The Vergecast - Fixing your own gadgets, from HomePods to Harmony remotes

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of home theater remotes: repairing broken gadgets and why you should do it.  01:55 - David Pierce talks with Nic of Nic’s Fix, a repair service specializing in Apple���s original HomePod.  Nicsfix.com New Apple HomePod 2023 Comparison and Teardown; Is it better? Is it fixed??  28:15 - Alex Cranz talks with Quin at Harmony Remote Repair, who offers fixes for the discontinued universal remote from Logitech.  harmonyremoterepair.com Logitech officially discontinues its Harmony remote 47:07 - iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens joins the show to talk about the state of fixing your own stuff and what’s next in the fight for the right to repair. Rebble with a Cause: How Pebble Watches Were Granted an Amazing Afterlife | iFixit News  New York breaks the right to repair bill as it’s signed into law Email us at [e-mail] or call the Vergecast hotline at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and you are listening to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Home Theater Remotes. And I'm your friend Alex Cranz, and I am currently sanded my plupy. My plupy is a 3D printed trackball. I've talked about it on the show more than once. I love the thing, but sometimes the plastic gets a little rough, and I got to sand it and make it smooth. That is what I'm doing right now. But one of the reasons I really like the plupy isn't because I have to sand it sometimes. It's because it's open source.

Any part of it I want to repair or modify, I can. I don't have to ask permission. I can just go do it. And there's a ton of documentation online that lets me do it. But a lot of gadgets aren't built like that, right? Most companies don't want you to repair their gadgets. They want you to go and buy new gadgets, hopefully from them when your current gadget breaks. So today on the show, we're going to be talking to some of the people who are out there repairing those gadgets,

repairing things like the HomePod and the Logitech Harmony Remote. And we're also going to be talking to the guys at, I fix it because like us, they care a lot about the right to repair. It's a very exciting episode. You're going to have a lot of fun. I'm going to get back to sanding this plupy. Stay tuned. The show's coming up right after this. Get smooth. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-St. Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Okay, welcome back. As I mentioned before, we're doing a whole episode about Do It Yourself Gadda Repairs. Though it may not be as easy to fix your old tech as it used to be, we're still seeing a lot of independent technicians opening up things like your laptops, phones, smart speakers, and more trying to figure out the best way to make them work. And that brings me to our first guest for the day, Nick from Nick's fix. So my phone name is actually Dominic Splatstozer, but you guys can just call me Nick for short. Nick started to spend his free time taking apart the original home pod. Way back in what was it, 2018.

After fixing a few of the broken ones, he started his own business. doing it. Nick offers a service where you can send him your busted home pod and he'll take it apart, repair it for you and send it back. This is something you probably get with AppleCare, depending on what's wrong with it. But Nick offers a special feature to his repairs that most technicians don't, streaming the repair live on YouTube so you can actually watch your device getting fixed. That's actually one of my main focuses for my repair services is offering that experience to actually not just sit around and wait for it to show back up at your door fixed, but to actually be a little involved in the repair process and watch it happen live,

ask any questions that you have about it. Talking to Nick today is my good friend and yours, David Pierce. He's going to be talking to Nick all about his home pod repair business and his thoughts on how easy or complicated these things are actually to fix. Let's go ahead and roll the rest of this interview. Also, hi, David. I want to talk more about choosing homepots because homepods, because home pods are such an interesting thing to me and that like in a certain sense the home pod

was like a total miserable failure of a product right it was like it was like very good but it was too expensive not that many people bought them it was the whole thing but on the other hand every single person i know who has a home pod is like insane about it they love it they're like no you don't understand it sounds so much better than all of your like crappy google stuff people have such weird feelings about the home pod why did why did you no that's that's actually spot on i'm i'm one of those home pod fanatics yeah there you go i didn't actually buy my first one when they were first released. I was actually pretty skeptical at first, but full-time I actually work as a sales engineer at a software company and our CEO came in

one day with their home pod. And that was the first time I ever heard one. And that was also the first time I ever heard anything that sounded that good. I was just absolutely blown away that the sound that was coming from this like small mesh object on the table was just permeating so like omnidirectionally, you know? So I'd always been fascinated with them, but I never really stepped up and spent the money on one until towards the end of 2018. I bought one from Best Buy for myself as like a Christmas birthday present and I absolutely loved it. I actually ordered for Best Buy like in-store pickup. So I showed up as soon as it was ready to pick up. I grabbed it, went home, set it up, used it for a few days. And then I got an email from Best Buy a few days later saying,

hey, we noticed that you haven't picked up your home pod. We're just going to go ahead and ship it to you. And I was like, uh, okay. Yeah, that's an email you just like pretend you never saw, right? You're like, oh, I don't know what you're talking about. I never got your email. I was like, I don't know if what will actually happen or not. So lo and behold, a few days later, a second one shows up.

And that's when I got to experience what they call stereo pair for the first time, which is what allows you to basically pair two home pods together so that way you've got left and right channel versus just, mono audio out of each one. And man, if the math doesn't work out because you'd think just two speakers is two times better than one, but it's, it felt so much more than that. And that bit me. After that point, I was, I was addicted. I started looking up how I could get my hands on these for as little money as possible. Because, you know, 300 to 350 bucks a pop is, it's hard to swallow, even for how good they are. Yeah, it adds up. So I went online and I, I,

I found quite a few broken ones on eBay, and a lot of them were described as, you know, just won't power on. So I was like, okay, let me Google around a little bit and see if anybody's actually fixed this before. Lo and behold, there was this YouTube channel like Electronics Repair School or something like that, and the video title is repairing the most irreparable Apple product ever or something like that. Okay, that's tricky. That's crazy. Okay, this will be hard. Yeah, we have to melt it.

Oh, yeah, this will be a long video. It took the guy like two to four hours or something to get into it, diagnose the actual problem, fix it, and then put it back together again. And I saw that and I was like, I could probably do that a little better. Most of what I learn and what I still learn to this day is just simply through searching the internet, usually just Google, knowing how to search for what you're looking for. and, you know, weeding through the results until you find something that you can work with. And that's actually how I managed to discover the repair for one of the most common issues with

home pods being death farts. Sorry, is that the technical term? Death, death farts. We're good at this as the official term. Yeah? That's the one that I've and many others have been rolling with. So we're using it. So essentially, death farts are, you hear this sort of like really loud buzzing sound from the home pod.

followed by an unexpected restart. And it's easier to just call it death farts because it sounds like it's a very large flatulence. And it's usually associated with the home pod failing shortly after. So hence the nickname. The reason why it happens is because there's too much what's called DC offset

being generated by the amplifier and sent into the subwoofer speaker. For a while, nobody knew how to fix this. There was one person who, theorized that it was coming from the amp chip, but again, there was no actual exact replacement for that amp chip. And I saw that as a challenge, and I took it up. I did a whole bunch of Googling just DC offset, DC offset in amplifiers. What causes DC offset? And I came across this blog post that was talking about it, and they said DC offset will get worse with heat. And that was my

Eureka moment. I was like, okay, what if I take my hot air gun and I move it around the board with my multimeter connected watching for the DC offset, until I see that offset spike? And that gave me about a quarter-sized area on the board that was really sensitive to that heat. So then what I did, to pinpoint because of the really dense component placement on these boards, I heated up my plastic tool and I would use the hot plastic tool to touch all the different components until I saw which component specifically made the DC offset spike. And that's when I found those capacitors that tend to go bad over time, slowly start to filter less and less DC voltage before that audio signal is sent through the amp and to your subwoofer speaker. And the worse those caps get,

the more DC voltage is generated. And when it reaches a certain point, the amp will actually detect that and produce that death fart behavior. So just a bit of Googling and trial and error and poking around allowed me to crack one of the toughest irreparable nuts in the home pod. It's not bad.

Yeah, so wait, you were about to tell me about the first ones you tried. I was going to ask about that, too. Like, what was that first one like? Oh, that first one, it was absolutely nerve-wracking. But I kept telling myself, you know, it's already broken. I don't have much to lose. This was actually before I even had any of the proper tools. At the time, all I had was a standard soldering iron.

I wasn't able to actually get to the component that you need to replace effectively with the soldering iron. So what I ended up doing was taking a knife and like stabbing at the diode and breaking the Bacca light casing apart on it. And then essentially just soldering a new diode on top of the broken old one. Okay. Just to see, just to test, if my suspicion was correct that most of these no power home pods were in fact caused by the same root issue. And that's what I discovered after buying a dozen or so of these broken ones is majority of them have the same issue. But nobody's even putting very great information out there on how to repair this or offering services. So that's, I saw the opportunity there and I seized it.

Did you just do the one? And then you're like, okay, this works. I can fix it. No, no. And so the first one was a huge relief because I was like, that feeling of like actually fixing something and bringing it back to life. I don't know. It's like a drug. But I felt a little more confident. So I worked on probably about a dozen more for myself. And then I built up the confidence and got down a decent technique that minimized damaging any parts on it, getting into it, you know. And then once I had what I felt like, like was a decent stockpile of spare parts, because I was a little worried about, you know, breaking people's stuff and not having anything to, you know, replace it in that, in that case. That's when I started surfing around social media like Reddit and YouTube, finding people leaving comments saying, hey, my stuff's broken, and then letting them know,

hey, I'll fix it for you if you cover shipping, totally free. Just to get my name out there, build up a reputation. And did that a few dozen times. started charging money for the repairs once I felt really confident and I started getting a lot of positive feedback on it and also knowing that the repairs actually last, that I'm not just replacing something that's going to blow up again in a few months. Yeah, all right. So walk me through the process. So one shows up in your workshop. It arrives. What do you do? So the process actually starts a little before I even have them send it in. So what I try to do is, first of all,

screen the repairs before I have people send them in because there are unfortunately still a few things that can't be fixed on them. And because there isn't a way to fix that issue, I don't have ways to fix those broken parts and then offer that as a repair economically. So what's on that list? What are like common things that you see that you're just like, I can't fix this. This is hopeless. Basically, the only issue that we haven't been able to fix are software issues with the logic board. So that could be an interrupted update, causing it to boot loop or become bricked.

The most common symptom of this being the blinking volume buttons, that's what everybody calls it. Totally. If you're experiencing boot loops or the blinking volume buttons, any kind of software issue, since there's no way to restore the software on that, that's pretty much where I say, I'm sorry, I can't do anything unless you're able to secure another home pod

and I can do the logic board. I'll just swap the logic board for you. Every other issue, be it any issues with your sound, the base, physical damage, and then most commonly no power whatsoever, all of those issues we've found repairs for. And if we can't do the board level repair, then I do have enough parts on hand to just replace the part outright. Got it. Okay.

All right. So you vet through this first process to figure out, like, is this a thing I can do or is this not a thing I can do? Exactly. Do you tell the people you can't help? just like throw it away. Godspeed. What I usually try to tell people is have hope, hang on to it if you can and wait because maybe one day we will find a repair for this or Apple may give us a way to repair this. And what's really frustrating with those ones is

there's actually a way to connect these things to your computer or Mac physically via USB. if you rip off the rubber foot on the bottom, there are a bunch of debug pins and you can essentially solder a USB cable on there. Or if you know you are and you're fancy like that, you can use that. But you can connect a USB cable to the bottom of it, plug it into your computer, and then be it a Mac or PC,

iTunes or Finder recognizes that a HomePod is connected to your machine. And Finder even gives you a button to click. It says restore. So you click it, And then it says we're unable to restore the software. I presume it's because Apple doesn't have the software available on their servers, perhaps. But we also don't have the IPSW file that you would normally use to restore essentially any other Apple product that already exists, including the HomePod Mini, actually, which is, it's, it's kind of strange because they allow you to restore the HomePod Mini, but they don't allow you to restore the original HomePod.

Oh, that is weird. Possibly maybe because they didn't anticipate anybody really getting that far. That's, yeah, that would be a very Appley explanation where they're like, ah, nobody's even going to try. But at the same time, for these issues with the software, what we suspect are software are software issues, at least. If it was as simple as restoring the software on them, then you would think they would be able to repair those in the Apple store because a lot of people go bring them into

the store and they say, we can't repair this, we just have to outright replace it for you. Got it. Okay. All right. So I guess it sounds like you probably know what the problem is for most of these things before they arrive on your workshop table. Yep. So there's no like sort of opening it up and poking around just to see what would happen most of the time, I would guess. Yep. So generally, if it's no power, even in that case, we've seen a few different root causes for no power failures. but generally I can take a pretty good guess based on the power draw from the wall exactly what has failed. So like a power draw between like three and 10 watts is usually the most common failure that we see, which is the shortage shockkey barrier diode on the amplifier board.

And then a lesser power draw of around 1 to 2 watts, more often than not is actually a shorted capacitor on the logic board. Interestingly enough, we've seen different capacity. capacitors failing on the logic board, but ultimately all causing the same no power issue. And then the third and least common being absolutely no power draw whatsoever, which is a blown fuse in the power supply. And how easy is it to actually get inside of the thing in the first place? Like Apple is not exactly famous for wanting you inside of its gadgets.

Well, when I fix it in a handful of other people were first trying to get into these things, they absolutely destroyed them and getting into them. Which, I mean, it's understandable. It's the price you pay when you don't have any information available on how to open these up. Sometimes you've got to know, you know. Right.

So after that, there was this YouTuber and Redditor, Oh, at me, Nick, who actually found a rather graceful way of opening these up without destroying them. This isn't very easy to do. I wouldn't suggest taking this apart unless the warranty is gone. The power cable.

It's not replaceable, so don't try pulling it. Actually getting inside, if you have the experience opening them up before, it's a walk in the park. Okay. But if it's your first time, you're definitely going to feel pretty nervous working around certain components. You might end up by actually breaking something, but having gone through a few hundred of them by now, it's a breeze. Like I said, it takes like 30, 45 minutes to crack it open, fix it and put it back together again. So how specialized are the tools you have for this? Is this the kind of person thing like anybody with a butter knife and a dream could do? Or do you have like a specialized tool set to make all this work?

Well, like it was with my first attempt at the very beginning, with enough motivation, you can do whatever you want. A butter knife in a dream. Exactly. Exactly. But with the right tools, nothing I have is specialized. So I've just got the standard I fix it, Jimmy tools. to crack open the top plastic, and then I use the heat gun, which is a standard tool for board level repairs, and I've got a flathead screwdriver that I used to actually pry at certain parts. And then a T6 torque screwdriver, which to that point, actually surprisingly, Apple used the same screw size, T6, for all of the screws in this device, which is quite the opposite of the 2020 MacBook Pro that I just worked on yesterday. Yeah, that's like an unusually helpful thing for

Apple to do. Yeah, it's such a strange dichotomy of both repairability and irreparability in the same product because you've got all the same screw size throughout the whole thing, but then they glue it together. Yeah, that sounds about right. So how long does this take you normally? Like, are you, are you folks, HomePod's kind of in and out in a day now for the most part? That's what I usually do, is the same day that they're delivered. I'll go ahead and set up the stream, shoot them an email letting them know when the stream's going to happen,

and then usually within a few hours, we'll get them fixed up, and then the next day we'll ship them back. More often than not, I like to, after repairs, just leave them plugged into power overnight before I just call it good after leaving it plugged in briefly

and then sending it back to them. Got it. Okay. So, and that kind of makes me wonder, like one of the things I was going to ask you is what should, Apple and other companies be doing to make this stuff more repairable? Because I think you and I probably agree that all these things should be more easily repaired. But it also sounds like you've kind of gotten to a point where it's not that hard. It's not that arduous. And that maybe like it would be

great if it wasn't glued together. But it doesn't sound like it's a gigantic issue for you to get in and repair these things anymore. Like do you wish that there were things Apple would do to make this easier on you? Yes. There's a lot of things that I wish Apple would do, of course. So yeah, we obviously we know how to fix a lot of these issues now, but it still leaves a lot of questions. Without board schematics, we don't really know why these things are failing. We can only take our best guesses. Second to that without board schematics, we don't know what we can upgrade to potentially avoid these faults from happening again in the future.

But most importantly, I think it would help if companies like Apple had people dedicated to evaluating their products before releasing them and assisting them with making them more repairable before they even put them out in the first place. Okay. Do you worry that then they'd put you out of a job, like if it was so easy to repair, no, they wouldn't need Nick to do it for them? No, I don't think so. Because at the end of the day, there's always going to keep people out there who are out of warranty, for example, and they don't want to go and pay the premium for the first party to fix it for them. and I'm here doing it in my free time. I am more than happy to charge a reasonable rate for repairs.

Have you gotten into doing other Apple products? You mentioned the MacBook and dealing with that stuff. Like I know it's a deep well of unrepairable Apple products out there. How much of that have you gotten into? Oh, for sure. So I've always been a bit of a tinkerer and self-repairer for my whole life. But recently, and this is what I say on my website too, is I specialize in HomePod repairs, but I'm also open to take a look at anything that you've got that you may also want to get fixed.

Be it an Xbox controller, we've had some of those in for stick drift repairs. We worked on an Intel Nuck, which is like a small form factor computer. Sure, yeah. And then last night was actually my first time streaming and working on a newer MacBook Pro like this, the 2020. Prior to that, I haven't touched anything newer than like 2010, 2011. So it was quite a learning experience. So now that you've seen all this, where does the home pod fit into kind of the like repairability index of all the other Apple products you've seen? Even like the HomePod mini.

I would put it a little less than average because of the software issues. If there's no recourse if the software goes awry on your home pod. So for that alone, I would knock it down a few points. But aside from that, hardware repairability-wise, we haven't run into anything that we haven't been able to fix yet. So, and what about outside of Apple stuff? Like, I think you're, I suspect, like, looking at kind of the whole world of right to repair and all this stuff.

Like, do you feel like there's a, there's a bright future for you as a person who wants to help people fix their stuff? Or is this all kind of trending in the everything is glued together and harder and harder to take apart direction? That's hard to say because it, for a while, it did feel like things were moving more more towards glued together. But then you look at the newer products that Microsoft was putting out. It looks like they're actually making it easier to repair now.

And if I'm not mistaken, they actually also have people that they work with that actually tell them how to make it more repairable too. But that's a good sign. I feel like Apple is going to be the very, very, very last company to sign on for this, would be my guess. But it does feel like it's coming. I feel like there is reason to be optimistic that by choice or not, Apple and others are going to have to start to play ball with, including with folks like you,

like do you have a sense of what it would look like if Apple was like, we welcome third-party repairs, you know, Nick, welcome to the fold. Like, would you want that? Would you want to be involved with Apple that way? That's the dream. Okay. If they actually worked with their customers in third-party repair shops and actually, you know, identify these faults and took in that feedback better, that's the dream.

Well, thank you. This was really fun. I'm really glad we got to do this. Yeah, of course. Glad I could be here. All right. Thank you, Nick, for talking with David for the show. It was a super insightful conversation. Obviously, since David recorded that interview, there's a new second generation home pot. The big home pod is back, baby. And we talked to Nick to get his thoughts on the speaker and its repairability. Nick, of course, has already done a tear-down video of it. So here's what he told us about the new home pod. So repairability does seem much easier overall. It's great to see now that everything is screwed together.

There's no more adhesive holding anything, but rather in place there's gaskets. So more people, I feel like, will be able to get these open and put them back together again without breaking things in the process. It's also really nice to see that the power cable is not only removable like the first generation was, but it's significantly easier to remove. As far as downsides, they now tie the draw strings together to keep the mesh snug, and they don't give you enough length to untie it without the strings slipping through the mesh. So we were able to stuff the mesh back into the base without it, so the end result was pretty much the same. But it is a little more tedious than it was in the first generation

where the strings were definitely just long enough for you to pull them back together and cinch that mesh back up. And then overall construction and quality, of the parts themselves felt pretty good. It's different than the first generation. It feels much more like a big mini, both in terms of the actual feel of the parts that they use, the plastics,

and also how it's put together. It's exactly like the mini. Thanks again to Nick. If you want to check out his repair service, you can go to nicksfix.com. That's a N-I-C-S-F-I-X. Only one X in there, guys. We're going to take a quick break,

and when we come back, we'll be talking about fixing the discontinued, Logitech Harmony Reboat. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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Hey guys. So we were talking about repairing the home pods. Product Apple is still selling and updating, but what about the tech that is now off the store shelves and no longer being manufactured? You know, like the Logitech Harmony remote. Logitech officially stopped supporting their universal remote control way back in April 2021.

It was super devastating for, for myself and many other Logitech Harmony Remote fans. So what happens when that remote now breaks? With a quick search, you'll probably end up on Quinn's page, Harmony Remote Repair.com. We went to, you know, a web platform, and it took off. Quinn has been repairing Harmony Remote since 2010, more than a decade before they were discontinued.

And like Nick, he gets sent gadgets from all over the place for him to fix and then send back. He just doesn't stream it. The Harmony Remote is so. such a niche gadget to dedicate to repairing. So we had to talk to Quinn about his experience fixing thousands of universal remotes. Hey, Quinn. I'm glad you could join us. Hey, thanks so much for having me. I got to say, I'm super excited. I know we were talking right before we started recording about our Harmony remotes. How many do you have, like, that you don't repair,

that you just use? Oh, really? Only two now. Okay. That makes sense. Since we've been doing this for like 13 years, you know, we sort of went through the whole gamut, you know, starting with the older Harmony 880s, 890 series, and then falling in love with the Harmony 1. Yes. Which is still actually my favorite. Oh, my God. Good. Mine too.

It really is. It's so clean. Yeah, and easy to use. And it still has a lot of physical buttons, which, you know, a lot of the, older folks, I mean, that's one of the reasons they would rather get them repaired than move on to something like the elite or the ultimate or even use a cell phone now. I mean, that's, that was the big push was to sort of move to the smartphone platform and throw away the physical controller completely. I got to tell you, I had a Vizio TV. There was a year of 2016,

Vizio said, we're going to do these TVs and we're not going to ship a remote. We're going to going to ship a tiny tablet, I cannot find that tablet anywhere, and I have to use my phone or like my Apple TV remote. It's the worst thing. Like a physical remote, just superior. I wonder if you can use a harmony. You can. I just haven't set up. I have an old Harmony 650 laying around that may or may not have some acid damage in the battery that I need to go clean up. Oh, hey, you know, I know someone who might be able to fix that for you. You're just helping me out so much today, Quinn. Thank you. Well, can you tell me kind of how you got started doing this? Because you repair a lot of them. As our listeners know, the Harmony line is, for all intents and purposes,

dead. There's no real development on it. Some people are still kind of working on the software. There's a demand on Reddit that I totally agree with that they should just open source it and give us all access. But you're repairing these. You're keeping those of us who still cling to remote as good. Well, you know, Logitech was never interested. in repairing them or even working with third-party repair shops. I mean, and it started back in 2010 when I was tired of having four and five remote controls. And, you know, the first thing I did was like, you know, I thought, ah, man, maybe Radio Shack has a universal remote that I can use. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, I don't like this.

What else is out there? I had never heard of Harmony. So I Googled Universal Remote. and there was all this stuff about Harmony, Logitech, Harmony Remote. I said, what's that? So I read about it and I said, oh, my God, this thing's great. You choose A and B from the Chinese menu and put it in and then download the stuff over USB. I said, I got to have one.

So I get a Harmony 880. It lasts about a year, I guess, just sort of out of warranty. and suddenly no devices work at all. Yeah. Nothing's responding. I said, oh, hmm, could be the IR emitters. And lo and behold, the IR emitters had burned out. So I called Logitech.

I said, hey, I've got this Harmony 880. It's just out of warranty. Can I send it to you to get it repaired? You're like, no. We don't do that. I was like, well, I'd get that. Some, you know, some companies, it's not, you know, cost effective for them to do that?

What have, you know, where can I go to get it repaired? And they're like, we don't know. I'm like, well, what can you do? And they said, well, we can give you a 50% discount coupon to buy a new one. And that was just so bizarre. Yeah. Because as you know, these are not $25 remote controls. And neither are they, you know, like $30 logitech mice or keyboards.

And I think that's probably what their model was based on. It's like, we're not going to fix those. We're just going to, you know, somebody's going to, if it breaks or somebody's going to buy another one. Right. So, but, you know, the Harmony 880 at the time was like, I don't know, $250 remote control. So I'm like, there must be other people that this is happening to. So I started to research it. And lo and behold, a lot of people had broken Harmony Remote controls.

Shocking. And like nobody, you know, people were trying to fix them themselves. sells and they were, or they were taking the 50% discount coupon, you know, but I just thought, my God, there must be something I can do. So that's how it started. I started with just a simple repair. I actually used eBay, an eBay service. I said, you know, if your Harmony's IR emitters have burned out, send us your remote and we'll swap out the IR emitters for you. And it was really reasonably priced. It was like $30 or something. And at first, I didn't think really anything would come of it. But yes, people started sending in their remotes on an eBay platform. And I was like,

okay, this could be something maybe. So, you know, my background is software development. I really wasn't a hardware guy at all. So I didn't know a lot except for just, you know, a little bit of a hobby soldering here and there. So I had to sort of talk to friends who were electrical engineers and we started opening these things up and just, you know, and then it turned out that certain things go wrong with them. Yeah. And it's always the same things. Each model actually has an Achilles heel. Oh, interesting. Yeah. For the Harmony 650, it's the buttons. Oh. They always tend to, And those squishy buttons, they kind of stop working after a while. So it's the squishy buttons that need work.

The 880, 890, their IR emitters burn out, their snap dome buttons don't work, and you get the dreaded blue screen of death on those. So, you know, it doesn't render any images, just the backlight goes on. And that's just on the remote. And that's just on the remote, yeah. Oh, brutal. You know, and the Harmony one, well, you know, don't drop it too many times because. we've done thousands of LCD replacements on the Harmony One. So we discovered this just pretty much through some research and trial and era.

You know, this is just a family business. It's just me and my son and daughter and wife. And everyone sort of did a little bit of stuff. My daughter was really good at, you know, web design. And so she helped the website go up. And my wife was really good with narratives and verbiage and writing. And my son dabbled a little in soldering. So that's what happened.

And in 2010 or so, we went to, you know, a web platform. Is this like your full-time job now? Are you still software developing? Or is this kind of like a hobby repair thing you do on the side? It's more like a hobby. And it was a hobby sort of, you know, second job kind of. Even back in 2010, I was working. at the New York City Department of Education for many, many years.

And I sort of did those two things at the same time. It was kind of brutal in the beginning because we had a lot of orders. And so I'd be burning the midnight oil doing it. Because my thing was to really get it out within 24 to 48 hours. Yeah. Because I knew. You know, people were like, Quinn, I can't live without the remote. I don't even know how to control my AV setup at home with it.

at it. Or my wife is going to kill me. We got to go back to the four remotes and I don't even know where they are, you know. So it was really important to sort of try to get these things in, do the repair the same day if possible, and get it out either later that day or the next day. So it was very fast turnarounds. And then it just so happened that I retired a few years later and this kind of became the full-time thing. And once Logitech stopped manufacturing them a couple of years ago, I thought that that would be the end of it. Yeah.

You know, I really did. I said, oh, okay, well, that's that. Yeah. It was a fun run. It was nice. It helped a lot of people. But then something strange happened. It was kind of like you have these two camps now.

There are folks who said, well, I'm done with Logitech. and who knows how long they're going to keep the software back end up. Right. And when they shut those servers down, well, then the new ones are bricks because they need that service up and running in the cloud. And the older ones, they'll work forever as long as you don't change anything in your AV setup. But the second you get a new TV or a new receiver or whatever, well, you're not going to be able to program it. So anyway, that camp is sort of like saying, well, we're done and we're going to look for an alternative.

Which doesn't really exist. Which doesn't really exist as far as we can see. That space is really... There's pretenders to the crowd. Some people have attempted, but no one's really nailed it the way that Logitech did. Yeah, the sofa baton, I think, was one. Cavo, I believe, was another one. And, you know, a lot of the receiver makers, they're just like, just use art.

Like, plug everything into your receiver that you've spent $2,000 on and use that. Right. That's a little expensive. for someone who just wants to run their TV and their PS5. Yeah. So the other camp was like, well, I want to keep this going as long as I can. And so what happened was since there were no more being sold by Logitech or distributors, there was only third-party markets like Amazon or eBay and everybody jacked their prices up on these used models.

And so it became more reasonable. now, people said, well, I'm not going to pay $250 for Harmony One. And then they found me. And so suddenly the repair business actually got very busy again. It goes in drips and drabs, up and down. And now we're still going strong, you know? Still pretty busy. Yeah, I mean, we might get, in the heyday, we were getting about 15 or 20 a week, like when we were discovered. But now we still get, you know, seven to ten maybe a week. That's still a lot of remotes. Yeah, yeah. So we've done, we've actually repaired about 6,000 of them. And we've sold a lot

of parts, too, because we really encourage, you know, I'm a big fan of right to repair. And we put out some YouTube videos on how to change the LCDs, on how to fix buttons if you want. So some of the trouble is some of these parts are proprietary and you can't get them anywhere. But a lot of it is also kind of off-the-shelf stuff or you can harvest them from a parts remote. So we encourage people to do that if possible. If they can get a broken one, maybe you can use the parts from that to fix what's wrong with yours. Yeah. You know. We're seeing a lot more 3D printing. We're seeing a lot more going to factories where you can kind of get some one-off PCBs and stuff like that. Yeah. From companies, how much of that do you think is going to play into the repair business for

something like the Harmony Remote? For us, probably not because the most common point of failure on almost all of these remotes is the LCD. Okay. For the ones that have them. And that's like a little custom. They are not off the shelf, you know. Logitech, you know, they did proprietary LCDs. As a matter of fact, for the first few years, they were happy to play ball with us. And they actually put me in touch with their LCD manufacturer in China. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. First I said, listen, I'll buy, I'll buy LCD. I had this whole thing. I said, look, you guys don't repair them. I'll repair them.

Send your customers to me, and I'll be your, you know, they'll love you. Yeah. People will love you. Just, you know, I'll do the repairs. You just make sure that I can get the parts. I'll buy the parts from you. Yeah. And Logitech was like, no.

You know what we'll do, though? We'll give you a contact person in China, and you can contact them and you can buy directly from them, which actually worked out well for us, you know, but the minimum order requirement is like 4,000 LCDs, you know. It's going to be a couple of years before you go through all of those. Well, that's what happened. We said, okay, well, we'll take a chance and we'll make like one or two buys, and now we're sort of working through them, and we still have enough to keep us going for a little while. But once, when those LCDs are gone, then,

that part of the business will shut, you know, and so we'll see, we'll see how far we can bring it. People will have to be harvesting them on eBay and shipping that along with the remote that needs to be fixed. Yep. Ooh, that's brutal. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's like, we talk a lot about right to repair and we're talking about it a lot on this particular episode of the Vergecast. And I think the Harmony remote for me is one of those things that really calls this out because it is this product that is very niche, right? You did about 6,000 repairs.

And the grand scheme of thing, that's a fairly small amount compared to like what Apple's doing. Sure. Yeah. But every single person you and me included who has a Harmony remote loves it. They do. Like if I don't have, if my remote's not working, if it's like run out of batteries and I don't have any batteries in the house, that's worse than having like the Wi-Fi not working. Like that's worse than my power being out. The frustration of losing this piece because it is such a simple product that really just fits right in and it just does its job.

And it's awful that we've lost it. And you're kind of like it. You're protecting all of these people, including myself, making sure that we can kind of carry this on as long as we can until the servers get shut down and we can never update our remote again. It's true. And sometimes I think, you know, I've been doing this for a while and, you know, I kind of want to, you know, just sort of quietly start to phase it out, you know, because, but, you know, I feel the love. I feel like it's, I really don't want to leave folks hanging out there who still want to get these things repaired. And, you know, we get orders from Europe. We get people saying. sending these things in from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Iceland. The only place in the world that I've never had an order from is China. Oh, interesting. But my guess is that because they can probably fix it there themselves. Probably easier to get some of the supplies. They can get the supplies, you know. Somebody knows somebody. It's easy. Everything's manufactured. They're on the harmonies.

So, but that's it. I mean, virtually every place else, they actually send them. And I, and I sometimes I say, wait a minute, you know, it's expensive because when it's coming internationally, they have to pay shipping both directions to get it, you know, to get it here. And sometimes there's duties and or customs fees. So I said, are you sure you can't find just a replacement locally? And it's usually the same. story. It's like, no, they are, you know, everybody's jacked up the prices, especially since they're no longer being made. And it's cost prohibitive to buy another one. It's cheaper to ship it and get it repaired. Thank you for your service, Gwen. I very much appreciate it. Glad to help. Glad to help. Okay, we're going to be right back after this next ad, and we're going to be talking

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in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Welcome back. We could not be doing a gadget repair episode without talking to someone from I FixIt. It's required, right? The people at I Fixit have been tearing down computers and the like for decades now

and have influenced a lot of do-it-yourself technicians by sharing repair manuals and tips for fixing everything from laptops to phones to cameras to toys, basically anything. They've also been a big proponent of the right to repair, a movement to enact legislation to ensure that consumers of electronics also have the ability to get them fixed when they break. In December, New York Governor Kathy Hochel signed into law the Digital Fair Repair Act, which establishes that consumers and independent repair providers have a right to obtain manuals, diagrams, diagnostics, and parts from OEMs to repair their own devices, with some

exceptions. CEO of I Fix It, Kyle Weens, overall, was thrilled. That will then open up the floodgates of access to a lot of this information parts and tools that we need. But a few weeks before that bill was signed, Kyle Weens took some time to talk with me about the practices at IFixit, the state of gadget repair today, and what's next in the right to repair? Kyle, how long have you been CEO? Have you been there from the very beginning? From the very beginning, we started in 2003, so we've been at it a little while. We've taken apart every gadget for a long time. I've been using you guys since 2003.

I had like a PISMO. Yep. Yeah, that was one of the first repairmen that we wrote was the G3 PISMO. One of the best laptops Apple ever made. Thank you. There's a big fight on the Vergecast about what the best that laptop ever made was, and I will like PISMO. Yeah, absolutely. That's my number one.

You can have two batteries, one on either side. I mean, very robust, super repairable. One of the reasons I used your manuals was because I would replace the processor in it. You could replace the processor and everything else in it. So I just like, I was in my dorm room cranking it open. There is still, I think, I'm sorry to whoever lives in my dorm room at my old college, there's probably still a neon pink outline in the bathtub from where I spray painted the laptop to make it look sick. It's rough.

We're not here necessarily to go down memory lane with me, although I would love to. to do that. Instead, I want to talk about you guys don't just do laptops, right? It wasn't, like, it started as this place for Apple devices and how to repair those devices because there wasn't a real easy way for people to do it at home before you guys

came along. When you were still like, P.B. Fix I still type in P.B. Fix it. Hopefully the domain still works. Yeah, we started as PowerBook Fixit, and then we upgraded to I Fix It and expanded from Apple stuff to everything else. And that has been a lot of fun. I would have gotten bored with just Apple

products. Well, and they're not as repairable as they used to be, right? Although it's getting better. You started when it was very repairable. We started when they were very repairable. We've had some dark, a dark decade, if you will. But I feel like we're coming out on the other side now. We're starting to see some improvement. So besides just time to move away from Apple, what really led to embracing these other devices and creating manuals for them? Well, so, I mean, we started with Apple products because Apple had been like going out of their way to prevent people from knowing how to fix them. And so we solved that. problem. We created an alternative to Apple's repair ecosystem. We had parts, tools, and information

all in one place. Make sure the information is free, creative commons, available for free to the world. And once we'd solve that, we started looking around, we realized, wow, this repair ecosystem that we built really is absent for just about every other product, too. And so how could we build out a free repair guide for everything? And so that's been our mission ever since, has been how do we really fight back against e-waste and make all the things in our life last longer? How do you deal with those devices that maybe not as many people have? That there still seems to be a little bit of a demand for it. But it's, you know, like the pebbles of the world where there's not a lot of people going out to repair pebble right now.

But there's probably someone who still really wants to repair it and will come to you to look for it. Yeah, so there's a long tail of hardware, both in terms of how many they make and also sort of a long tail through time. We have a really thriving Atari 2,600 repair community on I Fix It. Oh, wow. And there are things that you run into if you're trying to use an Atari 2,600, 30 years later, where, you know, like you have capacitors that fail and you have to replace them. And maybe that was a reasonable lifespan for that capacitor. But if you want your Atari to keep going. So what we find is people Google it. And you land on these communities. You get communities of people around, you know, the 12 people in the world that have that specific thing are all hanging out on the same forum. Yeah. Like, I think the Logitecharmony remote is a really good example right now where Logitech discontinued it. The company doesn't really care about it anymore. And now there's like this. big community building up and these guys who are like, that's just what they do. They just repair this one device because nobody else will.

Yeah, and I mean, it was maybe the greatest remote of all time. So why wouldn't you? I would say yes. As someone who still uses hers, yes. Yeah. But like the harmony wasn't built with, I mean, they don't go out of the way to make it hard, but like just the battery is not something that is designed to be user-replaceable. Now you take a few screws off. You get inside. It's just a connector.

It's easy to swap the battery. but it's not part of the user manual. So if you want to make these things last longer, you've got to go out of your way a little bit. And I think maybe that's okay. I think sometimes we put all of the pressure on the manufacturer. You know, we're over here and I'm advocating for rate to repair. There's an element of responsibility from the manufacturer,

but there also is a responsibility on the part of owners. If we want to be able to keep these things for a long time, we need to be able to roll up our sleeves and put some effort into keeping them alive. I totally, totally agree. How do you go about finding those parts and stuff? Because I think one of the things that really drew me to, I fix it in the beginning, was that it wasn't just you had these great manuals, but you also had like, oh, do you need these special screwdrivers? Yes. Do you need this weird obscure battery that was made for one year to work with the PISMO? I'm making that up. I don't know if that really happened. But do you need that? You guys had that. Like you had this really nice, rich supply of parts, which was the other part of this component. How do you do that with all of these other devices where the population of people needing it isn't as big? If we're lucky, you know, the parts are out there.

I needed a dial for my Canon 5D Mark 3, found the dial from someone in Chen Gens somehow. So maybe there was enough of a factory spool-up making that. But when you get to the longer tail, there aren't. And so really your best option at that point is scavenging parts. And so we do that a lot here. We'll sometimes for like new Apple laptops, we can't get parts for them. We'll buy new laptops.

We'll part them out. We also have partnerships with recyclers where we'll like rescue, like Kindle batteries is something that we can't get from Amazon. Amazon. And so we rescue Kendall batteries before they go into the shredder and then we make them available to people. It was just in this moment when I realized that Kindle batteries would inevitably die. Yeah. Batteries screens. And Amazon just doesn't sell parts for them. So we try to fill in the gap. Do you see that like, I'm so sorry to our listeners who are like, no, no, keep going, Alex. Don't just get stuck on Kindles. But do you see with that one, is there a pretty decent community? Because those devices are so cheap.

They are cheap. But some of them, you know, like you got the early ones and they've got. cellular connectivity that is kind of valuable. So I think it depends, but I would say the cheap nature of what Amazon has done with the Kindle makes it so that I think there is less of a concentrated enthusiasm around making them last than there is with something like a harmony where it's more of a unique object that's kind of a cultural artifact. Amazon has photocopied so many Kindles that you don't have the loyalty to any singular Amazon object like you do in other cases.

And I think that's a shame. and I think Amazon should bear some responsibility for that. I would thousand percent agree. As much as you can agree, I would agree with you on that statement. Like, I guess the other kind of component of this, we talked a little bit about how you guys get the parts and stuff. What about the software element of this? I feel like that's kind of becoming increasingly a big part of repair in a way it just never was. Yeah, it really is.

Well, and we're covering, you cover the genesis of new technologies. Well, what happens with those technologies? I saw a post today where Ukrainians were talking. about how the Russian equipment that they have is easier to fix than some of the NATO equipment that they're given. They're like, the NATO stuff all has computers and the Russian stuff doesn't, and so it's easier to work on. So as we're moving into the future, as we have put software and computers and everything, how do we deal with that? And I think the Pebble is a really good example of both the opportunity and some of the challenges that you have to work with.

Yeah. So there's the Rebel community that has been out there. We've written about them extensively where the Pebble servers shut off and so they've set up alternate servers and all alternate ecosystem that you can use. But the latest problem was that in order to talk to the new Android devices, there's 64 bit. There needed to be a firmware update to the pebble. And there's no way to do those firmware updates without having the secure signing certificate sign the update. And so this is something where it didn't matter how enthusiastic the community was. Without that magic secret key, they could not push this update to the... Right. And this is where I think it's, you know, because you think about companies that shut down,

what do you do? How do you plan for taking care of these devices afterwards? So in the case of Pebble, Fitbit bought Pebble, and then Google bought Fitbit Fitbit, and so the secure key is open by Google. So someone at Google needed to sign the key, and magically it happened, it got signed. So somewhere in the bowels of Google, someone found the secure key, signed the community update, pushed out there, and you can make the Pebble work with 64Bid Android now. How likely do you think it was that that person was a Pebble owner and was like, I am not letting this die? Yeah, and they were actually a contributor to the rebel community. So this is where it's cool.

You had an engineer who had been part of all the way through and then said, okay, I'm going to make this happen. I think that this is a conversation that we need to have about ownership. Like at one point, if the company is going to go away, or let's say that that key had disappeared in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it is in the best interest society at that point to get that key out there so owners can use it. Yeah. Corey, Doctor likes to say if someone puts a lock on a device that you own and doesn't give you the key, it's not for your benefit. Well, I think we're seeing that, like, right now with the Logitech Harmony, right?

Like, the Harmony Remote, Logitech still owns all the software. They still technically maintain those databases and stuff, even though technically is doing a lot of work here, right? But there's a big call in that community, just open source it. Just give us access. Stop gatekeeping this stuff. Like, you don't care about it anymore. Let us have it. And the company has said no, just flat out we're not doing that.

Yeah, and you never know. an IP thicket that they have to wade through in order to free that. I've written an article a while back called the end of ownership. And as you as you move into software and it's so intertangled with these complex IP agreements and maybe Logitech doesn't own all the software and so they can't necessarily. We need to start pushing back as a society against that kind of thing. How do you how do we do that? Well, the GPL is one way to do it. So like we found a John Deere got jailbroken at DefCon and we installed Doom on it. Yeah.

And in the process of doing that, we realized, hey, there's all kinds of GPL code running these software-enabled tractors that John Deere hasn't been releasing into the world. I don't know the situation with the Harmony, but you can imagine, like, we haven't seen, I think, enough litigation around the GPL. We saw that a couple of years ago a bunch of companies were releasing emulators, and they were basically like Sega Genesis, all these other ones. And they were using common creatives licensed software to do it. it just quietly. And I remember speaking to a lawyer at that time and I said, hey, how do we stop this?

And he goes, you sue. That's it. It's just on these communities. So is that something where these communities need to be working with lawyers developing class action lawsuits? Yeah, the communities that are involved and engaged in creating open source software that then gets built to create these commercial products have a lot of leverage and they could get more engaged. And so the software Freedom Conservancy has the rights to prosecute copyright for Linux and the Wine Project and many others. And they've started to get more active. So they've actually sued Vizio for GPL violations on their TVs. And I think maybe that's an opportunity because one problem that we have, you buy a new smart TV and it's got spyware built into it that you can't take off. Yeah. But it's built on the backs of all of

this open source software. You should be able to get your own copy of the Vizio software and remove the spyware, compile it and install it on your own TV and run it. That's the, the bargain that they made when they built it using GPL software. If they built the whole stack themselves from scratch, you wouldn't have that option. But because they use GPL software, I think we have a lot more rights than we've been able to exercise. Is that something we should be pursuing just through litigation? Is that something that people should be pursuing through, like, I don't know, laws? Well, in the case of the GPL situation of Vizio, I don't think we need an additional law. We have

the law. We have a contract. Vizio agreed to the contract when they decided to use GPL software. They're in violation of that contract. So that should be an open-in-check case. Now, it's going to take a little while on the courts. We need more public attention on it. Yeah, I think that's my question is like right now, if we want people, if we want these companies to do this, to open up the software, then we have to sue, right? Like, you have to get a bunch of people together. You have to get a lawyer together. You have to spend a lot of money on yours end just to get them to say, yeah, okay, we'll open it up and maybe we'll pay your legal fees. Maybe we won't. And that's a lot of on the customer, on the consumer. Are there are there consumer laws and stuff? we can be advocating for to change this? Yeah, I think there's an opportunity. And so that's what we've been working on with the right to repair laws. The right to repair law says, hey, if you're going to make a product, you got to make

service manuals, parts and tools available. So that's, I think, our biggest opportunity to open this up initially. It won't get us the software, but it will get us any diagnostic software, parts, tools. You know, we talked earlier about how there were these dark days where Apple devices were just super unreparable. Everything was glued in, soldered in. Don't you dare crack it open or Tim Cook would come to your house and take it away. We're out of that phase now, right?

We're seeing signs of hope. We have a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, I mean, the default, you know, over the last decade, yeah, has been Apple devices glued together. It's still the case with some products, but others are changing. So the MacBook Pro, I think all of us have suffered with a lack of ports on the MacBook Pro. We've had Butterfly keyboards that have traumatized all of us and driven some of us to the brink of insanity. Or maybe coming out on the other side of that, they've gone back to a sane keyboard design. They're adding more ports back in.

The internals of the MacBook Pro have gotten easier to repair, which is very exciting for someone like me. I actually switched to Dell laptops away from Apple laptops because I just wasn't willing to own an unreparable product. So Apple's kind of gone that way. We've seen Dell, obviously, is pretty repairable. Microsoft has even gotten a little more repairable after like the catastrophe of its early devices. The original surface was just a glue-filled monstrosity. And now the new one has upgradable SSD. You can swap that out.

The battery is user-replaceable. It's just a totally different Microsoft. What would you say is like right now a device coming out? It's already out. Maybe it's coming out soon. That is just super repairable where you're like, hot damn, they understood the assignment. Well, the framework laptop is the gold standard from a laptop perspective.

It's amazing. It's got modular ports, all of that. From mainstream perspective, Dell has this concept Luna laptop that is designed to come apart very easily. That's really cool. They haven't announced anything real that you can buy based on that. But I think that concept is fantastic. But the gold standard that you can go out and buy right now is the fair phone on the phone side of things,

which isn't sold in the U.S., but you can import into the U.S. and they work and the framework. And not the Steam Deck? Steam Deck is cool. Steam deck is pretty darn fixable. Yeah, I'm sitting here. As we're talking, I'm tinkering about the Valve Index. headset that we were taking apart. Yeah, I think the seam deck is certainly, I mean, the SSD is modular.

You can swap that out. The battery is a little tricky key to access, but overall, it's designed to be a very repairable product. So I have to full disclosure, we're working, we're collaborating with VALB, we're distributing service parts for them on that one, but they've been great to work with. I'm going to say my worst repair ever, and then I would love to hear yours. So one time my sister asked me to repair her G3 eyebook, not the, the color. ones, but the one that came right after that was all white. And I said, sure, you know, I'd repaired plenty of Pismos. I'd prepared a lot of computers at that point.

I'd taken the whole, like, display off of a Wall Street, G3 Wall Street, and put it back on. So I felt good. And then I opened that thing up, and it was then, like, plastic, then wrapped in aluminum. Mm-hmm. And then all the screws were stripped. Oh, perfect. So I cried. And I went to our local Mac repair store, and I paid them $50 to fix it.

That's just probably perfectly reasonable. Yeah, that was a very complex machine internally. There were lots of cables and routing. Yeah, that was around the same time the 12-inch G4 aluminum was also kind of a similar design. It was hard to work on. And Apple got the memo on that, by the way. So the subsequent machine was the white MacBook. And it was much more serviceable.

And those things still work. We have a member of our community that still does refurbishment and sells those white MacBooks. Don't say that. My mom still hasn't replaced hers, and I've been trying to get her to replace it. They're good machines. Mom, do not listen to this part of the podcast. Tune it out. What would you say was your worst, like your most nightmare repair?

Because I spent like three days on that damn laptop. And before I was just like, I'm done. I'm paying someone. It's always the thing that's in front of you. I should mention, like, I fixed it started because I was trying to fix my G3 colored the toilet seat shell I book. Those G3s, man. I couldn't find a service man for it.

It was very frustrating. And I ended up, you know, I couldn't figure out where all the tabs went to get back together. So I had to dremel and cut some of the plastic tabs off to like shove the thing back together. It was not a great repair experience. Did it hold up? How long did it last after that? It still works. It's still a functional machine. Yeah. You still have it? Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. It's fantastic. And I mean, the best devices stick around, right? They become part of it. Well, and I think this is also, you know, you think about the last phone that you had and some of the photos and some of the adventures and the things that you did with your friends with that phone. I think we need to be imbuing a little bit more

of the emotion and the experiences that we have into our gadgets. But there's some, I think we get disconnected from that a little bit. So I'm open to ideas. How can we stay emotionally connected to these things that have taken care of us for so long? I was going to ask, how do we, because I know how to do it with a car. I spend that much money on a car and I'm emotionally attached to it afterwards. But, you know, my phone, I'm spending, you know, a fraction of that, but still a lot of money in. I just don't have that emotional attachment, especially when it drops. Everyone's got a phone or three in the drawer, right? Well, Samsung had a really cool idea called Galaxy Upcycling,

where it was the ability to wipe Android off of an old Galaxy phone and install any operating system that you wanted. So you could install Ubuntu, you can install Docker, and then you could use it kind of as a single-purpose device. So you take your previous cell phone, wipe all your data off it, and then you could use it as a baby monitor or like a nest camera at your door,

or you could use it as a temperature monitor. They had a cool demo using it as like a, like a raspberry pie controller for a fish tank. Love it. That's where we need to go. We need to be able to repurpose these devices and use them for more. But a seven-year-old Android is not going to have current security updates. So you can't have Android on it.

And it needs to be something else. Unfortunately, Samsung announced this. It was a cool project. I helped them announce it. And then they killed the project and they never released the software. But that's the kind of thing that we need. We need to be able to get to the bare bones of these devices and repurpose them as general purpose computers.

I absolutely 100%. Agree, because I've got an old iPhone 10 in this drawer right now. I would love to use it for something besides periodically testing new software builds. Yeah, and so that's on Apple, you know, release the security keys, let us install anything else on that iPhone. You know, thinking about VR, thinking about we've got all these new kinds of technology that are coming, what are some of the ones that you're maybe worried won't be repairable? Sure. I mean, I would say in general, my problem with almost all devices boils down to glue and batteries.

Yeah. And the area where those intersect the most is true wireless earbuds. Ooh. The AirPods are the worst example, but most earbuds out there, you know, AirPod type earbuds, have glued together products with an integrated battery that only lasts for a year and a half, and then the product is disposable. This is not good for the environment. It's not good for our pocketbooks.

We're replacing. I have my wired headphones here that will continue to work for a decade. Your wireless earbuds that you're listening to this on will not. And that's a failing of a product category. You can't take those wireless earbuds with batteries built into them. And by the way, every time you buy a set, you have two earbuds and you have the charging case. So it's three batteries. That's three batteries that can't go into the trash, that can't go into recycling.

The electronics recyclers don't want them because they don't have enough raw materials to make it worth their time. So there's no plan for dealing with these things at end of life. And they're screwing us over. I mean, it's $159 for a set. You're going to go back every two years and buy another set? That's what a lot of people are doing. What's happening in IFIX land right now? What are you guys working on?

seeing some gadgets pop up into your frame. Yes. So to set the stage, I'm sitting here in our lab, and I've got our microscopes here, and I've got all kinds of cool new tools. So we're excited. We have two new tools. So this tool here, we call this the anti-clamp or clampy, and this is a posed suction cup. So it's a pride tool with suction cups on it and a big screw handle. And so you stick the phone in it, and I turn the screw, which is silent, but, you know, I'm clanking. So it's a clamp. And on the clamp instead of two rubber feet, there's two section cups, and then a big old blue handle on the top.

And you stick the phone in, and you clamp it down, and then you turn the screw, and it opens the phone. Because the challenge with adhesive on these screens is the screens have gotten more and more fragile. It's hard to open them without breaking them. And so this tool really makes it just dramatically easier to open the screen without breaking. So make it easier to replace a battery and all that other stuff. To make it easier to get in and replace a battery, yeah. And the thing with adhesive, if you can apply a small amount of force over time,

you're going to be a lot more successful than if you're just like jerking on it or if you're prying on it aggressively. So we're really excited by the anti-clamp. And then the other product, let me grab it for you. So this is show and tell what I fix it. I have disassembled. So this is a valve index controller. But to disassemble it, I have used our new fix mat, which is a dry erase mat with built-in storage trays

trays for keeping track of things. And what's cool is it's magnetic so I can stick screws on it. and they don't fly away. You don't have to use like 40 different little containers to store all your screws. Exactly. Oh, I love it. And Egg Carton works, this is better.

So if I want to go out and I'm not a writer at The Verge where I can just write my fury about right to repair, I want to go out and I want to help the right to repair movement. What do I do? Yeah, absolutely. So wherever you are in the world, if you're in the United States, go to your state.repair.org.

So California.repair.org, New York. repair.org, and you'll find the current status of a right to repair bill in your state. There are, we're expecting about 25 bills to be active in 25 states starting in January. And then around the world, I mean, like, there's a right to repair bill in the Canadian parliament right now that's being debated. There's active work happening at the European Commission. So repair.org in the U.S. Repair.

Atupeer.E.U. in Europe, can repair in Canada, and there's an Australian Repair Coalition as well. Get involved and engage with all those and they'll connect you the resources. but like high level, it's talk to your politicians, talk to everybody around you and say, we want the rate to repair repair. I love it. It's dumb that I can repair my car and not my computer. Yeah, well, the reason you can repair your car is because we have rate to repair laws for cars. We don't have rate to repair laws for phones.

And that's the, honestly, the laws that we're proposing for rate to repair electronics, we took the auto bill, we copied and past it. We deleted the word automotive when we ran with it. It's a good framework. It works. Like, you can get your car fixed, right? You can go to a local mechanic and get it fixed. You can go to the dealer and pay more.

if you want them to do it. It's perfectly fine, right? We should be able to go to the Apple store if we want. We should also be able to go to local mechanic, you know, eye mechanic, or, you know, do it yourself. Yes, we need options. That's the through line of this entire episode. We need options.

All right, well, thank you, Kyle. This was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. Thank you. Chat soon. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you for listening. We'd love to do more of these gadget repair episodes.

So if you repair a certain kind of tech or are looking for someone to repair something for you, hit us up. You can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com. And if you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, call the hotline, guys. It's 866, Verge 11. That's 866, Verge 11. We may answer a question you have in a future episode. In the meantime, there's tons more coverage on everything we're talked about today on

theverge.com. So head over there and say hi. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive. producer, and Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is the Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neely, Richard, and myself are going to be back on Friday with some more of the Verge crew to talk about all the biggest tech news of the week.

Until then, I'll see you later.