Come January 1, 2026, manufacturers must also stop using parts pairing to block repairs for these devices. That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone.
SB 5680 goes even further for wheelchair users. It covers power wheelchairs, manual wheelchairs, power-assist devices, and mobility scooters. Manufacturers will have to provide not only parts and tools, but also firmware and embedded software, the stuff that’s often used to digitally lock out independent fixes.
Hopefully this doesn't mean the system can't report a non-OEM part being installed at all. Buying a used product that's been hacked apart would be frustrating.
There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3:
> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss.
So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing against customers right now) has to stop making their products unusable when non-OEM parts are used for a repair.
Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.
> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair
Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.
Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.
The problem with non-genuine parts is that you don't know what they are.
Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the design, who figured out how to "optimize" it by removing an "unnecessary" part, which was actually engineered in as a crucial safety precaution. You never know.
You may even buy the same non-genuine part you've been buying for years, from the same seller, and suddenly go from an exact copy to the "competing factory" case.
That's what trademarks are for - pick a part from a manufacturer you trust. Of course the legal uncertainty around replacement parts has made it so no well-known brand makes them for anything but their own products, and the anti-consumer-rights propagandists use this to argue it is an intrinsic property of "non-genuine" parts, and we must be protected from making our own choices.
If what you're buying is specified you get significantly improved visibility on the concerns you described. When it's not specified you're in the same place as before - the factory making them for the Genuine OEM is also trying to shrink the BOM by removing unnecessary parts.
Also be aware that the in the case of a TPM and fingerprint sensor there are some very important security guarantees that a part must make in order to preserve the security of the system. So it is not in fact scare mongering to try to get this right in the law and commenting about the difficulty of getting this right is not being infected by Apple follower talking points.
The replacement parts have to work, otherwise they are not replacement parts. Neither fingerprint sensors nor TPM chips are magic. There is no difficulty here.
I think this is already covered by a different area of law: false or misleading advertising prevention.
If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equivalent replacement to the OEM’s TPM, that advertising was false. This isn’t much different from buying a smaller hard drive for a computer: just because it works in the machine doesn’t mean it’s as big as the old one, and if it was advertised as 1TB and only stores 500GB, then the advertising is false.
It should be allowed for a system to warn about using a part that has not been certified to work in this type of situation. There is a middle ground where third party parts are allowed but they have to demonstrate that they meet a certain level of safety to not have a warning pop up.
> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.
"How dare you be anything less than blindly enthusiastic about this obviously good thing, you've clearly been tricked by someone evil."
I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to.
Sorry, I can't parse the multiple negatives of "hopefully this doesn't mean they can't.." followed by "there's no such restriction".
I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.
If someone damages your property, they must pay for damages.
That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the same car you had before. The parts might be unobtainable. Or the car’s value may have depreciated enough to be less than the cost of repair.
It’s sucky that you are “forced” to acquire new parts or car, but that’s life. They will pay you the fair amount for damages, not necessarily restore exactly to the previous state.
Hm. There is no restriction in the law about showing the OEM status of parts in general was how I wanted my sentence to be understood. A permanent notice and limiting functionality is explicitly forbidden, but it follows that a dismissable notice (or something like a popup notice triggered in a settings menu) is allowed.
Yeah, this still seems problematic in the case of a device being sold and represented as original. Though I suppose this is always a risk we take buying used.
Not personally, no, though I am surprised to learn in this thread that it's apparently an issue.
I do know with cars, replacement parts sometimes have fitment issues that cause body shops hassles, driving up labor costs, and having replacement parts devalues a desirable car. (on the other hand, so does ANY bodywork, even with OE parts).
Yes. Insurance companies being able to force you to take a generic when you and your doctor know you need the name brand is frustrating. If you change insurance, you and your doctor must go toe-to-toe with the insurance to prove you need the name brand. And then you're forced to "trial" the generic again. Yes, there are legitimate cases of generics not working right for the person.
> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to ... Reduce the functionality or performance of a digital electronic product
Dismissable would have to be defined, but when being annoying about it it should be possible to show that it reduces the functionality. It would be clearly against the spirit of the law, but sure, Apple already risked management jail time by ignoring court orders so they might try stuff here as well.
> That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone.
I'm curious if that means that it's now illegal for the company to tell you if you have a device with fake parts.
I also don't quite understand the security implications. If you need some attested part, like a TPM, and this and some other thing like a fingerprint sensor fail and you replace them both, you cannot disable the fingerprint sensor since now technically it cannot attest itself?
Presumably, you can have the TPM tie fingerprint data to the sensor.
If you replace the sensor with a "fake" one, old fingerprint data becomes invalid. This would be good enough for users, as adding their fingerprints back would take them minutes at most, while providing no value for attackers.
Nice! That had gotten extremely ridiculous to the point where I've been actively avoiding new consumer products just because maintaining them is such a hassle.
I wondered what it would mean for small manufacturers and they are not exempt however o3 believes "in practice, your duty is limited to providing whatever service manuals, firmware-pairing utilities, and spare parts you already possess (or have made for warranty work) and making them available at cost, digitally for free."
EDIT: as people below have posted, o3's "at cost" is misleading, the text actually says "at costs that are fair to both parties"
Very interesting, there's a carveout for video game consoles:
> Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to require any original manufacturer or authorized repair provider to make available any parts, tools, or documentation required for the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a video game console and its components and peripherals.
Wonder if Valve/Xbox/Nintendo asked for that, this being Washington State.
Given the support valve provides for the steam deck I'd be surprised if it was them. They seem much more interested in having a viable alternative to keep Microsoft from walling windows in such a way to kill steam than caring that they make the actual devices.
I would 100% percent expect both Microsoft & Nintendo to have had a hand in that though.
I've often wondered how much cross-talk there is between the two companies, given that the Nintendo America HQ is smack in the middle of the sprawling Microsoft campus. There's got to be some, I should think.
I am sure there is some within the bounds of the law, but I don't think this time around that would have happened much. What's good for one is good for all, and they all know that, so why risk collusion by even thinking about it, when all they need to do is represent their own interests and be done.
I wasn't getting at any illegal sort of collusion.
More like, connections which form because people meet each other over time. Or jump back and forth between companies, because their office location doesn't change much. That would lead to a flow of ideas between the two companies in a totally organic and not problematic kind of way. People know each other and talk shop occasionally while at the gym, or yoga or the neighborhood BBQ or whatever.
Yes exactly. If anything, I would expect Valve to support this bill based on how repair-friendly they are. I will admit that over the years I've become a huge Valve fanboy because of their amazing contributions to Linux and making the Steam Deck an open platform, but Valve has really done a ton to make the world a better place. Yes it benefits their business too, but they definitely could have gone more evil than they did, so there's still reason to praise them.
This is a result of there being a general consensus that video game consoles are "a thing" that we are all used to, and that the loosely-coupled movements of right-to-repair and antitrust are not seeking to disrupt the video game industry for fear of distracting from their larger goals.
It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)
I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.
> can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.
Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.
And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)
> Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game.
Well, this becomes a bit of a circular argument, but certainly part of the reason for that is the only thing one can do on a Nintendo Switch is game, due to its restrictive software.
And, strictly speaking, this statement is false. The only thing most people do on a Nintendo Switch is play games, but there is a subset of people that hack their switches and install things like Android TV. The thing is basically just an Nvidea Shield, hardware-wise. Not being able to do everything an Nvidea Shield can do is a software restriction.
I do see your point re: Apple's ambitions being far vaster than Nintendo's. But in terms of controlling their own markets, they are still seeking similar levels of control.
Why would anyone believe that spare parts would need to be provided at cost? I’m a proponent of right to repair, but that would be an absurd over-step (and be a strong force to ensure that no spare parts are available to anyone).
The bill actually says “at costs that are fair to both parties,” not “at cost” as in losing money. You’re arguing over what ChatGPT imagined the bill said (and GP posted without verification), not what it actually said.
IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included?
With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."
I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time.
The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.
There's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it.
Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).
Manufacturers can already legitimately say the additional price for 1 spare part for a $5 part is actually $250,000 dollars because the last mould has worn out…?
Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.
Tough luck then. The point of the law is to make it easier for people to repair the things they rightfully own. Not kill business by requiring all companies to indefinitely manufacture parts for anything they’ve ever sold.
Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.
It makes actively preventing repairs (including via software restriction, which happens today) illegal. It clarifies that it is the responsibility of the company providing the product to in good faith facilitate 3rd party repair of the product by providing parts and documentation fairly. This is sadly not the norm for electronics goods hence the whole movement in the first place.
250k for a single mold if they don't have drawings of the final size of the last is reasonable - high but reasonable. Building molds is still a lot of trial and error that CAD cannot help with. Plus time for one off on an assemble line is not cheap since it is often half an hour of nobody in the factory working except the two people switching out the mold. once you have a mold you can make thousands and so the cost ammortizes out if you need that many.
my company has looked into spending billions for a chip fad of obsolete processes just to get some no longer in prodction parts. So far not worth it.
Actually this is probably the best way to ensure that price gouging does not happen. The fixed and NRE costs are already included in the price of the original device. Charging those again for replacements would be double-dipping. And the law still leaves it up to OEMs to decide how to cost the replacement, so there's some wiggle room there. This is an intelligently crafted bill.
I don’t agree that Gillette making a profit on razor blades is “double-dipping” and certainly not in a way that I want to prevent.
The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.
The razor blades thing is a problem specifically with the patent system.
The intent of a patent is that you invent something useful and get a temporary monopoly over it as the incentive for the invention. The premise is that the value of the patent is proportional to the value of the invention, and therefore the incentive we want to create for inventing it. If you invent something which is no improvement over the status quo then nobody is going to pay you a premium for it.
The problem comes when you patent an interface, like the connector between a razor handle and a blade. Because then even if the connector is nothing special, the replacement blades have to use that connector and then you get artificial demand for the connector, not because it's such a great connector but because the customer is in the market for blades for their existing razor. It's a mechanism of cheating the patent system by collecting a premium disproportionate to the value of what you invented.
This is even worse in tech products because a phone costs a lot more than a razor, so if you need a part, the amount they can stick you for because there is only one place to get the part is proportional to the value of a $900 phone instead of a $7 razor. And on top of that, they're not trying to sell you replacement parts, they're trying to turn your existing phone into slag so they can sell you a new phone.
Which is why the most important thing is that you can get repair parts from third parties, who both provide competition for parts and actually want to sell them because their primary business is selling repair parts instead of selling new phones.
One proposal I keep mentioning for copyright and patent reform is they can never apply to data formats or digital/physical interfaces. Also, an exception to reverse engineer those for compatibility. That combination might combat a lot of problems.
Comparing consumables like blades to replacements like screens is intellectually dishonest. Those two are not the same thing and there is no merit to your argument.
To play devils advocate here, maybe the idea is that if the part is not eligible for third party sales by way of patents etc, then the manufacturer should not be allowed to simply charge more for a replacement part that that of a newer model?
So I could find some manufacturer using a part I want and order it at their cost rather than having to go to a retailer?
Is there anything that allows a manufacturer to require you send in the broken part after or any limit to how many times something can be "repaired"? Because I'd like to purchase a very large number of NVIDIA GPUs at cost.
The phone part sounds great, the wheel chair portion sounds like it will just make wheel chairs more expensive. Wheelchairs are generally already highly repairable, and this will just reduce the options to consumers
High end wheelchairs are the opposite of repairable. A friend of mine has to use one because of his disability. It was the only model that met his particular needs for his disability, and was around 14k when he bought it.
He can't even change the battery pack without sending it back to the company. The horn shorted out, and if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty. Fuck, one of the wheel spoke things cracked and we couldn't even put a new wheel on it, because they only sell the wheels as part of the lower chassis to the tune of 5k.
It's obscenely expensive to have a disability in the US, and these companies take advantage of people who just want to have basic mobility. It's really disgusting.
It'll just make many good wheelchairs unavailable in WA, forcing consumers to buy out of state, import from a foreign company that doesn't care about state laws, or go with a worse product.
Since these are presumably financed by the government, the first two options may not even be available to most.
Axis locks out certain useful features in their IP cameras unless you install an Axis-branded SD card.
Since Axis doesn't actually manufacture SD cards, they are obviously rebranded high-endurance cards from one of the major fabs (possibly with some minor firmware parameter tweaks). Except, they cost twice as much and aren't as generally available.
Would this law have any bearing on that business practice?
Without the Axis-branded SD card, they axe or deteriorate access to the cameras from mobile devices.
Namely, you cannot add the camera to a site for access from Camera Station Edge. This applies to both the desktop and mobile flavors of the software.
On the desktop version of Edge, there's a little-known hack you can make to a config file to override the behavior. But this means you need to drag a computer to the physical site for the initial provisioning.
There is no such override available on the mobile app.
(Also depending exactly how you provision, the Storage, Motion Detection and Continuous Recording toggles will be disabled when viewing the device in Edge).
It's a weird place to gatekeep, and reeks of pure sales / marketing driven impetus.
Are there generators you can't fix right now? I assumed most of them are pretty basic designs, an ICE with either an inverter or non-inverter generator. You can look up how to tear them down and repair them step by step on YouTube (including commercial units)
Commercial Tier 4F diesels of the John Deere variety have latching fault codes when they relate to the aftertreatment system. It requires the manufacturer's proprietary scan tool (which they will not sell to you) to clear the code, even if the actual issue was something as simple as a connector left unplugged for too long.
Requiring proprietary dongles/software to clear fault codes are not uncommon, but I'm surprised there hasn't been enough interest for there to be a 3rd party tool.
Like McDonald's Shake Machines had a 3rd party tool to help diagnose issues.
The McDonald's stuff in particular is a red herring. Their requirements are contract requirements, put in place after too many franchisees tarnished their name with listeria outbreaks.
Right, but the solution shouldn't have been a racketeering scheme.
This is the risk of franchising in general. You lose a certain amount of control over quality and you put your brand at much greater risk. In exchange, you get to expand your brand much faster than if you did it under centralized control and investment.
Large generators are fuel-injected, which requires a microcontroller with software.
In the 1990s that software was write-once, non-upgradeable, and bug-free because it was trivial. But it hasn't been that way for a long time. "Fuel injection requires software" turned into an exploit vector for feature creep.
Detroit diesel two strokes were entirely mechanical. As were cummins engines like b5.9 with a bosch p-pump. In fact all diesel engines have fuel injection, and they were all mechanical up to the 80s/90s.
The early electronic components were not reliable in an underhood environment and were not easily modified as engine control requirements advanced. Most of the 35 vehicles originally equipped with Electrojector were retrofitted with 4-barrel carburetors.
Yeah but you can just get a Megasquirt DIY kit and make your own ECU for most EFI engines (from 1 to 16 cylinders). To the other person's comment about the generator circuitry: most generators are pretty simple mechanically, you can make a new circuit to control the output.
I'm guessing the rationale of the law is to prevent needing a repair company to exist & reinvent the electrical components of every single product in existence.
Idk about the commercial units, but my portable inverter generator has a bunch of schmoo (highly technical industry term) that covers the entire electronics board. If a component on that board fried, I'm not able to repair it without replacing the whole board.
Conformal coating? That used to be the norm way back in the day for all kinds of electronics. Kind of a dick move, now, unless there is an environmental reason.
Normal on anything that has to work outside. Also, hardly an impediment to repair. I've done it myself on a car ECU: open case, scrape off conformal coating, desolder blown IGBT, replace with IGBT salvaged from junkyard unit, spray on new conformal coating, done - been working like that now for 5 years.
Parts pairing is also a/the reason you can't just swap in the junkyard unit even though it came from a car with the same engine. We tried it - did not work.
Potting within a brick of epoxy is the real dick move, but also not impossible to repair either.
That pairing is for theft reasons - chop shops will steal a car, take the parts off and sell them. However the expensive computers are paired and so they won't work when sold this way thus making the value of a car to a shop shop much less and so helping prevent that theft mode.
Though I think there should be a process to get the parts paired after verifying the car isn't stolen. I'm not sure what that would be though.
Probably epoxy potted, an order of magnitude more difficult to repair. Either way a coating is probably called for in the places a generator will be used so you probably wouldn't want to skip it just for repairability.
Typically a generator is used outdoors, so it makes sense to protect the PCB and other electronics from conditions experienced there. I wouldn't know what those conditions are, being on Hacker News and all.
I just had a new 48kw generator installed on my property and it was a nightmare with Generac. It's apparently a new model and it took them 4 tries to get the right controller sent to the tech to get it up and running.
It appears that the Washington bill excluded power tools whereas the Texas bill did not, which means that in Texas I should be able to swap dead lithium cells out of my expensive power tool batteries.
I fully support right-to-repair but do you need a law to repair batteries?
You can buy a battery build kit for M18 tools (for example) on AliExpress that comes with everything but the cells.
I'm a bit of a tool nerd and I'm not aware of any power tools that are doing DRM in their tools to prevent usage of third-party batteries but I don't mind being wrong so I know which brands to avoid.
Very interesting. Maybe I can afford Milwaukee tools now! Their tools are good, and sold bare, for semi-reasonable prices but their batteries are eye-wateringly expensive.
(I should probably pick one of these up before Torque Test Channel does a video on them and they end up getting sold out for a year.)
Edit: I'm referring to the PDNation universal battery + brand-specific adapter in particular.
Just took a look here, and I didn't see anything over 20V offered. I'm in the market for 40V versions for some of my gear.
I also have Gold mount and V-mount type batteries that I'd love to have the cells replaced. If you think power tool batteries are expensive, take a look at film/video batteries!
To those who want to do this: make sure to swap out all cells in a battery at once to be safe, ideally using new cells that are all from the same manufacturer and same production run.
Mixing old cells with new can lead to a runaway thermal event in the worst case (i.e. unstoppable cancer-causing fire).
I wonder if the scope of "diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of digital electronic products" is extensive enough to be usable for requesting protocol documentation for purposes of integrating products with systems from different vendors (such as DIY). Plenty of IoT stuff has proprietary "hubs" or "cloud services" (that frequently pose reliability, privacy and security problems), and I'm really curious if this law could be used to repair this design defect.
While this is overall good progress, this bill was watered down by WA politicians after meeting with their corporate donors. Someone already mentioned the video game console exemption, there were a number of other changes, detailed here: https://ethicalhour.com/ethicalbusiness/microsofts-bold-move...
This law does not apply to tractors or game consoles. It's neutered as all fuck.
From the article:
Of course, these wins come with carve-outs. HB 1483 exempts:
Video game consoles
Medical devices
Motor vehicles
Agricultural and construction equipment
Security systems and alarm equipment
Internet and TV equipment from ISPs
Off-road recreational vehicles
Large-scale energy storage and solar gear
Low earth orbit broadband gear (until 2044)
No need for that much effort, just have a horde of lawyers convince lawmakers that dishwashers are actually medical devices, that help relieve wrist pain from doing the dishes. A bit of brib- lobbying might help the lawmakers understand if the arguments aren't enough.
Everything you listed is what the typical Washington resident will WANT to repair. How is this law even worth celebrating? And how did these companies obtain these exemptions?
"Low earth orbit broadband gear" is incredibly specific lol, I believe there's exactly 2 companies with large offices in Washington that would apply to.
I'm not familiar with BO's rocket offerings other than the New Glenn phallic thingy. I chuckled thinking they'd just have the passengers open the hatch and push the new satellites out and hope they push hard enough to reach orbit.
So it carves out most of the stuff I could reasonably expect to be covered under this? The only thing I can see covered would be cell phones and DVD players
Purely due to industry norms, no laws that I am aware of. For example Tesla makes it much harder for third parties to repair vehicles both by not making parts available and by using DRM/part-pairing/phoning-home to require authorization from them to replace some parts.
It's a traditional benefit of decoupling the sales and maintenance of vehicles from the manufacturer. The manufacturer should not care who buys their parts, so it should be purely an additional revenue stream. ASE certification means any shop can carry out warranty repairs and the manufacturer doesn't have to have repair shops and staff in every city/town.
That said, it's not just Tesla that has broken this model; Volkswagen Auto Group in particular are famous for requiring proprietary tools and software packages to diagnose and repair their vehicles, and refusing to sell tools/software to independent shops. I think some manufacturers are just more tightly coupled to dealerships, so there's a profit motive in forcing all repairs to happen through them.
Also the not-to-be-underestimated culture around car modding and the aftermarket, which has lead to a situation where you can build a stereotypical mid-century vehicle with entirely aftermarket parts, but parts availability falls drastically for anything newer.
This doesnt do anything. Sellers have rights to not have liability for their products as long as you agree. this means they will make you agree to terms before buying the product. terms that will be far more obtuse than what you would have had before.
you have to incentivize the market to build repairable products. the proper solution is the complete removal of software and hardware patents or copyright. our age is control of production, everythings been engineered already.
Honestly, given the current administration and Congress, I could see this being the focus of a federal lobbying effort to "reduce burdensome state regulations that limit consumer choice, kill jobs, and increase prices".
Will companies be forced to design products that can be repaired in any state? Or are there ways they can still restrict repairs for states without right-to-repair laws?
I imagine they will simply only provide the required parts/software/documentation to customers/repair shops who prove residency in a state that has these laws.
They will do a cost-benefit analysis, I'm sure, but most likely it'll just turn into small businesses not selling in the restrictive states, and large companies making different versions. One of the versions will probably be better in almost every way except lack of right-to-repair compliance.
Not that I’m dissatisfied by this being on the front page, but why is this article news right now? The bills were delivered to the governor in April and then signed in May. Regardless, this is great news!
I might need an ELI5 here. "Right to repair" as in "right to choose someone who repairs"? Don't think anyone stops you from repairing your own stuff yourself.
It's almost never been a question of how to execute the repair - rather, it's a matter of repercussions for repairing 'yourself' (or authorizing a third party to on your behalf). Actors like John Deere and Apple have taken steps that are actively hostile to self-repairs, from voiding service agreements that have nothing to do with the repaired parts, up to bricking your device.
easiest example: most components of a macbook laptop have their serial number baked in the OS (or some hardware controller, idr). So even if you can find a legit macbook part from another laptop, and you can even replace it yourself (which is also impossible but that's another story), the laptop won't boot. In order for it to boot, you need a special device which "official apple repair" people have, which can bake-in the new part's serial number.
Security measure - otherwise someone can intercept your MacBook during delivery, replace the original component with a fake one that has a backdoor and ship it to you and you start using it completely oblivious to the fact it has been hacked.
That might be an argument to reject non-genuine components, but it's not an argument to reject genuine components just because they've previously been installed in a different device. (And even if it's possible to modify a genuine component to add backdoors, this still doesn't help, since they could just modify the one that came out of your MacBook too.)
In theory people will steal Apple devices, then when they learn that digital locks make them impossible to use they will gut them for parts and sell those. Serial locking would defeat that. In practice, yes, it pretty much just exists to make them millions off of forced overpriced in-house repairs.
It's purpose is to legally force other companies to serve the interests repair shops over consumers. Instead of letting the free market, consumers, dictate what aspects of a device are important repair shops want to be able to profit off of every device and stay relevant even if it results in worse products for the consumer.
We've "let the free market decide", and the consequence is that consumers got fucked.
In general, this tired adage about "market efficiency" has stopped making sense to most people a long time ago. Whatever unregulated markets are efficient at, it's not making the average person's life better. Don't be surprised then that said average person votes for regulation.
The entire point is that companies are vertically integrating the repairs market into their product business. This directly removes competition from the market. The regulation here is to preserve the free market you are advocating for here.
1. Consumers have no choice, so they better prefer it.
2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.
3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.
1. They do have a choice. No one is forcing them to buy a specific product.
2. A product who is more complicated and expensive to repair is not necessarily a worse product. This could be a trade off in favor of something consumers value more.
3. It's normal to target a lifespan for a product. For mature products ignoring it is a sign of amateurs. This is not the same thing as making a product bad on purpose.
1. Choice isn't binary, there's infinite levels of choice. Other comment mentions information asymmetry, that's part of it. Not all choices are clear, some choices take unrealistic amount of time to make, some of them are incompatible with work or contracts, and on and on.
2. Sure, but this is not why it's being done. It can be a trade-off, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that a lot of products are specifically made worse because you can make more money that way. Anti-repair is a racketeering scheme first, any other "benefits" are secondary. That doesn't mean they aren't real benefits, but it does mean that they were never the intention.
3. Planned obsolesce is the same as making a product worse on purpose to make more money. That doesn't mean that targeting a lifespan is bad. But when you shift from making washing machines that last 20 years to ones that last 5, that's an intentional choice to get more money from consumers.
There's some significant information asymmetry involved such that it's a lot of effort to know how repairable a new product is. The consumer may not even be the one to perform the repair; there are a lot of independent repair shops replacing things like smartphone displays. It would be a nasty surprise for someone who got their screen replaced for $80 on their last phone to learn it's first-party-only and $300 on their new one a couple years into ownership.
The overwhelming majority of consumers are also employees.
What's better, low prices and low wages, or high prices and high wages? The "Chicago school of macroeconomics" holds the first position. I'm highly critical of that position.
Even if you do agree with the Chicago school, there is a problem: by vertically integrating the repairs market, you take away the consumer's ability to repair their own products. The consumer is forced to pay the business to do the repairs, instead of doing it themselves for free. That's objectively more expensive for the consumer.
By allowing companies to vertically integrate repairs into their product business, we have allowed them to create an entirely new market of rent-seeking. This both monopolizes a service (preventing competition) and adds extra cost to consumers. It doesn't matter what your ideological stance is on economics: this is objectively bad for consumers.
Consumers can still by products they can repair themselves if they value such an aspect of a product. I'd it is an extra cost than that gives a competitive advantage to other products who aren't vertical integrated like that.
That's only true of there aren't market implications to this newly-introduced rent-seeking model.
If your position is that market competition is what will overcome the negative implications of anticompetitive behavior, your position is logically incoherent.
The reality is that the only way to be competitive on price (and thereby survive as a business) is to do your own rent-seeking. We can all plainly see that this is how it has played out in reality. No business can actually rely on the promise of right-to-repair obsessed consumers to keep them afloat.
Thats because there isn't one and there hasn't been for a long time, and I'm not talking about libertarian fever dreams. Regulatory capture and legislated protection for big corporations at the expense of smaller ones are rampant. They don't want real competition and they don't want real regulation, only regulation that will make it hard for others to enter the market without significant cost.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/110039/double-trouble-for-repair...
Hopefully this doesn't mean the system can't report a non-OEM part being installed at all. Buying a used product that's been hacked apart would be frustrating.
There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3:
> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss.
So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing against customers right now) has to stop making their products unusable when non-OEM parts are used for a repair.
Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.
> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair
Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.
Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.
The problem with non-genuine parts is that you don't know what they are.
Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the design, who figured out how to "optimize" it by removing an "unnecessary" part, which was actually engineered in as a crucial safety precaution. You never know.
You may even buy the same non-genuine part you've been buying for years, from the same seller, and suddenly go from an exact copy to the "competing factory" case.
That's what trademarks are for - pick a part from a manufacturer you trust. Of course the legal uncertainty around replacement parts has made it so no well-known brand makes them for anything but their own products, and the anti-consumer-rights propagandists use this to argue it is an intrinsic property of "non-genuine" parts, and we must be protected from making our own choices.
If what you're buying is specified you get significantly improved visibility on the concerns you described. When it's not specified you're in the same place as before - the factory making them for the Genuine OEM is also trying to shrink the BOM by removing unnecessary parts.
Depends on the part. Non-OEM laptop memory? Fine. The failure/error rate is usually negligbly higher than OEM if at all.
Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner.
I imagine similar differences exist for many other kinds of parts as well.
Also be aware that the in the case of a TPM and fingerprint sensor there are some very important security guarantees that a part must make in order to preserve the security of the system. So it is not in fact scare mongering to try to get this right in the law and commenting about the difficulty of getting this right is not being infected by Apple follower talking points.
The replacement parts have to work, otherwise they are not replacement parts. Neither fingerprint sensors nor TPM chips are magic. There is no difficulty here.
Ok, how would you ensure this is right in the law without creating a loophole?
I think this is already covered by a different area of law: false or misleading advertising prevention.
If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equivalent replacement to the OEM’s TPM, that advertising was false. This isn’t much different from buying a smaller hard drive for a computer: just because it works in the machine doesn’t mean it’s as big as the old one, and if it was advertised as 1TB and only stores 500GB, then the advertising is false.
It should be allowed for a system to warn about using a part that has not been certified to work in this type of situation. There is a middle ground where third party parts are allowed but they have to demonstrate that they meet a certain level of safety to not have a warning pop up.
> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.
"How dare you be anything less than blindly enthusiastic about this obviously good thing, you've clearly been tricked by someone evil."
I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to.
https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill... https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repa...
Sorry, I can't parse the multiple negatives of "hopefully this doesn't mean they can't.." followed by "there's no such restriction".
I legitimately share the parent's concern. In a related matter, insurance companies are allowed to force me to accept non-OEM parts when my car is repaired. It sucks that someone can crash into me, and force me into taking sub-standard parts.
If someone damages your property, they must pay for damages.
That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the same car you had before. The parts might be unobtainable. Or the car’s value may have depreciated enough to be less than the cost of repair.
It’s sucky that you are “forced” to acquire new parts or car, but that’s life. They will pay you the fair amount for damages, not necessarily restore exactly to the previous state.
Hm. There is no restriction in the law about showing the OEM status of parts in general was how I wanted my sentence to be understood. A permanent notice and limiting functionality is explicitly forbidden, but it follows that a dismissable notice (or something like a popup notice triggered in a settings menu) is allowed.
Yeah, this still seems problematic in the case of a device being sold and represented as original. Though I suppose this is always a risk we take buying used.
Do you feel the same way about generic drugs being substandard?
Not personally, no, though I am surprised to learn in this thread that it's apparently an issue.
I do know with cars, replacement parts sometimes have fitment issues that cause body shops hassles, driving up labor costs, and having replacement parts devalues a desirable car. (on the other hand, so does ANY bodywork, even with OE parts).
Yes. Insurance companies being able to force you to take a generic when you and your doctor know you need the name brand is frustrating. If you change insurance, you and your doctor must go toe-to-toe with the insurance to prove you need the name brand. And then you're forced to "trial" the generic again. Yes, there are legitimate cases of generics not working right for the person.
So there's nothing stopping them from having that pop up every single time you turn your phone screen on?
Just above it says:
> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to ... Reduce the functionality or performance of a digital electronic product
Dismissable would have to be defined, but when being annoying about it it should be possible to show that it reduces the functionality. It would be clearly against the spirit of the law, but sure, Apple already risked management jail time by ignoring court orders so they might try stuff here as well.
> That means no more pop-ups that say “unknown part” when you swap in a working screen. No more downgrading your camera or fingerprint sensor just because you repaired your own phone.
I'm curious if that means that it's now illegal for the company to tell you if you have a device with fake parts.
I also don't quite understand the security implications. If you need some attested part, like a TPM, and this and some other thing like a fingerprint sensor fail and you replace them both, you cannot disable the fingerprint sensor since now technically it cannot attest itself?
Presumably, you can have the TPM tie fingerprint data to the sensor.
If you replace the sensor with a "fake" one, old fingerprint data becomes invalid. This would be good enough for users, as adding their fingerprints back would take them minutes at most, while providing no value for attackers.
Why not allow pairing the fingerprint sensor with the SoC fully offline?
Nice! That had gotten extremely ridiculous to the point where I've been actively avoiding new consumer products just because maintaining them is such a hassle.
Here is the bill for consumer electronics: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1483&Year=202...
Text as passed (for pasting into LLM :)): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho...
I wondered what it would mean for small manufacturers and they are not exempt however o3 believes "in practice, your duty is limited to providing whatever service manuals, firmware-pairing utilities, and spare parts you already possess (or have made for warranty work) and making them available at cost, digitally for free."
EDIT: as people below have posted, o3's "at cost" is misleading, the text actually says "at costs that are fair to both parties"
Very interesting, there's a carveout for video game consoles:
> Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to require any original manufacturer or authorized repair provider to make available any parts, tools, or documentation required for the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a video game console and its components and peripherals.
Wonder if Valve/Xbox/Nintendo asked for that, this being Washington State.
Given the support valve provides for the steam deck I'd be surprised if it was them. They seem much more interested in having a viable alternative to keep Microsoft from walling windows in such a way to kill steam than caring that they make the actual devices.
I would 100% percent expect both Microsoft & Nintendo to have had a hand in that though.
I've often wondered how much cross-talk there is between the two companies, given that the Nintendo America HQ is smack in the middle of the sprawling Microsoft campus. There's got to be some, I should think.
I am sure there is some within the bounds of the law, but I don't think this time around that would have happened much. What's good for one is good for all, and they all know that, so why risk collusion by even thinking about it, when all they need to do is represent their own interests and be done.
I wasn't getting at any illegal sort of collusion.
More like, connections which form because people meet each other over time. Or jump back and forth between companies, because their office location doesn't change much. That would lead to a flow of ideas between the two companies in a totally organic and not problematic kind of way. People know each other and talk shop occasionally while at the gym, or yoga or the neighborhood BBQ or whatever.
Minor point but Microsoft does offer replacement parts and repair instructions for some of their Xbox controllers. https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/warrant...
Yes exactly. If anything, I would expect Valve to support this bill based on how repair-friendly they are. I will admit that over the years I've become a huge Valve fanboy because of their amazing contributions to Linux and making the Steam Deck an open platform, but Valve has really done a ton to make the world a better place. Yes it benefits their business too, but they definitely could have gone more evil than they did, so there's still reason to praise them.
Yeah, I figure so - they were just the first company in Washington to come to mind given that I own their product, unlike the others :)
This is a result of there being a general consensus that video game consoles are "a thing" that we are all used to, and that the loosely-coupled movements of right-to-repair and antitrust are not seeking to disrupt the video game industry for fear of distracting from their larger goals.
It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)
I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.
> can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.
Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.
And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)
> Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game.
Well, this becomes a bit of a circular argument, but certainly part of the reason for that is the only thing one can do on a Nintendo Switch is game, due to its restrictive software.
And, strictly speaking, this statement is false. The only thing most people do on a Nintendo Switch is play games, but there is a subset of people that hack their switches and install things like Android TV. The thing is basically just an Nvidea Shield, hardware-wise. Not being able to do everything an Nvidea Shield can do is a software restriction.
I do see your point re: Apple's ambitions being far vaster than Nintendo's. But in terms of controlling their own markets, they are still seeking similar levels of control.
Either way, I think that once a law like this is on the books, it will be much easier to attack exemptions in it going forward.
Valve already provides parts and documentation for the Steam Deck through a partnership with iFixit.
Why would anyone believe that spare parts would need to be provided at cost? I’m a proponent of right to repair, but that would be an absurd over-step (and be a strong force to ensure that no spare parts are available to anyone).
The bill actually says “at costs that are fair to both parties,” not “at cost” as in losing money. You’re arguing over what ChatGPT imagined the bill said (and GP posted without verification), not what it actually said.
IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included? With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."
I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time.
The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.
There's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it.
Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).
The cost of a single part is a lot higher than the cost of a pallot of them to a factory on some day 6 months from now.
Manufacturers can already legitimately say the additional price for 1 spare part for a $5 part is actually $250,000 dollars because the last mould has worn out…?
Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.
Tough luck then. The point of the law is to make it easier for people to repair the things they rightfully own. Not kill business by requiring all companies to indefinitely manufacture parts for anything they’ve ever sold.
So then what does it change?
Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.
It makes actively preventing repairs (including via software restriction, which happens today) illegal. It clarifies that it is the responsibility of the company providing the product to in good faith facilitate 3rd party repair of the product by providing parts and documentation fairly. This is sadly not the norm for electronics goods hence the whole movement in the first place.
They might want to talk to their legal departments before claiming such a thing if it isn't actually true. Lawsuits involve discovery.
250k for a single mold if they don't have drawings of the final size of the last is reasonable - high but reasonable. Building molds is still a lot of trial and error that CAD cannot help with. Plus time for one off on an assemble line is not cheap since it is often half an hour of nobody in the factory working except the two people switching out the mold. once you have a mold you can make thousands and so the cost ammortizes out if you need that many.
my company has looked into spending billions for a chip fad of obsolete processes just to get some no longer in prodction parts. So far not worth it.
How does this relate to my comment or any other comment in the chain?
I don’t think anyone suggested manufacturers could get away with lying all the time.
Actually this is probably the best way to ensure that price gouging does not happen. The fixed and NRE costs are already included in the price of the original device. Charging those again for replacements would be double-dipping. And the law still leaves it up to OEMs to decide how to cost the replacement, so there's some wiggle room there. This is an intelligently crafted bill.
I don’t agree that Gillette making a profit on razor blades is “double-dipping” and certainly not in a way that I want to prevent.
The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.
The razor blades thing is a problem specifically with the patent system.
The intent of a patent is that you invent something useful and get a temporary monopoly over it as the incentive for the invention. The premise is that the value of the patent is proportional to the value of the invention, and therefore the incentive we want to create for inventing it. If you invent something which is no improvement over the status quo then nobody is going to pay you a premium for it.
The problem comes when you patent an interface, like the connector between a razor handle and a blade. Because then even if the connector is nothing special, the replacement blades have to use that connector and then you get artificial demand for the connector, not because it's such a great connector but because the customer is in the market for blades for their existing razor. It's a mechanism of cheating the patent system by collecting a premium disproportionate to the value of what you invented.
This is even worse in tech products because a phone costs a lot more than a razor, so if you need a part, the amount they can stick you for because there is only one place to get the part is proportional to the value of a $900 phone instead of a $7 razor. And on top of that, they're not trying to sell you replacement parts, they're trying to turn your existing phone into slag so they can sell you a new phone.
Which is why the most important thing is that you can get repair parts from third parties, who both provide competition for parts and actually want to sell them because their primary business is selling repair parts instead of selling new phones.
One proposal I keep mentioning for copyright and patent reform is they can never apply to data formats or digital/physical interfaces. Also, an exception to reverse engineer those for compatibility. That combination might combat a lot of problems.
Comparing consumables like blades to replacements like screens is intellectually dishonest. Those two are not the same thing and there is no merit to your argument.
To play devils advocate here, maybe the idea is that if the part is not eligible for third party sales by way of patents etc, then the manufacturer should not be allowed to simply charge more for a replacement part that that of a newer model?
That's the only kind of example I can think of.
Pretty much all of that o3 output is wrong. You could at least check its work before posting.
Getting parts at cost?
So I could find some manufacturer using a part I want and order it at their cost rather than having to go to a retailer?
Is there anything that allows a manufacturer to require you send in the broken part after or any limit to how many times something can be "repaired"? Because I'd like to purchase a very large number of NVIDIA GPUs at cost.
The phone part sounds great, the wheel chair portion sounds like it will just make wheel chairs more expensive. Wheelchairs are generally already highly repairable, and this will just reduce the options to consumers
High end wheelchairs are the opposite of repairable. A friend of mine has to use one because of his disability. It was the only model that met his particular needs for his disability, and was around 14k when he bought it.
He can't even change the battery pack without sending it back to the company. The horn shorted out, and if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty. Fuck, one of the wheel spoke things cracked and we couldn't even put a new wheel on it, because they only sell the wheels as part of the lower chassis to the tune of 5k.
It's obscenely expensive to have a disability in the US, and these companies take advantage of people who just want to have basic mobility. It's really disgusting.
> if we had disabled it (he can't even use it), it would've voided the entire warranty.
The Magnuson-Moss Act pretty surely falsifies that claim by the manufacturer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warran...
It'll just make many good wheelchairs unavailable in WA, forcing consumers to buy out of state, import from a foreign company that doesn't care about state laws, or go with a worse product.
Since these are presumably financed by the government, the first two options may not even be available to most.
The full bill is here:
https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho...
It's only 12 pages and is easy to understand.
I hope "easy to understand" doesn't translate into "has loopholes" this time.
Axis locks out certain useful features in their IP cameras unless you install an Axis-branded SD card.
Since Axis doesn't actually manufacture SD cards, they are obviously rebranded high-endurance cards from one of the major fabs (possibly with some minor firmware parameter tweaks). Except, they cost twice as much and aren't as generally available.
Would this law have any bearing on that business practice?
Interesting. I know at work we use a lot of Axis cameras, but I don't know if we use those features (which ones?) or whether we bought their SD cards.
Without the Axis-branded SD card, they axe or deteriorate access to the cameras from mobile devices.
Namely, you cannot add the camera to a site for access from Camera Station Edge. This applies to both the desktop and mobile flavors of the software.
On the desktop version of Edge, there's a little-known hack you can make to a config file to override the behavior. But this means you need to drag a computer to the physical site for the initial provisioning.
There is no such override available on the mobile app.
(Also depending exactly how you provision, the Storage, Motion Detection and Continuous Recording toggles will be disabled when viewing the device in Edge).
It's a weird place to gatekeep, and reeks of pure sales / marketing driven impetus.
isn't this a copied and pasted version of the one in Texas that Louis Rossmann talked about in his video ( https://youtu.be/C_ohgeWKcOY ) ?
With the same loophole, i.e., selling assembly parts meaning screen with hinge and camera etc(expensive). instead of just the display(cheap).
Apparently, there is one slight variation > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182235
> a soldier struggling with a broken generator
Are there generators you can't fix right now? I assumed most of them are pretty basic designs, an ICE with either an inverter or non-inverter generator. You can look up how to tear them down and repair them step by step on YouTube (including commercial units)
Commercial Tier 4F diesels of the John Deere variety have latching fault codes when they relate to the aftertreatment system. It requires the manufacturer's proprietary scan tool (which they will not sell to you) to clear the code, even if the actual issue was something as simple as a connector left unplugged for too long.
Requiring proprietary dongles/software to clear fault codes are not uncommon, but I'm surprised there hasn't been enough interest for there to be a 3rd party tool.
Like McDonald's Shake Machines had a 3rd party tool to help diagnose issues.
There is interest, but thanks to DMCA 1201 they put a thin veneer of encryption on it and suddenly it's a felony to make/use that third party tool.
We could, of course, repeal DMCA section 1201, but no one in government wants to do that.
The difficulty of fighting against things which are concentrated benefits to a few, and diffuse harms to everyone else. :/
The McDonald's stuff in particular is a red herring. Their requirements are contract requirements, put in place after too many franchisees tarnished their name with listeria outbreaks.
Right, but the solution shouldn't have been a racketeering scheme.
This is the risk of franchising in general. You lose a certain amount of control over quality and you put your brand at much greater risk. In exchange, you get to expand your brand much faster than if you did it under centralized control and investment.
Large generators are fuel-injected, which requires a microcontroller with software.
In the 1990s that software was write-once, non-upgradeable, and bug-free because it was trivial. But it hasn't been that way for a long time. "Fuel injection requires software" turned into an exploit vector for feature creep.
To be needlessly pedantic, fuel injection does require a micro. I only say this because I deal with classic Bosch K-Jet systems often.
Detroit diesel two strokes were entirely mechanical. As were cummins engines like b5.9 with a bosch p-pump. In fact all diesel engines have fuel injection, and they were all mechanical up to the 80s/90s.
I assume you meant to say does not require a microcontroller, given that Bosch K is a mechanical FI system.
There's also analog EFI, which was rare and expensive and otherwise not great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendix_Electrojector
The early electronic components were not reliable in an underhood environment and were not easily modified as engine control requirements advanced. Most of the 35 vehicles originally equipped with Electrojector were retrofitted with 4-barrel carburetors.
Yeah but you can just get a Megasquirt DIY kit and make your own ECU for most EFI engines (from 1 to 16 cylinders). To the other person's comment about the generator circuitry: most generators are pretty simple mechanically, you can make a new circuit to control the output.
I'm guessing the rationale of the law is to prevent needing a repair company to exist & reinvent the electrical components of every single product in existence.
Idk about the commercial units, but my portable inverter generator has a bunch of schmoo (highly technical industry term) that covers the entire electronics board. If a component on that board fried, I'm not able to repair it without replacing the whole board.
The rest is fairly simple ICE like you say.
Conformal coating? That used to be the norm way back in the day for all kinds of electronics. Kind of a dick move, now, unless there is an environmental reason.
Normal on anything that has to work outside. Also, hardly an impediment to repair. I've done it myself on a car ECU: open case, scrape off conformal coating, desolder blown IGBT, replace with IGBT salvaged from junkyard unit, spray on new conformal coating, done - been working like that now for 5 years.
Parts pairing is also a/the reason you can't just swap in the junkyard unit even though it came from a car with the same engine. We tried it - did not work.
Potting within a brick of epoxy is the real dick move, but also not impossible to repair either.
That pairing is for theft reasons - chop shops will steal a car, take the parts off and sell them. However the expensive computers are paired and so they won't work when sold this way thus making the value of a car to a shop shop much less and so helping prevent that theft mode.
Though I think there should be a process to get the parts paired after verifying the car isn't stolen. I'm not sure what that would be though.
I'm going to guess that it's actually potted in epoxy, not just a conformal coating.
Probably epoxy potted, an order of magnitude more difficult to repair. Either way a coating is probably called for in the places a generator will be used so you probably wouldn't want to skip it just for repairability.
Typically a generator is used outdoors, so it makes sense to protect the PCB and other electronics from conditions experienced there. I wouldn't know what those conditions are, being on Hacker News and all.
I just had a new 48kw generator installed on my property and it was a nightmare with Generac. It's apparently a new model and it took them 4 tries to get the right controller sent to the tech to get it up and running.
Coincidentally I am in Washington State.
It appears that the Washington bill excluded power tools whereas the Texas bill did not, which means that in Texas I should be able to swap dead lithium cells out of my expensive power tool batteries.
I fully support right-to-repair but do you need a law to repair batteries?
You can buy a battery build kit for M18 tools (for example) on AliExpress that comes with everything but the cells.
I'm a bit of a tool nerd and I'm not aware of any power tools that are doing DRM in their tools to prevent usage of third-party batteries but I don't mind being wrong so I know which brands to avoid.
We've been using these at work and they are great!
https://ceenr.com/
Very interesting. Maybe I can afford Milwaukee tools now! Their tools are good, and sold bare, for semi-reasonable prices but their batteries are eye-wateringly expensive.
(I should probably pick one of these up before Torque Test Channel does a video on them and they end up getting sold out for a year.)
Edit: I'm referring to the PDNation universal battery + brand-specific adapter in particular.
Just took a look here, and I didn't see anything over 20V offered. I'm in the market for 40V versions for some of my gear.
I also have Gold mount and V-mount type batteries that I'd love to have the cells replaced. If you think power tool batteries are expensive, take a look at film/video batteries!
To those who want to do this: make sure to swap out all cells in a battery at once to be safe, ideally using new cells that are all from the same manufacturer and same production run.
Mixing old cells with new can lead to a runaway thermal event in the worst case (i.e. unstoppable cancer-causing fire).
I wonder if the scope of "diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of digital electronic products" is extensive enough to be usable for requesting protocol documentation for purposes of integrating products with systems from different vendors (such as DIY). Plenty of IoT stuff has proprietary "hubs" or "cloud services" (that frequently pose reliability, privacy and security problems), and I'm really curious if this law could be used to repair this design defect.
While this is overall good progress, this bill was watered down by WA politicians after meeting with their corporate donors. Someone already mentioned the video game console exemption, there were a number of other changes, detailed here: https://ethicalhour.com/ethicalbusiness/microsofts-bold-move...
Companies like John Deere have way overplayed their hand, and I'm glad to see the regulatory winds are changing.
This law does not apply to tractors or game consoles. It's neutered as all fuck.
From the article:
Of course, these wins come with carve-outs. HB 1483 exempts:
By 2026 my dishwasher is going to have a forced update to run Doom in an effort to be classified as a video game console, isn’t it?
No need for that much effort, just have a horde of lawyers convince lawmakers that dishwashers are actually medical devices, that help relieve wrist pain from doing the dishes. A bit of brib- lobbying might help the lawmakers understand if the arguments aren't enough.
I think you’ll find “Hurt me plenty” is sufficient for all but the toughest baked on food stains.
It will be a patched Doom that doesn't let you upgrade or fix your armor.
If Samsung gets Doom to do LAN multiplayer with the coffee machine and the refrigerator, then they all deserve the title of video game console.
Anything connected to the internet ought to be a "Security system" and should therefore be exempt as well
I don't know if the assholes behind these restrictions are clever enough to think of that loophole. Thanks for giving them the idea!
Everything you listed is what the typical Washington resident will WANT to repair. How is this law even worth celebrating? And how did these companies obtain these exemptions?
.. just like every other carve out exception. Bribes.
Not sure if the link was changed by the mods or something, but just a heads up that your quote's from the iFixit article [1], not the EFF one [2]
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/110039/double-trouble-for-repair...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/right-repair-law-washi...
"Low earth orbit broadband gear" is incredibly specific lol, I believe there's exactly 2 companies with large offices in Washington that would apply to.
Doesn't that include all home Starlink devices?
Starlink is one of those 2 companies (or grandfather commenter miscounted and meant 3)
Plus Amazon's Kuiper when it eventually launches
I'm not familiar with BO's rocket offerings other than the New Glenn phallic thingy. I chuckled thinking they'd just have the passengers open the hatch and push the new satellites out and hope they push hard enough to reach orbit.
Why do right-to-repair bills always have these kinds of exclusions? These are pretty important categories.
Lobbyists
So it carves out most of the stuff I could reasonably expect to be covered under this? The only thing I can see covered would be cell phones and DVD players
hilariously, this states right to repair law does not include road going or ag vehicles. Ya know, the impotus for this now hijacked initiative.
"tell me the state of washington protects failing US auto manufacturers and shade tree mechanics without saying it".
But hey, at least now I can rest assured knowing that korean smartphones are now going to be a little cheaper to repair in wshington.
Road vehicles should already be covered by existing right-to-repair rights, are they not? Otherwise, how would independent repair shops still exist?
Purely due to industry norms, no laws that I am aware of. For example Tesla makes it much harder for third parties to repair vehicles both by not making parts available and by using DRM/part-pairing/phoning-home to require authorization from them to replace some parts.
It's a traditional benefit of decoupling the sales and maintenance of vehicles from the manufacturer. The manufacturer should not care who buys their parts, so it should be purely an additional revenue stream. ASE certification means any shop can carry out warranty repairs and the manufacturer doesn't have to have repair shops and staff in every city/town.
That said, it's not just Tesla that has broken this model; Volkswagen Auto Group in particular are famous for requiring proprietary tools and software packages to diagnose and repair their vehicles, and refusing to sell tools/software to independent shops. I think some manufacturers are just more tightly coupled to dealerships, so there's a profit motive in forcing all repairs to happen through them.
Also the not-to-be-underestimated culture around car modding and the aftermarket, which has lead to a situation where you can build a stereotypical mid-century vehicle with entirely aftermarket parts, but parts availability falls drastically for anything newer.
...but those are most of the things I want to repair. Did the check from HP not clear?
This doesnt do anything. Sellers have rights to not have liability for their products as long as you agree. this means they will make you agree to terms before buying the product. terms that will be far more obtuse than what you would have had before.
you have to incentivize the market to build repairable products. the proper solution is the complete removal of software and hardware patents or copyright. our age is control of production, everythings been engineered already.
Does it include the right to decompile and modify any software?
Honestly, given the current administration and Congress, I could see this being the focus of a federal lobbying effort to "reduce burdensome state regulations that limit consumer choice, kill jobs, and increase prices".
Does this mean I can go to Washington to tune my Audi S5 that protects the TCU with encryption?
034 Motorsport can't help you with that?
Will companies be forced to design products that can be repaired in any state? Or are there ways they can still restrict repairs for states without right-to-repair laws?
I imagine they will simply only provide the required parts/software/documentation to customers/repair shops who prove residency in a state that has these laws.
They will do a cost-benefit analysis, I'm sure, but most likely it'll just turn into small businesses not selling in the restrictive states, and large companies making different versions. One of the versions will probably be better in almost every way except lack of right-to-repair compliance.
What if I buy in WA, from a WA store and a WA manufacturer but live in ID?
It'll follow WA laws. You could live on the moon for all anyone would care, if the sale is in WA, it's covered by WA laws.
and nevada!
https://www.kolotv.com/2025/06/04/lombardo-signs-cell-phone-...
Would this also apply to a vendor’s encrypted file format?
Not that I’m dissatisfied by this being on the front page, but why is this article news right now? The bills were delivered to the governor in April and then signed in May. Regardless, this is great news!
I might need an ELI5 here. "Right to repair" as in "right to choose someone who repairs"? Don't think anyone stops you from repairing your own stuff yourself.
It's almost never been a question of how to execute the repair - rather, it's a matter of repercussions for repairing 'yourself' (or authorizing a third party to on your behalf). Actors like John Deere and Apple have taken steps that are actively hostile to self-repairs, from voiding service agreements that have nothing to do with the repaired parts, up to bricking your device.
easiest example: most components of a macbook laptop have their serial number baked in the OS (or some hardware controller, idr). So even if you can find a legit macbook part from another laptop, and you can even replace it yourself (which is also impossible but that's another story), the laptop won't boot. In order for it to boot, you need a special device which "official apple repair" people have, which can bake-in the new part's serial number.
What's the purpose of that other than making it harder to repair? Is there any good faith argument to made made here?
They will say "security", and unfortunately half of HN will gobble it up no-questions-asked.
The security argument can be achieved just as well by giving the user the master key (on a Yubikey-style HSM if needed) to unlock the protection.
The fact it's not done that way clearly shows the primary security they care about is that of Apple's bank account.
Security measure - otherwise someone can intercept your MacBook during delivery, replace the original component with a fake one that has a backdoor and ship it to you and you start using it completely oblivious to the fact it has been hacked.
That might be an argument to reject non-genuine components, but it's not an argument to reject genuine components just because they've previously been installed in a different device. (And even if it's possible to modify a genuine component to add backdoors, this still doesn't help, since they could just modify the one that came out of your MacBook too.)
It does remove any incentive for a thief to steal a Macbook. They can't strip it for parts and sell those parts if they won't work.
In theory people will steal Apple devices, then when they learn that digital locks make them impossible to use they will gut them for parts and sell those. Serial locking would defeat that. In practice, yes, it pretty much just exists to make them millions off of forced overpriced in-house repairs.
Great from a security perspective, as far as mass stealing and swapping/scrapping parts for resale is concerned. I wonder how they'll prevent it now.
> Don't think anyone stops you from repairing your own stuff yourself.
They do. By making the parts needed for repairs unavailable to you. And by making it really hard for other manufacturers to make compatible parts.
It's purpose is to legally force other companies to serve the interests repair shops over consumers. Instead of letting the free market, consumers, dictate what aspects of a device are important repair shops want to be able to profit off of every device and stay relevant even if it results in worse products for the consumer.
We've "let the free market decide", and the consequence is that consumers got fucked.
In general, this tired adage about "market efficiency" has stopped making sense to most people a long time ago. Whatever unregulated markets are efficient at, it's not making the average person's life better. Don't be surprised then that said average person votes for regulation.
The entire point is that companies are vertically integrating the repairs market into their product business. This directly removes competition from the market. The regulation here is to preserve the free market you are advocating for here.
It's possible consumers prefer the vertically integrated model of repair. Increasing competition doesn't necessarily make things better for consumers.
1. Consumers have no choice, so they better prefer it.
2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.
3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.
1. They do have a choice. No one is forcing them to buy a specific product.
2. A product who is more complicated and expensive to repair is not necessarily a worse product. This could be a trade off in favor of something consumers value more.
3. It's normal to target a lifespan for a product. For mature products ignoring it is a sign of amateurs. This is not the same thing as making a product bad on purpose.
1. Choice isn't binary, there's infinite levels of choice. Other comment mentions information asymmetry, that's part of it. Not all choices are clear, some choices take unrealistic amount of time to make, some of them are incompatible with work or contracts, and on and on.
2. Sure, but this is not why it's being done. It can be a trade-off, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that a lot of products are specifically made worse because you can make more money that way. Anti-repair is a racketeering scheme first, any other "benefits" are secondary. That doesn't mean they aren't real benefits, but it does mean that they were never the intention.
3. Planned obsolesce is the same as making a product worse on purpose to make more money. That doesn't mean that targeting a lifespan is bad. But when you shift from making washing machines that last 20 years to ones that last 5, that's an intentional choice to get more money from consumers.
There's some significant information asymmetry involved such that it's a lot of effort to know how repairable a new product is. The consumer may not even be the one to perform the repair; there are a lot of independent repair shops replacing things like smartphone displays. It would be a nasty surprise for someone who got their screen replaced for $80 on their last phone to learn it's first-party-only and $300 on their new one a couple years into ownership.
The overwhelming majority of consumers are also employees.
What's better, low prices and low wages, or high prices and high wages? The "Chicago school of macroeconomics" holds the first position. I'm highly critical of that position.
Even if you do agree with the Chicago school, there is a problem: by vertically integrating the repairs market, you take away the consumer's ability to repair their own products. The consumer is forced to pay the business to do the repairs, instead of doing it themselves for free. That's objectively more expensive for the consumer.
By allowing companies to vertically integrate repairs into their product business, we have allowed them to create an entirely new market of rent-seeking. This both monopolizes a service (preventing competition) and adds extra cost to consumers. It doesn't matter what your ideological stance is on economics: this is objectively bad for consumers.
Consumers can still by products they can repair themselves if they value such an aspect of a product. I'd it is an extra cost than that gives a competitive advantage to other products who aren't vertical integrated like that.
That's only true of there aren't market implications to this newly-introduced rent-seeking model.
If your position is that market competition is what will overcome the negative implications of anticompetitive behavior, your position is logically incoherent.
The reality is that the only way to be competitive on price (and thereby survive as a business) is to do your own rent-seeking. We can all plainly see that this is how it has played out in reality. No business can actually rely on the promise of right-to-repair obsessed consumers to keep them afloat.
The free market arguably hasn't worked like that in ages.
Thats because there isn't one and there hasn't been for a long time, and I'm not talking about libertarian fever dreams. Regulatory capture and legislated protection for big corporations at the expense of smaller ones are rampant. They don't want real competition and they don't want real regulation, only regulation that will make it hard for others to enter the market without significant cost.
generally the DMCA made it illegal to do many repairs, as they involve circumventing some rights management lock
Many manufacturers take active measures to prevent or discourage you from repairing your own stuff yourself