For Consumer Electronics, The Fix is Out—Or Is It?

Did you know that Apple can tell if you break your iPhone screen and take it to get fixed by somebody who isn't in Apple's authorized repair network and uses a non-Apple screen to fix it?  Not only can they tell, they can intentionally disable your phone when they find out. 

That's exactly what happened to Antonio Olmos, a news photographer covering the refugee crisis in the Balkans, when he broke his iPhone screen and couldn't find an Apple-authorized repair facility in Macedonia.  But he did find somebody who fixed it with an aftermarket screen, and the phone worked fine until a routine sofware update a few months later.  Then, wham—Apple turned his phone off.  When Olmos inquired, he was told that Apple did this as a "security measure" in case some of the unauthorized parts were defective.  But that wasn't the problem—the phone worked fine until Apple broke it in an act that looks suspiciously like punishment. 

Olmos had enough connections with the media to raise a public stink about the issue, and eventually Apple caved and quit turning off phones that have been repaired by non-Apple facilities with non-Apple parts.  But with his inquiry, Olmos turned over a rock to reveal just one of the many ways that manufacturers are increasingly trying to discourage repairs of their products by anyone other than their own limited number of authorized repair facilities—and sometimes not even then.

In an article on the website of the professional engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, two leaders of the "right-to-repair" movement, Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne, describe how this is happening, not only with consumer electronics but with items as big as tractors.  For example, John Deere, the agricultural-equipment maker, took the position that in selling a tractor to a farmer, the company didn't really let go of the tractor—they only granted an "implied license" to operate it.  John Deere reserved the right to repair it or say who was going to repair it—certainly not the farmer.

This didn't sit well with farmers, who complained, and the U. S. Copyright Office ruled that John Deere was wrong—when a farmer buys a tractor, he can do anything he wants with it, from fixing it himself to driving it into a lake. 

These are only two of the most egregious examples of manufacturers who try to discourage consumers from fixing their own stuff, or using independent repair shops who use aftermarket parts.  As anyone who has been to a non-dealer-owned auto repair shop or an Autozone knows, independent repair facilities are often cheaper than dealerships and can do work of just as good a quality as the dealerships.  And many aftermarket parts are comparable in quality to OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts.  So why do the makers seem to hate it if you fix something of theirs that breaks?

Well, the obvious reason is that as soon as a company sells you one of their products, they are competing with themselves.  If the product breaks, you have two choices, in principle:  fixing it or buying a new one.  The maker wants to sell you a new one, of course, and anything that can be done to make fixing difficult or impossible will tend to tilt your decision in the direction of a new purchase.

This helps a maker's bottom line, but it also contributes to the millions of tons of electronic scrap that goes into landfills worldwide every year.  As economist John C. Médaille put it, "Only by constantly buying what we don't need or already have can the system sustain itself; the size of the garbage dump becomes the true measure of our 'wealth'."  So what should be done?

The answer that Wiens and Gordon-Byrne favor is legislation at the state level to prohibit manufacturers from monopolizing product repair or preventing it altogether.  While this has some chance of working, it is only part of the problem. 

The things a culture values can tell you a lot about the culture.  Multinational corporations have encouraged the development of a worldwide consumer culture that values things that the corporations can sell at a profit.  And in the absence of strong counterforces from custom, religion, or politics, the consumer culture increasingly dominates the lives of not just millions, but closer to billions of people.  In 2016, almost two-thirds of the world's population owned a mobile phone.  That's about the same percentage of the globe's population who, as of 2013, do not have indoor plumbing (flush toilets, in other words).  Now don't get me wrong—having a smart phone, or any kind of a phone, is a huge leap forward toward all sorts of civilizational goods:  the ability to call for emergency services, to participate in a market economy, and so on.  Mobile phones can on occasion be lifesavers.  But so can flush toilets.  There are good reasons, however, that Apple is in the smart-phone business and not the flush-toilet business. 

State laws protecting our right to fix things can redress some of the grievous wrongs that companies are trying to put across with regard to product repairs.  But even if all service manuals were posted for free on the Internet and you could find a competent independent repair shop in every city and town, many of us would still be just waiting for our phone to break down to give us an excuse to buy a new one. 

This is a moral issue, really, and to explore its depths would take us far beyond the limits of this blog space.  But the heart of the matter is whether we believe what the manufacturers want us to believe, namely (as Médaille again puts it), "that our happiness lies not in persons, but in things, and not merely in things, but in constantly new things." 

That notion is, to put it indelicately, a lie.  But it's behind much of the advertising and marketing that we are subjected to all the time.  Until we recognize that lie for what it is, and change our ways of living and using our resources to reflect our realization that it's a lie, all the repair-protection laws in the world won't make much difference in the flood of electronics that goes from store to user to garbage dump faster every year. 

Sources:  The article "Why We Must Fight For the Right to Repair Our Electronics" by Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne was posted on the IEEE Spectrumwebsite on Oct. 24, 2017 at https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics.  The statistic on worldwide mobile phone use is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/, and the one on flush toilets is from http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/22/_60_percent_of_the_world_population_still_without_toilets.html.  John C. Médaille's book Toward a Truly Free Market (ISI Books, 2010), pp. 194-195, is the source of the quotations attributed to him.