, Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne, describe how this is happening, not only with consumer electronics but with items as big as tractors.  For example, John Deere, the agricultural-equipment maker, took the position that in selling a tractor to a farmer, the company didn't really let go of the tractor—they only granted an "implied license" to operate it.  John Deere reserved the right to repair it or say who was going to repair it—certainly not the farmer.

This didn't sit well with farmers, who complained, and the U. S. Copyright Office ruled that John Deere was wrong—when a farmer buys a tractor, he can do anything he wants with it, from fixing it himself to driving it into a lake. 

These are only two of the most egregious examples of manufacturers who try to discourage consumers from fixing their own stuff, or using independent repair shops who use aftermarket parts.  As anyone who has been to a non-dealer-owned auto repair shop or an Autozone knows, independent repair facilities are often cheaper than dealerships and can do work of just as good a quality as the dealerships.  And many aftermarket parts are comparable in quality to OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts.  So why do the makers seem to hate it if you fix something of theirs that breaks?

Well, the obvious reason is that as soon as a company sells you one of their products, they are competing with themselves.  If the product breaks, you have two choices, in principle:  fixing it or buying a new one.  The maker wants to sell you a new one, of course, and anything that can be done to make fixing difficult or impossible will tend to tilt your decision in the direction of a new purchase.

This helps a maker's bottom line, but it also contributes to the millions of tons of electronic scrap that goes into landfills worldwide every year.  As economist John C. Médaille put it, "Only by constantly buying what we don't need or already have can the system sustain itself; the size of the garbage dump becomes the true measure of our 'wealth'."  So what should be done?

The answer that Wiens and Gordon-Byrne favor is legislation at the state level to prohibit manufacturers from monopolizing product repair or preventing it altogether.  While this has some chance of working, it is only part of the problem. 

The things a culture values can tell you a lot about the culture.  Multinational corporations have encouraged the development of a worldwide consumer culture that values things that the corporations can sell at a profit.  And in the absence of strong counterforces from custom, religion, or politics, the consumer culture increasingly dominates the lives of not just millions, but closer to billions of people.  In 2016, almost two-thirds of the world's population owned a mobile phone.  That's about the same percentage of the globe's population who, as of 2013, do not have indoor plumbing (flush toilets, in other words).  Now don't get me wrong—having a smart phone, or any kind of a phone, is a huge leap forward toward all sorts of civilizational goods:  the ability to call for emergency services, to participate in a market economy, and so on.  Mobile phones can on occasion be lifesavers.  But so can flush toilets.  There are good reasons, however, that Apple is in the smart-phone business and not the flush-toilet business. 

State laws protecting our right to fix things can redress some of the grievous wrongs that companies are trying to put across with regard to product repairs.  But even if all service manuals were posted for free on the Internet and you could find a competent independent repair shop in every city and town, many of us would still be just waiting for our phone to break down to give us an excuse to buy a new one. 

This is a moral issue, really, and to explore its depths would take us far beyond the limits of this blog space.  But the heart of the matter is whether we believe what the manufacturers want us to believe, namely (as Médaille again puts it), "that our happiness lies not in persons, but in things, and not merely in things, but in constantly new things." 

That notion is, to put it indelicately, a lie.  But it's behind much of the advertising and marketing that we are subjected to all the time.  Until we recognize that lie for what it is, and change our ways of living and using our resources to reflect our realization that it's a lie, all the repair-protection laws in the world won't make much difference in the flood of electronics that goes from store to user to garbage dump faster every year. 

Sources:  The article "Why We Must Fight For the Right to Repair Our Electronics" by Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne was posted on the IEEE Spectrum website on Oct. 24, 2017 at https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics.  The statistic on worldwide mobile phone use is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/, and the one on flush toilets is from http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/22/_60_percent_of_the_world_population_still_without_toilets.html.  John C. Médaille's book Toward a Truly Free Market (ISI Books, 2010), pp. 194-195, is the source of the quotations attributed to him.