Right to Repair is a common sense idea. More than 46 states have introduced some form of Right to Repair legislation, and five have already put laws on the books, but the fight is far from over.

Restricting Access to Parts, Tools, and Documentation

Many manufacturers restrict access to parts and tools, refusing to make them available to anyone but their own dealers’ repair shops. This kind of control creates a repair monopoly, locking independent shops out of repairs and enabling manufacturers to set artificially high prices. It’s not a coincidence that a smartphone screen repair is often about half the cost of a new device. The so-called “50% rule” is an arbitrary (but often-cited) point at which many customers will opt to replace instead of repair. In addition to controlling parts, most manufacturers refuse to publish the related instructions—instructions they have already created for their internal use. Withholding repair documentation makes DIY repairs more difficult and more dangerous.

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Blocking and Locking Third-Party Parts

Some manufacturers go even further than restricting access to original parts and actually block third-party options such as screen and battery repair or printer ink. HP was caught using fake error messages to obstruct third-party ink cartridges; HP then paid out a hefty settlement to its printer customers. Apple discourages third-party parts with “unable to verify” warnings that show up as persistent messages on your lock screen and get added to your device information. John Deere puts their tractors into a slow-drive “limp mode” when some errors show up until those errors are cleared by dealer-only software. These disingenuous alerts and artificial feature limitations erode trust in independent repair, driving customers back into the manufacturer repair monopoly.

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Pairing Parts to the Motherboard

An increasingly common and awfully effective strategy to block repairs is pairing parts to the device’s motherboard. If a faulty part is replaced with a new one, the main board will refuse to accept it. The only way to replace that faulty component is to find a new part paired to a new motherboard, which makes repair more expensive and complex. We first saw this in the Xbox 360, which “married” the game disc drive to the motherboard, driving up the cost of a disc drive repair by 10 times. More and more manufacturers have started using this strategy to block independent repair. Apple’s Self Repair program locks parts to a device serial number, which dramatically limits the potential for independent repair and end-of-life refurbishment. Manufacturers generally have the ability to re-code these parts to accept new ones. Their own authorized repair shops use pairing software to do so. But keeping that pairing software secret is another way to maintain a monopoly on repair.

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Designing Unrepairable Products

Manufacturers make all kinds of unrepairable design decisions that block or discourage repairs. They use proprietary screwheads, so people have to special order the tools they need. Batteries get glued in with industrial adhesive, making basic maintenance ridiculously difficult. Components get soldered together into ungainly assemblies, meaning you have to replace, for instance, an entire top case just to replace a key on a keyboard.

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