I would rather force companies to release schematics, specifications and documentations after, say 3 years and let the market decide which part must be made. With competition it would lower the parts price and potentially these parts could remain available for ever and if the product is actually great could even become a standard. For example, those parts could be reused to make a new product.
> I would rather force companies to release schematics, specifications and documentations after, say 3 years
On top of that I would had that this documentation must have been released to an escrow before being releasing the product (many hardware companies come and go within few years. I wouldn't mind an exception to the escrow for "big enough" companies). Also, the secure boot keys must also be released if a major security (~ local root privilege escalation without hardware access) issue hasn't been fixed for one year.
I’d go further and dictate that a reference implementation of the software be required in source code form, and the instructions include a secure boot bypass (e.g., cut this trace on the board, pull a jumper, etc).
Yes, and that is irrelevant. If the owner can fully control his or her device then so should NSO. That's why well-designed hardware tends to have hardware-enforced hardware input to override security settings. In the past they were simple dip switches on motherboards (some gaming motherboards still have them for overclocking), for modern phones it seems to be the secure boot/hypervisor environment itself in conjunction with hardware keys like volume buttons. Physical hardware-validated input (or physical access to the device) is sufficient to spoil the schemes of NSO or any other group of remote coward criminals. No need to further encroach on owner rights.
"NSO" should never be accepted as a valid argument against providing a secure boot bypass to device owners. Never.
> "NSO" should never be accepted as a valid argument against providing a secure boot bypass to device owners. Never
Thank you for making this decision for me and millions of others. I appreciate it being suggested that I be forced to trade tangible security benefits for someone’s else’s sense of aesthetics.
This would need to be paired with regulations regarding the quality of third party replacement parts, otherwise we’ll end up with a lot of near-ewaste quality parts flooding into the market and tripping up consumers who don’t know any better or simply don’t care (“why buy the $75 high quality part when there’s this $15 shoddy alternative on Amazon?”).
> when there’s this $15 shoddy alternative on Amazon?
smart consumers eventually learn. I don't buy electronics from amazon anymore. I probably never will. Too many near fires. Too many things lasting just longer than the return window etc.
or any 3rd party marketplace, really. Newegg Marketplace is the same people who are on Amazon, so buy direct from them. If the stuff is fake then I can at least get @ them directly, and they can make changes to their supply chain.
Around here repair shops with lower prices than first party get shitty parts. At best they're not on par spec-wise on non-breaking things (e.g max nits or color reproduction on a display), at worst they either last way less than third party (e.g battery) or are outright dangerous (damaging other parts or outright fire hazard).
I've been burned often enough that for me it's first party or nothing, and get third party only as a last resort.
People at large don't care about/understand these immaterial things so at scale competition is a race to the bottom.
I’d go with “make parts available for two years after sale ends, and then release schematics. Schematics are not required to be released as long as the parts are still reasonably available.”
Well, there's a trend now towards proprietary ASICs - and the market isn't going to be doing custom ASIC runs of M1s are they? The cost would be astronomical. The manufacturing and assembly techniques for a lot of modern electronics are simply beyond the capacity of most manufacturers.
This doesn’t make sense because most hardware with custom parts are actively manufactured and sold for longer than 3 years. If companies were forced to release all internal documentation, that only guarantees that competitors would begin manufacturing clones while the original product was still being sold. It wouldn’t accomplish the goal of getting replacement parts in the hands of consumers.
Minnesota's right to repair law does require documentation and tools be available.
It has too many carveouts, just the same. But things existing in the first place is progress.
>In general, the Digital Fair Repair Act requires manufactures of certain electronic products to make documentation, parts, and tools for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair available to independent repair providers and product owners on fair and reasonable terms.
Minnesota Statutes Section 325E.72, subd. 3(a).
I don't think releasing schematics is a good idea. There is so much more to a production process than documentation. QA is a huge factor in fitniss for purpose and durability. Also, spare parts can/should preferrably be the ouput of the same machinery and production lines as the original parts, which makes it better for the environment.
Your other points are well-taken, but don't address why you don't think releasing schematics is a good idea. Schematics make diagnosis and repair possible without having to engage in reverse-engineering.
Good point. I actually meant, releasing schematics for the sake of 3rd parties reproducing parts of probably inferior quality, would be not a great idea. Schematics for understanding, yes, but those can be more high level - black box if you want - schematics for the sake of understanding how the system works or interconnects. A repair manual.
The document says “necessary software”, so, presumably you’ll be able to do stuff like swap out components and jtag (or whatever) your design verification test suites, keys, firmware, etc., simply by following the steps in the software documentation.
This works fine, except that apple can use xyz semiconductors widget Q and mandate to that supplier that they are the only ones allowed to buy that part.
So ridiculous regulations and requirements before a small company can get a product out. Not to mention, ready to use blueprints for companies in China and India. This should only apply to companies above a certain cap.
This just seems like a new moat the big companies have dug to discourage small companies from breaking into the hardware industry. If this was about the right to repair, then the bill would have been about releasing schematics and preventing anti-repair designs (like the Hall-effect sensor in Macbooks that includes a circuit with the sole purpose of preventing third-party replacement). In actuality, this is against the little guy in two ways; the purpose of forcing repair shops to disclose their use of "unauthorized" parts can only serve to try to discredit them in the eyes of the public. The public just wants their devices to work, but now California wants to scare them with this idea of "unauthorized" parts.
As much as I kind of like this it seems like this is basically another freebie for random offshore companies like BEEMOK and JOOBLE that are spamming stuff via amazon/temu/et all. There is basically 0% chance they even exist 7 years later and then another basically 0% chance you could actually get any remedy against them even if they did.
The general solution, at least as done by some other countries, is to hold the seller/importer also wholly responsible for upholding all the regulations and warranties - so if the manufacturer is bankrupt, or not responding, or overseas, then that's the problem of whoever sold you the lemon and took your money (i.e. Amazon, Temu, Walmart, etc); if they allow shady sellers on their marketplace, that's their loss.
the main point is that someone has to do the due diligence on the product, and it shouldn't be the consumer, especially when there are few to no remedies.
My point is that liability for consequences determines who (and if) does due diligence. If there are no remedies then customers are on their own, and either they do due diligence themselves or there is no due diligence at all; but as soon as the seller has to bear financial consequences for selling noncompliant product, suddenly they will become very capable of effective due diligence.
It's all about the incentives and motivation; companies which are permitted to offload risks to consumers will do so and ignore even trivial measures they can take to reduce these risks.
Absurd bureaucracy, and what are you gonna do when it ceases to exist after the paperwork is filed and hte aprts are just funneled back into manufacturing? Making manufacturers bank the schematics and auto-releasing them after manufacture ends is less work for the manufacturer and easier for the market.
Relevant section of the constitution. Don’t know if this would fall under inspection:
> No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws: and the net Produce of all Duties and Imposts, laid by any State on Imports or Exports, shall be for the Use of the Treasury of the United States; and all such Laws shall be subject to the Revision and Controul of the Congress.
SCOTUS has ruled that, with specific and compelling reasons, states can implement these kinds of interstate restrictions. If Congress wanted to, they could pass a federal law that would pre-empt the state law, but has not done so.
it would also mean that the FedGov would have to evaluate or interact with every sort of intra-state interaction, which would get onerous and expensive quickly.
> FedGov would have to evaluate or interact with every sort of intra-state interaction
I don't think that's the case. It would be up to Congress. They have the authority to pass a law that says: "No state may put up any intra-state barriers to commerce at all", and that would be that.
Or they could choose to pass a law that's a lot more specific, in which case they would need to deal with each intra-state interaction.
It says right there they can do what is needed to execute inspection laws. They just can't charge you to import. California had serious problems with Mediterranean fruit flies destroying crops from the 50s onward, which is why they started doing this.
Yeah, just encountered those on a road trip and wondered how they were legal. Was right on the Cali/Oregon border for a couple of days and those checkpoints were also only sporadicly staffed, so I don't understand the point anyways.
Progress is good to see, but I fear this will still result in only large expensive assembled “components” being made available. Like for a MacBook, instead of being able to buy a $0.02 capacitor replacement, Apple will probably sell the whole mainboard “part” for $2,000.
Edit: I was a bit lazy in my writing and what I really meant were things like inexpensive proprietary power management ICs, NVMe storage modules, and/or T2 security chips, USB controller ICs, etc.
1. The capacitor is part of a chip. There is no practical way for you to figure out that the capacitor has failed. You will just know at best that the chip is not working right. And even if you could somehow find out that a capacitor on the chip failed there is no practical way you could replace it.
In short, if a capacitor on a chip fails you will need a new chip.
2. It is a discrete capacitor. Probably surface mount soldered onto a PCB, possibly thru-hole soldered onto a PCB, or maybe some other kind of package with leads soldered across something else like the terminals of a switch or something like that.
In this case it is a commodity part. You go to DigiKey or similar, find a capacitor that with the same capacitance, voltage rating, ESR, temperature range, etc,, which will be available from many manufacturers, and DigiKey will be happy to sell it to you for a few cents (plus $7 shipping).
It would be nice if the device maker had to tell you the electrical parameters you need to match when buying a replacements capacitor, but it would be overkill to make all the device makers actually sell such readily available commodity parts.
These are all great points. I was a lazy in my writing and what I really meant were things like inexpensive proprietary power management ICs, NVMe storage modules, and/or T2 security chips, USB controller ICs, etc.
You would probably need a microscope and some appropriate tools. Looking at the 10's of thousands of $$ my neighbor has in metalworking tools, there isn't much of a problem asking home enthusiasts to buy some tools to do what they need.
You might not but you could pay a semi-affordable third party repair place like Louis Rossmann to do it for you. That still helps the general consumer, even if its not “DIY”.
There are repair shops that will replace them for you. With good equipment and a steady hand it's certainly possible.
But if you go to an Apple-certified shop they'll just swap out the entire board and call it a day. In Apple's mind those are not replaceable. In their repair system Apple treats a MacBook as a collection of maybe 20 parts and a bunch of screws.
They are expensive labor but still less than half the cost of a whole new logic board with CPU, RAM, NVMe, etc. Looking at something like $600 instead of $1200+. Plus with Apple's authorized solution you are guaranteed to lose all your data, whereas third-party repair shops that do board-level repairs may often be able to avoid data loss.
My friend and I both sent our MacBooks into Louis Rossmann the same week. He spilled a cup of water on his, mine just killed itself for no reason. The repairs were expensive but they managed to not lose any data, and it still saved us many hundreds of dollars each vs. doing an Apple-authorized repair.
- Faulty Mac magnetic sleep sensor
Reality: Go through "genius bar" to replace assembly
Repairability: purchase sleep sensor, pair/calibrate with to macbook serial number because many of their parts are serialized.
Summary do we have access to following?
- Schematics and documentation
- OEM software working with serialized parts and calibration
- Individual parts and components not just assemblies. Cables are a great example.
Not all of these scenarios the end user can do easily however, independence pair shops can with a proper support.
Most faulty capacitors were manufactured around 2000s ( see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague ). Those days are long gone. Most battery charging issue now are unrelated to capacitor .
> Most faulty capacitors were manufactured around 2000s ( see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague ). Those days are long gone. Most battery charging issue now are unrelated to capacitor .
> l
While that's true the point still stands that we don't have access to supply chain parts to fix reparable charging issues.
What you are thinking of is limited to electrolytic capacitors. There are different kinds of caps.
Tons of dead Tantalums, those will explode in your face. Found in old gear from 1970-90.
MLC ones will burn so hot as to turn surrounding PCB material into coal, sometimes even causing open flame fires.
Small ceramic ones will dead short but not explode like tantalums, leaving you with dead weight of a product - this is the most common failure scenario in modern phones/laptops.
Something I can chime in on. We've been doing Mac/PC/iPhone @ our B&M repair shop since 2009. We've delayed a few hundred thousand pounds of e-waste from hitting the dump before it's truly EOL (doesn't sound like much but we're also retaining the customers familiar computing environment which is a huge value add).
We've also enabled our customers to skip quite a few generations of upgrades due to extended operation of their existing hardware.
To keep things simple: the parts used to achieve this were from computer recyclers across the US, not even once have we used parts from a manufacturer. There are quite a few reasons for this besides maintaining our profitability. We love high quality OEM parts.
I have a feeling this will become a profit center for manufacturers and be priced just high enough that there's no room to justify maintaining hardware when repair labor costs are added to the equation.
My opinion is the "Garbage by Design" lockouts that happen due to hardware/software/firmware locks, are going to be the main culprits preventing companies like mine from performing the same extended use of these tools and thus causing more "upgrades" and trashing cycles.
I think the most important thing is that parts remain swappable without manufacturer intervention and red tape. Louis Rossmann and Hugh Jefferys also make great videos about these issues.
-Typed on my 2011 17" Macbook Pro (16GB/1TB) while pulling 20W from the wall.
Made me think of this in the accounting chapter of an aged textbook:
---
For decades companies that stockpile old goods have been "writing down" the value of their inventories. Using the accepted principle of evaluating inventory at the lower of two figures--current market price or the cost to produce--they sharply depreciate the stock to reflect the slow movement of dated parts that may never be sold. (...) the Supreme Court ruled... unless... actually scrapped or offered for sale at the reduced price, write-downs are... illegal.
The Supreme Court Decision in the case of Thor Power Tool Co. vs. IRS meant that Thor had either to sell or scrap its devalued parts or to revalue its inventory and pay back taxes on the basis of new valuation... accountants advised clients to take no action, and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants notified members that they need not advise clients to seek permission to conform to the Thor Power Tool decision.
The IRS then shocked the accounting community... all improperly devalued inventory still on hand would need to be scrapped or revalued and back taxes paid.¹
¹ Jerry Giesel, "Product Liability Suits Jump in '80, Court Report Says," Business Insurance, October 6, 1980, p. 1.
The seven-years provision seems a bit heavy handed. That may significantly raise the cost of doing business in California and result in companies not selling their products there. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
California would not pass these laws if it meant companies would stop doing business in their state. They know that they are too big of a market to write off, which is why they feel comfortable passing these laws. As an example, all of the auto industry faces tougher emissions standards because of California's stricter regulations.
I don’t think all manufacturers follow CARB for all the cars they build. When I lived in California I knew several people who bought their cars in Arizona because it meant they’d have more horsepower and fewer parts that could break. Also I removed the extra California emissions junk on my motorcycle because it caused the bike to leak fuel if it fell over.
The device didn’t improve emissions. It was designed to try and prevent gas fumes from coming out of the tank. It technically did do that… but only if the bike was upright.
Yeah and they also fall over all the time. And when that happened, it leaked gallons of gas. It increased the amount of pollution and created a fire hazard.
My friend and I are working on a sort of synthesizer and we have trouble enough sourcing parts for our prototypes let alone having a stock of everything for 7 years!
Our designs are on GitHub and are no secret, we encourage people to build their own. There's no way we could provide parts for that long. The profit on each device after our labor is negligible.
Set up an entity, ideally non-Californian, and ignore the law. Obviously not legal advice. But if you’re still chugging along in a few years, you can afford to back comply. If you aren’t, there is nothing for a customer to sue.
If you are providing parts to an authorized service center you also have to provide parts for third party service centers. I think if your product isn't designed to be serviced then you're safe.
I had the same reaction, and had to go read the text of the law.
You can always spot an emotionally-driven law (as opposed to one driven by logic) by the fact that it requires carve-outs for 75 different edge cases to be passable.
Critics will call this the work of “special interests,” but this means the law itself was actually passed to please a special interest group.
If we can agree that’s it’s a dumb law under that many different scenarios — then it’s not a good piece of legislation.
As a consumer this makes me happy, but god, California must be an awful place to run a business. They keep piling on the most business-hostile laws. Another silly cookie consent law, unpoliced shoplifting in SF, where does it end?
I've had a moment of reckoning the other day: my Android phone is rather old by recent cool-ness standards: it's a Moto G5 plus, happily running Android 8.0. Just in the past week, two of the apps I use have dropped the support of Android 8.0. I don't know what feature they decided take up on (the gain) by dropping support, or what load shed is, but I was not pleased that this has started happening.
On the one hand, I'm rather relieved: I don't have to keep downloading the endless stream of "new" features that I don't want. More often than not, I've found the updates keep breaking something, or upset my established pattern of working. On the other hand, I'm facing the constant danger of some of the vital apps dropping support: for example, the work-related apps, without which I won't be able to log in remotely.
I suppose there's the option of rooting and installing a custom ROM. But then, there's no guarantee that it'll continue to work as before, in all its full glory. It's also the case that some apps (especially the work-related ones) refuse to work on a rooted device.
So, no matter how strongly I'm determined to stay put, I'll eventually be forced to get a new phone.
I guess what I'm saying is that a modern devices are a complex ecosystem. Just having the right tools at hand, passing the right law, or having an open-source, DIY, path ahead doesn't necessarily mean that things will be same as before. For some things, we are necessarily dependent on other people doing the right things--and some of those things, nobody can force them to do it.
Speaking as a mobile dev, if OS versions are dropped in apps it’s usually to try to keep the scope of supported devices/OSes within the realm of sanity, especially for smaller companies/teams. Long-term support of older OSes is easier on Android than iOS but can still pose challenges.
Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that. If I were the developer, I don't want an old version holding me hostage from moving on (for some definition of 'moving on'). As a user, it's sometimes that helplessness that turns into entitlement.
Yeah, they may have looked at the number of users on Android 8 and decided it was worth it for everyone else to stop spending time making sure they don't break it.
As with most regulation, what matters most is what are the consequences if they don't follow? If it's just a slap on the wrist then it'll be more cost effective for them to just eat the penalty than pay to have a surplus of supply manufactured then stored for years.
> 42488.2. (a) Notwithstanding any other law, every manufacturer of an electronic or appliance product with a wholesale price to the retailer, or to others outside of direct retail sale
This only affects manufacturers who sell wholesale. Is this intended as a proxy for a manufacturer's ability to comply with this law? It seems that any large manufacturer who wishes to not comply simply has to stop using wholesale prices, though I'm not sure how feasible that is.
I think the rationale behind this statement is that it doesn't apply to small specialty manufacturers. e.g., small manufacturers that sell direct to their customer are exempt.
I build custom electronics (not consumer items), mostly with very small unit volumes. e.g., I just shipped 10 units of a device that monitors a controller and sends a message to an Android app when it turns on or off. The entire lifespan of this product will probably be under 100 units. Making someone like me have to comply with laws like this would probably be enough to rethink the whole thing.
Related to the topic, it is commonly said/claimed that there is federal law requiring automakers to have parts available for 10 years for any car they sell. As far as I can tell this is not true. If they offer a warranty, they must have parts available for the term of the warranty. And for emissions control parts, under some circumstances they are obligated to repair defects discovered within 8 years (this doesn't necessarily mean they are obligated to stock the original parts).
In reality, for any reasonably popular car, there will be OEM or aftermarket parts available for most things that commonly fail or wear out, for 10 years if not much longer.
Not even that. Tesla (most famously, but many others) have very long waiting lists for many parts, parts that are in no short supply for the purpose of building entire cars, but are not available at all as parts.
I'm not a lawyer. Would this make it harder to invoke California's Songs-Beverly Act for device replacement? (California's Lemon Law)
Previously, you could buy an appliance >$100 and if it broke in 5-7 years you could ask for service or parts to repair it. If the company cannot produce that, they would be required by law to replace the "thing" with an equivalent or newer product. This looks like the 7 year requirement is on things still being sold.
If companies must retain 7 years of parts now, this kinda closes the loop on getting new stuff in a Planned Obsolescence world. :p
(k) This section shall not apply if the manufacturer provides an equivalent or better, readily available replacement electronic or appliance product at no charge to the customer.
Before this, you could take advantage of their poor planning and not keeping parts or offering repair service. Now they're required by law - as long as the product is still being sold.
Do they included mandatory quality of the product ? At minimum quality that is equal to what they are selling. No car battery with half of advertised capacity or CrV pliers that become tattered on first plain nail. Or ever thinner cloths. All of them with relevant certificates and all needed papers. Usually straight from China. And no control from any TLA+ :> Producers or AliSellers dillute instantly on contact with troubles so the only way is to control quality @importers and clog them with what they voulountarilly push.
Used to work in Europe for a CA based company. Every tender required at least 7 years of support, sometimes 10, including all parts. Good to see them catching up
> Used to work in Europe for a CA based company. Every tender required at least 7 years of support, sometimes 10, including all parts. Good to see them catching up
This is for consumer goods. It's not the same. Consumers could always decide to only buy things with 7 years of support, like your tender process.
In certain industries life cycle requirements are common (e.g. our customers expect 15 to 20 years of product lifetime) but it is far from universal and isn't enforced by a EU wide law AFAIK.
Yep - if you’re a business wanting to buy a million dollar machine to do whatever, you want some assurance that it can be repaired and will be working until replacement time (at least the depreciation schedule, often many MANY years longer).
Physical things have interesting support - there are actually companies whose entire business model is support equipment from companies that have been gone 40+ years.
Right. My little cottage industry/side gig used to build electronic boards that were used to interface 40+ year old machine tools to modern controls when the original controllers broke and replacements weren't available. I sold to a small company that did nothing but retrofits like that.
Really wish I could find more niches like this. It's a boring but profitable domain to get into.
Yup. At my last job, we designed our products (medical instruments) for a service life of 15 years and a market lifetime of 25. i.e., from the time the product was released to the market, you could expect Service and Support and spare parts to be available for at least 25 years and the device itself was expected to last 15 years in the field.
Of course, I'm talking about large machines that cost between $500k - $1M each, so...
What's the point of it if the manufacturer makes the parts extremely expensive? For example, Apple's 4k screen for iPhone 11 Pro Max is $400 at apple. The phone itself is $150 on eBay. Aftermarket parts cause functional impairment (truetone gone if 3rd party screen used). This bill should be "use any part without software limitations".
Would love to see someone in the industry recognize this discrepancy and say "we proudly say we match our OS upgrades with the strongest right-to-repair laws in the country". Google Pixel?
Edit:
Well hey, at least Google is now doing 10 years of Chromebook updates (likely demanded by schools)
The interesting dog-that-didn’t-bark on California’s most recent wave of consumer-focused regulation is the Supreme Court.
The stereotypical view of the Court majority as a bunch of right-wing corporatists doesn’t hang together in this instance: They’ve rejected the so-called “dormant Commerce Clause” in a case centered around CA’s ethically raised pork standards, and generally seem unconcerned with arbitrary 50-state regulation of commerce so long as Congress has not chosen to intervene.
It also looks like it doesn't apply to all-terrain vehicles, or to machinery, equipment, implements, or attachments used for or in connection with:
1. Lawn, garden, golf course, landscaping, or grounds maintenance,
2. Planting, cultivating, irrigating, harvesting, and producing agricultural or forestry products,
3. Raising, feeding, or tending to, or harvesting products from, livestock and any other activity in connection with those activities,
4. Industrial, construction, maintenance, mining, or utility activities or applications, including, but not limited to, material handling equipment,
although that exclusion does not apply to "self-propelled vehicles designed primarily for the transportation of persons or property on a street or highway" even if they are used for one of the above things.
There is also an exclusion for alarm systems, which are "an assembly of equipment and devices arranged to detect a hazard or signal the presence of an off-normal situation".
And as planned, were sitting here blaming Deere and not the politicians who allow this to happen. Deere is simply looking out for its best interests. The real scum are these so called "representatives" who place corporate interests over small businesses and citizens.
Walk through your local Lowe's and home Depot and take a close look at their lawn equipment. It's all junk that will be thrown away in a decade. Plastic bushings, plastic spindles, flimsy exhaust mounts, etc. If you seriously take the time to look closely, you can see where you they are engineered to fail.
Even contractor brands like Stihl are starting to do this stuff. Most of their trimmers now do not have a grease fill port on the head. To make matters worse, replacing a head costs almost as much as an entire trimmer...
You can call them "scum" if it makes you feel better. But even if the greatest shame campaign the world has ever seen was to miraculously convince John Deere to change their ways, other companies would just step in and take advantage of the system the same way John Deere has.
Yes but it's much harder calculus. What's the net of a very large tractor manufacturer existing or not existing? If they lobby in a way you don't like but they also cause cereals to be 15% cheaper, how can you calculate their "unpleasant"-ness?
A public official taking a contribution in return for carving out an exception in a law is quite an easy one.
The same calculus applies to the politician, you're just imparting certain social duties on one and not the other.
If you want to know why american society is prone to this sort of privitized corruption: this is it. Business is seen as a pure mechanism, but politics is a place of hyper-individualized duty.
In europe, i think the reverse is more often true. Businesses are seen in personalized ways, as having explicit social duties compromised by greed; and politics is a pure mechanism.
Erm no - businesses can also be moral. In fact there's an enormous social pressure to look good. That's why people get fired for things that happen on Twitter.
The only difference is businesses get money for doing something someone else wants, and they need to keep doing that. Politicians take your money and can't even do the one thing they should be doing: be impartial and resistant to even more free money.
> businesses get money for doing something someone else wants
> Politicians take your money and can't even do the one thing they should be doing
^ Here is my issue. This is a cognitive-dissonance. You can equally say: businesses failing their social duty aren't giving society what it wants; rather, they are sating the greed of their customers, shareholders and execs.
Whereas politicians are balancing competing power interests into a compromise piece of legislation with a chance of being passed, and thereby improving the situation; if, very imperfectly.
You see, under these reframings it is the biz failing, not the polician.
to be clear, I do not agree with either framing. My point is only how quickly americans adopt this "if someone's buying, it's excusable" morality as applied to business. As-if politics were a place of heroic powerful individuals, and business merely a mechanism.
The reality is both is true of both. Business can be held to much higher standards; and politicans can be more subtly understood.
> My point is only how quickly americans adopt this "if someone's buying, it's excusable" morality as applied to business.
I'm not sure why you're talking about Americans, but my point is that the main thing a business does is create employment and useful goods or services.
> As-if politics were a place of heroic powerful individuals, and business merely a mechanism.
No, creating employment and useful goods or services is extremely important and heroic. It's just different to being the person who takes money from others on the sole basis that he/she will be impartial and not take bribes.
As a foreigner in America, I think America is culturally particularly business oriented and holds favorable views on business activities (until they get too large and obscure, then they become led by lizards or some such), and in particular I think the average person here is more prone to think that it's ok for a business or person to seek to maximize their position in the market by almost any legal means. As in, if the player is good at the game, you can't blame the player (up to a point).
They should maximise by legal means. That's how you get better service, lower prices and better products. That's why computers aren't $1m each or still in the KHz CPU range. Or why every company is now making electric cars. Or... why most things are as good as they are.
But that's an naive ideological take on the virtues of business; whilst at the same time you offer a naive cynical take on the vices of politics.
D'you not see this sort of double-think taking place?
Exactly the same naive gloss can be given of policitians: their compromises are part of the democratic process by which competing power interests are balanced without oppression. There are no Company Stores, or Company Scrips because corporate power is given "an inch" but no more. And there are FDAs and the like because Society gets its two inches. And so on.
Politicans are creatures of a mechanism as much as businesses.
This "reduce one to mere mechanism, but not the other" is pure naive ideology.
Business does not "offer better prices" etc. through this mechanism. It offers prices every bit as flawed as politics offers policies.
> But that's an naive ideological take on the virtues of business; whilst at the same time you offer a naive cynical take on the vices of politics.
I don't think that's a virtue of businesses. It's their primary function, and their primary good: producing useful stuff or services for their customers, and employment to their employees. The more useful their product/service, the more money they get, and the better their customers' and employees' lives will be. If they campaign to make that easier by making regulation less onerous, that's in pursuit of those primary goals.
That's different to a government job (e.g. in regulation-setting/enforcing) where their sole job is to set and maintain good standards in their area. They provide no value other than that, and if they aren't even doing that, then they're worse than useless. They're useless and they cost money we aren't allowed to refuse to pay.
> It's their primary function, and their primary good: producing useful stuff or services for their customers
This claim is a specific ideological interpretation of business, call it "consumer capitalism".
You can reject than and believe say, "social capitalism" or "democratic capitalism". Where the purpose of business is to, on net, improve society -- and is given a licence to operate only insofar as, on net, it does so.
> their sole job is to set and maintain good standards in their area
Again, call this "noble bureaucracy". You could instead believe, "resolution bureaucracy" where the job of bureaucracy is to prevent conflict, not to resolve to an ideal.
> You can reject than and believe say, "social capitalism" or "democratic capitalism". Where the purpose of business is to, on net, improve society -- and is given a licence to operate only insofar as, on net, it does so.
You could do, but then you have to invent a currency to award to people who you think improve society from your perspective. Or you could just use the existing one.
Businesses routinely do not produce net benefits; routinely do not have efficient prices; routinely benefit their customers at the expense of society; and routinely distribute money away from net goods towards net bads. Indeed it is routine that an efficient market operating at marginal profits is a catastrophe for society: consider social media, climate change, and so on.
This isnt a problem I need to solve for the observation to be true.
The issue I have here is the black/white false perceptions of politics/business.
I don't think this is automatically an ideology. Money is a universal intermediary for exchange of goods and services - "reward" is a bit of a juvenile word for it, but it is obviously an exchange of value.
> Indeed it is routine that an efficient market operating at marginal profits is a catastrophe for society: consider social media, climate change, and so on.
But this is just seeing the bad side, and also assuming that markets somehow are worse than alternatives. Almost everything produced, e.g. the thousands of specialist components that go into your laptop or phone, and them not costing a giant amount of money or advancement, is based on efficient markets. And big government solutions such as communist Russia is much more of a catastrophe, as people tend to be slaughtered or starve to death. Markets, while not perfect, are clearly better than them, even in the worst cases.
If you want a morality police to decide who gets to decide how moral each business is, you have to decide how corruptable that incredibly powerful entity would be, compared to the decentralised market action of customers voluntarily paying for products and services.
If the politician is scum as a result of having ought to judge the corporations' lobby as being scum, then it follows that the politician is able to come up with a calculus where the corporation is scum. And if the politician is able to, so am I.
And every time the citizenry tries to use regulation to reign in a megacorp it ends up creating more burden for that company's competition. megacorps legal team can easily squeeze into the loop holes, but mom and pops (and entrepreneurs) get ground up like cheap meat.
So I definitely prefer this, and this is used to be a sort of unspoken rule in Canadian law. The law just had this bias built into for the "little guy" in the fight. Seems to have changed under the current Führer, at least from a non-resident's perspective. IMO that's the right bias to have to counter the matthew effect in Capitalism.
> you can see where you they are engineered to fail
Really? Please give an example. I have been hearing this for at least the last 15 years and have yet to find someone who can offer an example of anything that was "engineered to fail" when challenged. Not saying it doesn't exist, but I'd just like to see a single example of it happening.
Sacrificial parts that are designed to fail in order to mitigate a more serious failure do not count for the purposes of this request -- that's just Good Engineering Practice.
I think people should rephrase it to "not engineered to last/repair". This is a much easier metric to point out and is about equivalent (though, less nefarious) to what they mean.
If you use that metric, it's insanely easy to quantify. Just look at the average refrigerator today, compared to one from the 50s-70s. It's a fraction of the cost, but it's built from cheaper/less reliable parts in a repair-unfriendly (but quick to produce) manner. The idea being that you'll buy a new fridge every 8-12 years and recycle (ideally) the old one, versus spending the cost of a car on one and keeping it for a generation or two. This is what planned obsolescence means, usually.
The only nefariously intended to "break" items that I can think of are electronic devices that are unrootable and rely on third-party networked services.
Oh, I completely agree with you on that. Most consumer items are built to a price point. If you're building to sell at a low price, you have to keep Bill of Materials cost low to make selling the thing worthwhile, so it's not surprising that, e.g., a cheap riding mower is made from thin stamped steel chassis whereas a commercial one is mostly heavy weldments that hold up to being banged around for hours each day.
I'm not being difficult. When I read "engineered to fail" that's not the impression I get from the statement.
> I'm not being difficult. When I read "engineered to fail" that's not the impression I get from the statement.
I agree with you. I think people mean something else entirely, colloquially. Which is why I distinguished for clarity.
I think the people who came up with the concept of "planned obsolescence" meant something entirely different to the zeitgeist meaning. That is, building something cheap with the intention of consistent replacements versus building something expensive with support/operational costs ongoing. One guarantees you return to them, the other you're just as likely to seek services elsewhere.
The zeitgeist took that and morphed it into "they actively engineer/design parts that will fail after two years".
Honestly seems to me that some BOMs (and therefore some practically-achievable price-points) should be illegal, then. You shouldn't be allowed to market something as a mower, if it's built such that the act of mowing gradually shakes the mower apart.
Yes, a change like this would mean that, in the short term, there'd suddenly be no "consumer" version of many products. But that'd only be the short term. In the medium term, I'd expect heavy pressure for innovation in materials science, with all these companies that were fine with plastics before, suddenly investing money and labor into operationalization of e.g. scaling carbon-fiber production.
This sounds like me like an inquiry into "quality" and an attempt to make illegal those products lacking a certain quality.
I generally call these products "<thing> shaped objects", e.g. a helmet shaped object that has all the outward appearance of an actual helmet, but does little to protect the wearer in the event of a crash. "DOT standards!" you might object, but DOT is generally known to be the worst standard in the world, often holding the industry back instead of moving it forward. If the department of transportation is unable to properly regulate safety equipment like helmets, I'm not sure I expect better results from a government committee intended to regulate the quality of nearly everything.
This, of course, assumes that one can not only define "quality", but determine a threshold on a spectrum that delineates legality. Or maybe we'll just accept Tsars that "know it when they see it."
Yes, there is no general definition of "quality." But every industry and product has its own internal, domain-specific definition of quality. For hard drives, "quality" is MTBF. For batteries, "quality" is measured in loss of charge capacity per charge cycle.
Or let me put it this way: the commercial/industrial versions of these products do some things differently. Why do they do those things? To increase "quality." If the industry didn't know what its "quality" metric was, then it would be impossible for them to make the commercial/industrial product "better" for long-term commercial/industrial use than the consumer one.
In any industry where the commercial/industrial version of a product — one that lasts decades in heavy use — is already an existence proof for the possibility of "quality" in the product category, you can simply regulate that the consumer version must also be made to last at least N years of regular consumer-duty use. Doesn't matter how they accomplish that. Maybe they can't accomplish that, with positive margins, at a price point anyone is willing to buy, at first. Oh well. Keep trying.
Compare/contrast: FDA stage-3 drug trials — the trial phase that tests drug efficacy. It's up to the drug's manufacturer to declare to the FDA what effect the drug is supposed to have — it's the very same effect the company is applying to the FDA to be able to market the drug as having. An efficacy trial, is simply the FDA demanding, from a drug's manufacturer, proof positive of its own planned marketing claims about the drug. That efficacy proof uses metrics specific to the pathology that the drug treats — and likely metrics invented by the drug manufacturer themselves, while researching the problem. But crucially, the manufacturer, before even starting the trial, has to convince the FDA that these metrics are sensible ones to measure efficacy by; and also has to work with the FDA to reach a consensus on what would constitute a satisfactory level of efficacy for their drug (i.e. what metrics thresholds are meant by a marketing claim like "relieves headaches.")
If the industry is already able to determine quality, how do you propose to wrest that design process— enforceably, and without destroying value— and place it in the hands of aging politicians? The FDA example is a good one, with complaints like American sunscreen and toothpaste being subpar, and amid news that Phenylephrine is effectively a placebo (and was not the manufacturers' first choice).
Would I enjoy high quality items? As someone shopping for a new toaster after ours simply stopped working (and after allowing my son to disassemble it both impressed and appalled at its design), in a word, yes! I suspect, however, that attempting to centrally plan quality would merely achieve a lower standard of living for most people. Telling the average person "you're not allowed to buy that because we deemed it to not be high enough quality (trust us)" and following up with "Oh well" seems well meaning but, respectfully, out of touch.
> I suspect, however, that attempting to centrally plan quality would merely achieve a lower standard of living for most people.
My feeling is different, and comes from an intuition about capitalism:
• Companies will make money the easiest way that they can, with regard for any kind of unenforced "code of ethics" being a path-dependent rarity, rather than something common.
• But companies do have the internal talent to solve problems in more challenging, constrained, and ultimately useful/ethical ways, if they're simply prevented (through regulation) from choosing the "easy way out."
If you allow a game studio to put slot machines in front of children, then that's what they're going to do to maximize ROI. If you don't permit them to do that, then the market demand for "games" is still going to drive them — or at least, one of their competitors — to ship some actual video games that are fun-qua-fun rather than being addictive and money-sucking.
If you allow a drug manufacturer to make an "anti-colic" baby formula that contains heroin, then that's what they're going to do. (And did! The early 1900s were wild!) If you prevent them from doing that, then the demand that still exists is going to force them [or one of their competitors] to put some research into how to actually address colic without just effectively putting the kids in a coma. And someone's going to figure it out.
If you let companies sell asbestos insulation, then that'd be what they'd do — it's the cheapest insulation to manufacture, and so it'd also be the cheapest insulation to buy if it were on the market. If you prevent them from doing that, then they'll have to get off their asses and innovate up a cheaper form of non-asbestosis-causing insulation.
I don't see why "you can't market this as a 'lawnmower' if it shakes itself apart after eight months; try again" is all that different from "you can't market this as 'building insulation' if it destroys your lungs; try again." In both cases, I'd expect the continued market demand + supply-side talent-base to come together to solve the problem a better way.
Kitchen aid stand mixers converted from using metal gearing to plastic gearing in their consumer stand mixers. After a certain amount of use, the gear wears out and costs $50 for a replacement.
The commercial line still uses metal gears. The maintenance on it is to check grease/lubricant after a certain amount of use.
(We used the stand mixer daily. Our home edition lasted 6-9 months before needing a gear change. The commercial edition has been going strong for a few years now.)
I’m sure there’s a reason why they moved to a fail-safe gear for consumer use — but as a consumer — I have no clue what that reason is. (We do ask a lot of our mixer tho!)
I have one of those mixers and I've replaced the sacrificial gear at least 3 times, although I usually get the gears for far less than $50. I gotta learn to not overload it with bread dough :-)
Based on what I see when I open up the unit, the reason they don't have an all metal gear train is that doing that would impose the need for higher strength on everything in the transmission and the chassis up to the motor. That would increase the cost to the point where it would cut into sales.
The larger consumer mixers (6qt?) are built more heavy duty since I know that they can take a larger vertical load, but I don't know if they also have the nylon gear.
Why not a shear pin? There's no need to make the (more expensive) gears the shear point when you can use a pennies-each shear pin (or shaft, or similar).
I think I may have misunderstood GP's post. I thought they meant that one of the gears was changed to plastic (as in mine) with the rest remaining metal. But it's more likely that they meant that the newer models are now using a fully plastic geartrain based on what I've read since.
> I’m sure there’s a reason why they moved to a fail-safe gear for consumer use — but as a consumer — I have no clue what that reason is.
As someone who just infrequently uses their gifted kitchen aid mixer let me offer a new perspective.
I’d be ill-inclined to use it if I had to oil my kitchen equipment. That’s the reality. I use it once a month, and i would be turned off if I had to add lubricant. I’m an engineer, I get why it’s good, I get the purpose, but it’s just one more chore I wouldn’t do.
The father of a friend worked at a high position at Canon.
For a specific enterprise command, the client company wanted printers with a lifetime 20,000 copies instead of the base 10,000. Canon went "no problem, we'll see with our engineers" and actually they only had to remove a small device which was basically a print counter and would artificially block the ink input at approx 10,000 copies. So nothing to do with good engineering, only bad business practices.
>Sacrificial parts that are designed to fail in order to mitigate a more serious failure do not count for the purposes of this request -- that's just Good Engineering Practice.
Except when that part breaks and the company does not make replacements available and the product was not meant to be taken apart to replace it. Mechanical fuses only work when you can easily buy and replace the mechanical fuse and ALSO fix whatever caused the failure in the first place. Otherwise it's just a weak link.
That designed-in weak link that you can't fix could be the difference between you being pissed off because your machine doesn't work anymore and you losing a hand.
That's just not the thought process. A vacuum with a cheap motor isn't going to have trouble hurting your fingers if you stick them in the brush at the right angle. But the bearings will wear out in 5 years.
Another is drills with cheap housings or gears. The drill will happily rip a glove off and de-skin you. But it'll still wear out faster than if it had metal gears or a tougher housing.
Usually safety is an expense. Extra sensors, very carefully engineered weak links that suddenly break under load.
Another counter example to your point is my automated litter box. It has a pinch sensor for safety reasons, which is made of two metal contacts. This sensor is directly above the pee/poop so it corrodes and I have to take out like 20 screws in a machine filled with poop to fix it, like every year. They could just have added a plastic cover and one screw to protect the contacts, but no.
Probably the only thing I can think of to support your argument is cars. The front end of a car is plastic and metal designed to absorb energy in an impact. But household stuff...
I gave you one already. Newer stihl trimmers removed the grease plug. It's impossible to lubricate the trimmer head and they predictably fail after so may hours. A replacement head costs nearly as much as a new trimmer. The head is the most common part that fails on trimmers.
I owned a treadmill (second-hand, details long forgotten, sorry) which had two long steel rails (running the length of the machine) for the main structure. The brackets which connected the rails on the front side were steel, but the ones on the back of the machine were inexplicably plastic. There were major load paths (cyclical loading from running) going straight through these brackets to the feet. Between the wear and plastic embrittlement, these parts were the first to fail, and the entire rest of the machine was in decent condition (easily years of life left).
There was nothing particularly complex about that part, they could have easily used steel brackets. I can't help but feel like it was designed for a specific lifespan.
Usually by using very cheap bearings which last just past the warranty period and cheaping out on reinforcement in critical areas. The AvE YouTube channel covers lots of this with his BOLTR teardowns.
> so called "representatives" who place corporate interests over small businesses and citizens
California farmers have more influence in Sacramento than John Deere. Either they didn’t engage in this fight. Or there is a reason they would want this exempted.
Those representatives get elected because wealthy companies like John Deere spend lots of money to make sure that happens.
Take the money out of politics. Pass strict campaign finance reform laws, kill super PACs, and put severe limitations on what qualifies as "lobbying", and a lot of these problems will go away.
Sure. And guess who needs to do that? The politicians. Again, all the blame sits on their shoulders. Expecting companies to have some sort of morale compass is just a result of the media hiding the truth from everyone.
To me, it'd make sense in theory to carve out these exceptions even without a lobbyist asking for them: it'd make for a bill that gets immediately passed rather than endlessly argued about and shot down, because a bill with these exceptions has nobody on the other side of it pushing back. And that could just be the first step; you could then do a series of smaller bills (or better yet, riders to must-pass bills) that each try to knock out one of these exceptions.
In practice, though, I feel like the exemptions here will be interpreted as part of the "spirit of the bill" rather than examples of realpolitik expediency...
I'm wondering if it was a carve out that was easy to give, doesn't water it down too much and is helpful for other politics:
* Sony produces semi-conductors and movies (Sony Pictures, Columbia, Tristar)
* Microsoft is big in enterprise cloud (ie: government)
* the impact of people being forced to upgrade their phone because they can't fix it, is probably larger than people being forced to upgrade their game system because they can't fix it
Note: I 100% agree with you. I see video games as the same as all other consumer electronics which were included, but I can see if Sony/Microsoft came complaining, it's a good bargaining chip/favor for other initiatives.
I’m actually more surprised that they didn’t cave to Apple. In either direction. Apple should have been kicking and screaming to have no exemptions.
Alternatively, the iPhone and AppleTV, and all their computers will now be redefined as gaming consoles (which honestly, what’s the technical difference)
Why would Apple complain? You can repair a phone screen as long as you pay 50% off the price of the original phone. As long as they control the supply of components and are able to price them as they wise, it’s a win win for them. The difference between Apple and any other phone, is that Apple has maybe 15 different models to support that each one has been sold by millions of units, meanwhile there are thousands of different android phone models.
The trillion dollar behemoth famous for having few models can afford to stock parts for seven years. Can Motorola, or the smartphone or laptop arm of Lenovo (industries with famously low margins) justify staying in the space and competing with Apple?
So, there is a defensible reason for this carve-out.
For generations now, video game consoles have had very aggressive cryptographic pairing of parts, done in the name of securing the hardware against hacking by the console owner. This is done to prevent mods to enable cheating and piracy. Given that consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales, there's a justification for this.
Providing replacement parts for game consoles would also require tools to re-pair the replacement parts. If these tools need to be provided to independent repair shops, there's approximately a 100 % chance of them getting leaked and destroying the security of the console.
I'm not going to say that this is a good or a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that there's a real reason for lawmakers to treat game consoles different than phones or computers, and that it isn't necessarily a sign of corruption.
This is also done for iPhones, which have not been exempted.
The "security" of the console against "unauthorized" software is arguably against the public interest. Is it really to the customer's benefit to exclude software providers from the market? Haven't we been round this with app store discourse?
> consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales
The purpose of gaming consoles is to play games, and allowing cheating software on them ruins the experience for others. Consoles are not general purpose computers, they have a specific use which is gaming, and it is reasonable to protect the fairness required to have a good experience when using it in the way it was intended to be used.
Phones are not general purpose computers, they have a specific use which is to communicate with people over a distance.
See?
But you can in fact turn it around, because both phones and games consoles are in fact general purpose computers that are able to execute any program, before the arbitrary limitations are imposed on them by the manufacturers.
My point is that it is normal for special purpose devices to be regulated in such a way that prioritizes their primary purpose. And this is true for smartphones. The parts of your phone that must comply with telecom regulatory standards are locked down in black boxes separate from the main system.
The problem is this doesn't prioritize their primary purpose. It ensures that the device will simply stop functioning within a relatively short time frame. This sort of crypto-locking of parts makes them impossible to fulfill their primary purpose when a part fails and the manufacturer won't sell a replacement part. It's unacceptable to brick devices in the name of cheat defense.
I disagree. If it is not playable due to the manufacturing failing to prevent cheating, there is no need to replace parts on it, as it would be broken either way. A fair playing field is essential part of a functional game.
If the immobilizer on your car fails, it will brick your car too. The solution isn't to prohibit immobilizers and shrug our shoulders at car thieves, it is to require manufacturers to provide parts. Which we have long done for cars in the US.
TL;DR: Don't prohibits locks that protect consumers just because the lock could need maintenance. Require the manufacturer to provide parts for the lock.
I have a Nintendo Switch, I've literally never used it to play a game where cheating is a concern. Cheating in games is not a crime and it's not worth bricking devices to avoid.
I'm glad your experience has been fine. That doesn't mean that everyone has the same experience. Cheating in games can easily become criminal, and people have been arrested for doing so. Even though cheaters are often not prosecuted, these activities can often amount to fraud or hacking.
You don't need to lock down a console and prevent "unauthorized software installs" to prevent cheating. You do what game developers have been doing on PCs for years: validate all of the player's actions on the server, look for players with suspicious patterns of activity then ban them.
Behavior analysis is one approach used on PC games, and it has varying degrees of success. There are weaknesses to this approach and it tends to be a cat-and-mouse game of cheat developers adding fuzzing and anti-cheat developers adjusting their behavior analysis. Visit forums for games that use this kind of anti-cheat and you'll see people complaining about cheaters.
More popular games have shifted towards anti-cheat systems that run at ring zero and prevent you from playing the game unless it is happy with everything running on your system.
This is correct to be honest. rooting your phone doesn't ruin other peoples phone experience unless you perform actually illegal conduct perhaps (maybe some hacks or w/e?). Cheating in a game is not illegal, so companies need to take it upon themselves to prevent it. This is honestly fairly logical. it does not at all compare to PC or Phones.
And when people "root their phone" they are just modifying part of the device. The baseband is closed source and illegal/impossible to modify in order to protect the network and spectrum.
Some of us do get pretty close and modify stuff like EFS to enable/disable functions (voNR) and enable bands that were present but not legal at the time the device was certified. In US, band 77 was disabled on many devices but later became legal to use. The manufacturers didn't want to pay for the recertification but the device is capable otherwise. We also sometimes add band combinations (for carrier aggregation) that the manufacturer missed.
AFAIK, it's still true for Sony/Microsoft but hasn't been true with Nintendo for a while, I think since the Gamecube (when they stopped trying to play the performance game).
Why must the government pass laws to protect the specific business model of exactly 3 mega corporations, a business model which harms consumers and harms competition?
The DMCA exception for consoles is the same thing. The government is just taking these companies word for it, and harming everyone else. If Playstation/Xbox/Nintendo can’t survive without these handouts from the government, then why should they? It’s not like game consoles are a necessity. The free market is what should decide whether a business model succeeds or not.
And regarding privacy, that’s bs. If consoles somehow become overrun with piracy, then publishers can just move their games to other platforms. PC is much easier to pirate on, is in general used by more tech savvy people, and it doesn’t have a rampant piracy problem. Steam wouldn’t be as successful as it is otherwise.
US law in that area looks more at consumer harm, not incidental harm to other companies, IIRC. There's a separate way to get in trouble here around predatory pricing, but I think that's more complicated (you have to be doing it specifically to drive people out of business). It depends on what the rest of the market does. See https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Specifically
> Pricing below a competitor's costs occurs in many competitive markets and generally does not violate the antitrust laws. Sometimes the low-pricing firm is simply more efficient. Pricing below your own costs is also not a violation of the law unless it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses.
So
> Is it okay because Sony/MS don't raise prices?
Yes exactly this.
See also:
Printers sold below cost with expensive ink refills.
E-readers, often
Razors for shaving - the base or chassis or whatever you call it is often sold below cost.
No problem, it's a good question, and it only works that way because of the particulars of US law. It differs for other countries, or even within the same country over time (the US's consumer focus was less strong in earlier years).
The consoles-are-sold-at-a-loss explanation has always seemed like an extraordinarily week argument for giving Microsoft and Sony a pass on bad behavior.
Their consoles may be sold at a loss at launch, but I don't know of any console hardware that wasn't net profitable over it's lifetime with the possible exception of the XBox with the ring-of-death problem.
42488.2.f already mentions limitations in the bill to prevent overriding anti-theft.
They could have extended that to include anti-piracy or anti-cheat or cryptographic pairing, but they didn't. They created a specific carve out for video game consoles and not for those other things you mentioned.
When the government uses words generically to define its compelling interest to regulate, they are usually sincere. When the government uses words to protect an industry explicitly, they usually have been bought.
I don’t see how it’s anticompetitive: any startup trying to get into the space is going to be making the case for product-market fit in terms of things like subscriptions and selling access to developers. I’d think a one-time per customer console sale at a loss would be one of the easier expenditures to justify to investors.
Without trying to defend this particular carve-out, I would suggest that things like computers and video game consoles are improving in capability over a much faster time scale than TVs and video cameras. Hence there is much less of an expectation of longevity / relevance than with other tech goods.
That said, the same argument could be made for mobile phones as well, so it's clearly spurious.
>Hence there is much less of an expectation of longevity / relevance than with other tech goods.
These kinds of arguments are hollow. Especially in gaming, if you make a good console with good games, people will want to hang on to them and play them for literally decades. But even ignoring that specific aspect of gaming culture, it really should not be up to some top-down, self-serving analysis about what most consumers should expect. Otherwise it's just a race to making the least consumer-friendly product so you can make legal/political arguments about consumers obviously want to buy expensive garbage which they expect to break beyond repair in a few years at best.
That argument made sense 10 years ago, but since then we've seen a lot of slowdown in computers, consoles and mobile phone progress, while TVs have overcome the LCD slump.
The value difference between 10 year old console (PS4!) and new one, can be smaller than 10 year old LCD vs new OLED.
> > Without trying to defend this particular carve-out, I would suggest that things like computers and video game consoles are improving in capability over a much faster time scale than TVs and video cameras. Hence there is much less of an expectation of longevity / relevance than with other tech goods.
I disagree with your point, but I'll reply to this one:
> That argument made sense 10 years ago, but since then we've seen a lot of slowdown in computers, consoles and mobile phone progress
That argument doesn't made even less sense 10 years ago in my opinion. When things are moving fastest (eg, most profitable) is when parts must be made available for consumers to repair themselves. When things are moving slower, then the IP/schematics should absolutely be provided if nobody is willing to make the parts.
Honestly though: how long something lasts shouldn't matter, companies should still be forced to provide support for things they sell, or else to provide their IP/schematics so that other people can support the trash that was sold.
This is absolutely true when you look at hardware from today vs 10 years ago, then do the same comparison between the 90s and 80s or even 00s and 90s. People are playing basically the same manner of game now and 10 years ago, but between the 80s and 90s there was radical change in technology in a way that shaped the development of entirely new video game genres. Video game development since about the early to mid 00s has been mostly a matter of refinement, very little has been truly revolutionary.
It makes less sense. Video game consoles typically run 5-10 year cycles. If anything, supporting repair on them should be easier, because you can play the same games on the console at very first release as you can on the console sold right before they discontinue them. PCs and phones get updates yearly, and a 10 year old PC certainly can't play the same games as a brand new one.
Apple has been making uncharacteristic strides in this area. At WWDC this year they announced that Death Stranding was coming to Macs, and at the Sept 12 event they had a fairly long piece about how the iPhone 15 Pro is capable of playing AAA games. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was actually a conscious strategy for this angle but that’s speculation.
Speaking of video game consoles I remember finding out that Nintendo would still “repair” a GameCube without composite out into one with it for years and years after the GameCube was not sold new.
I dont want to start a war with any right-to-repair purists, but I do think in lieu of offering 7 years of parts a company that makes reasonable low-cost (or free) replacement a simple request for 7 years would also be meeting the needs of most consumers. And a lot of video game consoles have very liberal policies already toward this regard.
Some products are significantly cheaper to replace than repair, even if they cost more than $99.
A defined "support period" with relatively bounded costs is all we really need, I agree.
Knowing that if I buy a technology product that is more than $100, it will either work for 5 years (or whatever) or be repairable for some fraction of the original cost, would make me satisfied.
my only concern with this exception is it creates a monopoly, which then needs to be carefully regulated at multiple levels.
Yes, we can regulate the price, but if only the original vendor can perform repairs we might also need to regulate quality and timeliness (similar to how lemon laws for cars often specificy a maximum number of repair attempts, or hours away from the owner for repairs, before the vehicle must be refunded).
I think it’s an okay approach, but I also think it requires a heavier hand from the government, and from ongoing oversight, than letting the market figure out reasonable rates for a repair.
It's weird to me that video game companies apparently have this much lobbying power but all the other consumer electronics corporations don't. Are they really much richer than all the others combined?
the regulation is much more about regulating a governmental solution to the android-iphone wars than regulating consumer freedoms or e-waste etc. those are convenient levers for the powers involved.
tim sweeny does not care about unlocking your xbox. at no point was that a possible outcome or a consideration in his thoughts, no matter how much the android guys waved the flags.
it's about unreal and unity legislating higher gross margins, and about breaking the apple restrictions on facebook's permission requests, and about safari resistance against google chrome browser monoculture. and y'all lost.
is that crass? I guess, but it doesn't matter, because we have to live with the google browser monoculture anyway. I had some people recently tell me "EU will just regulate it if it becomes a problem!". how long did it take to become a problem? didn't google move pretty much right into the enhanced ad profile thing?
it is what it is, the laws are passed, but holy shit the arguments have been so transparently bad-faith, or incredibly blind.
I’m just so tired of the fanboy wars and the “wow did you actually read someone advocating resale of stolen/mugged parts to bring prices down”. Yes, on HN no less. The android fans are shameless. I’m so tired of the “wow iPhone fans are brainless” (earlier this week). Etc.
It’s become so casually normalized for android fanboys to be toxic and gloat about anyone who calls it out. It’s so fucking weird. When did this happen. 2012? 2014?
And no, there is no iPhone contingent going around calling android people brainless blue bubble sheeple or saying that their purchase melted their brains etc. it’s crazy. I am so tired of the way the android contingent casually misbehaves, everything is brainless this and brain-rotted that and sheeple this.
The people you're trying to embarrass by linking here look pretty reasonable.
>there is no iPhone contingent going around calling android people brainless blue bubble sheeple
On HN? Maybe not. Out in real life? Yes, there absolutely is. I recently got an iPhone, and the number of people who said something along the lines of "OMG you finally got an iPhone, yay!" was fucking obnoxious.
I think it says a lot about the terrible state of things that such mild and inadequate legislation as this can be characterized as "the strongest yet".
Don't get me wrong, any progress is good, but this is, at best, a very tiny baby step.
That ship has now sailed for (almost?) all manufacturers, but I would like to remind that Apple was the pioneer in normalizing anti-consumer practices like non-removable batteries.
Who is "them"? Until Apple was strong-armed into launching the self-service program they didn't sell first-party replacement parts at all, let alone for seven years after launch.
What does this have to do with Sony? As far as I know, every manufacturer including Sony and Apple do their utmost to extract as much revenue from consumers as possible.
I agree, 7 years should be in the flat plateau of most product's bathtub curves, before most things start failing and consequently need spare parts in the first place. 15 years would be a lot more meaningful, but it really depends on the type of product in question.
Linux LTS is not even supported for 7 years, but only 4 years for the latest one. It's not a linear function for how much it costs to add another year of support.
Nothing says that they can't ship a newer version of device software, if they find that less costly (as long as the newer sw fully supports the device, of course).
California: we're rich and powerful and without us you companies and people couldn't make money, so let's use this power to force people to do what we want! Hey, where did everyone go?
This is an odd take for something that is decidedly pro consumer. Like what's the downside to having businesses have to plan for their product having to last less than a decade in the market?
"There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs."
Why make the decision for the consumer. This is forcing a choice on them by the state, that is going to have trade-offs, most likely increasing the price of the initial product significantly.
And as others have called out, no name brands that ship from overseas are not going to follow this and there is likely no enforcement mechanism to make them do that. So all this will hurt are large legitimate companies. It would likely drive many large companies out of various product lines.
Consumers already had little to no choice in the matter where it counted. California is making the decision for the producer that they must offer the choice to consumers to repair a product that brakes in a semi-reasonable timeframe (should definitely be longer for some product categories, arguably less for others).
American brands often already enjoy significant advantages in reputation (not to mention actual quality), in part due to regulations and business norms in the states. This only strengthens that.
Moderately more expensive products that can be expected to be operable for substantially longer is a big win for the overwhelming majority of society, including future generations (in more ways than one). It remains to be seen if that is the actual result of legislation like this, but it is certainly a noble goal for society and worth attempting.
Consumers had all the choice. They literally kept buying unrepairable devices, so the market naturally shifted away.
99% of users, even after this bill, will never repair anything ever. It's forcing niche desires onto everyone.
It's a law that forces producers hand to do something the vast majority of consumers don't actually want.
Almost everyone will continue to buy a new phone when theirs breaks. No one wants to use a year old phone. It's already outdated. That's what makes it anti-consumer - being directly out of line with what consumers actually want.
You live in a different world where noone wants to use a year old phone. I certainly live in a different, and perhaps non-standard, world as well. At my game night last night there wasn't a single phone newer than 5 years.
Well they all work in tech and make well over 6 figures, they could buy one if they wanted. There may be some desire, but it's balanced by other factors.
Everyone wants the latest version even if they can’t afford to upgrade. No one buys the latest phone and is wishing “man, I wish I had bought last year’s iPhone”
This bill hurts the poorest people by making certain products even more inaccessible to them. Before, they could at least have a choice between something they could afford and something repairable. Not anymore, that choice has been taken away from them.
I'll believe this argument when we start giving a shit about the poor when it comes to the literal basic necessities like food and housing.
And plus, this is such shortsighted thinking when the whole point of right to repair is to reduce the total cost of ownership and longevity of electronics by making them not disposable.
This reasoning also applies to literally every regulation in every field and product segment. We can apparently never set the bar higher than the ground.
> I'll believe this argument when we start giving a shit about the poor when it comes to the literal basic necessities like food and housing.
You’re right, we should greatly reduce the regulations around housing in CA to allow for faster development so the poor can have newer, cheaper homes.
> And plus, this is such shortsighted thinking
No. The issue is the use of force. If you want a repairable option, pay more and get one. You’re forcing the poor to pay more for what you willingly chose to, and that’s bad. Don’t tread on the poor, keep their options open.
Because that's not really what's happening, consumers are product takers and this law also affects them. It's as much a law about not buying trash as it is not selling it.
The number of product segments where none of the firms in the market offer long term support and parts, especially in consumer electronics is embarrassing. I have an easier time finding parts for products makes 40
years ago than 5 years ago.
> It would likely drive many large companies out of various product lines.
Fantastic! Literally overjoyed to hear it. The louder people complain the more I believe this law will actually change things and do some positive good.
My reaction to understand this: if the cost of manufacturing something is 7x in California compared to the rest of the USA then it’s easier to just not sell it in California.
But having not read anything besides HN comments yet this I don’t expect this to be the reality of the bill, only the reaction to the headlines.
Not sure if it's still the case but there was a time when I would browse aftermarket performance car parts and a number of them could not be sold in California.
I suspect there will be some products that won't be available in California in the future. But there will be many companies that adapt and stay in the California market.
Yes, there are already a number of products that Californians just don’t have access to, for their “protection”. I imagine this bill will further reduce the quality of life for Californians.
This isn't about protection any more than laws against littering are. It's basically a boycott that actually works because it goes through our established system for collective action.
Do you have domain expertise in hardware design and supply chains to judge this issue competently, carefully weighing the pros and cons, or did you consult your gut?
No because that's not even a consideration. The bar to passing a law like this isn't some greater good market analysis, it's whether it's it literally possible to do because the mandate is for companies to, maybe drastically, change their behavior to stop making trash.
Like what even is this, do you like the rampant corporatism where laws can only be passed if it doesn't affect your profits too much uwu? Won't you of those poor corporations flooding the market with garbage?
That's always how imports work, you can buy basically anything that's illegal to be sold but not illegal to use in your area by importing it from somewhere else. It's where people are getting flavored tobacco.
The logical conclusion that "for the protection of local business we have to allow everything" is a bit absurd. You can still buy it but you can't buy it here is a pretty normal compromise, would you rather it be enforced and you be charged with possession of a Huawei?
