Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Right to Repair Deep Dive!

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

After making a recent MKBHD Right to Repair video, Marques and Andrew take to Waveform to dive a bit deeper into the topic and discuss how Right to Repair is affecting both consumers and companies. The conversation explores the many complexities of the topic, including how several regions are handling it differently. Come for the spirited debate, stay for the multiple interviews from a broad range of Right to Repair experts. Links: Subscribe to the pod & share with friends: http://bit.ly/WaveformMKBHD Subscribe to the pod on YouTube: https://bit.ly/WVFRMPodcastYouTube https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh MKBHD Right to Repair: https://bit.ly/3hHyYNi iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. help H ELP calm okay welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts I'm Marques and I'm Andrew and I'm David hi that was so smooth thank you that was incredible I've been told I'm a very smooth person. David, welcome to the podcast. You've been on audio episodes before, but happy to have you here. We've talked about what we're going to do in this episode, which is a sort of a larger

conversation or exploration of right to repair. The topic is incredibly complicated and has a lot of different perspectives and facets to it i feel like we're going to explore and dive into as many as we can but the whole point of this is to uh is to understand it better and there's uh there's not a whole lot that hasn't been talked about in different places we're just bringing it all in one place here uh so if you haven't already watched the right to repair video on the main mkbsd channel do watch it. It's like 20 minutes long and has some interviews in it. We'll be talking about more than that and clearly for longer than 20 minutes here. So this is a little extra on top.

Anyway, all right. Where do we even start? I don't know how to start this. Okay, I want to bring up something that like got me thinking about right to repair in the first place and then had me coming out and asking you are we ever going to do that right to repair video yeah and it was actually related to the boosted episode so okay if you guys haven't like heard the boosted episode yet you should listen to it um i did some follow-up interviews after the boosted episode and there are these kids

they go to this college and they're trying to keep boosted boards working so i'm david and i am the founder of xr general hospital and i fix boosted boards and they have these uh they basically call it a boosted hospital where they have people that send in their boards and they fix them and they've like worked with manufacturers in china to get these parts that they only made for boosted the company and they're trying to keep them alive. And it turns out they are really big right to repair advocates. Imaginably. So when they brought that up to me, I was like, you know, Marquez did mention he wanted to do a right to repair video. Maybe this could kind of turn into something. So that's kind of what really got the wheels turning.

Right. So if you haven't seen, first of all, the boosted episode is great. It's a whole exploration of like the rise and fall of boosted boards and how that, I mean, had a really high apex and then a really low trough at the bottom. But it's a really good like overall story to follow. But for me, right to repair is interesting because the more I look into it, especially for the video that we ended up making, the more I ended up being on the side of, like it seems really, really difficult

for like any one final conclusion to work. Because there are two forces that are going to always be working against each other, which is tech getting more and more well integrated and better and harder and harder to repair. And then people wanting to be able to repair that stuff. And they will always be at odds with each other. And that was the part I had the hardest time with.

Spoke to Lewis Rossman about it. He gave me his two cents, which I really liked, which was. I just want it to be if you're going to glue something into the device, whatever it is, I'm willing to jump through all those hoops to fix it. But don't tell the company that made this part, they're not allowed to sell it. It may seem hard to understand that this stuff is going to continue to get harder to repair, but they're up for that challenge. People who actually repair these things also evolve with the tech. Now, we were talking about this before, like, I don't know how deep that goes. Like when you're talking like soldering the memory to the sensor of a camera or literally just combining parts

that used to be three different pieces into one piece. Like you could say that's done to make it obsolete later, you could say that's done to make it obsolete later you could say that's done to make it's harder to repair but also typically it makes it better like the the image processing happens faster when it's on a chip closer to the image that needs to be processed so all this stuff is is always at odds but i'm curious what other stuff you've dug up uh maybe there's a devil's advocate side of like the anti-right to repair movement i don't even i don't think it's even a movement it's more of just like yeah the constant lobbying and and conversation from those who don't support right yeah i mean just to like play off your point there

i mean like ibm last week announced two nanometer processors right two nanometers yeah okay with a whole new architecture type so they're not even using FinFET anymore. And this is just an example of how deeply integrated tech is getting. They're using ultraviolet light to create these chips because the visible light spectrum has too big of a wavelength to actually fit transistors. So this is the point in which, no, you can't go in there and fix these things because they're thinner than a strand of dna it's not like it's not like you can go in there with tools right but once we get to that point you know there's so many benefits four times better

battery life with two nanometer your phone could last five days on a single charge you know it's like very very useful yeah um but regardless yeah i i tried to i tried to talk to as many people on as many sides as we could get a hold of um got lucky and was able to speak to the julian sanchez i'm the director of emerging technologies at john Deere. Which sounds... I always find this part interesting when like this, like, we are so focused in the tech world, but tech enthusiasts and right to repair enthusiasts have made this alliance with these farmers. And a lot of them are like, it's very based in Nebraska, it feels like. I know my sister-in-law is a reporter in nebraska and they cover a ton and just like john deere has created the same kind of problem that

we're seeing with like apple where it's like these farmers want to be able to repair these machines and therefore it's stopping in a similar way apple is so now you don't really see farmers and tech nerds like banding together too often, but here we are. But also, everything is tech. Yeah, it really is. I learned so much watching those John Deere videos about how high-tech those tractors are. When I think of a tractor, I just think of a thing you pour gasoline in and drive across the field. But they have so many automated systems to the point where they save lots of money by relying on the tech in these tractors and how exactly the irrigation is distributing pesticides and things like that.

It's really high tech stuff. So in 2021, you can find a tech argument or a tech angle to almost everything. So it almost doesn't surprise me that tractors are looped into that. Which is why this general discussion right now is going to have such big precedent for the future. And I think the reason it becomes such a discussion and the reason we really dove into it, other than you talk to the people with Boosted, it brought up the conversation. We all sat down one day and had like a three hour conversation about what we were.

Because like, it's really hard to pick one side. There's, I think most of us would lean towards the right to repair side, obviously, but there's a lot of times when these bigger companies bring up points that are hard to argue. Exactly. It's really, really hard to argue some of those points. So that's why I think we reached out to all these different people to try and get a better idea from people in the realm of what's going on. You want to get a more balanced you know viewpoint right because it's like i obviously like you said we we're all going to kind of like lean towards right to repair yeah but talking to the cto of john deere i was like oh wow like the amount of things that are benefited by the amount of technology that they put in these tractors and first of all i just want to say like

benefited by the amount of technology that they put in these tractors. And first of all, I just want to say, like, I loved that it we ended up taking this like tractor angle, because when you think of tech and then you think of farming, I think that's not the first thing that comes to mind. It's not. But then you say, like, everything is tech and it's like, oh, yeah. And a really good point that the CTO brought up to me was that farming is kind of a unique industry because this is one of the great things about agriculture, which is that environmental sustainability and profitability

are actually one in the same. In a lot of spaces, you have to sort of sacrifice something in order to get environmental sustainability. In farming, if you can ultimately get to a point where you don't have to apply or use as much stuff, you are making money and you are benefiting the environment. So they actually have a benefit, like they have this incentive to optimize better. And farming is all about optimization, right? Like how much water exactly can you use to get the most crops possible? much water exactly can you use to get the most crops possible he told me that one of their tractors that they have right now can use ai to determine what is a weed and what is a plant while it is driving over these crops and then it will only spray the pesticides on the weeds

and they save 90 of the pesticides that they were spraying before they used this tractor with this AI, which is insane. And again, it's like good for the environment, weightless pesticides. It saves the farmers tons of money. This is why it was hard for me because like I fall on the side of, yes, we should have right to repair. And that's where I landed with the video. But I also want tech to get better.

Like I want that 90% savings and I want the obvious benefits that come with optimization to be available to all and to keep moving forward. So like all of those arguments that I fully understand, like it's easy to take a side if you work for one of these companies. Yeah, absolutely. Of the other side. So I can imagine if you work for not just John Deere but Tesla or Apple or any number of companies that, as Lewis Rossman would put it, pretty much every company has some sort of anti-right to repair stance. I could see how they would land on the, don't you want us to make our stuff better? Don't you want those savings?

Don't you want the tech to continue to move forward? That's going to be their argument every time. And that's why it's hard to argue against it. But us on the other side, we're like, well, the screen breaks. I don't want to have to throw the whole thing out. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting because, you know, I was kind of pressing him on like because we watch these videos from like Motherboard did a video on like this movement with these farmers to get the tractors more repairable, I guess.

I guess the main problem that they have right now is that these tractors at this point are all very integrated, like we talked about earlier, like the more integrated, the better the technology gets. And so because of this, there's sensors all over the tractor that can determine if things are going wrong and they can throw error codes. And if they throw specific error codes, you can't really use the tractor until you bring it into a service center. Or what he said is that a service center agent will actually get dispatched out to you because

they also have LTE. And as soon as it noticed that there is an issue, it will send a text message to the farmer and say, hey, this has an issue that needs to be worked on by a service person. Do you want us to dispatch someone right now? Or do you want to bring it in? There's a lot of cases where the dealer will call the customer ahead of time and say, Hey, have you seen the trouble code? Oh no, I'm really busy. Okay. Well we saw it and there's, there is a repair person on the way to, to help you out. Um, so that's, that's kind of crazy too. And what these farmers are basically pushing for is like like they don't want to have to deal with the time it takes to have one of these out of commission. But something that – and again, I'm playing devil's advocate.

I don't want to be like just a marketing mouthpiece for John Deere. Let's be clear about that. But he did tell me that 95% of the problems on the tractors can be fixed with just standard tools and you don't need anybody out there. Like he said, the tractor is able to determine problems with like, if you have a leaky hose of some kind that like a pressure hose, it knows that that is leaky because it's not getting certain pressure readings off of this pressure sensor. And you can replace that with any third party part. He said 90, 95 times out out of 100 you are able to fix that as a farmer it's just when you get these specific error codes where like things are a bigger problem and their worry there is like

if you've seen these tractors like at ces they have these tractors that they started um they're bigger than this room they're freaking massive they are so big and like you don't want to risk the chance

of like you know something major malfunctioning because it's a very computerized thing and they run

themselves and they are self-driving they're like autopilot tractors yeah like at this point it is just

an operator sitting in the seat that kind of pivots like you're in a starship or something. And you're not even really pressing anything. You're just making sure that you're not running over anything terrible.

Because he said something that's kind of funny that they have not yet figured out. There are no systems at the moment in commercialized that are doing obstacle recognition and therefore avoidance. They have self-driving, but like if you got like, I don't know, a barrel in the field or something, it'll just run right over it. Okay. They got to work on that one. So they've got all this technology, but they don't have that, which is kind of funny. But anyway, yeah, no, I would love to hear your guys' thoughts on that.

Yeah. Okay. So we can go, we'll start with the tractor stuff. I feel like, obviously I'm not a farmer, so I'm not going to have the most educated opinion about what tractors should and shouldn't do. But no, it makes a lot of sense. I keep hearing that as soon as something goes down, farmers are dealing with the downtime, but they're also dealing with the amount of money it takes them to bring the tractor into wherever that service center for John Deere is to have it fixed and then to get it all the way back. It could be thousands of dollars. for John Deere is to have it fixed and then to get it all the way back. It'd be thousands of dollars.

And so if the farmer had the ability to fix any and every problem, that would help their business, that would help their downtime, everything would be better for the farmer. John Deere sees it as a liability, the way I understand it, where if someone does go into those 5% of problems where it really shouldn't be touched by someone who doesn't know what they're doing and then they hurt themselves or they damage the whole tractor, then it looks bad to John Deere and now John Deere has to deal with even more stuff.

So they just want to limit that liability, which is what companies do. I get it. So I don't even, again, I don't have a conclusion or a side to take. It's just like, that's the way it's going to look. Yeah. I think it's always going to be, maybe not easy, but there will always be an argument because

even if it's 95% of the time, even if John Deere's customer service is incredible, there's going to be a time where that 5% happens on a really bad day for that farmer that they need their stuff right away. They're on a really bad time crunch. It's going to happen and they can't wait for that. And if they know if they have the tools, they're on a really bad time crunch, it's going to happen and they can't wait for that. And if they know if they have the tools, they could fix it. And no matter what, no matter how good everyone works, those complaints are going to be pushed to the front

and we're always going to see that as an issue. And the minute one farmer talks to all their other farmers, I mean, this isn't just farmers, this is people using iPhones, this is people using computers. Like if I have a problem with something and I can't get it fixed right away or I get inconvenienced, I'm going to complain to everybody. Yeah. No, it's this weird balance, right? Because obviously if you're using 90% less pesticides,

you are much more fuel efficient because it is, you know, driving itself. So you're not driving over the same path multiple times or like this is all optimization so you have to balance like that potential downtime that you're going to have with the benefit of like how much extra crop are you going to have and it just becomes this like sure this is going to be very difficult to deal with like twice a year but all the benefits that you're getting from that like does that outweigh that potential downtime you have i i want I want to pivot to Tesla because I think this can kind of encapsulate a bunch of versions of this. And of course I like talking about Tesla all the time. So, you know, here we are. Um, so I, my first car was a, was a hybrid. It was a Toyota Camry hybrid, right? And when I was shopping for cars, one of the things I kept hearing from dealerships

was if you have a regular gas car and something breaks, it's pretty easy and pretty good chance that you're going to find a way to fix that. Now, obviously you can do oil changes and you can do simple fixes, but if something breaks in the gas car, there's going to be someone at a shop nearby who can know what to do with it. And if you get a hybrid, they kept telling me this, if you get a hybrid, not too many people are going to want to touch that. There's just way more electrical in there. If you get a Prius, if you get a camera hybrid, any of these things, like you'll have better mileage, you'll have an overall better car, it's more fuel efficient, all these things will be better about it. You have eco mode, you have like an electric only mode.

But if something breaks, no one's gonna really want to touch it and then my next car was electric and it's the extreme end of that which is if literally anything breaks whether it's something with the computer or the electrical or the motors or the battery or any other part of this panel of the yeah. No one in any regular third-party shop is going to want to touch that. You have to go back to Tesla. But it's the best car I've ever had. Right.

Is that trade-off worth it to people? I'm doing air quotes for audio listeners. Is that worth it? And I think one of the potential questions is, are these newer, more high-tech, more well-integrated things breaking less often than the previous older things that were easier to fix? So if something's 10 times harder to repair, but only breaks one out of every one tenth of the amount of times that the old school stuff broke, is it worth the trade off? Right.

Curious what you guys think of that. Yeah. And I think this is a conversation that we had for like three hours in the office because you can take anything to the nth degree, right? So if we're like, okay, you have these future M5 Macs that are so integrated, they use two nanometer everything and like the processor is like, you know, this big, but like everything is so deeply integrated. But because it's so deeply integrated, individual modules don't really break and the whole thing falls apart one one hundredth of the time. But then you do just have to buy a new one if it breaks down. It's like, where does that trade off become useful? And it becomes profitable for the company, but it's also when does it be also become

profitable for the consumer? Because the whole point of right to repair is... Yeah, you don't want to lose money by having to replace a whole thing instead of just a part. Exactly, but if it's more cost effective. I think that that curve, I don't know how to explain this, but it lands somewhere in the value of that thing to you. that thing to you. So if it's my phone and you told me you could have an unbreakable phone, but, or an almost unbreakable phone, but an almost completely on unrepairable phone, I would take that. Yeah. But if you told me I have to have a car or something I rely on every day, and I can't quickly get a new one and it's almost unbreakable, but if it does break,

you just have to get rid of that car. I would be less likely to take that risk. So I'm saying if it's a more disposable thing, I'm willing to take that price. If it's a lower value thing, I'm willing to sacrifice the right to repair. But if it's a high value thing, I still want that ability to repair. I think. I think one thing, though, in this debate about more unbreakable versus more repairable is user error that we're not talking about right now because in all these situations that makes perfect sense if the phone's used correctly or whatever but how many broken

screens are there how many destroyed corners or charging ports get destroyed from somebody or and yes i know we will get to the point where that's getting harder and harder to break but i guarantee you we will break them or with a car like you're like a tesla makes perfect sense there are way few moving parts so if you use your car perfectly all the time it will most likely outlast a motor i mean we haven't gotten official stuff on that but chance there's way less things to do so it's easier to mess up but you can mess it up and when you do or yours wasn't even your fault a tractor trailer side swiped you yeah no other car would take two months to fix that part but because it happened that did there's there's always this user error aspect of it and i

feel like i probably i'd love to to ask Lewis, how many things does he get brought into him tech-wise at least that are because Apple messed up and it broke or because a user messed up and it broke? That was a great point. Let's take a quick break and then dive into that. The Paramount Plus exclusive series, The Agency. The CIA sends us out to behave in a dangerous way. Starring Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere. Whatever it takes, make it appreciable. The Agency, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. You know what's great about ambition?

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Mitsubishi Motors. So yeah, when we talk about user error, we were just talking about how many of the repairs do you think are happening because somebody did something wrong and their thing broke or just because they were using it like it was perfectly intended to and it just happened to break i would be so curious about those ratios and a bunch of different like industries because i feel like cars like obviously you hit something you're gonna have to get your car repaired but you're right but if you drive a tes Tesla the exact same way that you drive

a normal gas car the brake pads on the Tesla will last 50 100 times as long because you don't use brake pads nearly as much because of regenerative braking from the motors so the brake pads are just rated to last a lifetime of the car which is insane there's just one less moving part one less thing to have to replace or break or fix that. I mean, they still have brake pads because you don't always regenerative brake, but it's just one less part that is likely to eventually reach the end of its life in your car. And that's the type of thing that I think cars of the future are going to continue to improve on. There's going to be more things where it's like, well, cars in the past used to have

a whole moving steering wheel inside the car. and now we don't have those anymore because they would break eventually i guess um bad example but i was gonna say yeah nobody where do we not have yeah nobody breaks their steering wheels but i'm sure there's lots of switches inside there that people are like breaking off where plastic would break but that's the that's the inevitable future is like, cars are just going to keep getting more and more well integrated and they will ideally last longer and longer. But if they ever have something that breaks because of user error, they will immediately be subject to a way longer process of going back to the manufacturer versus a regular gas car where you could have fixed it yourself. Right. So that is an exact example of when I talked to Fairphone, something that they're trying to fix. Ah, okay.

So it's funny that you bring up like user error and system error because at some point they almost kind of converge, right? Every single year Apple releases a new iPhone, they always talk about how the screen is better. It's less shatter resistant, right? That's like a combination. More shatter resistant. Or more shatter resistant. In theory anyway.

Yeah, in theory. Yeah. You know, it's like they're talking about like it will crack less and all this stuff. And it becomes like a feature of the phone. So in that way, it's also like a feature. But then it's also user area when you break it. So I don't know. Either way.

Fairphone was really interesting to talk to. They actually contacted us after the RetroPair video went live because they wanted to chat about their phone. They're this company from Amsterdam, and they make phones that are supposed to be as basically like repairable as possible. They are not the newest phones. I think the newest one is still running on Android 10, and they use generally lower-end Qualcomm processors. Android 10 and they use like generally lower end Qualcomm processors But for people who like really care about like replacing individual things in their phones, they make it really easy So you can either swap out the screen everything is it's almost like project Aura in a way from Google if you guys remember that Yeah, very similar like they have these modules

The Fairphone 3 plus is actually just the Fairphone 3, but they released some updated camera modules. So if you don't want to buy a 3 Plus, you can actually swap out the cameras in the 3 and then you have a 3 Plus, right? So anything that breaks or if things get better, you can sort of just upgrade it almost like a PC. But then again, you get that downside of, okay. And I asked him in particular, I was like, well, a lot of people replace their phones because they start to feel slow. Right. And if you're using these like mid ranged, older Qualcomm processors, like our people are really going to be excited about that. I mean, a big part of the marketing in like any new chipset launch or any new phone launch is how much faster the new processor, the best processor we've ever made. Right. But Fairphone wants to take a different approach. And this was really interesting to me. much faster than your processor. The best processor we've ever made, right?

But Fairphone wants to take a different approach. And this was really interesting to me. They said, ideally, they would like their customers to have one of their phones for seven years. Even with spare parts, even with having to change your battery after two years and a half. That's Miguel Ballester from Fairphone. And doing some upgrades when you want,

you still end up in those 30% reduction. If we even push it to seven years, which might sound super crazy, but it's technologically not impossible, we think, you would be talking about 45% reduction. And that's using the same type of phones, right? We're only talking about extending the use phase. Because the refresh cycle of general phones is like two to three now. And, you know, if you're a real tech head, you replace your phone like every year. So they want people to use these phones and they're like, okay, my screen broke. I'll buy a new screen module, slap it on.

My camera broke. I'll buy a new camera module, slap it on. Right. I'll buy a new screen module, slap it on. My camera broke, I'll buy a new camera module, slap it on. But again, you've got all these downsides, which is like you can't make it faster. They do guarantee five years of software updates, but they said only when it's needed. That's also a hard guarantee when you want seven-year life to not guarantee a seven-year.

Yeah, and also like a chipset doesn't necessarily support you know the software that long so it's kind of a it's a weird thing a big part of the way they made the company is because they are actually trying to make the world like more sustainable he brought up this good point of the fact that like so if you

look at the whole ecosystem of materials every year only around 10% actually less so there's some reports that say If you look at the whole ecosystem of materials, every year, only around 10% actually less, so there's some reports that say like somewhere between nine and 10% of material that is used in industry and all the different industries, not only in the consumer electronics industry,

only 10% gets recycled. So the other 90% is just stuff that ends up either in hibernation, so in the drawers in our homes, or in a landfill, but it does not get recycled. And this is so every year, I just want to make this picture every year 90% comes from the ground from a mine, let's say, and gets landfill to make it super simplistic. It does not get recycled. The amount of devices that we have just sitting in our drawers and stuff not being utilized when they could be utilized and then other people are going out and buying new things.

But there's actually a cobalt shortage right now, which is this rare earth metal that's used in a lot of batteries and a lot of devices. And it's just using a ton of devices. And they've been working really, really hard to try to make the mines of these cobalt mines like have better working conditions and to get more value out of the mines while also like treating the people better because obviously it's like really bad, not great.

And it's it's it's we're at this point where it's like kind of sad because we have all these devices sitting in our drawers that have cobalt in them and if you you can recycle i think he said about 90 80 to 90 percent of the cobalt in devices pretty effectively and yet there's a shortage when we have all these devices every single person has an old phone or an old this or that that has cobalt in it it creates a lot of waste. That's Ethan Manister. He's like a community manager for defunct boosted board users. He runs the discord for boosted boards and also is one of the mods on the subreddit. And being in that kind of environmentalist front, as an architecture student, I have to worry a lot about where these products that I'm using for my education go. It's

kind of antithetical. If I'm practicing sustainable building and sustainable design, I need to make sure that the things I'm using do not contribute to something that I'm trying to stop. Yeah, this is really curious to me. I'm going to try to make an analogy, but we'll see if it works or not. But I think it's really interesting that they still, despite being modular, expect it to last seven years and then you get rid of it. And I wonder what that limiting factor is. Is it just because it's going to get too slow after seven years and won't support the software anymore? Or is it just because, well, the other thing is how many people want to buy a phone that isn't as performant because it will be more repairable in the future?

And you're talking about how there's so much cobalt in the world, but it's inside of gadgets that we don't use anymore. And I'm thinking like, I remember when I get like a notebook for school and I would like take notes on like half the pages. And then once the class was over, I didn't need to take notes on it anymore. And I just got rid of that notebook. I didn't use the last 50 pages in the book. They're perfectly usable blank pages, but I just don't feel the need to use those because they're part of something I'm done using. Right. And it's like, is there going to be any

way to get people to want to use their old gadgets, to want to repair, to want to take advantage of these extra resources we know we have? Or do people just want the newest thing, no matter what? It feels like that's kind of where we're at. Yeah, and it's like where capitalism is at. I think that's what, you know, people always want the newest thing. It's just that conversation was so interesting to me because it's another angle of right to repair. There's so many angles now. There's the like, you should be able to do whatever you want with the devices you own. There's the you should be able to fix anything and have access to the parts that the manufacturers have. And then there's also the sustainability angle

of like we are destroying our planet by just like replacing our devices constantly. And so that's like three or four different major angles to this idea. Yeah. And I think that's also, I don't want to say it's downfall, but a reason why the messaging has not been really loud.

Yeah, it's not as easy to lump everything into one easy to adjustable sentence, you know. Can we talk about the printer thing from that video? Yeah, I just want to I just want to bring this up because we we do research for videos and it just takes us down random paths. And I just felt the need to tell people about this. OK, so the example we use in the beginning of the right to repair video. Can you do anything you want with the thing you own and you buy an object you get to use it however you want but if you buy like a potentially dangerous object you can't use it to harm people that's against the law but like what if you just buy a printer you can just do whatever

you want with the printer right you can put it on whatever table in any room you want you can plug it in in any outlet you please like no one's gonna stop any wi-fi yeah maybe feels like it potentially but you get it working and you can just go ham get whatever paper you want print on napkins print on regular paper print red white and blue whatever i wouldn't suggest nap yeah i wouldn't suggest it but you can if you want to um but if you try to photocopy money currency legal tender it actually won't let you do it or print either like or print it at all and that's because the printer well not the printer so it is illegal to print money and so the printer companies have built in a way of recognizing when some sort of legal tender is being printed or photocopied.

There's actually a really specific dot pattern that has a name that appears on many major currencies. And they're all like you can find it on the dollar and the euro and every every like piece of paper money has this dot pattern. And you can just put that dot pattern on a piece of paper and it won't print it so if you try to photocopy some money like some printers will throw up an error message on the screen like i won't do this some will get halfway through then see the dot pattern then blank the rest of the page so you get like half a dollar bill it's really interesting seeing this happen

but this isn't because like there is some physical limitation of the printer. This is something that you bought that you own that is perfectly capable of doing this thing, but they're not going to let you because they don't want to have that liability on themselves. Somebody printed money with an Epson printer and now Epson looks bad. So I don't know. That's just like a random quirk of, the ownership. Like we all think of ownership as being able to do whatever you want that it is physically able to do. And if you're able to repair the thing, physically speaking, I'm just going to do it. No one should be able to stop me. Uh, but that's, that's, there's not yet another wrinkle in that

because there's always going to be people trying to stop you to do, trying to stop you from doing things that you should be able to do yeah it's it's funny that photocopy thing actually even transcends to a lot of photo editing software I tried to open a ten dollar bill in Photoshop oh yeah it throws this random error code that references this law from like the 80s or something yeah it makes perfect sense like you and if you draw if you drag a png of money into photoshop because i'm not touching this you can't have this in a layer it's funny because we were doing a video on a 300 phone i think and i had 200 bills for the thumbnail i needed one more and i was

like all right we'll just photoshop like we'll just copy another one because i can't i can't print money obviously so we'll just make another one because I can't print money, obviously, so we'll just make another one. And we couldn't even do that. I forgot how we actually figured that out. I don't remember either. But that's just such a random – it's a great news. Yeah, no, I mean that's another – it's like that's a whole other angle to write your repair too is like the ability to do whatever you want

with the things you own, right? And I think that's what the farmers are angry at. There's a lot of people who, you know, there's these stories about people who put the autopilot stuff on their Teslas and it's like they shouldn't be doing that. And the car gets mad at them. And then Tesla doesn't want to be liable when people hurt themselves. But then you were talking to Simone. Right. And she said that, like, yeah, the project got so much traction that it would like look really bad for them to go after me that's Simone but it's also like I mean I remember scheduling a service appointment because I wasn't I had some software issues and the service tech before I came in

called and was like hey I know who you are and I know what you've done to your car. And I was so freaked out that I actually didn't go. And it's kind of weird that like, you're scared of a company punishing you for doing something with their product. Simone's story is interesting. So if you haven't seen what Simone did with her Model 3, which she still drives, by the way, which is amazing. She took the back half off of it and turned it into a pickup truck. Like I still get alarms going off in my car being like, hey, your seatbelt and the rear seat isn't plugged in. And I'm like, there is no rear seat.

That's what you don't know. And the project is great. And I wanted to keep as much of the structural integrity of the original Model 3 as possible. But like you see that thing driving around on the street and you're like, I've never seen anything like that before. It's so cool. But when you go to that length to modify your car, sawing off beams and like putting other truck parts in there, obviously that's not covered under any sort of warranty. Not only that, but it'll probably be strongly discouraged by Tesla. under any sort of warranty.

Not only that, but it'll probably be strongly discouraged by Tesla. And whenever something happens to a Tesla that is against their terms of use, basically, they have every right to shut that car off of software updates, to blacklist that car's VIN number from supercharging, to do whatever they want to essentially discourage the continued use of that car, And also probably safety. They didn't do any of that with Simone's car. They still let her supercharge. She still gets software updates. The only thing it does is it keeps paying her to buckle the backseat of the car,

but there is no backseat of the car. But that's just a funny like, okay, if Tesla sees this one project and it's really good PR and they don't want to do anything about it, they don't have to. But at the same time, if you're somewhere in the middle, if you're somewhere and I just want to, I don't know, chop out the back seats of my car and put in different back seats. I don't think they're going to want you to do that. And there's a very good chance they have a good reason for you to not do that. It's like the farmers, they don't like that they physically can't use their tractor when it throws these error codes that's that's the biggest issue for them is like they are like i bought this why does it just not work now and i don't

have control over that and that's what they like very much dislike but it's the exact same thing as tesla where like it could be a major safety concern because these these like tractors are freaking huge so really it's this conversation of like do you have the right to be dangerous with the stuff that you bought from other people yeah that's kind of like what's the risk level there yeah also to take it back to printers which are not risky at all why can't you print things with black ink when you're out of yellow ink like seriously that's like big printer It's it's completely physically possible for me to change the text in my document to blue and print it in blue. And I'm out of black ink, just print it in blue. And it's like, I can't print anything right now.

Like, why? That doesn't make any sense. To go back, though, on like we're talking about safety that I think the safety excuse for companies makes way more sense for like Tesla and John Deere, because those are things that not only can like, can hurt the users, but like potentially hurt other people. I think that's a little, this is a little harder when it comes to an iPhone. Yes, there are battery issues, that can cause damage, but a lot of iPhone, MacBook, I shouldn't just say that there there's plenty of, you know, computer know computer smartphone general consumer goods they're a lot less dangerous if something bad would happen yes you can get in a battery that explodes but like that's much different than a tesla like not being able to break as it's flying down the

highway so it's a it's very different so i find that excuse much harder by these big tech companies to to throw out there this is actually one of the things I saw a lot in the YouTube comments section, still valuable to this day, which was that basically everything is dangerous. That was their argument where they'd say, all right, Tesla won't let you dig into like, you know, snipping wires and getting into the batteries of the car because you might hurt yourself. But anyone can change their brakes. Anyone can do a tire rotation. And if you mess that up, you will crash and hurt at least yourself, but probably more people. So maybe Tesla shouldn't have that excuse. If you can go

into your iPhone, you can probably break the battery and that will hurt you a lot. Like everything is dangerous was their argument. So there should not be any right to repair, like division between non-dangerous and dangerous things. Their argument is everything can hurt somebody, probably even printers. And you should just not be able to repair anything or you should be able to repair everything. It's, it's one or the other. I don't, I mean, it's hard to argue that, that logic, but I think generally my assumption would be a lot of these companies use safety as yeah oh a nicer way of them saying we don't want the bad pr for something that happens yeah

it's like it's much more image based on them than it is on them caring about if you like this sounds pretty bad but i'm sure a lot of these companies care more about the article that says someone died because of their product and less about the actual person dying about yeah it's just it's definitely it's funny that tesla will let you change your wheels as much as you want totally allowed and you can mess up a couple bolts and the wheel falls off and like that's definitely going to hurt some people but there's just like a level of risk that tesla's calculated that they're willing to accept before they will straight up like blacklist your car and you think you shouldn't touch the stuff on that side of the spectrum I think that's the specific point where it

becomes user error versus manufacturer yeah right like imagine if Tesla didn't let you change your wheels that would just be like literal zero customization by the person like would you could you say they have control over could they theoretically ever have control over your wheels? That's the thing. I mean, I guess they could physically I'm sure they could find a way I mean, I'm sure they could find a way because there's always tools for you to do whatever like they there if I want to Go in and remove the computer and put in a different one I physically could do that enough screws and wires but like it's not gonna work

but all they would have to do is find some sort of sensor that doesn't get triggered when you change the wheel and then bricks the car yeah i mean there's potentially potentially i'm just saying wheels are like a pretty standard thing i think we've all come to the the understanding that wheels at at least at this point we don't know in future, are something that users change all the time. They're low risk. They're very low risk, exactly. People change them all the time with a low percent of failure,

and that's good. There's a certain number of things people don't change all the time with that low of a risk, and that's where they draw the line. Yes, you can change your computer out in your Tesla. All right, well, I want to talk about some of the final, like the conclusion type stuff that's actually happening around right to repair. We'll do that after the break.

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yeah so i talked to taylor from ifixit and he brought this up and then also when i was talking to fairphone they also brought this up but basically i'm not sure if you know about france's new repair scoring system that they just implemented so So that's Taylor Dixon from iFixit. In France, they just came out with a whole repairability scoring system that manufacturers are required to score their own product based on the availability of parts, how hard the thing is to disassemble. And so France legally obligates every company within certain categories to do this to assign this repair score. Right now, this is only in France, but it's kind of populating

throughout the EU slowly. And the EU actually seems a lot more willing to put these kind of legislation pieces into place. This is something we talked about the very end of our video, right? It was like, what are the next steps? Legislation has got to be the next thing. I know in the States, it's much more like per state, actually. In the EU, we have this new Green Deal from, I think it's already one year and a half ago. And there's this circular economy package that is being put into place. So I think steps are being done really, really fast here when it comes to legislation, but also, yeah, let's say, pushing a little bit the brands to have that responsibility into the market. But in France, they actually have these repairability scores

that have to go on certain electronics. So right now it's not on everything. It's on like smartphones and laptops and things that you would think would have potentially some replaceable parts. But effectively, there's it's a score from one to ten, even though there's there's like it's there's decimal. So it's technically one to one hundred. But you have a very strict list of things like, okay, how repairable is the screen? How repairable is this part? How repairable is this part? And then right now, the manufacturers themselves

are the ones that give themselves a score, which doesn't seem great. He did say that friends tried to make these as robust as possible so that you couldn't cheat. But if something was between a 4.6 and a 4.7, good chance they're going to6 and a 4.7 good chance they're going to give it a 4.7 but um turns out this is actually having a lot of impact on consumers which is not something i i necessarily expected that but i guess if you think about like

i would like to know how much those like uh warnings on cigarette packages like if you've seen the the cigarette warnings in like aust, they're like, you are going to die if you smoke these in big, bold letters. Your lungs will explode. And this is a picture of it. It's a similar thing. So like these scores are not only saying like, hey, by the way, you'll be able to keep this thing longer because you can fix it, but also that it's better for the environment.

And apparently that's actually having a really big impact on consumers. Really? Okay. I was going to ask, there's so many, I have so many questions. Okay. Number one. So how do they decide what gets a score and what doesn't? Cause you said this is smartphones and computers and things that should have replaceable parts, but that's been a moving goal over time. Like today it's easy to put smartphones and laptops on one side of that line and maybe smaller accessories i'm just going to say headphones for example on

the other side of that line but 40 years ago the line was over here right so i guess the line's here today but does that law define what gets a score i don't know like what's a computer not really sure about that but um the other is as you said the companies yeah make their own scores how do you define a five out of ten repairability is it just for how many parts of the phone so they have a checklist they have a checklist of like can you replace this part can you replace this part can you replace this part and that's why it's based on product category right now okay it's like laptops versus phones versus this and it's kind of like it's kind of like youtube right like there are so many hours of video uploaded per

second that you cannot physically have enough human beings on the earth to do this it's obviously scaled down for product launches but there are a lot of products that are being launched all the time yeah you can't have someone from france that is paid to do this full time because they will never catch up. So this makes me think like if I am a company, I am immediately planning on maximizing my score and probably trying to do whatever I can despite the product's lack of repairability to maximize my score. And I'm trying to think, cause like in a, uh, in the EPA rating for how many miles per gallon your car gets, there's a standard test and you, you run through the test and companies have tried to cheat this test, but you eventually land on a standardized score.

I'm wondering if there's going to be parts that are technically replaceable, but that there are no available replacements for it. Like where you'll technically be able to say yes you can do you can replace the charge part with three easy screws but we won't sell you that like they'll get a high repairability score despite not really you know making a better product for right to repair you know what's funny is when i asked i was fair phone about this and they said that most companies in like europe are like happy to sell you the parts like he he he was actually kind of surprised or I mean, he knows about Apple, obviously. But when I asked him that, I was like, so theoretically, because I asked him, do you guys have like repair centers for

people that don't want to repair their phones, even though it's fairly easy with Fairphone? He's like, Yeah, we have one repair center in in France. And I was like, Okay, well, like, what about third parties? You know, do they have access to in France. And I was like, okay, well, like, what about third parties? You know, do they have access to these parts? And he was like, well, we're a small company. We only have 200,000 customers right now. But yeah, why not? In the end, then a Fairphone will be repaired faster

and a customer will be happy again. So why not? I mean, if we scaled up and we're the the size of apple we'd happily give every part we have available to a third party because that just means more people using our phones like he seems like perplexed that i was asking this question i i love that philosophy i don't think it scales yeah like if you are apple it's easy to say at least when you're small scale yeah because when you get to these bigger companies who are rightfully arguably anti-competitive or they are in ruthless competition where if they do make parts available and they do have to deal with more

liability and more headlines that's worse for them yeah so they have more incentive to not allow that sort of stuff to happen and just just send us back your phone we'll fix it for you for 150 bucks like that's what the bigger more competitive companies are going to do so yeah i guess i'm not surprised that a company like fair phone or at least position like fair phone is perfectly happy to sell you parts and be an advocate for right to repair but i'm so curious about those stickers and like how many companies are specifically going to try to maximize their score while not actually doing anything good for right to repair. Yeah, I think I think everyone is obviously always trying to optimize their score. But it did.

I did get a general sense that in the EU it is at least more of a consideration than it is here. And I think that is backed up by the fact that legislation passes more easily. Whether or not we like it. backed up by the fact that legislation passes more easily. Whether or not we like it, I think the legislation that passes is kind of like a distilled sense of what the people in that area care about. And obviously people here, they care about the environment, they care about right to repair, but they're not like loud about it, you know? And in the EU, people are louder about it. And that's why they only sell and in the eu people are louder about it and that's why they only sell phones in the eu right now so on the score you're saying there's like a checklist

and it's based on if you can repair it does it have anything to do with who can repair it that that would be something i'd have to look up because like tell you that that like the first thing i can think of is yeah apple can maximize their score they can repair everything you just have to do it through them. And whether that is going to delete everything on your storage in the process, or Lewis has talked about, and I don't remember the exact specifics,

but there's certain components in a MacBook where if Apple were to try and replace that, they would say they can't recover anything from your hard drive, where he has ways where, or at least he digs a little deeper and can find different ways that might actually be able to save you like all the information you had, which is super, super important to a lot of people. So the score sounds

fantastic. I do agree with you that I'm sure outside of the US, I bet people care about that score a little much. I would like to see if anyone gave to see if anyone gave but it's also bold on the front of the packaging i think that actually does make a big difference i i would love to see that might be the most important part of the legislation like if everyone's required to give a mile per gallon but then nobody has to tell you what it is versus it's in the sticker on the window like that number is going to mean something. So you might not care at all about repairability, but when you get to the store and you, you know, this new legislation passes and suddenly there's two phones next to each other. One of them says three out of 10. One of them says eight out of 10.

Maybe you are swayed a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. And this almost comes out. Sorry, we'll be talking one second. This almost comes back to, we had this conversation before about like reviews and like how people like micro differences in reviews on Amazon. Something's a 4.7, something's a 4.6. Always going to go with that 4.7.

Like it's the things that are in the consumer peripherals that has a big influence on what they buy. I think what I would specifically be interested in, though, is Apple obviously sells their phones in their own stores. Somebody who's not us, we would all kind of understand what a repairability score is most people would not they would immediately ask a question and now who's the person they're asking the question to the apple employee that's inside the apple store oh how is that good so what about the horizon story you know if the iphone has a three and there's a bunch of other phones actually has any customer support at all oh sorry bad joke in the u.s people buy their phones no no yeah yeah

exactly so i'm thinking i'm just saying if they're actually helpful oh yeah but like if you if you're just looking at the box or looking at the sticker which i think it's a nice like understandable logo it's an out of 10 rating clearly that's cool but yeah like i do think if they saw a lower rating and especially it gets a different color it's a little more worrisome and to throw another wrench in it no pun intended there is uh there's gonna be like apple has like their name recognition and if apple ships their phones out there and they get a one out of ten i think people care less about their repairability score because they know the and they get a one out of 10, I think people care less about their repairability score because they know the good phone has a one out of 10. So it must not mean much. Does that make sense? I kind of disagree with that. Really? Yeah. I think that, I mean,

I think people buy iPhones cause they've always bought iPhones, right? I've talked to people who had an LG phone and I was like, Oh wow. Like you're using, I don't see a lot of people using LG phones. They just say I've used LG phones since the flip phones. And so like people stick with what they know. But I do think that like putting this information in their face when directly compared against something right next to it does have an impact on people. And like, it's very hard to sway people off of platforms. And I think a lot of people will just stay on the iPhone, even if it has a one out of

10 and the Fairphones right next to it with a nine out of 10. Yeah. But I think there will be a sizable amount of people who would at least think about it. Yeah. I think there's, there are people, I guess there's like two types of shoppers. There's shoppers that go into the store knowing what they want. Ah, my iPhone's getting kind of old. Part of it's broken.

I'm going to the store to get the new iPhone. Tell me where the store is, son. I'm going to get a new iPhone from the Verizonizon store and they walk in and they're like which one's the new one i'll buy it and it has a one out of ten and they go oh okay oh well really i'm getting one out of ten i really think that would make an impact that's one type of person okay okay the other type of person is going in ready to cross shop and they're gonna go i would like a big screen phone i don't know which one yet but i would like a big screen phone and they walk in and there's three or four big screen phones and they might ask a question cross shop and they're going to go, I would like a big screen phone. I don't know which one yet, but I would like a big screen phone. And they walk in and there's three or four big screen phones and they might ask a question or two and they might shop around and

pick two of them up. And one of them has a higher score than the other. That person's probably going to think about that score a little more. But I think there's a lot of people who you say buy LG, LG, LG, LG, because they're familiar. And even if they recognize something's not that great about it, at least they know LG stuff. And there's a lot of iPhone users who are just on that track and they just know their iPod, their AirPods are going to work and then the Mac is going to work with it. And they're just going to get an iPhone and that's what they're here for. And oh, it's got a one out of 10. This other phone's got a 10 out of 10, but it doesn't work with my AirPods.

I don't really care. So I think those people will see the scores and go, I guess one out of 10 is not so bad because the iPhone just works with all my stuff already. So I'm curious what type of effect those stickers may or may not have on those groups of people. But that's just a thought. Like you said, I think that it's extremely dependent on the type of customer. But I still think that it will have an effect on all customers, whether or not it actually changes the customers that just know what they want.

I don't know. But at least they'll think about it for a second. It's like when you watch a documentary. It's like you watch that documentary about like how bad McDonald's is for you. And then everyone's like, I'm a vegan now. And then the next day they're eating McDonald's again. And then six months later, yeah. This is one more really good Lewis Rossman point, which is.

I don't think most people know it's an issue until it's long after they bought it. And that's part of it. So I think they care after they've had the experience. So when someone brings me a machine that's like $4,000 and I say, this would usually be a $300 repair, but the manufacturer doesn't allow me to get this chip, so you've got to buy a new one. That sticks with them. And then the next time, they'll say, I care about this.

But most people don't care until they're made aware of it as a problem or just like most problems. Most people don't care until it personally affects them. And so if you go your whole life, never having to replace a single part in your car, you honestly probably don't care how repairable or replaceable the parts are or tech for that matter or your tractor, whatever. If it works, it works. This is probably why John Deere has so much leverage is because their tractors are probably

really good. They're really good. If the repairability thing is such a big problem, buy a different tractor would be a really good answer. But John Deere stuff is so good and so dominant that people just keep using that stuff. But when the day finally comes where something breaks and you actually do have to repair something, you're going to care a lot more about right to repair, about how repairable the thing is that you bought, about the repairability score you ignored before. All that stuff comes right to the top and you'd be a right to repair advocate from nothing as soon as something needs to be replaced. It's so funny because when we think about it, I think you can actually make the

analogy that John Deere is basically the apple of tractors, right? Like they make the one, I don't actually know any other tractor companies. When I try to think off the top of tractors right like they make the one i don't actually know any other tractor companies when i try to think off the top of my head if someone said name a tractor company i'd say john deere say tonka i don't even know if they make i don't even know and so like and i think that's how a lot of consumers feel in the u.s people say oh give me your iphone but they don't you know nobody knows what one plus is unless you're like in the tech community right so it's kind of like, yeah. And at the same time, they make really good stuff that works with all its parts.

They have an app on your phone that will tell you like what parts of the tractor are having issues. If you can fix it yourself and all this stuff. And it's like very high tech, very this, this. Um, but yet they,

at the end of the day, they control the ecosystem and it's really similar in that way. Yeah. That's, that's always, uh, it always comes back to the illusion of choice. Yeah. It's like, listen, you don't like the way we do things by a different one. Tesla's like, you don't like the way we handle repairs with our electric cars.

Fine. Buy a different one. Yeah. Guess how much fun you're going to have. Yeah. Not as much. You don't want to buy a gender. You don't want to buy bro.

Buy another tractor. What other track? What other tractor? Exactly. So if you're out here buying phones and you realize at the end of the day, Apple has a lot of leverage and a lot of control and people are just here for the iPhone anyway, they can, this is something I talk about all the time. They can use their good product as leverage for bad behavior. And this is just another one of those examples of anti-right to repair is just another bad behavior that people are willing sometimes to deal with because the iPhone is so good to them.

I think that's basically it. Until it breaks. Then we revisit the right to repair video that Marques made and how angry we are. It's that extreme frustration of like, oh, I hate them as a company, but oh, their product is so good. That's what everybody feels about Apple

and that's pretty much what these farmers feel about john deere too product is king product is king well yeah i think that's that's kind of the moral of the story i think honestly if you were to distill pretty much every video i make into like one sentence it would be like how good the product is is the only thing matters. And when we talk about right to repair, the only reason it's an issue is because people still keep wanting to buy these things despite their poor repairability scores. And there's going to be little features that are bad in otherwise great products and people are still going to want to buy the otherwise great product. There's always going to be stuff that comes up to make you question the overall quality of an

usually pretty great product and how important each of these factors is to you is going to determine how important, you know, the overall product experience is to you. But generally, typically product is king. And if you make a good product, everything else comes after that. You know, at the end of the day, we have to worry about the limited resources that we have. So it's a question of safety. People's lives are not replaceable. People's limbs are not replaceable yet. So it's a question of safety and humanity at the end of the day. It's more ethics than it is legality. And we need to worry about holding, you know, people above money.

And that's just, that will always be the answer to every question. Yeah. Yeah. And people can't really question that either, right? Yeah.

Well, that's been it. I feel like we've talked our faces off again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty good for Waveform, but we'll be back next week with a more regularly structured episode of Current Events. Unless something crazy comes out.

I mean, there's always a chance, but there's plenty of videos planned on all the channels. So let us know what you think of this style of roundtable format, if you will. There's always room to edit and improve. You can discuss it on the new Discord channel. You can discuss it on Discord. We are on YouTube, but you can discuss it on the new discord channel you can discuss it on discord we're on youtube so you can leave it in the comments section you can tweet at us now we're all over the place this is great may the best platform win uh all right that's been it talk to you guys later peace waveform was produced by adam molina we are partner with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.