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Despite A Flood Of New State Laws, Most Industries Still Suck On ‘Right To Repair’
from the laws-don't-mean-much-if-they're-not-enforced dept
Washington State recently became the eighth U.S. state to pass new right to repair legislation making it cheaper and easier to repair technology you own. At this point, roughly one-third of Americans now live in a state where some form of right to repair law has been passed, usually with broad, bipartisan, overwhelming public support.
But according to a new report by U.S. PIRG, most industries and companies aren’t really changing their ways. U.S. PIRG graded 25 products, five each in five different categories: dishwashers, phones, tablets, laptops and gaming devices. The manufacturers were graded as to how readily they provided customers with the parts and manuals needed to repair products.
The results were… not good:
“Of those products, 40% received a D or an F, 28% received Bs or Cs, and 32% received As. Of these products, we could not access a repair manual for 48%, and 44% had no spare parts available.“
Laptops generally fared pretty well, but no dishwasher in the study scored above a C. The study also found that Atari and Sony all failed to provide any repair materials for the game consoles reviewed by the organization.
One problem, as noted recently, is that none of the states that have passed such laws have bothered to enforce them. Companies in most states haven’t really been asked to do anything different. In some states, like New York, the bills were watered down after passage to be far less useful. I’ve yet to see a single state take meaningful action against any company for right to repair violations, despite the fact there’s clearly no limit of bad actors to take aim at.
That’s going to need to change for the reform movement to have real-world impact; but with states facing unprecedented legal threats across the board during Trump 2.0, meaningful consumer protection—and picking bold new fights with corporate giants—likely won’t be a top priority for cash-strapped states.
Filed Under: consumers, hardware, manuals, manufacturers, parts, reform, right to repair, state law
Comments on “Despite A Flood Of New State Laws, Most Industries Still Suck On ‘Right To Repair’”
i am honestly surprised by some of the A ratings.
Atari?
Sony, sure, but Atari is hardly even a real company—just a name bought by a holding company. And the 2600+ can hardly be considered a real console. It is, rather, a single-board computer with some embedded games, that happens to take original Atari joysticks.
So, basically, there are two compoments: the “console”, which has no replaceable parts but isn’t expensive enough to need them (and won’t be likely to fail if made correctly); and the controllers, whose pinout is documented here. The controllers will eventually wear out, but replacement ones are easy to get, and here’s a repair guide.
I’m really a bit mystified as to why they’d include that product, which is quite different from the others of its class. I’d rather see more things like stoves and air conditioners evaluated. I know people of have spent hundreds of dollars for a replacement stove part, and one who recently spent upward of a thousand for a new air conditioner circuit board (which likely didn’t cost more than $10 to make).
I'm honestly surprised
Apple scoring somewhere around a B average is kinda shocking. Valve getting an A+ is actually not surprising to me at all somehow. And as someone who owns a second-hand MSI laptop? Their score does not surprise me in the slightest. (It’s a good laptop, don’t get me wrong, but the fact that several things just ‘don’t work’ in linux is still annoying as hell.)
"none of the states that have passed such laws have bothered to enforce them"
This calls for a right to repair the right to repair law.
(Where is my state-fixing manual?)
Re:
Here you go.