This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams.
I'm sensing downsizing of "repair teams" in the not so distant future, with calls for repair being forwarded to sales.
GET FUCKED VOLKSWAGEN YOU COCKSUCKERS
Wait, what's wrong with VW?
VW does parts pairing. It resulted in me having to get a new vehicle when my steering wheel controls and air ag stopped functioning. Turns out you have to program the clockspring with the old clockspring and bringing it to VW resulted in a 350$ charge for them to say "we can't fix this".
Fuck VW.
Dealerships are literally the worst place to take a vehicle for a repair. They are in the car selling business, not the car fixing business.
Motor vehicles are exempt and the law doesn't affect anything until 2025.
Oh for fucks sake
You didn't think the law was for you/us, did you?
HP screaming
I wonder what Louis Rossmann has to say about this.
Parts pairing is prohibited only on devices sold in 2025 and later. And there are carve-outs for certain kinds of electronics and devices, including video game consoles, medical devices, HVAC systems, motor vehicles, and—as with other states—"electric toothbrushes."
What’s a good-faith argument for exempting these devices? Or was it simply successful lobbying in protecting corporate interests.
The goal of the bill was to get something with teeth passed. Fighting every lobby at once would be impossible, so they leave those devices out of it and will now be able to work on different laws for those things. At least that’s what I read they’re doing for the John Deere stuff at least. The legislators know it’s going to be a difficult battle, so they segmented the law to make it so that a failure in one spot wouldn’t cause a loss everywhere.
Heh. Teeth.
I could see an argument about medical devices, HVAC, and vehicles... But I don't think I'd agree with them. Except maybe medical.
Consoles and toothbrushes though? What the fuck?
Even HVAC, WTF?
I mean, I don't want the thing supplying the air I'm breathing to accidentally not burn all the gas and lead to carbon monoxide poisoning etc.... Things like the ductwork and shit, for sure, but not like, a burner.
The great irony is it's frequently the "ductwork" that's the problem: plugged or badly installed exhaust pipes, which the manufacture has no control over. The rest are the appliance itself wearing out or failing with no warning.
I've repaired furnaces myself several times including replacing burners and exhaust fans -- it isn't rocket science. It's no different than working on any other "dangerous" thing like a car. If someone somehow manages to fuck up so badly it hurts or kills someone that's on them.
Yeah that's totally valid. Agreed.
But I also wouldn't really trust third party parts for the appliance itself. I think once you do, that immediately becomes a possible problem. If it was in my house, I'd only buy from the manufacturer for something like that.
But on the other hand, Idk that it's necessarily wrong to legislate forcing these companies to allow it. I generally believe consumers should have the option on their own, but some things are too dangerous. I'd pretty much be against medical devices but HVAC is a little more uncertain to me.
Good thing part pairing doesn't exist for the Switch.
Mine is the Ship of Theseus at that point.
I guess console because they want the whole thing intact to enforce DRM?
Exactly.
For toothbrushes, are they worried repair won't re-seal it effectively so make it unsuitable for use in the wet environment?
Which is dumb, because there's nothing stopping anyone from replacing the seals/glue when they put it back together. And at least in the USA manufactures have been covered for damages/harm resulting from a flawed consumer-based repair since since 1975.
I hope you're right and this isn't about them getting ready to DRM brush handles to brush heads. Sonicare brush heads are ridiculously overpriced compared to the knock offs
I don't see any argument for vehicles, tbh. HVAC tinkering is almost exclusively high voltage so that makes just a little sense, don't want people swapping a 350 volt AC capacitor with a 250 volt DC capacitor and having it blow up, but Vehicles means a manufacturer can do everything imaginable to limit part availability and kill aftermarket parts purely for profits.
I do for things like ECUs that are programmed to the vin to prevent theft or tampering that would allow an attack vector for the vehicle.
I’m waiting for Apple to announce they are pulling out of Oregon 😂 [^1]
[^1]: Also the impending injunction 😒
the pairing restriction would "undermine the security, safety, and privacy of Oregonians by forcing device manufacturers to allow the use of parts of unknown origin in consumer devices."
If only there were options that would encourage the use of safe, genuine parts.
The "undermine the security, safety, and privacy of Oregonians by forcing device manufacturers to allow the use of parts of unknown origin in consumer devices" line is the same reasoning used by AT&T back in the old days as to why you couldn't buy your own phone or use a dial-up modem.
What, like companies selling high quality, reasonably priced parts?
My favorite part of the MN right to repair bill is that it requires OEM parts/software/schematics to be offered to consumers at the lowest possible price, including any rebates, sales, deals, etc. It's not quite an "at cost" situation, but it's probably about as close as you can get without crossing that line
It sounds good, but that’s enough wiggle room to drive a truck full of money through. Even “at cost” has been abused pretty badly.
Yea, I agree. I think these bills should require the maximum cost to be cost of manufacture at the date of engineering; i.e. a part designed in 2008 can not cost more than the materials to make it and it must keep that price for as long as it is used.
But progress is progress, we'll get there eventually as long as we keep up the political pressure.
Edit: please read the spirit in that example rather than to the letter. There's a lot of nuance that I just skimmed over, and that's because I don't want to write the bill.
Even better. I thought we were just talking about the cost to provide the repair information, which should be free after so many years of shenanigans.
Good points about parts cost/availability. Hopefully ORs bill keeps costs down with the threat of competition.
The issue with that is it leaves no room for paying the engineers who actually designed the device. The cost of designing the parts is really expensive. I have no issue with a small markup. I definitely agree though that the costs shouldn't be so absurdly prohibitive to repair though.
I think that it would still leave room for engineers to be paid a living wage. After all they aren't getting paid for designing parts, they're getting paid to design a product made of interoperable parts
Don't forget the actual cost of manufacturing. The building, the workers, the people working behind the scenes on finance or logistics, or manufacturing details...etc
Manufacturing takes a lot of people on a lot of different levels not only to get it up and running but to keep it running and that's expensive.
Tooling for manufacturing is also insanely expensive
