New EU law requires devices to be repairable - Every phone, television or washing machine you buy in Europe must be easier to repair starting tomorrow. That’s when the European Right to Repair Act takes effect
The products covered by the obligation to repair currently include:
washing machines and washer-dryers
dishwashers
refrigerators
electronic displays
welding equipment
servers and data storage products
mobile phones, cordless phones and tablets
tumble dryers
e-bikes and e-scooters batteries (from 18 February 2027)
Hopefully this will benefit other countries indirectly, instead of designing one repairable phone and one not repairable, should be easier to just design one.
“Hold my beer” - Nintendo, releasing an EU centric revision. Meanwhile Apple and Samsung are digging up every legal loophole to prevent the law applying to their devices.
Not bad by the standards of modern phones, but hopefully not good enough for the new EU standards. Imo adhesives should only be used if they’re replaceable or reusable and the screws should be limited to philips and flatheads.
philps and flatheads can be damaged too easily: torx or nothing!
these teeny tiny screws are really finicky and both philips and flatheads are prone to slipping, causing faster wear and easily leading to stripped screws…
any design that is inherently resistant to that is a must for small parts!
Sure thing, I don’t care much about the specific screw type, just that it’s a type that’s commonly available so you don’t need a unique screwdriver for each device you own.
Are we talking about the same apple that invented a new type of screw to keep people from taking their phones apart? The same apple that once people could get a trilobe driver, then made it so that generic replacement screens would not work because of some protection from non-apple hardware? Then went on to make sure that you can’t use non-apple parts in a laptop?
I wouldn’t want to be putting second hand parts in my phone when repairing it. I can’t imagine there are many second hand screens or batteries around for sale given they’re the things that are replaced the most.
Not that I’d ever want a second hand screen or battery anyway.
Sounds like this is to prevent theft for parts. Considering it says right there that parts can be unlocked with the user’s account. So it’s the same mechanism that makes a stolen iPhone non-functional unless unlocked by the user.
Ask the previous owner to remove the locking, same way as they would need to if you bought the device to use it. What’s the problem?
Again, says right there they should just remove the device from ‘Find my’, which disables Activation Lock, the very same feature that prevents theft for reselling the device for regular use.
Instead of using Repair Assistant to unlock the part, you can remove Activation Lock using Find My.
no but i’m not talking about me. i’m talking about tyler, 27, who just gets a new phone and doesn’t care about whatever accounts the old one had, so he throws it away and now the parts are available at a repair shop.
From Apple’s side, this situation is indistinguishable from the phone having been stolen.
P.S. Although maybe there’s a way to learn to what account a part is locked, and write to them ‘hey bro, could you please unlock this phone you threw away’. Then again, the repair shop also can’t know that the phone wasn’t stolen.
I have to admit that I haven’t checked ifix scores for a hot minute and am surprised that since the iphone 15 Apple consistently beats all other big brands in reparability score.
Before that of course they were bad, which is probably why people remember them that way.
I like that trend, hopefully Samsung and Google also hop on that bandwaggon any time soon.
But those devices don’t have to meet these laws, so they’re irrelevant.
I also didn’t say they have always been great, I said they’ve been at the forefront for years, which is true. Their recent phones are easier to repair than almost any other phones on the market.
I don’t think they have a problem with the ifixit scores, more with the words you have chosen to convey your message. Also of course you will not find any love for Big Tech in the Fediverse ;-)
well, one thing that surely is not repairable about apple is their software. you can’t fix their operating system by installing a more meaningful alternative to it on your device, can you?
Apple and Samsung be like: “It’s not a mobile phone or a tablet, it’s a phablet so it does not fall in to any category of the devices that need to be repairable.”
The loophole in the directive is smaller phones. Smartphones go from 10.16 cm (4 inches) diagonal to 17. 78cm (7 inches) and everything bigger (up to 44.2 cm) is a tablet.
Samsung and Apple’s flagship smartphones are very close to be considered tablets but that wouldn’t save them from the requirements.
As far as I know, nearly all flagship phones, Apple or otherwise, get about 7 years of update support (except Pixel phones with GrapheneOS which get 14 ignore; I remembered this incorrectly).
The difference is, even my old phone running Android 8 (a 9yo OS) can still browse the web, run all apps, and perform fine as a phone. An even older phone running Android 4.4 can still run 3rd party apps. iPhones seem to stop working about a year after they stop receiving updates, and they don't support sideloading (also know as running the software you want to run on the device you own).
Are you sure about 14 years of support? I think Graphene basically supports things as long as Google does, due to reliance on their source code releases. Double that would be impressive.
The oldest iPhone that can run the latest iOS is the 11 from 2019. Apple is still providing security fixes all the way back to iOS 15, which goes back to the 6s released in 2015. So, somewhere between 7 and 11 years for Apple depending on what you are counting as support. As a personal experience, my partners iPad from 2017 still runs fine, though it is stuck on iOS 16 and only gets security updates.
Oh trust me, I'm no fan of Samsung, but I tend to value control of my devices over...whatever it is Apple does. I had an iPhone until I discovered replacing the home button myself artificially bricked the device due to DRM forcing customers to go to an Apple store for repairs. Never again
Also worth noting that up until about 3 years ago finding an Android phone that was supported for even 4 years was almost impossible. Apple have been doing 6-7 years of full OS version updates and 8+ years of security updates almost since the start.
Been starting to see more randomly picky apps. Based on vintage and rooted device.
Uninstalled the FedEx app, since every time I tapped on a tracking number, it would divert to the app which would promptly shame me for having a rooted device and refuse to run.
That’s also included in the directive. Manufactures will be required to provide OS updates for at least 5 years “from the date of end of placement on the market” (which means the date the brand shipped the last device of a model).
That is actually fairly reasonable. I use a 5 yr old Xiaomi which a has 8Gb (as much as an entry level Surface or MacBook. Fuck AI) an octacore CPU, great camera, ultra fast charge, great battery etc. But I realize most people change phones every 2-3 years regardless of how well their phone works, because of “shiny new thing”
So I saw that my car offered up all sorts of useful diagnostic information for self diagnosing stuff. Was very excited and went to look at it for a generic fault without having to get software to tell me what the fault is. I thought "it’s stupid it has fully functional computer display yet tells me basically “contact a dealer, but it’s safe to drive” instead of what the problem is. Then I find out that because I’m in the USA, the company keeps it to themselves…
So if they see value in treating regions differently, they will absolutely go out of their way to screw over the regions that will let them.
Car manufacturers screwed over consumers the last 10-15 years big time! Cars used to be the big thing many could fix a lot on by themselves and were proud to do so. Then they basically just said incrementally to the DIY’ers “it’s all computers now, not your cup of tea”, purposely made cars less and less self repairable and got away with it! It’s infuriating.
Exactly, repairing your car was even a very common trope in Home Improvement, which kind of catched the average American household of that time pretty well, or so at least to TVs best abilities to generalize
Do you seriously think they computerized cars to make them less repairable? That’s some tin foil hat stuff there.
They started computerizing cars to make them more efficient, reliable (ironically), safer, etc. The problem is that beyond OBDII there is no standard for diagnostics, and makers keep these proprietary.
They didn’t do it for that purpose, I am saying they used the opportunity of cars becoming more digital to make them less repairable outside of “certified dealers”
They didn’t have to keep it proprietary, and I think in many “computer problems” the certified dealers will just replace 1 circuitboard by a new one, but it’s a part which private customers are not able to order and replace themselves
I think they are making their vehicles much more computerized and much more software-driven, and at the same time supplying their technicians with tools to deal with that, but not customers. And they are constantly flirting with ideas for subscriptions and advertising and tracking. So maybe not all that to purposely make them less repairable, but it’s more of an ecosystem that they control and the end user doesn’t.
Yeah, I get the impression newer cars are designed to fail just outside warranty because the car companies make more on the dealerships repairs then they do on the sale of the car.
Okay, but the economics of doing that are different between software and hardware. It’s much more expensive to have a full second hardware design compared to just turning a software feature off in certain markets.
Tbf they also did that when they were on lightning.
And they are not the only one to do that. I have a flagship android phone one step before the super flagship but It only got usb 2.
It is really annoying to transfer media at such a low speed.
NPO Radio 1Apparaten verplicht repareerbaar door nieuwe EU-wetIedere wasmachine, telefoon of televisie die je vanaf morgen in Europa koopt, moet beter repareerbaar zijn. Dan treedt namelijk de Europese Right to Repair Act in werking. Wat dat in de praktijk betekent, bespreken we met Ruth Mugge, hoogleraar Ontwerpen voor duurzaam consumentengedrag aan de TU Delft, en Oscar Visser, CFO van Fairphone.
