Starting January 1st, 2026, Washington state’s new Right to Repair law will come into effect. It requires manufacturers to make tools, parts and documentation available for diagnostics and repair of ‘digital electronics’, including cellphones, computers and similar appliances. The relevant House Bill 1483 was signed into law last week after years of fighting to make it a reality.
A similar bill in Oregon faced strong resistance from companies like Apple, despite backing another Right to Repair bill in California. In the case of the Washington bill, there were positive noises from the side of Google and Microsoft, proclaiming themselves and their products to be in full compliance with such consumer laws.
Of course, the devil is always in the details, with Apple in particular being a good example how to technically comply with the letter of the law, while throwing up many (financial) roadblocks for anyone interested in obtaining said tools and components. Apple’s penchant part pairing is also a significant problem when it comes to repairing devices, even if these days it’s somewhat less annoying than it used to be — assuming you’re running iOS 18 or better.
That said, we always applaud these shifts in the right direction, where devices can actually be maintained and repaired without too much fuss, rather than e.g. cellphones being just disposable items that get tossed out after two years or less.
Thanks to [Robert Piston] for the tip.
I think there should be a Right Not to Update Bill. I paid for my computer and its’ operating system. I will decide if and when it will be updated. The bill would have to describe exactly what each update will do and in clear terms. It should include requirements that would delineate feature vs security updates, exactly what these updates will do and that they cannot be combined. It should also include our choice not to have features or programs removed, etc.
Totally agree. iMovie was removed from my latest iPhone restore. Deleting all my edited movies. Also a music player app disappeared after a restore along with all my music. Can no longer download the app. I’m furious. My only consolation is that I never gave a penny to Apple, I always bought used.
Regarding electronic waste, this category needs to work like the cigarette butt regulation in Spain. The cost of cleaning up is distributed among the tabacco companies. Would work with plastic. Just pay cash per kilo of waste brought in then charge the companies that import and produce it.
but but but,…. then HP can’t brick people’s printers any more when they dared to use 3rd party ink.
Totally Agree!
but but but,… then Microsoft can’t brick foreign powers’ computers and cripple their economy at the US goverment’s demand.
That’s a tough one. I might be mistaken, but I believe China has their own Windows equivalent for that very reason.
This 100%, I’d go even further and force companies to partially refund consumers if any features are removed through a firmware update after purchase. How is it ok to force a customer to update their software in the name of security while removing functionality?
Linux my friend, linux is the way
I’ve been seriously thinking of making Windows 10 my last Windows and going to Linux. We’ll see. Just have to make the jump.
I made the jump from MacOS a few years ago and haven’t looked back. Tried many distros and eventually settled on KUbuntu, which has a lot of documentation and just werks™
At home I could and would manage to do so, but at work we use some big CAD packages, which are Windows only…
“iOS 18 or better”… you mean Android? :)
(not intending to start an iOS vs Android comment war, both suck in their own way)
I wasn’t thinking of iOS or Android. I was only thinking of MS Windows, but it can apply to all of them!
What I personally find more annoying is the way companies deal with business owners. Let me give two known examples.
Farmers used to be able to fix every vehicle themselves. A standard toolkit was all that was needed to rebuild an entire tractor. I know because I helped repairing a few of them. These days you can’t. Especially
big greenis going after farmers attempting repairs and make purchasing parts impossible. Farmers can’t easily switch brands as tractor companies work in specific area’s so if you are in abig greenarea, you really don’t want to buy another brand of tractor, as supplies and service for your brand is non existent, leaving you with very expensive equipment you can’t get get serviced. This forces farmers to buy from brands likebig green, instead of switching to another brand that might be better and more customer focused. Most farmers aren’t rich and a lot are just barely holding on to their farms. Sure, there are a few corporations that own giant farms but they don’t care about any of these issues.Another example is the good old ice cream machines at McDonalds. McDonalds signed a license that only the manufacturer of the ice cream machines is allowed to service the machines and they charge insane amounts of money for repairs and service. Franchise owners are usually not wealthy enough to pay for it and can’t easily afford repairs, unless they own a bunch of franchise locations at the same time. Franchise owners are forced to purchase that specific model of machine and aren’t allowed to use another machine. The machines break often and repair bills can be very large. The result is that they leave the machine broken for a longer period of time. So if you want to know why the ice cream machine is always broken, this is it.
I mean sure, it’s annoying for customers but I refuse to pay the price of a good used car for a mobile phone so Apple isn’t anywhere near what I want to pay and even if I want to spend that much, I wouldn’t want one as the hardware is just terrible. iPhone’s break the moment I look at one. I paid a lot of money (like, 300 euro’s) for my Android phone when it came out 4 years ago and I’m still happy with it. The entire outside is filled with scratches and dents.
What is this Windows people talk about … Use Linux. Update when you want to update. Dig as deep as you want to know what updates you are getting and what was changed. And reboot on your own time. Apply your only the ones you want… Total freedom of choice what desktop to use… And what distribution. You don’t have to use Windows…. Or Apples OS. Your have choices.
We could always ‘repair’ our own computers (replace the HD, CPU, motherboard, etc.) . Of course who wants to repair down at the chip level? How far do you take it? Back to hole through parts? Bottom line, going to be more expensive for the consumer I suspect for devices that ‘comply’. Phones would become bulkier (wouldn’t mind that if you could just remove a cover and slip in a new battery pack, like you could before ‘thin’ phones). The unintended consequences of a ‘feel good’ law… Strikes again.
LOL, that made me laugh… As just mentioned above a few seconds ago, I would like to go to Linux at some point. Just don’t know or want to deal with all the hardware compatibility issues that I may encounter.
Linux Mint is a Linux distribution that is very friendly to beginners. It’s progressed to a state that it almost always “just works”. Also, Trying out Linux is very easy these days. Most distributions have “live” versions. Download it, put it on an USB stick, and then boot from it. If you’ve got a storage media on hand, you can go from zero to running Linux in 15 minutes.
For longer term dual boot systems…
You can mess with a boot loader, but I find it both easier and robuster to simply add another SSD to your system, and then use the Bios / UEFI to select the boot media. This way, you do not have to change a single bit of either the old installed OS, or the new one.
Bios / UEFI usually has an option to set a boot media permanently, and/or to override with a keystroke during startup.
Not being a Linux wizard I installed Mint on an old Compaq laptop. Works great, kept the family from buying a new junk windows. Only issue was a 4 minute blank screen booting time. Could never figure out why or how to speed it up. Took hours of research to no avail.
Really, hardware support problems are pretty much thing of the past with Linux unless you have a ‘special’ case. Every time I’ve upgraded to a newer laptop, Linux just ran on it. Same with desktops and servers. As said above you can boot from a USB stick and test ‘basic’ compatibility if you wish. Personally I now just boot, wipe disk clean, and install Linux. Wifi works, sound worked, video worked, etc. To bad that newer laptops don’t have a ‘hard-wire’ RJ-45 connector anymore. I had to buy a USB-C to ethernet cable for my last laptop. I digress… Every time I’ve upgraded my systems, Linux supported the parts. Not like 10 years ago and more where hunting for drivers…. Times have changed. Even printers (at least my Brother ones) are auto detected and ready for use. Granted when I moved to the ‘then’ very new AMD Ryzen platform with a 1600, Mint (which I was running) did not support it. Had to get the latest Ubuntu version to get Linux on the system at the time. That’s in the past.
I recently had a case of a new Dell laptop where Windows 10 or 11 wouldn’t install because it didn’t have SSD drivers (!). Linux installed just fine without any problem. So tables have fully turned.
Except… for GPU’s which have a tendency to become unsupported relatively quickly and have no open source drivers.
Thanks for the info, guys. Mint would be my go to distro as I’ve read multiple times that it is beginner friendly and most like Windows. And thanks for the tip, paulvdh, about just using a separate drive to dual boot. I friend of mine discussed with me about dual boot and said that it’s such a pain that he eventually went to two machines. Having separate media effectively does that. And that’s good to know about the hardware compatibility too.
Wake me up when LCD font rendering in Linux (be it X11 or Wayland GUIs) comes anywhere close to Windows. I don’t care that I can watch Big Buck Bunny in VLC at 60 fps when my primary mode of communication is still screwed and has “wontfix” status. I’m not switching to CRT either because it’s not 2007 anymore and I can’t buy second-hand Dell P1130 for $50.
” In the case of the Washington bill, there were positive noises from the side of Google and Microsoft, proclaiming themselves and their products to be in full compliance with such consumer laws. ”
Hmmm. It seems this could require that their products be open source.
(as a side note, I happen to work at McD waay waay back when they were just starting on the “everything is microwaved” path. Industrial grade microwaves easily cost 3-5 times the usual consumer grade ones, and the cost to the owners bck then was just stellar … their solution? fire workers, “streamline operations” aka “corporate restructuring” so that they can afford microwaves … aha … that’s how we ended with “every burger now comes in a soggy bun” deal and wages that are more like allowances than wages).
Aside from that, industrial machinery is never cheap … it makes sense fixing it indefinitely … which to the vendors sounds like “returning customer we can milk indefinitely as well” until the vendor company croaks over, and then WHAT? Go with another expensive vendor, of course.
Which brings me back to the topic at hand.
There should be TWO regulations in total – TWO, not one. First one, as stated, The Right to Repair and availability of spare parts. Second one, designed and built in a way that makes future repair possible. Not just slapdash put it together, the hell with the invariable need to fix anything. DESIGNED BY THE ENGINEERS, and not by the peanut counters, by the engineers who WILL give it a proper thought “this part may break first, so let’s make sure it is reachable by the average Sam doing his fixing on the budget”.
Modern cars are the prime example in failing the second part. Try changing a starter on, say, Nissan Versa (actually, it is not as bad as, say, Saab, but still quite bad) and you’ll know what that means. Yes, taking apart one quarter of the engine just to get to the starter. Compact cars are known to be one of those slapdash-it-comes-together-in-one-way-never-gets-taken-apart-except-in-the-junkyard. How phones are different? Not terribly much so. They are compact for sure, and mostly not in the way you’d find it helpful. Actually, they are terrible, and I’ll stop at that.
I once changed a starter on a friend’s late 80’s Subaru and it was located on the top of the engine, to access it i just needed to remove the air cleaner.
Socialist countries tried that. Result was products that nobody wanted (except for people behind the Iron Curtain who had no choice). At first products which were designed by engineers, designed for durability and designed to be repairable were absurdly expensive and produced in rather low quantities. Then those engineers “rationalized” products and production processes, availability improved a bit (though queues – even for a roll of toilet paper – were a regular occurence) goods got cheaper but also worse (usually in terms of build quality or features).
In the end this approach is what led to 1989 collapse of socialist economies and in turn governments across Europe. Turns out it’s better to let people build whatever they want, however they want and leave it for free market to decide.
Two years or less? My current Android phone is five years old, and it was a discount model from two model years previous when I bought it. My current cost per year for this one is south of forty bucks and still falling. (Service, on the other hand …)
I only buy a new phone when the one I have stops working; and I have replaced batteries in the past (thanks, iFixit!).
Operation FTW.
Apple will find a way around this. An obvious “way around” would be to create two slightly-different SKUs, one with easy-repair and significantly cheaper one without. The easy-repair SKU would have the same parts as the “discount” one, except Apple would charge a lot more for the phone and the interchangeable-repair-parts.
The “discount” SKUs would not be available to residents or business in Washington, but if they wanted to drive to Oregon to buy one, no problem until it breaks.