Close All Tabs - The Fight for Your Right to Repair

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Today’s culture of overconsumption urges us to simply throw broken items away and buy new ones. But there’s a growing shift to treat non-working devices differently. In this episode, we dig into the “right to repair” movement with Louis Rossmann, a repair technician, YouTuber and consumer rights advocate. Rossmann has spent years pushing back against the companies that make our devices harder, or even impossible, to fix. From parts pairing to “authorized repair” loopholes, we unpack how tech companies maintain control over the products you’ve already paid for. As devices like phones and even cars move toward subscription-based use models, we examine the question ‘do you truly own something if you can’t repair it?’ Guest: Louis Rossmann, repair technician and advocate at Rossman Repair Group Further Reading/Listening: The Gloves Are Off in the Fight for Your Right to Repair — Boone Ashworth, WIRED Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement — BBC Clippy is back—this time as a mascot for Big Tech protests — Eve Upton-Clark, Fast Company Wheelchair Users Are Finally Winning the Right to Repair — Julia Métraux, Mother Jones A Growing ‘Right to Repair’ Culture in California — Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, KQED’s The Bay Read the Transcript here Email us at [e-mail] Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional producing support by Gabriela Glueck. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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A vacuum is here. We need to ring the bell. Let's read the bell. Let's read the bell. All right, everybody. Pay attention. Are we going to read the bell here? We're at a repair cafe. These days, it's one of the hottest spots in town. Are we just impaired? What did we prepare? Vacuum. All right, drink the bell, let's go. Woo!

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, all the lovely repair people. Repair cafes are community events, where people bring in their faulty espresso machines, vacuums on the frits, and other broken items. Volunteers help with repairs, to the best of their abilities.

like soldering wires or replacing errant bike chains. The whole point is to encourage people to repair and reuse their stuff instead of tossing them into a landfill as soon as they stop functioning. Last month, Close All Tabs Senior Editor Chris Agusa popped into the library in Milpedas, California, for Repair Cafe Silicon Valley. How many of these repair cafes do you think that you've done or the organization has run?

Oh, my God. We've certainly ramped up over the past few years. years. Used to be about one a month. Now it's two, sometimes three a month. Jesse Cornblum is one of the organizers for this repair cafe. The one thing I do know is between now and the end of May, we have 12 events played too. Here's how it works. Members of the community bring in their broken stuff, fill out a form, and then get paired with a volunteer who might have the skills to fix that specific item. We have volunteers who sign up ahead of time. They specialize in things like sewing or bikes, and we have a lot of general fixers who can work on electronic devices, some mechanical

devices, out of a few people with special skills for things like microwaves. At this repair cafe, a volunteer with a shock of red hair helps a woman with her tower fan. The fan only spun for a few seconds before shutting off. Usually that means that there's like a dead capacitor somewhere on the power supply, so operating on that assumption, we opened it up, and we found a capacitor, and we found a whole bunch of brown gunk around it, which means that the capacitors electrolyte is probably leaked out and the capacitor has gone dead. Kay, the volunteer, takes a closer look inside the fan.

So this capacitor is probably good. I think this capacitor is fine, which is upsetting because now we don't know what's wrong with it. At a nearby table, another volunteer, Sophia, hunches over a disassembled device, wielding a soldering iron with surgical precision. had struck. We have a Dyson hair dryer right now that has been chewed up by a German Shepherd. And since there's some warranty issues with it, they weren't able to get it repaired by Dyson. So we are here doing some re-soddering on some wires that have been chewed up.

Dyson hair dryers are pricey. They're like top of the line. We're talking hundreds of dollars. For the person who brought it in, this repair cafe is her last resort. I also check the appliance repair shops. They say they don't fix those small appliance. And my last hope is here. And it's also my first time here.

And I'm super happy to have this helped by somebody. This is part of the reason repair cafes are taking off. They'll try to fix things that manufacturers like Dyson or authorized repair shops won't touch. For many, the biggest draw is a shift in mindset, feeling empowered by fixing what they own. even if the companies that made them discourage repair. Shonu Sen first came to one of these events with a pair of jeans that needed mending. Yes, they fixed clothing too. Inspired by the experience, she later joined as a volunteer to learn new skills and to give back.

It doesn't matter if you want to save something if you don't have a way to learn how to maintain and repair your things and there's no one to teach you. This repair cafe, and the many others popping up around the country, represent a bigger shift from consumers across industries, but especially in electronics. Do you really own what you bought if you can't fix it? I mean, even the word consumer suggests a lack of ownership. Today, we're talking about the right to repair movement, what it is, how big tech companies have responded, and why this movement is changing our relationship to our stuff.

This is Close All Tabs. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Leading us through this deep dive is one of the key voices in the movement. He started out as a DIY guy, flipping broken laptops as a side hustle, and went on to build a massive YouTube following and push for actual legislation. Ready? Let's open a new tab.

What is the right to repair? Right to repair to me is the idea that you should have. the ability to fix what you bought and paid for. It doesn't mean that you have to fix everything that you own. It doesn't mean that the manufacturer has to make it easy. It simply means not putting intentional barriers in place to you being able to repair what you bought and paid for. This is Louis Rossman. He owns a data recovery and laptop repair company, and he's been fighting for the right to repair across the United States. If his voice sounds familiar, it might be because he followed one of his repair tutorials on YouTube. Also, he's a pretty fast talker,

especially today. He isn't a regular. coffee drinker, but told me he had some caffeine before this interview. So try to keep up. If you are unable to fix what you own, do you really own it? Is it yours or are you just leasing it from the manufacturer? Who has control over your product, the manufacturer or you? Back in the 2000s, Lewis started working at a recording studio in Manhattan. As an aspiring recording engineer, he needed a demo reel. To make that, he needed a program called Logic, what some of you might know as a DAO or digital audio workstation. The thing with logic is that it's owned by Apple and will only run on Apple products.

The problem. MacBooks were super expensive. Lewis didn't have that kind of money. So I got a used one on eBay. It showed up broken. I got a partial refund for it. And when I finished the session, I sold it and I made $250. And I thought, I've never made more than $4 to $600 a month in my life at that point.

And here I just made $250 for what was about 15 to 20 minutes of work. Let me try that again. And it just kind of snowballed into the repair company. that I have today. This started as his side hustle. Lewis doesn't have any formal training in tech repair, but working at the recording studio, he started to think like a technician.

He got into the mindset of troubleshooting, learning to problem solve the way other engineers did. And as time went on, I started adding to the services I offered, so instead of just basic screen repairs, here, we'll do component-level motherboard repairs. So if Apple says it's $1,200 to fix, we'll fix it for a few hundred dollars by just replacing the one thing that's broken rather than replacing everything.

I started hiring more people. I got a real store, and I showed people how to do these repairs on YouTube, because my customers would tell me Apple has told me, if somebody says they can fix the motherboard instead of replacing it, they're probably scamming you. So I thought, oh, really? Okay, cool. You're calling you a scammer? Let's go. Lewis had started a second business that sold replacement parts, but was struggling to keep it afloat.

He found it really therapeutic to talk about what he was dealing with on camera, on YouTube, like a video diary. Then he started making repair videos. Originally, it was just from my own customers to show, like, I'm not scamming you. And I didn't expect the channel to explode into, like, millions of subscribers. Anybody that looks at my early content probably sees this and just thinks, like, why would anybody watch this? I had no idea why anybody would watch it, but it just kind of exploded and went from there.

Right. I was going to ask, like, how did you learn how to fix a laptop, right? If your background was in fixing, like, recording equipment. You don't learn how to fix it. You learn how to not break it by virtue of breaking it. So usually there's two types of technicians, and I'll fully admit to being the second type. there are technicians that can open something and follow instructions and go, oh, here's exactly what I do to do a good job. I'm not that person. What I'm good at is messing with something.

Like, how hard can I pull on this tab before it breaks? Oh, okay. So once you break it, you know how to not break it. I would go through all the excuses I had. Well, I would fix this, but I don't know what chip is which. Okay, why don't I know that? I don't have a schematic. Okay, now I have the schematic, but I don't know how to read this.

I don't know what the components do. Okay, now I know what the components do, but I don't know what the circuit does. And now I would just go through all the excuses that I had in my head for why I didn't know how something worked and then use those to try and figure it out. And I would tell myself, well, I'm a tech. Now, I don't know what I'm doing. I'd say, I'd say, I'm a tech.

And a tech would say if they don't know what this is, they'd probably ask for somebody's opinion. And they read a book. And if the book didn't make sense, they'd probably ask somebody else. If they asked somebody else that didn't make sense, they probably tried to find a video on it. I just kept going through all the things that were excuses to me for five years. And I would have students when I was teaching a class on this that would feel really bad if they made a mistake three or four days in, and then they corrected themselves. And I would always have to remind them, you corrected yourself four days in.

I corrected myself, like, after two or three years of making that same mistake. So don't feel bad. As Lewis honed his own skills, his client-based grew. And that's when he started to notice the barriers to actually repairing phones and laptops. A few years in, another repair shop owner told him about their spot getting raided by law enforcement. Because they weren't authorized Apple repair providers, the police assumes that the shop's replacement parts were stolen. It didn't help that a lot of these parts, from iPhone screens to

laptop motherboards, were recycled. Lutz remembers being frustrated that even back then, it was nearly impossible to get individual parts from Apple. They only sold pre-assembled replacements. If I go to Apple, they're going to want me to pay almost $400 to buy this entire assembly, when all I need is this $30 or $50 screen. I don't need your hinges, I don't need your camera, I don't need the Wi-Fi antenna, the invertible, all this other extra stuff that's showing up there. That was just one of dozens of hurdles he faced as a repair tech. His suppliers would get shut down, and Lewis would have to scramble to find new parts. Apple, for one, would force authorized recyclers to shred old MacBooks and iPhones

so that their parts couldn't be reused. Companies would release new laptop models, but wouldn't make the new schematics available to even authorized service providers. So fixing a faulty motherboard was a process of trial and error, which took a lot longer. So I never really asked the question of why is this entire business based on dumpster diving? Why is it based on Alibaba and eBay and random people, like random suppliers that go in business and go out of business? I never really asked that question. I never even had the consciousness to ask that question until around 2013 to 2015. And then when I heard about rights or repair in the automotive field, where in 2012, I believe there was a law or memorandum,

understanding in Massachusetts where it was yeah the manufacturer should make available to the people fixing vehicles the parts and diagnostics software um everything else needs to fix a vehicle why don't why don't we have that why do i need to buy a donor board and then pray that the chip on the donor board that was in a garbage somewhere is good why can't i just go to any vendor and just buy the chip it never really occurred to me and then when i started asking that question it was impossible to unring that bell and once i started unraveling that and asking about it it will It kind of took on a life of its own. All he wanted to do was fix laptops.

It didn't have to be this hard. And that's when he started speaking out about it on his YouTube channel and got involved in the Right to Repair Movement. We'll hear more of his story in a new tab. After this break. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star One, you keep more of your money.

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We're back with Lewis Rossman, data recovery technician, right to repair activist, and YouTuber. Let's open a new tab. The Fight for the Right to Repair. Let's talk about the history of the right to repair movement. Like you said, this affects almost to every person, you know, tech people, farmers, people who work in the medical field. Can you give us a little history of the right to repair movement? Like, when did people start to push back? I think 2012 in Massachusetts with the memorandum of understanding for motor vehicle.

repair. Most of the right to repair legislation that you see coming out around 2015 was a copy and paste of that and they just crossed out motor vehicles and put in consumer electronics. As these legal efforts spread, more and more states held hearings to consider repair protections for consumers. Right to repair advocates showed up to make their case. But so did tech industry lobbyists. I started showing up to these hearings and I would bring my camera and the idea is if I win, I win, and if I lose, I'm hoping that people will see this and just understand how frustrating it is for me. When I sit in front of a politician and I bring up my argument in my opposition says something like, these people stand to make a lot of money being here today. And it's just,

like, you're getting paid $200 to $300,000 a year as a lobbyist to be here today. I paid $250 from my hotel and my plane ticket and I gave up on income to be here today. Yeah, who's making money to be here, my motherfucker? I wanted people to hear this. And, like, instead of me, making the argument as to why you should care about rights or repair because then I'm putting a thought in your head and it's not my place to tell you what to think. I want you to listen to what I said and listen to what they said and tell me what you think. And people would listen to this and go, my God, that is the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever heard in my life. And the thing is, a lot of these rooms that I was going into to record these hearings, they were set up for

newscasters. They had a good position to put a camera. They had an XLR patch panel, so you'd have the microphones for all the different people testifying. It was all set up, but nobody was taking the time to do this. The news was covering something else. Because again, when you look at even just the news right now, you're talking about invading Greenland, the Epstein files, ICE, regardless of where anybody watching this is on any of these issues, whether or not somebody can clear an error code in their tractor,

just kind of falls to the bottom of the list of priorities for CBS and Fox and MSNBC. They're not showing up to these local hearings to hear Lewis talk about not being able to get a charging chip to somebody's luxury Facebook machine. They just don't care. It was simply having these people that have been lying and saying crazy messaging, messed up shit for years on camera. The one that was the biggest to me was in 2015 where this one politician, assembly person in New York said,

the opposition lobbyist for Apple said that when you work on a MacBook motherboard, you actually have converted it to a PC. You're converting it to a PC, but then you don't tell your customer that you've converted it to a PC, and you misrepresent it to them as if it's still a MacBook, which is fraud. And I just had steam coming out of my ears. It's kind of like, well, if you have a Ford F-150 truck and if you change the tires and some good year to

Michelin. Now it's not an F-150. You have to rip the Ford badge off of it. Like, really? And I tried to explain this to him, and I brought up the broken device with a wire on it that fixed it. And I purposely disconnected it. I showed him the schematic. And I said, here's why this wire is important. See when I reattached the fan spins. See when I do. This is what I do this. Explain to me how this is no longer a MacBook and explain to me how this analogy would work if we were talking about your truck. Changing from Goodyear to Michelin. And he's like, and then he just starts writing. And I'm like, are you even listening to me? What are you doing? I spend all this time to show up here. He's like, I'm co-sponsoring your bill, asshole, and then he hands it back to me.

And he shows me. And I realized it was that simple. And I wished I had a camera in the room. I was so mad to this day, 11 years later, that I did not have a camera in that room so that I could have on record that that's what somebody who was Apple Lobby said. It pisses me off. So I said, I'm going to show up with a camera to every single one of these. Because the reason that all these people have been getting away with this is because there hasn't been any sunlight. Nobody looks at it.

Nobody listens and watches. And if they did watch it, they would realize that they can't make things up like this anymore. They're getting away with these lies because they're talking to legislators that don't understand technology, and there's nobody calling them out on it. From 2017 to 2020, Lewis was posting Right to Repair updates on YouTube, traveling across the country to show up to state hearings, rallying his viewers to urge their representatives to sponsor consumer rights bills, all while still running his repair shop. In 2020, Lewis got a phone call from an unknown number. He picked up. There was a mysterious voice on the other end. Who asked, what would I do if I had, let's say, a million dollars to help push forward right to repair?

And I'm like, yeah, this is a scam. Never like, what I have to? Let me guess. I have to wire you 5,000 first. He thought it was total bullshit, his words, and hung up. But then the number called again. As it turned out, that voice on the other end was calling on behalf of a billionaire. Aaron Yokeby, the founder of Yahoo Games, and one of the first investors in WhatsApp.

He's big into tech freedom and consumer ownership. Erin offered initial funding for Lewis to start Repair Preservation Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to repair education. The group launched Repair Wiki, a massive online repository for repairing all kinds of consumer electronics, from printers to e-bikes. But as a 501c3 organization, repair preservation group is limited in how much it can spend on lobbying efforts. So Lewis started a second nonprofit, Repair Preservation Group Action Fund. specifically for pushing for right to repair laws.

With the help of his viewers, he crowdfunded nearly $800,000. Instead of just me showing up with my camera and giving my testimony, I was able to actually help work with grassroots organizations. I was able to hire lobbyists to do that job. And after that happened, you started seeing right to repair get talked about a lot more. It wasn't just me anymore. It was a lot of people organizing at the local level to try to get things pushed forward. Lewis even got Steve Wozniak to respond to a cameo request about it.

Yes, that Steve Wozniak, as in the co-founder of Apple. Hi, Lewis. Steve Wozniak here. I've read a lot of articles about the right to repair issue. I'm always totally supportive, and I totally think the people behind it are doing the right thing. We wouldn't have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world, an open electronics world. Back then, when you bought electronic things like TVs and radios, every bit of of the circuits and designs were included on paper. Total open source. Someone with skill could get in and modify things to fix broken radios or televisions or to improve them or to even replace

destroyed parts. Very motivating for creative minds. Believe me, that's how I grew up. Anyway, it's time to recognize the right to repair more fully. So far, all 50 states have to be able to be. have introduced right to repair legislation. Seven states have passed actual laws, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Washington. It's a huge win for the movement. But there's a catch. Several, actually. Most of those laws have loopholes that make them not very worthwhile. So, like, culturally, there's been a lot of progress. A lot of people know what right to repair is that didn't before.

They know how their right to be violated. They know how ownership is going away every single day, but the law has not really kept up or had any teeth to push back against it. Which means that the fight for the right to repair is far from over. Each state's laws are different, and this patchwork of right to repair requirements leaves many gaps in actual consumer protection. What does the right to repair landscape look like now? We're getting into that in a new tab. Right to repair loopholes. The existing right to repair laws vary state by state. California covers consumer electronics, wheelchairs, and appliances, but not farm equipment. Maine and Massachusetts only cover car data, like access to diagnostic information.

New York only covers personal electronics. Minnesota doesn't cover wheelchairs, but does cover business equipment. And so far, of all of the state right to repair laws, only Colorado, Oregon, and Washington ban this tricky practice called parts pairing. That practice has become increasingly common among tech manufacturers, and it makes it much harder to actually repair products. Parts pairing is the idea that even if I take a new part from a new device and put it in my device, it will not work because that part has a serial number on it. And when the device senses that even if it's an OEM part, it's not my original OEM part,

it won't work properly. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer. Versus some random other person making it. So there's aftermarket parts, there's knockoff parts, there's used originals, and then there's OEM, which is this part is what the original equipment manufacturer used and the same grade in quality. Starting maybe five to seven years ago, this started to become more popular, where you would change a part and it wouldn't work, and people would say, well, you must have put a knockoff. And you said, no, I took this out of a new device.

And then they would buy a new device just to see if they were going insane, put the pardon to their device, and it wouldn't work because the device could sense that it wasn't my original one. And that's a problem because it makes the whole concept of recycling go away. If I have a device where everything is broken on it, it's not economically viable to repair, but this thing still works. I want to be able to use this part to fix this thing. It destroys that in a very bad way. How else has big tech responded to the right to repair movement? Are companies behind it?

Are they pushing against it? What's your read? Fake programs. They say, look, we released our right to repair program. Here's our parts list on our website. And I don't blame the press for this. The press covers thousands of different news items across thousands of different things every day. So if I see look at repair program, I see pictures of parts, I see in stock, I see it's not $10,000.

I'll think it's okay. But when a repair person looks at this, they see you want $206 for a smartphone battery because you say that it is glued to the screen. A lot of these programs are put together in a way where it makes no economic sense whatsoever. Now, when I say no economic sense, I don't mean that it's just the repair person says, I want to make 100,000 a year and I can only make 50,000 a year. Now, I mean that when I buy that part, if I would have charged my customer for the repair just the cost of the part by itself, my customer would look at me and give me the middle finger and say that's a ripoff. And that's the problem with a lot of these programs, is they were made to appease legislators and the

press. They weren't actually made to be viable repair programs that repair technicians actually want to use. Yeah, I was also going to ask like, you know, what does the current landscape of right to repair laws look like in the United States right now. Do some states have better laws than others? What are these laws missing? Every law has something missing. Like in New York, there's an exemption for trade secrets and safety. Now, when you have people showing up to legislative hearings and saying that if independent technicians fix your microwave, a macrometer will explode, that's a safety issue, what is a magnetrometer? The magnetrometer doesn't exist. So I don't want there to be something in the bill that says, you know, we can have exemptions if the manufacturers is the safety issue. Because

they've made up safety issues. They've made up names of parts that don't exist and testified in front of state legislatures numerous times to fearmonger politicians and are believing that everything's going to blow up if people can fix things. So I don't like the idea of a safety exemption because they're just going to say anything. Like what if a replacement screen, man, you could get glass. You can get a paper cut. What if that person is like a blood clotting disorder? Maybe they'll bleed out and die. I wouldn't be surprised if a manufacturer tried to say something silly like that. A lithium ion battery could explode. And true, a lithium ion battery could explode. your car could also not stop when going 80 miles down Hawaii and kill 30 people.

We don't say that you can't replace your brakes. The other is that in Minnesota there is right to repair that was pushed through a budget process, and that excludes game consoles. So, I mean, game consoles are a really big field of consumer electronics. So when you have a bill that says it excludes this, it excludes that. There are so many exemptions in many of these laws and carve-outs for all these industries. You can't repair medical equipment. You can't repair farm equipment.

You can't repair this, that, and the other. And even if you didn't have those carve-outs at all, When it says make available, what you make available to your authorized service centers, the entire reason that people are coming to repair shops like mine to begin with

is because the authorized repair center doesn't fix anything. It's easy to legislate, you must have a one-year warranty in your product. When it comes to repair, you're really trying to legislate, don't be a dick.

And that's why the battle, as I see it, is the cultural one. I want people that have watched my channel or got into engineering and electronics who become designers and engineers of these businesses because they grew up watching me live streaming in 2016

at 2 in the morning, Kursig, because I've tried to figure out where this trace goes without a schematic. When they get into this field and they're asked to do something that's anti-repair, when they're asked to send that email, oh, by the way, make sure that this part is only available to our authorized people and nobody else can buy that charging ship. I want them to remember what got them into this and then say, you know what, I'm not doing that. And if you want to make me do that, I quit.

And I want to live in a society where everybody is open to doing that. So I realize that a lot of what I'm pushing for, very likely I'll be dead or long dead by the time we actually get it. All these seeds that I'm planning are cultural seeds that'll take a few generations to actually change. Hopefully there's some success there. But like you said, like in the past, people did just fix their stuff. Like, it was the norm to just fix your stuff. It seems like we can still go back to that, hopefully. I would like to see things go back to that. And I'd like to see more people across more industries become aware of this. And the biggest pushback that I've seen is not even what companies do. It's what people accept. And I would like to see people

the more open is sticking together rather than saying you deserve it. This happens in my comment section all the time, and I always pointed out, and they're like, you know, what kind of moron will buy a digital picture frame? You should buy something like this. But that person who made fun of that user for that may also have a fridge that they didn't even realize that's ads in it. Or that person may have a smart TV that they didn't realize a spying on them. It's like, what kind of moron buys a smart TV that has this?

And it's like, you should have bought what I bought. And I really want to see people coalescing come together and realize that simping for billion-dollar companies that are ripping you off, stealing your data, you blind and trying to take away the rights of ownership is not the thing to do. It's the band together and say, you know what, I don't accept as practice. And even if I would not buy the thing my neighbor bought, that may happen to me someday. Let's work together rather than all shit on each other as we get robbed blind. Some companies are featuring repairability as like a key selling point in their marketing.

One example is the laptop manufacturer framework, which builds laptops that are easily dissembled, upgraded and repaired. What do you think about this trend? What does it signal for the right to repair movement? The fact that they have not gone bankrupt several years in in a very difficult and wavy economy. Like I think that their products just started to become popular right as interest rates were soaring

and all this economic volatility. I think it's very cool. They actually do try to make things repairable. And for any of the faults the company has had on like certain issues with certain products, I think their heart is in the right place and I like seeing that. And the fact that there is actually a market for it is great.

Now the problem is they're competing in a very low profit market. industry. Like companies like Lenovo and Acer and the companies that are making these products that a lot of people buy, their profit margins are in the single digit percentage and that's acting at economies of scale at tens of hundreds of billions of dollars. So for a new player to come in and do anything here, they're either going to have less choices available, which means less people buy the product, or they're going to have a higher price. So I love seeing it. I'd love to see more of it. The fact that they exist at all is very validating for the fact

that people are actually willing to spend more money just for a company that respects them. And I think that's a big part of it. It's not always about the money. It's about the respect. So what do you want people to take away from the rights repair movement? Like why should, why should they care? It's about ownership in general. And right to repair is a very small portion under the ownership umbrella. And that's where I've been focusing more of my work on in the past few years. Everything is moving to the subscription model. So look around at all these different products and take note of the fact that you don't really own them. The fact that hundreds of thousands of nest thermostats across the world stopped functioning with the functionality that they were advertised with simply because Google decided we don't want to support it anymore.

If Google can flip a switch and your devices stop working, if your car manufacturer could flip a switch and your heated seats are no longer activated, do you actually own any of the things that you bought and paid for? It seems like that's the kind of mentality of a lot of right to repair is just like trial and error instead of just giving up and accepting that you have to buy something new. Yeah, and the thing is the people that are authorized or say you're not authorized and you don't know what you're doing. The way you figure out how to work on it to begin with very often is by tinkering and messing around when you don't know what you're doing. And I hope that people who don't know what they're doing feel confident in trying to open things. Again, if it doesn't belong to somebody else, if it belongs to you and you're not sacrificing, you know, you're a significant other's data or something. Mess with something that you're clueless about and constantly learn something. And even if you've taken a chip off and you just put the chip back on and it still works, celebrate that.

Celebrate every time you've done something without making the device work. Trying to figure things out as you go is one of the best ways to learn. And I hope that more people feel confident in telling themselves, I'm completely clueless and that's okay. I'm just going to try it anyway. That mentality is exactly what community repair cafes are all about. Back in the Milpedes library, at the Silicon Valley Repair Cafe, volunteers dissected faulty appliances,

rearranging and re-soddering guts of wires in hopes of sparking some life back into them. One of the volunteers, named Tara, recalled the repair cafe's early days. So, yeah, last year, a woman came walking up, cradling this beautiful cherry apple red toaster. It looked gorgeous. And so I looked at it and said, I know what it is. It's a spring and it can be fixed. And I said, what's the story with your toaster? And she just beamed her face lit up and she's like, this was the toaster I won on Price's Right. This is the only thing I have left over from college. She said she and a whole bunch of her friends went to the Price is Right one morning and she was the first person. Corrine, come on down. And she won $25,000.

I said, did you get to spend the wheel? She's like, oh yes, I did. And she's like, well, the only thing left is this toaster. And it's my college toaster. And so we were able to fix it. And she walked away beaming. And that was just a great example of the kinds of things that we see here on a regular basis. It's just a toaster, but it was her college toaster that she won. Price is right. Irreplaceable. Irreplaceable.

We've heard about the consumer electronics side of the right to repair movement. Laptop repair technicians like Lewis who just want to replace hard drives without the headache of everything we drove into today. But did you know that a lot of today's repairs are only legal because of farmers who were sick of hacking their tractors? That's next week. For now, let's close all these tabs. Close all tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and it's reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung.

This episode was produced by our senior editor, Chris Agusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick, additional production help from Gabriella Glick. Our team includes producer Maya Kueva, additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer, audience engagement support from Mahasanod. Jen Chian is our director of podcasts. Ethan Tov and Lindsay is our editor-in-chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.

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