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The illusion of right to repair

You don’t have right to repair. It’s not designed to be. The design is often patented and protected for its intellectual property. You want right to repair on an iPhone? Have fun. I see the EU somehow wants phones to have user replaceable batteries, but why? Security, software updates, are based on hardware still. Hardware fails for legitimate reasons too. Solid state drives (SSDs) have limited lifetimes just like hard disks wore out and floppy disks could be damaged. You wanted an iPhone, you got an iPhone. It has surface mount components. Years ago that technology didn’t exist. Semiconductor technology was developed to make circuits and electronics integrated and smaller. Right to repair seems to encompass the idea of “if it’s broke, you fix it” but in semiconductors, you don’t do that, you replace the whole semiconductor. In a production environment, sometimes you don’t even do that, by slowing down a processor, for example, deficiencies in the silicon might allow it to function. The processor can be graded for it’s performance, cores deactivated, and the final product packaged and shipped. This is why CPUs from Intel have different numbers of cores, and come in variants like Ultra 5 or Ultra 7. However, if your CPU fails, you replace it, not repair it. So, on that front, your montage of “repair” is an illusion anyway. Right to repair by Louis Rossmann is an illusion from a technician who even remotely has technical capabilities AS a technician to think he can repair an iPhone with technology that is reverse engineered in such a way as to at least make it possible. However, Louis Rossmann is not a test engineer, nor a very good engineer. He doesn’t understand that when a piece of hardware fails, after you fix it, you have to repeat a whole slew of tests on the device to a very strict degree and put it through tests that are also intellectual property with test limits that are even more protected (by nature), which he more than certainly does not have access to. So, if you repair an iPhone, you really are taking a gamble. Replace a battery, that’s one thing, but batteries are inherently dangerous and should NOT be made removable either. That is probably more of a liability for everyone involved, than anything that would do anyone good.

However, right to repair is, and always will be an illusion. Don’t think you can repair it. Pay for the warranty if you want good, and reliable service. Often times, the end product is replaced entirely, retested appropriately, and recycled into something new later on.

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