The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - We have a right to repair! (Interview)

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

This week Adam went solo — talking to Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at iFixit, about all things Right to Repair. They discussed the latest win here in the US with Oregon passing an electronics Right to Repair law to allow owners the right to get their stuff fixed anywhere as well as limit the anti-repair practices of parts pairing. They also discussed the history of the DMCA, the challenges posed by Section 1201, the challenges of recycling products with glued-in batteries, the need for producer responsibility, the future of repairability, repair scoring systems to inform consumers, and so much more. Did you know that iFixit funds its advocacy work through the sale of its tools and parts? So cool.

What's up friends this week on the change like I'm going solo and I'm talking to Kyle Weins founder and CEO at I fix it we're talking about all things right to repair on this show. We discussed the latest win here in the U.S. in Oregon. They passed an electronics right to repair law to allow owners the right to get their stuff fixed anywhere. It also limited the anti-repair practices of parts pairing. This is something we discussed deeply in this show. I had no idea how deep down the rabbit hole Cal has gone with this, but he went deep and he took us there. We discussed the history of the DMCA, the challenges posed by Section 1201, the challenges of recycling products with glued-in batteries, a.k.a. AirPods,

the need for producer responsibility, looking at you, Apple, the future of repairability, repair scoring systems that will inform consumers. And here's something that's important to know about iFixit and Kyle's work. They fund all of his advocacy, all of their advocacy via the sale of their tools and their parts at iFixit.com. That's so cool. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at Fly.io, the home of changelog.com. That's where we live. That is our home, Fly.io. Launch now for free near your users today at Fly.io.

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No credit card required. Again, Tailscale.com. Well, everybody, we're here with Kyle Wiens today, iFixit CEO. And Kyle, I have to say, I'm a customer and a fan. I own some hardware, I suppose, some of your tooling, which helps me really to know and become aware of your brand. I have the ProTech bundle. Could not live without it. Use it every day. I recently adjusted my KitchenAid refrigerator door handles. I was like, I mean, I just happen to have this hex wrench nearby because, you know, I had the different bits. I'm like, why don't I just use my iFixit kit?

Because it's not just a computer. It's anything. I know. That's the thing. I use my ProTek way more to do home repairs than I do electronics stuff. Yeah. It's amazing what just having a nice set of tools around does. I love the lid.

I love that whole kit. There's a lot you can do with it. I recently needed a pair of tweezers because my kid put something in his air filter that we have in his room. It's a fan. It's an air filter, and you can put something in it going down. And he did it by accident. It wasn't on purpose. But I was like, gosh, where are my tweezers at for my eyebrows or whatever?

And meanwhile, I got these long ones, this awesome set of tweezers that's for this in my ProTech bundle. I'm not by any means suggesting people go out and buy it, but it's very useful to me. Well, I took a splinter out of my son's foot with those tweezers yesterday. So 100%. Multiple uses. I found great. Actually, I am. I'll endorse it. Go out and get it.

Their ProTech bundle is amazing. And you can buy it at Best Buy now. Is that right? Yeah, iFixit.com as well, but yeah, we're selling our toolkits. The pro tech is at Best Buy and we've got our screwdriver set in Home Depot as well now. Yeah. I'm looking here in my email cause I had to refresh my memory, but I bought the pro tech bundle November, 2022 direct from ifixit.com. Yeah, okay, so the ad is over for the ProTech bundle. I do like it. I do use it.

Okay. The right to repair movement is a big deal. We've talked to Cory Doctorow. I've been following Lewis Rossman on YouTube. I pay attention to the concerns around John Deere. I pay attention to obviously being a smartphone owner and a computer guy myself, building PCs, building primarily Linux boxes, not so much Windows boxes. Gaming PCs is something I'm trying to get into here soon. You know, and everywhere you turn

around in technology, there's some sort of DRM or gatekeeper or something that stops you. And here's iFixit. You're, I can call you a website, you are a website, but you know, this brand who you are, is it a movement? I know you sell tooling. I know you have tons of repair guides. I've repaired my Mac mini, gutted it from end to end because you have amazing repair guides. But here we are in this recent bill getting passed. You're in the middle of this. You're the CEO of this company. What is happening around this right to repair movement? What's the true epidemic that's happening around this? And is that the right word to use? I mean, this is the war on general purpose computing. This is the war on

tinkering. So to step back, I think its mission is to enable all of us to fix all of our stuff. We look at all the things in your life, anything that might go wrong, and say, well, what are the obstacles to you being able to do that repair? Maybe it's you don't have a screwdriver. Okay, that's easy. I can solve that. Maybe it's a lack of repair information. We started because I was trying to fix my iBook, and I learned that Apple's lawyers had sent DMCA takedowns to everyone that posted the service manual online.

Really? And I said, this is ludicrous. Like you're actually using copyright law to prevent people from knowing how to fix their stuff. And as a software engineer, as someone who like, you know, like we live off of freedom of information, that just totally struck me wrong.

So I said, well, let's fix that. So I bought, you know, another machine. We took it apart, took pictures, put them online. And that said, well, let's fix that. So I bought another machine. We took it apart, took pictures, put them online. And that was the first iFixit repair guide. Wow. So we're looking across the whole ecosystem and saying across every product category, what are the things that are not fixable now? And how can we make them fixable?

And so we make repair kits. You can get an iPhone screen that comes with all the tools you need to repair it, step-by-step guides. So we're solving the parts and the information piece. But the other side of this is you have to have an ecosystem, a software ecosystem that enables repair. And increasingly, you have proprietary parts pairing and all kinds of digital locks that get in the way. And I can't fix those just by making a screwdriver. We have to fix those with policy. And so that drew me out of my happy space sitting in front of a terminal, creating a really intuitive to

use repair website out into the public policy sphere to advocate for laws that legalize some of the repairs that we need to do. Yeah, it's funny that it does happen to get back into policy. You would think, I suppose, left to their own devices, companies are going to try to protect themselves. I can understand that psyche, the formation of an LLC is a limited liability company, a corporation, etc. It has its own DNA, but it's not a person. It's persons, but it's ran by people and they have their own way of thinking. In some case, they're very psychopathic, you know, when measured against typical psychology and human behavior. But it's really a shame that it has to go to the policy level

to sort of make these folks not be planned obsolescence focused. And then recently, this is just days ago, and you're aware of this, so fill in the gaps for me, but the state house passed Oregon's Right to Repair Act SB 1596 by a margin of 42 to 13. That's a significant margin. So yeah, we worked hard for that. Thankfully, we have the right kind of people at the policy level making these choices that

are being not just voted in, but also kind of following what the people want. What is your role in this? You know, you said you worked hard to get there. What's what is this bill? What happened with this Repair Act? What does this act and what was your role in it? This is the fourth major state that's passed consumer electronics right to repair. We've passed some other bills for farm equipment and cars. I was intimately involved with this. So this is based on reference legislation that our coalition wrote. It's published on repair.org, so you can go and download the reference bill. And specifically, the thing that we got into the Oregon bill that was negotiated out of the previous bills in California and elsewhere

was a ban on parts pairing, which is Apple's new invention. Parts pairing is not something you encounter unless you're trying to fix an iPhone, really. It's a new idea that is, hey, we have software in all of the individual parts. So there's not just software on the main board, there's software in the camera, there's software on in the display. And so why not have a serial number in the display, and that serial number can be hardcoded into the main board, and the main board will only work with that display, or it'll degrade functionality if it's not the serial number that it's expecting. And you know, in the software world, you look at this, like, if I was to ask you, hey, build me a lock that does this, you're like, okay, sure,

it'll be done tomorrow. Like, this is not a hard lock to build, but it's really nefarious because once you have these parts all paired to each other, now it totally impedes what you can do. It doesn't just limit the repairs that you can do yourself. What happens if you donate your phone to Goodwill and Goodwill get, you know, they've got two broken iPhones and they want to take the pieces and combine it and make one that works and sell it. That's the business model at all. PC recycling and computers for schools, charities have operated under for the last couple of decades. And Apple just shot it in the head. They said, no, you can't do that anymore. You have to have permission from us in order to swap parts in the device.

So that parts pairing approach has been, Apple has been turning the temperature up on that slowly. We published a chart which shows parts pairing really starting with the fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 6S. And then every model, they've added it to more and more parts. With the iPhone 15, they added it to the LiDAR sensors.

So you can't swap the LiDARs between devices. And so we published this chart. There's a huge issue. We detailed the parts pairing progression. New York Times actually thought it was so interesting that they ran it in their Sunday print issue right around the time the new iPhone came out when we analyzed the 15 in the fall. And that set the stage for the legislative fight, which is always at the beginning of the year. That's when the state legislatures get together and figure out what

laws they're going to pass for the year. And we have a number of states that are looking at bans on parts pairing. The Oregon bill is the first one to get over the finish line. And Apple does not like this law at all. They were in behind the scenes and actually they kind of finally popped out in front and testified against it. They threw everything they could at stopping this and we were able to overcome them. So feel very good about it. But what a nefarious strategy. Why would you do that? Yeah. What's interesting about Apple is they're a beloved brand, right? It's a very beloved brand back from even the Steve Jobs days. Like it's been a brand that a lot of folks have loved and they are really well known for innovation and pushing the boundary for technology. So kudos to them for all the innovation, right?

Yeah. But then they also are very privacy focused. And so they have these different levers in the public site guys, basically, of like their reputation, who they are. And there's this whole other side where is this parts pairing, which you say is nefarious.

And I would also agree that it seems nefarious. Then I think what is motivating them to do this? Obviously, it's money, right? Obviously, it's the stock value going up, shareholder value going up. That seems to be, in the words of Silicon Valley's TV show, whenever Jack took over Pied Piper as CEO, he said, hey, the product is not you. The product is not the software or the platform.

The product is the stock value and the value of the stock. That's the product, right? And so if that's the case, is capitalism to blame? Is it this greed mechanism to blame? Because obviously Tim Cook is out there with a smile on his face, praising the opportunities and the innovations of Apple, and there's the beloved brand, et cetera. And I'm a Mac user personally. I'm also a Linux user personally. Before the show, I said, hey, are you using a Mac? So then, you know, guide you on how

to do your local audio. You're like, no, I'm a PC user in this case. I go back and forth. I mean, I'm primarily on Ubuntu. I switched to Windows machine for this interview. Oh, wow. Yeah. I guess what I'm driving at really is how much have you examined what you think is motivating Apple to be this nefarious? Given its beloved state with a lot of its Apple fanboys and girls and people out there that just love Apple and they have privacy focus, they have all this innovation. What would make them do this? Why? Yes, there's two underlying factors. One, they're certainly very bottom line focused. And the money in this case isn't really them making money, taking your phone in and paying them for repair. The money is upfront in AppleCare. Apple is the second largest extended warranty company in the world. And that's where the profit

is, is in scaring you away from other repair options and making you think there really isn't another choice. And so when you buy the device, let me spend the extra money up front and get into AppleCare. And then you're in their system, their ecosystem, and then you're going to go back in. Oh, by the way, there's a deductible then when you take it in. So you're really just paying up front for the option to have a discounted repair later. But that's really where the money is at. So absolutely, there's a bottom line focus. But there's also a cultural component to this that isn't completely nefarious.

I disagree vehemently with it, but it's not at its core unethical. Apple wants to control the customer experience. They want to really optimize for the best possible customer experience. This has driven a lot of the innovation that we've seen from them. And they think that they can deliver a better repair total lifetime ownership experience themselves than if you're fixing it yourself or if you're taking it to a local repair shop. They think that their Apple store ecosystem is better. And this is an area where I just really disagree with them. If you look at what is the most optimal outcome for a customer, it's not happening to live close enough to one of

the 500 Apple stores that I can go in and get my device fixed quickly, right? I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee right now. It is a two-hour drive to the closest Apple store. Like, good luck. I'm not going to do that. And there is so much of the world that's not near an apple store and i think them being in cupertino like they're in this bubble where they don't realize what most of the real world is like is there an apple store in wyoming what are you supposed to do if you have one of these devices and it breaks and the repair shops can't fix it because of these parts sparing shenanigans so they're myopically focused on this idea that they can create a better customer experience. And then they're on the other side, they're basically delivering the McDonald's or repair.

It works much of the time for many people, but it certainly doesn't deliver what everybody needs. So you're saying then you don't think it's fully about the Apple brand and the desire to be so focused on the customer experience slash user experience that they, to have this part sparing, it aids them in enabling a controllable world. Absolutely. And I think you look at, you have to say, look at from Apple's perspective, they're really good at creating great experiences

and their ethos, their ego is around, we're going to create the best possible customer experience. And they're trying to do a thousand different things, right? And so they're going to try to be the best at a thousand different things. And they would say from a repair ecosystem perspective, they're really bad at it. They're terrible at it. But they have to apply the same philosophy to that, that they do everything else.

And so they have this conflict internally where they want to control the total experience, but they don't know and they don't have the culture and they're not willing to spend the money to build the kind of authorized repair network that would really be required to deliver the customer expectations that their brand proposition promises. Yeah. How does this compare then to an adjacent competitor? Let's say like Samsung is the most well-known I can think of. Like the Galaxy phone set they have. I'm not an Android user, so I'm not well-versed in literally Apple

competition. Sure. Well, let's pick Motorola because we've been working with Motorola for a long time. Okay. So Motorola sells Android phones. They have, you know, some small single digit percentage market share, but they have good phones. So Motorola doesn't have the Apple store experience. They don't have the ability to have those stores that you can take them into. And so instead they've said, well, they have to have a more open ecosystem. And so they came to us and said, hey, will you distribute repair parts for us? And we said, sure. And we put repair kits together. So you can buy parts for Moto G from us. You get the screen and it comes with the tools. And then we also

distribute parts to repair shops. So there's 20,000 independent cell phone repair shops in the US. So those folks are coming to us. They're buying Motorola screens. They stock them at their facility if they want, or they order them on demand as they need. And then look now, Motorola, who has vastly smaller market share than Apple, has far more service locations that can service their customers than Apple does. And it's because they're more permissive. So they can actually end up with a better customer experience by being more open than Apple. It feels like Apple is trying to control it.

They're trying to, you know, they want to like really control the baby's experience and they're strangling it to death rather than opening it up and saying, well, let's let a thousand flowers bloom. But I can't run iOS on a Moto G or a Moto Razr. Moto Roller Razr, right? Yeah. But Android is quite good. Yeah. And that's always been the thing. I mean, there was a time back in the 90s when you could run macOS on aftermarket PCs, but that ended in 98.

Yeah, for sure. And especially now that Apple Silicon is there, it's like never going to go back. Right. But you can try to run Linux on their hardware. You can't run their software on their hardware. So then we get into this scenario where, okay, maybe I'm iOS focused. My household is iOS focused because of an ecosystem. It's not just a choice that I like Apple in quotes better or iOS in quotes better. It's simply that we've now adopted, now we have sunk cost into an ecosystem. We have applications that we've bought from the app store that my kids use to learn piano or different things that like they're great applications, great things that you can buy, subscriptions potentially,

even these, just these things that sort of lock you in. Now we have even this world where apps can't move around or they don't move around very well, or they are only Mac OS or iOS focused. And it's great that Motorola has that story, but I can't run iOS there, which is an absolute bummer. Do you think we'll get into the position where right to repair becomes right to run, I suppose, in a way? Like I want to run my OS wherever I want, not just on your hardware. Well, let me take that.

Let's just talk about repair first and we can talk about OS portability. Well, I think the reason why that's important is because you get stuck by the hardware and its limitations in repair, but you come for the software. And so you got this locking mechanism, even iMessage.

Right. I mean, there's such a posh posture to iMessage. Like, are you a green bubble or are you a blue bubble? I mean, even from that perspective. Well, try Beeper. Happy Beeper user over here. It's fantastic. You can bust outside of the iMessage bubble. I'm going to 911 you, Kyle. So I need you now. Yeah. But go ahead. I interrupted just to sort of like round out my perspective. No, sure. So I mean, I would say, let's just start and say like you have hardware, whether you're in the iOS or Android camp, should you be able to fix your thing without having to phone home to the manufacturer for help? That should be a fundamental right that

we have across all hardware. Maybe Apple has the right to build a closed operating system, but they don't have a right to artificially limit how long hardware lasts. And they don't have a right to have a monopoly and long hardware lasts. And they don't have a right to have a monopoly and privilege their repair centers over aftermarket centers. So that's what right to repair laws are about, is leveling the playing field, enabling competition, and making it so that you, if you have an iOS ecosystem in your house, you should be able to repair the power supply in your HomePod if it fails,

because Apple doesn't have a repair plan for that. But there's an epidemic of HomePod power supply failures. Really? Yeah. I never bought into it personally, but. If it hasn't failed on you yet, just wait. If you have AirPods, your batteries are going to die. It's just a question of whether it's, you know, in the next three months or six months. I mean, their pod batteries last about two years and then they're toast and Apple doesn't

have a repair strategy for that. So we have to deal with the hardware and whatever ecosystem you're in, doesn't have a repair strategy for that. So we have to deal with the hardware and whatever ecosystem you're in, finding a way to make it last longer. So I would start with that. And that's the first set of retro pair battles that I'm focused on. Once we get beyond that, then we can talk about OS freedom and kind of the war on general purpose purpose computing. Well, friends, I have some good news for you. It is launch week once again for Sentry. And I'm here with Rahul Chhabria from the product team at Sentry. So Rahul, can you tell me about the launch week this year for Sentry? In March, we're making a huge investment into our product platform. We're trying to make it faster, better.

In November, we shared a sneak peek about our new metrics offering. So now developers are able to define custom metrics they care about and monitor how quickly their app is responding to the business measures they have to be accountable for, plus also the customer experiences that they've committed to. And that's going to be available in an alpha. People can sign up to get access. We'll turn it off for them in a couple of days once they write in and they can get going right away. Now, on top of that, it's like we are looking more at how do we make the product smarter? Now, I know the world is talking about AI and ML,

and they're all solving like we think like entertaining problems, but Sentry is taking a more thoughtful approach to it. We are trying to look at what is the developer trying to do? Like our goal is not to have you sit in Sentry all day long. Our goal is not have us like be a tab that you need to keep open. Our goal is to have this be a tab you open when something is wrong. Give you the information you need right away. Tell you how impactful it is to your user base and if you should care. And if it is something you should care about, here's how to fix it.

So we're taking a broader look at how developers use the product. Where is the noise they're seeing? Like, are they seeing repeat events? Are they seeing like things that are not critical rise to the top and have to automatically resolve them or ignore them? So we're going to make Sentry a little bit smarter with artificial intelligence to give you a more prioritized view of the issues that really matter. So you can solve them quickly and move on and not be distracted by random rage clicks that are you know just ghost issues those are the two major

things coming out it's like thinking about more like defining the metrics you care about also figuring out ways to like organize your issues so developers can actually solve those problems faster and then we're also working on a few features for our mobile developers like century is a platform that works with any technology you want but for mobile developers there's always been this like wait a second there was an error but hold on let me go dig up this device and see if i can recreate it uh i can't recreate it okay let me go look at the stack trace like it's definitely something there i'll just fix it push release and hopefully those now like the crash rates go up and the crash for user rates go up but there's it's always like this idea like i still need to figure out like where is that bank of used old devices for someone running, you know, iOS 13 on an iPhone 11 somewhere. So

we're giving them the ability, we're previewing the ability for mobile developers to actually see what happens on an end user session. So that way, there's no question about the problem or the latency issue, and building out more performance capabilities so they can see exactly how fast their app is performing. Those are the three big things we're planning on talking about. Aside from core platform announcements, some integrations and cool partnerships we're working with, I guess the big investment in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Okay. Sentry's launch week happens March 18th through the 22nd.

Check the show notes for a link to the launch week page. I'll be showing off new features, products. You can tune into their YouTube channel or Discord daily at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time to hear the latest scoop. Or if you want to get swag along the way, enter your email address at the page we'll link up to get swag all along the way. Or join the Discord, whatever works for you. Head to Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io. I'm sure they'll link it up somewhere.

Or check the show notes for a link. While you're at it, use the code CHANGELOG to get $100 off the team plan. Again, use the code CHANGELOG. Go to Sentry.io. here's me okay let me just use my perspective not really well versed with iFixit until recently bought your tools love them use the repair guide to gut the mac mini to replace the hard drive not because the hard drive was bad but because it was sort of obsolete. It was not an SSD. And so I replaced the spinning disk that was a three and a quarter or three and a half inch drive.

5200 rotation speed. Like it's not a very fast drive. It's terrible. Yeah. Got to this Mac mini as an experiment to explore the Linux world. Like, hey, I want to take this Intel 2014 Mac Mini. And wow, here's this repair guide on ifixit.com. And oh, they have this toolkit that I saw my buddy Luke Miani talking about.

And he's a big fan, right? And I'm paying attention to these folks out there that are just leading the way. And I'm like, you know what? I've got four of these things sitting here because at one point, those Mac minis with those rusty spinning hard drives. And it was how we Skyped everybody for these podcasts back in the day. We used to have a Skype tower where each person would call in on each Mac mini. We would pipe that audio out into a mixer and record to a multiple interface. I mean, it was archaic, but it worked. But I had this hardware that was essentially non-useful to me now. And that's where I discovered your brand and who you are.

Well, not so much you personally, but who your brand is. But I've never gone even beyond that until recently with your involvement in these bills getting passed or these acts getting passed and all the fight that has to happen. So here's me, you know, saying, you know, woe is John Deere because they've just like, they basically build gigantic farm computers, right? And this whole movement there, talked to Corey Doctorow several times, again, follow Lewis Rossman and just like knee deep in this. How does someone like you, software engineer, decides that you want to do something with

a repair guide? Now you're part of this, this change that needs to take place because i do want to gut my mac mini six years from now or eight years from now when it's not useful to me anymore and repurpose it if i so choose i want to be able to run linux literally on if it's a computer i feel like you should be able to run linux on any given computer in the world right because Because Linux is open source and it should be the replacement OS when that OS can no longer work. In this case, this Mac OS version was like on Mavericks

or something like that for this Mac mini. So even if I wanted to run Mac OS, I'm limited to, I can't go to the newest operating system. I have to go to like this older generation that has limited security, no updates. Great, but Linux still works. Ubuntu still works on any

given thing. So long story short, I'm new to learning about you and your company, but how did you get into this movement? Why are you so passionate about it? Obviously there's some steam here, but like what makes you be the right person to build the company, to distribute parts and to be the, you know, in quotes advocate for those who are not advocating or don't know how to advocate for their rights? Yes. I mean, it started by me getting radicalized by this censorship through copyright law, right? Like what gives them the right to prevent me from having access to the information I need to fix my stuff? As we've been systematically moving and enabling people to fix more things, we encounter obstacles and where there are obstacles, like I'm an

engineer, I'm going to solve that obstacle. And so one of the main obstacles that has come up is section 1201 of the DMCA, which is this law that makes it illegal to do certain kinds of math. Yeah, please look it up. So section 1201 says it is illegal to circumvent a technological protection measure protecting access to a copyrighted work. That's the phrase in the law. And that was intended to make it illegal to distribute tools to pirate DVDs. That was the reason they passed it back in the 90s. But now that law is being abused in all kinds of ways. Apple used it to go after jailbreakers.

It was used to go after people who are unlocking cell phones. Because the way that it's being interpreted is a copyrighted work could be any software. So if you have a cell phone baseband that is made out of software and it's on a device and you want to unlock the cell phone to move it from Verizon to AT&T, you are making a change to that copyrighted work. You're bypassing a lock in order to do it. And so you're in violation of Section 1201. So this is an absolutely ludicrous law.

And so we have been fighting to get the law revoked for a long time. And this was actually what brought right to repair for ag equipment to the forefront. I applied for an exemption with the US Copyright Office to be able to jailbreak tractors. And John Deere opposed it. And I wrote a letter in, I wrote an op-ed in Wired Magazine. This was back in 2012, something like that. And saying, hey, you know, this is a problem. Farmers, like they need to be able to modify software on their equipment in order to fix them. And that, John Deere went nuclear and they sent a letter to all of their dealers calling me a liar and calling out my

Wired article. And that really was the beginning of the fight for right to repair for farm equipment. Wow. And so ever since then, yeah, every three years, we go back to the Copyright Office. We go for more exemptions. The Copyright Office agreed with me and the farmers, and they granted the exemption for that. And we've been fighting it ever since.

We have not successfully fixed the federal issue, but we have started to make progress on it. So last year, we worked with farmers across the state of Colorado and passed the nation's first agriculture rate to repair bill. Huge victory, huge success goes into effect soon. And we're looking to build on that victory in other states. I look at the whole landscape. I'm looking at the entire material economy. What are all the things in our lives that could break? Is it farm equipment? Is it construction equipment? Is it your Mac mini?

Let's level the playing field. Let's enable repair across all of this. And what that has meant is that we've had to break open monopolies in all kinds of different areas. When I started helping people fix iBooks, I didn't know that John Deere was monopolizing repair and forcing farmers into paying them through the nose for service. But that was part of our mission. So

we identified the problem and we've been systematically tackling it. And we're going to do that in industry after industry. Wow. Since you mentioned Wired, I went to your author page on Wired and I'm surprised to see how far back your byline goes. I mean, you personally, not just like, wow. We've been doing this a long time. So to go back, the first law that I got passed, let's talk about cell phone unlocking, because it's part of kind of the war on general purpose computing. So my buddy, Sina Khanafar, made a unlock tool for unlocking the flip phones back in the day.

And AT&T got very upset at him and others. And so they sued him. He went to the copyright office and asked for help. And in the process, we put together a White House petition. So this is in the Obama era. And this is really our first opportunity, or the first time we used activated the internet to achieve political change. So we got the second highest petition count on the Obama We the People petition site that they'd ever had for a cell phone unlocking bill. The first most popular petition was to deport Justin Bieber back to Canada, which I think we can also get on board with. Obama did not respond to that petition, but he did respond to ours and he said that he agreed. And so I got experience like flying back and forth to D.C DC and I got to get a tie and we got it done. And we went from where the US was the only country in the world

where it's illegal to unlock a cell phone to it had been re-legalized. And that was the first time that we touched that section 1201. So that was back in the 2012 era. And then I spent the last decade since then fighting for rate to repair laws. And it was a long time kind of wandering in the wilderness working on this. We have introduced hundreds of bills and we have lost hundreds of times before we've won four in the last year. Would you say that you're getting better at them? Because I mean, once you get some experience, you kind of like make a network, obviously, gain more friends. And politics is all about who you know, right? It's all about the friends.

It's all about the coalition and the political momentum. I mean, we had in New York State, we had trillions of dollars in market cap registered to lobby against our bill. So it really is, do we have enough inertia and momentum to overcome these entrenched corporate interests? And the answer for a decade was no, we didn't. But we kept at it, we kept building, and now we're at the point where we are overcoming. How much have you dug into the DMCA Act itself in terms of who was personally responsible for its movement of it, and what was their motivation? Were they paid? Were they lobbied? Was there a lot of golf involved? At some point, there's corruption of a version of corruption happening here or a version of unfairness if not true corruption right yeah i mean i actually know a lot of the congress uh members of congress who were involved in

passing that law as flawed as it is it was a compromise between the technology companies in hollywood they really were terrified of internet piracy. This is in the Napster era and of undermining the creative economy of the United States. And they were concerned about technology getting in the way. Now, they wrote a law that was bad. And it may have been industry, the copyright industry that helped them write that. But I think it was a genuine mistake at the time. No one at the time had any idea that this law that they were crafting that they thought was applying to media would apply to all embedded software and therefore all products that are manufactured going forward, right? Anything that's going to be made

in the next century is going to have a microchip and therefore software in it. And so this is the most accidentally overbroad law in history. So it desperately needs to get fixed. But I wouldn't say that it was corruption up front. I think it was a well-intentioned flawed compromise. Okay. Better words. You're definitely more of a politician than I am because you can word better things than I can. Even that was terribly worded. Okay. So not necessarily on purpose, accidentally flawed because it was too broad. I testified.

So Congress had a hearing on fixing the DMCA last July. And so I flew out to D.C. and put on my tie again. And I got to testify. And Representative Zoe Lofgren, who has been in Congress for a long time, she was in Congress when they passed it. She said, look, you know, I was involved in drafting this thing and we screwed up and it was not our intent at all to have it impact repair and all of the things that it's impacting today. So Congress knows that there's very active interest in fixing this. They had a hearing.

It's the House Judiciary Committee that is looking at this. They want to do it. And honestly, really the headwinds right now between getting this thing fixed and where we're at now is just that it's very hard to get anything done in Congress right now because of the macro political situation. If Congress could just buckle down and do their job and get laws passed, I think we'd have a shot at getting this thing fixed. So what's the get revert then? If we're going to try to use some software terminology, how do we? We just need to delete Section 1201. There's no reason for this law at all.

Do you replace it? It doesn't need to be replaced. It doesn't need to delete section 1201. There's no reason for this law at all. Yeah. Do you replace it? It doesn't need to be replaced. It doesn't need to be there because what section 1201 says is it's illegal to circumvent a lock. It doesn't say like, if you took a copy of pick a movie, uh, Mulan, you take a copy of Mulan and you copy it and you sell it. That's that you're violating copyright. That's either there's $150,000 per infringement fine.

You can get a jail for 12 years. Like there's serious fines for this. We don't need to also make it illegal to make the software to copy Mulan. We can just make it illegal to do the infringement. And so there's a variety of fixes that have been proposed over the years. The simplest thing would be to just get rid of it practically that it's going to be hard to get that all the way through Congress. And so we have a more nuanced fix that, that has been proposed. That's what we're working on.

When will that happen based upon what you know in estimates? Yeah, that's a great question. In a decade or when? It could be any day. I mean, in terms of being- A bill could be introduced any day, but actually getting it moved through, it's unlikely that a whole lot is going to move through Congress until after the election. Yeah. Because, right, the Republicans don't want to pass something and give Biden a win that he can run on.

And so you're probably in stasis with kind of any legislation in Congress through the election. Yeah. It's such a weird thing, too, to be just a person trying to do their thing. And then you've got like this ebb and this flow. And the ebb is that last year of a president's term and whether or not they'll be re-elected and like that last year really is like a stale year even that first year sort of like get a lot of stuff done that last year they're in before re-election comes to play or a new election comes in play is like well should we let all this happen because that might aid them and that's not cool like for me i was like republican or not democrat

or not just get something done that helps the people. Right. Okay. So this goes deep. DMCA 1201. We've been talking about that. I speculated it was nefarious actions, but possibly even corruption.

You push back on that. I don't disagree. You said things like the material economy. I I've never thought about the material economy. Like you have, what else can you enlighten us on? Like red pill us, red pill the entire audience on like this whole thing what are we not thinking about as just normal people who are just like trying to work hard for their families and advance their

careers and build great software and build great companies like what are we not seeing what where are blinders up for us yeah so i've got buddies who do all kinds of construction work so it was put very well to me one time he says look if you build a fence out of wood, you're renting the fence. If you build a fence out of metal, it'll last forever. Your wooden fence is going to rot. You got to paint it regularly. Just build it once, build it out of metal, make it durable. I would say the same thing.

If you buy a thing with a battery, you're just renting it. The battery is going to wear out. That's a consumable. So anything with a battery has a lifespan of between 500 and a thousand charge cycles, depending on how they configure the battery. So 500 charge cycles on AirPods is how much do you use them? A year and a half, three years, something like that. And there is no path. I have destroyed many AirPods trying to remove the batteries. There's no path to pulling the batteries out and swapping it. And so this is really a challenge. If you look at most products today come with a battery. You get a Nest thermostat, it's got a battery in it. There's a whole variety of products that have batteries in them these days. And we need to do something about that. Because having a battery glued inside the product is like buying a car with tires welded to the frame. No one would do that, right? And say, oh, your tires wore out.

Time to get a new car. That is ludicrous. No one would ever do that. But that's the world that we are in with batteries. And it's a real problem. We've been like brain swoggled into thinking that, you know, oh, your batteries run out. Let's get a new phone. Yeah, I'm with you on that.

I'm an AirPods owner and I have a charger right next to my bed. And so I put them over there on that thing on the daily. Last time I checked, there's 340, 365 days in a year. I'm joking. I know how many days were in a year. So I'm imagining like every night I'm like just chiseling down that charge cycle so like maybe a year and a half or two years you know i got life in there if that is accurate to their battery you can't replace them they're so small right i mean but like at the same time like can we just not appreciate the innovation of

like wow there's so much tech in there yeah but it didn't have to happen yeah i mean there are some products that uh have so many downstream impacts that they just shouldn't exist in the first place. Okay. It's illegal to make something that pollutes the groundwater. It's the same thing. AirPods flat out as a product should be banned the way that they are. And I think Europe will. Go deeper. Tell us the details. What is your reasoning for that? Well, so I'll give you an example. You got a Best Buy and you're like, I want some wireless earbuds. And you got the Samsung Galaxy Buds and you're like, I want some wireless earbuds. And you got the Samsung Galaxy Buds and you got the Apple AirPods.

Same price. You look at the Verge. They've got equivalent product reviews. They seem to be functionally equivalent products. And so if you have a Samsung phone, you get the Samsung one. If you have an iPhone, you get the Apple one, right? Done. Unbeknownst to you, if after a year and a half or three years, whatever it is, when the battery dies, with the Galaxy Buds, you squeeze them a little bit, you pop it open, you go buy $20 new batteries from iFixit or wherever, stick them in, and it continues to operate. And the AirPods, you throw them away.

And when you throw the AirPods in the trash, it goes in the trash, it goes in the trash compactor. The garbage truck compresses garbage that you throw in there, and your batteries catch on fire, and they set the garbage truck on fire. And I would encourage anyone listening, look at your local newspaper and search in your community for garbage truck fires in the last year or two. Every community in the country is having a pandemic of fires and garbage facilities and recycling centers caused by batteries in these devices. You cannot put anything with a battery in the trash. You can't put it in the recycling. It has to be handled totally separately. It has to go to electronics recyclers who also don't want to deal with AirPods because they're not profitable for them to manage. So this is a product that at end of life is hazardous and it's screwing you out of

money because you're gonna spend 179 for airpods the only last two years this is crazy it's absolutely crazy it should have a big disclaimer when you're at best buy and you're gonna make the choice do i go left or do i go right it should be clear but it's not and i think samsung is being idiotic by not advertising how easy it is to swap the batteries on them. It's a major miss. I mean, wow. So why is Apple not being held then to a standard that says like an end of life standard? I feel this way about even recyclable product packaging. Like there's so much products that are packaged and things like why in the world? Like I just want the thing, not all the package.

I get it to me safely that it doesn't break. I can tell you exactly why. Tell me why. There's a guy named Walter Alcorn. Walter Alcorn works for the Consumer Technology Association in D.C. He wears fancy suits. He's in D.C. Probably most states have introduced some kind of extended producer responsibility law

that would require products like AirPods. Companies would have to pay in recycling. It might require more labeling. It would fund recycling programs. Walter spends all his time flying around different states and making sure they don't pass those laws. And Walter's salary at the CTA is funded by the tech companies led by Apple. And he's very good at it.

And for a long time, there were states passing more extended producer responsibility electronics recycling laws. And there haven't been very many passed in the last decade because he's done his job very well i couldn't help but uh ask chat gpt really quickly because sometimes when i'm on these calls i will just say tell me more about x and that's what i did here i said tell me more about walter alcorn what does chat gpt have to say well i'm not gonna read the whole thing is it's it's just too much but it said in particular in describing who he is, it says, in quotes, For instance, he has served on various boards and commissions related to environmental policy, urban planning, and community development, reflecting his commitment to environmental sustainability and community engagement. Now, based on what you said about this person, it seems like maybe that's a skewed description

of what he does. That may be what he does, but that's not the effects of his actions based upon what you've just said. Because if he goes around flying everywhere to ensure that these laws aren't passed or bills aren't passed or whatever, then the problem remains.

Like having an end-of-life product like AirPods go into the trash and set a trash compactor on fire. Now, at the same time, maybe people don't care because the person who's driving that truck is less of a person because they're a trash person. I'm not saying that. I'm saying maybe they're thinking that because, well, you would have to assume they just don't care about the little people, the people doing the work, right?

Just driving the trash truck out there, taking care of everybody's things. You know what I mean? Like maybe they think that. I don't know. But what a shame. Yeah. Well, and it's frustrating because you have a lot of really fantastic environmental organizations and local waste management organizations trying to do the right thing and trying to set things up. And they run into the buzzsaw of opposition to new rules.

Industry's general stance is, hey, let us do our work. Let's try to minimize regulation. And I can empathize with that as a business owner, absolutely. But when you get situations, when you get externalities, there was a recycling center in the Bay Area that caught on fire, burned to the ground a handful of years ago. And they have video of a consumer electronics device, kind of looks like a tablet, going through the shredder. And then you have a battery that goes into a shredder. It's already got maybe a bunch of suspended metal dust in the air.

The battery provides a spark and you get an explosion. In this case, the whole facility burned to the ground. And they have been told that if they have another fire, they will never be able to get insurance again. So now you're in a situation where you have an entire Bay Area affluent community that might not be able to have municipal recycling anymore because they can't get insurance to operate their facility. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, that's a whole other thing that's, I guess, several layers adjacent to right to repair and the movement you're a part of and the bills you're helping get passed and laws you're getting in place. But is this idea of recycling generally? I feel like it's, you know, you read headlines and are the headlines true? And there's some headlines, for lack of a better term, saying that recycling is a scam, basically. Well, recycling electronics is not a scam. We should, can and should recycle electronics. For sure.

The problem is when you glue batteries into it, it's like, right? I mean, just imagine like trying to recycle propane canisters and you want to take like, it's metal. It ought to be recyclable, but it could have flammable gas inside and you can't take a propane canister and chuck it into a shredder.

Really bad things can happen. It's the same thing with batteries. And I can show you video after video. I love to show people videos of recycling facilities, battery recycling facilities on fire, because it looks like a firework factory that's on fire. It's incredible, the energy and what happens as a result. It's very challenging to manage and recycle these batteries. Wow. So who takes responsibility for those fires? It has to be the folks who made money in the first place making and selling them to us. That's what I was going to ask you. Like who, how can we, I mean, we said Apple several times.

I'm curious if there's other brand names, not to keep slapping them around. Well, I would pick, the brand name is every single company that sells a phone with a battery that's glued in, which is every phone on the market right now. Wow. How do we make that illegal? So we've done it. So Europe is banning glued in batteries starting in 2027. And there's probably two reasons why.

One, repairable. Right. But then also the fires. Yes. Right. The responsibility of the end of life. Yeah. We just have to flat out stop gluing batteries into products.

How can we make companies responsible for the end of life of a product? Like even if it was a scenario where it does make sense to say, OK, in this case, a gluten battery just is better. And let's just say we buy that. Right. And we're like, OK, cool. You won the argument. You've got it. But now you have to be responsible. Fine. This thing, end of life, it has no recyclability to it in terms of having the battery replaced or whatever it might be. You've got to take it back, and you've got to be responsible for taking it back and properly disposing of the thing or finding another use for it. How do we do that? Yes, it's a legal framework called extended producer responsibility.

And the idea is you hold manufacturers responsible at the end of life for manufacturing the product in the first place. There are 25 states that have electronics extended producer responsibility laws. But unfortunately, those laws are kind of frozen in time two decades ago and they're not getting updated. So, for example, in California, when you buy a TV, you pay an extra couple dollars that goes into a recycling. And that goes to additionally fund recyclers over and above the raw commodity value. Because most of the time, recyclers are not funded. They pick up your recycling, it's free. The recycling is not funded. They have to make money off of the commodity value. So if my microphone here, if I send it in to recycle, they're going to take the steel and aluminum and the copper in that, and they'll make, maybe there's 50 cents of raw material in this microphone and that's the most they're going to make unless there's an

extended producer responsibility funding model from the manufacturer and that's kind of why they say recycling is a scam because you have to be willing to put the work in to find the value of this commodity that's no longer valuable to somebody else that originally bought it right or the company that made it? The term recyclable is really an economic term. The question is, is it economically viable to recycle? Am I going to get more value, commodity value, out of this thing

than the effort of collecting and processing? And so there's some products, the answer is yes. Cardboard generally is very profitable to recycle. Output on the other side and so everybody loves recycling cardboard other products it's more tenuous glass is kind of on the border line recycling like uh electronics like classic old electronics the old ones with lots of like ram chips with the gold connectors that's actual gold you look inside it it's gold that's very

profitable they love doing that but when you get to some of the smaller new electronics, there's very little gold and copper in it. And you have batteries glued into something like an AirPods. What's the commodity value in an AirPods? Far less than the time and effort involved in dealing with that safely. It's all about dollars in, dollars out. What's the cost to collect and process? And then what's the commodity value I'm going to get on the other side? What's up, friends? I'm here with one of my new friends, Zane Hamilton from CIQ. So Zane, we're coming up on a hard deadline with the CentOS end of life later this year in July, and there are still folks out there considering what their next move should be. Then

last year, we had a bunch of change around Red Hat Enterprise Linux that makes it, quote, less open source in the eyes of the community, with many saying, Red Hat is open source, but where is the source and why can't I download and install it? Now, Rocky Linux is fully open source and CIQ is a founding support partner that offers paid support for migration, installation, configuration, training, etc. But what exactly does an enterprise or a Linux sysadmin get when they choose the free and open source Rocky Linux and then ultimately the support from CIQ if they need it. There's a lot going on in the enterprise Linux space today. There's a lot of end of life of CentOS. People are making decisions on where to go next. The standard of what enterprise Linux looks like tomorrow is kind of up in the air.

What CIQ is doing is we're trying to help those people that are going through these different decisions that they're having to make and how they go about making those decisions. And that's where our expertise really comes into play. A lot of people who have been through very complex Linux migrations, be it from the old days of migrating from AIX or Solaris onto Linux, and even going from version to version, because to be honest, enterprise Linux version to version has not always been an easy conversion. It hasn't been. And you will hear that from us. Typically, the best idea is to do an in-place upgrade. Not always a real easy thing to do, but what we've done is we have started looking at

and securing a path of how can we actually go through that? How can we help a customer who's moving from CentOS 7 because of the end of life in July of this year? What does that migration path look like? And how can we help? And that's where we're looking in ways to help automate from an admin perspective. If you're working with us, we've been through this.

We can actually go through and build out that new machine and do a lot of the backend manual work for you so that all you really have to do at the end of the day is validate your applications up and running in the new space. And then we automate the switch over. So we've worked through a lot of that. There's also the decisions you're making around, I'm paying a very large bill for something

I'm not necessarily getting the most value out of. I don't want to continue down that path. We can help you make that shift over to an open source operating system, Rocky Linux, and help drive what's next, help you be involved in a community, and help make sure that that environment you have is stable. It's going to be validated by the actual vendors that you're using today. And that's really where we want to be as a partner

from not just an end user perspective, but as an industry perspective, we are working with a lot of those top tier vendors out there of certifying Rocky, making sure that it gets pushed back to the RESF, making sure that we can validate that everything is there and secure that needs to be there and helping you on that journey of moving. And that's where we see IQ really show our value on top of an open source operating system is we have the expertise. We've done this before. We're in the trenches with you and we're defining that path of how to move forward. Okay, ops and sysadmin folks out there, what are you choosing? CentOS is end of life soon. You may

be using it, but if you want a support partner in the trenches with you, in the open source trenches with you, check out CIQ. They're the founding support partner of Rocky Linux. They've stood up the RESF, which is the home for open source enterprise software, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, that is. They've helped to orchestrate the Open ELA, a collaboration created by and upheld by CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE. Check out Rocky Linux at RockyLinux.org, the RESF at RESF.org. And of course, if you need support, check out our friends

at CIQ at CIQ.com. What's the future of all this? Can you forecast a decade from now? quality high quality products to buy and use and enjoy to how it affects the long-term just the long-term economies and even the way that these companies profit and work yeah so the question is how do we align the incentives better because it's not like these companies are sitting there in a smoke-filled room saying how do i wreck the planet they're not starting from an evil perspective but their incentive is to sell more products and they're also reacting to how people interact in the market.

And so right now, consumers don't have the information that they need to send the signals to the manufacturers to build better products. So you're looking at the Galaxy Buds versus the AirPods, and you don't know. I bet the Galaxy Buds work fine with an iPhone. I had no idea about this. I bet some people would love to buy that and then have a product that would last longer. Yeah, nobody would. So what we need is a repair score next to the price. So when you go to buy a product, it should say, hey, this is an eight out of 10, this is a three out of 10. And then you know, like, well, I don't care if this is fixable,

or maybe I really do care. I'm spending a lot of investing in it. I want it to last a long time. And so this is not a novel idea. France implemented this law about three years ago. And France rolled out a rule for cell phones and laptops and a bunch of other product categories that says you have to have, they call it the Indice of Repairability. It is a scorecard that factors in. Is service manuals available? Can you get parts quickly?

How easy is it to take it apart? And so if you go to apple.fr and you look at an iPhone, look at the price, the repair index is right next to the price on apple.fr. And if you go into the French equivalent of Best Buy at retail next to the price, it's got the repair index next to it. So we worked with the French government and helped them technically build and develop the scoring system. This is going to be integrated Europe-wide in coming years. It's going to be built into the European Eco Index.

So there's going to be a variety of information available when you go to buy an electronic product in Europe, and that will include repairability. So then the question is, how do we do that in the good old U.S. of A? Because all of us are not shopping for electronics in France. And the answer there is the Federal Trade Commission. So you know how you go and you buy a water heater and there's a yellow sticker on it that says how much energy it's going to consume over its life? Yeah. So that's a program called

Energy Guide and it's run by the FTC. So they already are in the business of labeling products and giving consumers information. So along with all of our friends on the internet over the last couple months, we gathered 60,000 signatures asking the FTC to do a repair scoring system like this. And just at the end of February or beginning of February, we delivered the signatures to them. And now the FTC has said they're considering a formal rulemaking process

where they could maybe develop and then require a repair scoring system like this on products in the U.S. So there's precedent. We do this for appliances. Why can't we do it for everything else? I think it's possible, and we're working on it. Yeah.

I just don't think it should be that far of a stretch to say, if you want to make a product that has an end of life that is basically dangerous, you should be responsible for taking it back in so many shape or form, especially someone at the scale of Apple. Yeah. Well, feel free to give Walter an email and tell him that. Maybe I will. We'll see what happens there. I don't think I'll listen to you, but feel free to give it a try. Why is that person the gatekeeper to change though? Like what is a good salesperson? Like what is it that he's got that no one else can, where he's able to like, sort of freeze, you mentioned being frozen in time, keep these things frozen?

Yeah. So what happens is, you know, politicians are, they're trying to get things done through consensus. So most of the time, you know, someone comes and says, Hey, we should name our post office after, you know, this local worker. I'm like, Hey, everybody's excited. Let's do it. So those laws sail through. Then you get one that's like, hey, everybody's excited. Let's do it. So those laws sail through. Then you get one that's like, hey, we should require manufacturers to pay up front for recycling. The manufacturer's like,

well, that's going to be an onerous burden. There's all kinds of reasons we don't want that. And so Walter is the guy, and there's a bunch of other folks that show up and fight new regulations that might impact the tech industry. And knee-jerk, they oppose any ideas, whether they're good or not,

because it's additional regulation. So I said that we've introduced hundreds of right to repair bills over the years. Well, that has meant hundreds of hearings. So I've gone and testified to all kinds of these. And just about every single one, I've been there arguing for right to repair. And Walter, there's been a bunch of other folks, have been on the other side saying, no, we shouldn't. And so now these politicians have to make a choice. They have to make a value judgment of who's telling them the truth. And do they want to put in the effort of doing what we're asking for and also potentially upsetting some very large economic actors? And so the answer for a long time was, no, let's just take the easy path and we'll skip it this

time. Now we have enough momentum on our side that New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon have now passed right to repair laws. And we think more are coming. So you're the CEO of iFixit. Does iFixit cover these costs for you? How do you fund your advocacy? Yeah, when you buy tools from iFixit, that's who you're doing is funding our work. So you can tell I spend a lot of time on this.

We have a small team internally that works on these issues. We have someone full-time in Brussels working on things like the gluten battery ban. And then we work on policy here. And then we also have our volunteer coalition and members of repair.org that chip in and help. So it really is a industry-wide collaboration. But yeah, I mean, any money that you spend that I fix, it goes directly to fund our advocacy work.

Well, good thing I bought mine direct then. I didn't buy it from Amazon. I bought it from you all directly. Well, I appreciate that. Bezos doesn't need it. Well, I figured, you know, just because it's available on Amazon, should I buy it on Amazon? You know, like, because if I can go direct, why not go direct? Yeah. Support indie e-commerce. Appreciate it. Yeah, for sure.

For sure. You know, I'm not even sure of all the things you do. Like, what else do you do as a company that you make? Like, what is your economics as a company? How do you all make money? Is it just simply tools? What else? I know you've got masks.

They're all sort of like some sort of hardware artifact to repair something. Tell me more. more yeah so we think about it as we we give away the bits and sell the atoms so all the information everything on iFixit is free we don't run ads it's just like wikipedia open free repair manual for everything we really want to be truly comprehensive with repair information for everything and then we cross link those with parts and tools and the hope is that that also is useful content so uh if you're if you're looking at how do I fix a screen in my laptop, we'll link you to a screen. You can buy that screen from us if you want. And optionally, we can send it to you with the tools you need to do the repair.

So that's, you know, our business is split between the parts and the tools that we sell. But that's how we make our money. At the beginning, we thought about running it as a nonprofit like Wikipedia. And, you know, I could put my face up every December and we could do a fundraising drive and decided, you know, repair is a little bit different than Wikipedia because in order to repair things, you really like the information isn't enough. You also need the parts and tools. So we see providing parts, tools, and information altogether as part of the service of enabling repair. Yeah. I'm looking through just a

lot of the stuff you have that's like not tooling it's a google pixel 7 pro screen it's genuine you've got a macbook air 13 inch late 2010 2017 battery whole kit to do an aftermarket battery replacement if you want to you know but like if you buy the new m1, M2, M3, whatever they've got, I don't know. Can you replace batteries on current Apple Silicon Macs? You can. You absolutely can. You can. Okay.

And so those will be here eventually. What stops? We'll have them, yeah. Yeah, so the thing that stops you with those is just the glue. So when we sell battery kits for modern MacBooks, which absolutely never, ever throw away a MacBook. It's totally worth your while to replace the glue. So when we sell battery kits for modern MacBooks, which absolutely never, ever throw away a MacBook, it's totally worth your while to replace the battery. Unfortunately, the glue is kind of hard to get loose. And because the battery is so thick, it's hard to heat it. And so we include with the battery, we include a solvent. It's a chemical that you use to dissolve the glue and

make it easier to work on. So when you buy a battery kit from us, it comes with safety glasses and gloves and a solvent and, and everything that you need to kind of get through the glue, get the old battery out and then replacement glue strips to glue the new battery in. What does it take to make profitable products that you can sell? Like, it sounds like such detail oriented, high skill,

high investment. Like you just mentioned, like we include a solvent. We've thought about this. It sounds like such detail-oriented, high-skill, high-investment. You just mentioned we include a solvent. We've thought about this. We've tried to fix it ourselves. What does it take for you to run a successful company? Yeah, I mean, it's painstaking detail-oriented work. It is figuring out just like what, okay, cool, we got this battery for this laptop. Which different laptops is it compatible with? We sell thousands of different batteries, And so identifying the cross compatibility is really

important. So that's the objective is to present it to you. You go into iFixit, you plug in your device model. We find you the part. We say, yes, we have complete confidences. We'll work in your device. We'll guarantee compatibility. We'll put a lifetime warranty on the part. That's the experience we want to provide to people. Behind the scenes, it's a lot of database munging and spreadsheets and parsing opaque information. Sometimes in the case of Apple products, it involves painstakingly swapping and testing. Is this particular antenna or ribbon cable, does it work in the 15 and the 15 Pro? Does it work in the, you know, which different versions is it working? And so our technicians are painstakingly testing all of that and then creating compatibility spreadsheets.

And then that, at the end of the day, that just adds up to, you know, this cohesive experience where we tell you whether it will fit or not. I love that you have the part as an option as well as the fix-it kit. Because here I'm thinking, thinking gosh I've got a Nintendo Switch for my son thankfully we haven't had a battery issue yet we primarily leave it as a console connected to its dock on our TV but it does move around sometimes so I'm I'm sure the battery will eventually die down I'm looking through the list I'm like wow there's a Nintendo Switch console battery kit that gives you all the tooling,

which, you know, I own some of those things already because I already told you I bought your Pro Bundle. But then you can also just get the part only. I guess I would just Google it. Like Nintendo Switch battery replacement. Would I find you if I Googled that?

Like, are you? I hope so. But I would encourage people just if you have something broken, just go to iFixit and search for it. Google search is so inconsistent. It's all over the map. And I spend a lot of my life.

So what was the result? You're first. Okay. The exact. If you search for the exact title, we should be first. I'd also like try how you'd normally search for it. Well, I did. I searched exactly what your title is, which is Nintendo Switch battery replacement, thankfully.

And Craig Lloyd is who did this and nine other contributors. And it was last updated March 6th, 2024. So that was yesterday. Someone's tweaking that page yesterday. All right. Apparently. Yeah, apparently. Well, my son's birthday is today.

So maybe that's why. Maybe that's why. Oh, there you go. Well, we did it just for his birthday. I mean, so that's part of it. iFixit is a wiki, right? So the original repair procedure that we publish is not the best one. It's version one.

And then over time, it gets better. So if you're trying a repair on iFixit and you notice an error or something is different, great, hit edit and update it. It happens sometimes. Manufacturers change products with different versions. And so the one I opened and wrote the manual might have had six screws. You might have, and I put that immediately on my refrigerator. I'm like, yes, I got my fist up. I'm a fixer.

I can do this. And honestly, now that we're – I wanted to say this early in the show, but we've been so focused on the bigger picture here. I got to credit you all for giving me the courage to – or part of the many things giving me the courage to build my own Linux box and PC boxes because your guys were so good at dismantling this Mac mini that I was like, well, if I'm doing this, now I have confidence to actually build something. I never had that confidence before to say, let me source the CPU, the motherboard. I just never did it.

I had just always bought a Mac computer or a Dell computer back in the day when I was on Windows. Yes, there was a day when I was on Windows. And I want to say, like, you know, you're a part of the many layers of gaining confidence and trust in the fact that I can do some of these things myself. And now I'm like, well, if I wanted to build another, you know, now I'm deep into Homelab and building my own things and building up my Homelab. Like, it's just like a gateway drug in a way or a gateway path to this idea. Are you pretty popular? this idea are you pretty popular like are you pretty

like is i fix it i mean i feel like the more of the people in the world should know this because there's a refrigerator epidemic like i don't know how much you pay attention to like that i call my refrigerator cadillac because it costs so dang much i'm like and my sons have remote control cars in the house i'm like don't hit the refrigerator because it's my cadillac you know yeah i think it was like three and a like, don't hit the refrigerator because it's my Cadillac, you know? Yeah. I think it was like three and a half thousand dollars, like a KitchenAid. I mean, it's our primary refrigerator, you know? It's the one we have in our kitchen.

Like, I think some people have two. We have, we happen to have two because we have a large family and people come over and we need room for Thanksgiving dinner and stuff like that. But anyways, aside from having two, like my KitchenAid in my refrigerator, or my kitchen is, my refrigerator my kitchen is uh it's my cadillac like i i don't want to have to repurpose or rebuy that thing because it's just so expensive and there's a refrigerator epidemic where there's failure after failure after failure and like some people want to say okay well it was because of the pandemic and you know all the

shifting with the parts manufacturing and distribution you're shaking your head no are you in that realm too like does i fix it okay tell me oh very much so yeah no you look search for ice makers on they fix it okay uh yeah no we have thousands of parts for fixing appliances i've i've actually what i'm spending much of my time now is parsing through databases of appliance we have i think we've identified 100,000 different refrigerator model numbers in our database. We're adding more all the time. So yeah, I Fixed Admission is to enable you to fix everything. We take that pretty seriously.

We're the largest database of power tool parts, of medical equipment, you name it. But refrigerators in particular, we're very fixated on right now. Part of this is just as we add electronics to more and more products, they're getting shorter lived. Refrigerators used to last 30 years. Now they last five. Why is that? Well, it's because we put tablets inside them.

Now you have to worry about security updates. LG's website says, check for security updates for your refrigerator every other month. I kid you not. That's in their FAQ. And then what's their plan to replace capacitors when they fail? So these are things that we need to be thinking about. And I think we in the software and electronics industry bear some responsibility for this.

We're doing the hot, you know, cool new things. We don't talk about longevity. And then everyone else wants to make their boring old product, hip and cool new gadget. And there's a lot of shortcomings that come with it. Yeah. Well, the refrigerator in particular is like, I don't know. And by, I might by no means a Freon expert or how a refrigerator works, but I got to imagine that we've had these things for a while now. And the main innovation has been like windows to see what's inside. Maybe your grocery

list added to it, you know, things like that. But like the actual refrigeration, you might have multiple fans, you might have multiple zones, you might have the open drawer, which can be either a refrigerator or a freezer. And I get all that. So there's a lot of high tech things happening in there or more, let's just say complex, not so much high tech. How do we allow things like this to be manufactured that doesn't have, I suppose, a standard? It seems like planned obsolescence or just straight up don't care, sell an expensive thing and just don't care because you're a corporation, you can hide behind a warranty. I mean, there's people who hunt down their warranty. And like you said before, if I'm an X, Y, or Z, how far away is the Apple store?

Same thing here. How close is a, in Z, how far away is the Apple store? Same thing here. How close is a, in quotes, authorized repair person? And I was just watching an episode of, I don't know if you call them episodes or not, I guess a video of Louis Rossman's. It was a Samsung repair person, authorized repair person. He put a box cutter knife through the person's TV so that he can get off earlier? Like there's, I'll link it up for the show notes, but like, is the authorized dealer slash repair person or folks even for you so that you can get your warranty to cover? Like, sure.

Things break, get it. Totally get it. But shouldn't it be standardized to be built in a way so that it can be repaired and not have to be down for months or weeks with a refrigerator. Yeah. But so the problem up front is you don't know. And so if you're a company, you have a choice A or choice B, which one do I get? And people don't know, then it's random and there's no incentive to make the more repairable product. It is more effort. Sometimes it's more cost. And so we have to find a way as a market,

as consumers, to reward the companies that do a good job. Patagonia makes products that are really designed to stand the test of time. They charge a premium for it. People generally reward them for that. Cool. How do we do that in the refrigerator world, right? Which fridges are more repairable or going to last longer than others? So how do we find that out? Consumer reports? Well, that's why we need repair labeling. It's hard. Consumer reports doesn't factor it in. Wirecutter doesn't factor it in.

I can show you product after product that Wirecutter has recommended that have failed because Wirecutter's review is, this is what it's like the first week you have the thing, right? They spend a lot of time in a week, but they don't spend time longer than that. So the easiest proxy in a world where we don't have a repair scoring system

is to look up front and see, can I get repair parts for that thing? If I'm going to buy a $3,500 refrigerator, are they selling parts for it? Are they selling parts for the equivalent of this that they sold seven years ago? Are those still available? That's how you start to get a feeling

of what that company's ecosystem is like. I wouldn't even know where to begin. They just pick the new thing and just Google blah, blah, blah, spare parts and see if they're out there. I'll give you an example. Shark Ninja makes a lot of plastic blenders and vacuums and that kind of thing. It's impossible to find parts for them. Well, speaking of them, I just went to blend something this morning on one of their things and the blender didn't work anymore. I just bought it a year ago. I was so upset about that. I hope the company comes around because we've

written lots of repair guides for their stuff on i fix it but right now their products are effectively disposable because i don't know where to tell you to get the spare part for your blender they should if you go with a higher end if you got a blend tech or what's the you know one of the higher end blenders those companies do make parts available they do sell them so it can be you know flip of the coin you don't know and that's why up front you have to do your research before you buy the thing it's just unfortunately it's a little hard to do the research that's right so we publish repair scores on iFixit we've been scoring things for a while so we we you know we rate all the new smartphones when

they come out we give it a score from one to ten so we're trying to help uh but i i'm not consumer reports i can't score everything in the world. Yeah, I know. It's a lot of work to do the things that the verge does, for example, which they do a great job of from a media standpoint, gauging and judging and you know, their media model or their funding models different than yours or mine might be.

Yeah. And I would give Sean Hollister credit at the verge because he will disassemble products and talk about the insides of them. They don't see very many tech journalists do this, but are there places like I know in software engineering and software development and the tech world, so to speak, there's lots of conferences or gatherings, community gatherings.

If someone was like, listen to this, they want to get steeped in this beyond just simply going to iFixit and following you and the different things that you are publishing and what we point to from this podcast to get involved into the in quotes community. Where does this community hang out? If you're listening to this and you're a repair shop or you're a repair professional, I would encourage you to come to the Electronics Reuse Summit or ereuseconference.com. That's kind of the closest thing. It's in Austin in October. I'm going to go there then. I live in Austin. Okay. Well, come on down.

You'll be there? Yeah, I'll be there. So ereuse.com. Ereuseconference.com. Okay. So I went through the wrong thing. Ereuse Conference. It's being renamed the Electronic Sustainability Summit. But that really is where the repair shops come to hang out. I'd love to definitely dig deeper into this because I've, for many, many years now, I've had like a, you know, peripheral.

I've had an interest, but a peripheral vantage point, I suppose, to, you know, this movement. And I feel like even here on this podcast and what we do around here, especially this kind of conversation is not software developer at large kind of conversation, but it's very much steeped in the things we care about, you know, as technologists, you know, I wear ear pods, Jared wears ear pods. I'm sure that somebody is listening right now with a set of ear pods on or air pods. That's not your pods, air pods. Okay. So a lot to do. You kind of red pilled me a little bit here. I've already been eating a red pill on this movement anyways.

What is a good next step? If someone was like, okay, maybe this conference, the electronics reuse conference here in Austin later this year, October 22nd to the 24th year in Austin, Texas. It's one event. the entire industry is there apparently that's what it says on the website just reading it for you all what else where else should folks go what what's a good place to go further i mean i think the first thing is the next thing you have that breaks just try to fix it the worst that happens is it stays broken right that's fine you maybe break a little more. That's okay. It's already broken. Beyond that, if you really want to get involved, get involved with your state right to repair organization.

So in every state, if you go to oregon.repair.org or connecticut.repair.org, texas.repair.org, that will connect you with a form to write your legislator. Just fill out and drop them a note and just say, hey, I really support the Right to Repair Bill. Right now, 27 out of 50 states have introduced bills so far this year. We expect more are coming. And every single one of those needs support from citizens to get engaged and push their elected representatives. Who is behind Repair.org? Yeah, so Repair.org is a trade association representing repair shops.

I'm on the board. They're advocates and folks. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, their legal director is on the board. Consumer Reports is very involved. Other organizations that do repair in data centers. There's folks who do ag equipment, right to repair advocacy. It's a great organization. And it's almost entirely focused on on advocacy and policy work and are they involved at all in this upcoming conference too or even

yeah they'll be they'll be exhibiting okay and they'll be speaking usually we have a kind of right to repair state of the union kind of round table and talk about what's going on well what's left what's left unsaid what do we not cover that we can what do you want to stand on the way out i think it's pretty comprehensive i mean i think it not cover that we can, what do you want to say on the way out? I think it's pretty comprehensive. I mean, I think it's just like we can make the world we want to live in. So decide how important a repairability is to you. There are brands increasingly starting to pay attention to this. Lenovo just announced their flagship business laptop has upgradable Ram.

Again, they had taken the way they brought it back and it got a nine out of 10 on our scorecard, which is really good. So companies are starting to pay attention and we need to reward them for that and continue to demand it from the rest of the companies

we interact with. Yeah. All right. We'll leave it there, Kyle. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk. Thank you for giving me a deep dive into you.

Like I said, I'm a fan of iFixit. I hadn't gotten the deeper backstory, so I was very encouraged to have this conversation with you. Yeah. And I got my magnet over there in my refrigerator. I'm a fixer.

I'm a fixer. Sounds great. Thanks a lot, Adam. It was great to meet you. Thanks, Kyle. Well, I have to be honest because I'm an honest person, of course, as you know. I didn't know Kyle Weins until this conversation. I had been a purchaser, a consumer, a fan of iFixit.com, even a user of their tooling

and did not know how deep Kyle went into this rabbit hole. My gosh, we have a right to repair and we have a right to fix the things we have. We have a right to have Apple and others who decide to glue in batteries and blow up garbage trucks and not take the responsibility to plan for the recycling of their electronics to do so. It is a blight on the world

and they are leaving their footprints with our dollars. Okay, off the soapbox. That was an awesome show. Had such a fun time talking this through with Kyle. And I hope that you learned something along with me in this episode. If Kyle and his work is new to you, his advocacy, ifixit.com, anything whatsoever.

Come in Slack and say hello. So many people in there ready to say hello to you. changelog.com slash community. You are welcome. Hang your hat. Call it home. No imposters at all. You, yes, you listen to this.

Yeah, you, you're welcome there. So please come changelog.com slash community. Okay. One more thing. I started the show off kind of joking about an ad for the tech bundle, the pro tech bundle. As a matter of fact, I don't, I don't really care if you go and buy it. You should go and buy it. if you need some good tooling. I bought it. And now that I know that purchase funds directly, especially since I bought it directly from iFixit.com, I feel that's kind of cool to fund his advocacy and their advocacy for this right to repair movement and to have people like him on the front lines, fighting for you, fighting for me, and fighting for our future generation's rights to the technology we buy and use every single day. So go buy it if you want to.

Don't. Either way, I like it and you might like it too. There you go. But what I can say are true advertisements is for our friends at Tailscale, our friends at Sentry, and our friends at CIQ and Rocky Linux. Love Tailscale. You know my tail net is near and dear to my heart. And of course, that $100 coupon at Sentry using the code CHANGELOG to get $100 off the team plan. That's so cool. I love that too. And of course, CIQ's hard work to stand up and support Rocky Linux, the free and open source enterprise Linux platform.

Wow. Some good work out there. And I'm happy to have those types of folks as sponsors of our content. Because I love that stuff. They're amazing. And of course, the home of changelog.com, fly.io. Go check them out. Fly.io. Launch that for free. Near users. Too easy. So fun. We do it. We love it. You should check it out if you haven't done so already. And last but

not least, Breakmaster Cylinder. Those beats, they bang. They bang so hard and we love them. Okay, I'm done. That's it. The show's done and stay tuned for Friends. It's a good one. Bye, Friends. Game on.