You won't hear any here. HN, while libertarian-leaning on many issues, is overwhelmingly in favor of government regulation on this topic.
I'll be downvoted, but here's a few real potential downsides (which exist anytime a small group of people with good intentions THINK they understand a complex issue enough to fix it). All regulation has unintended consequences:
Ineffective at stopping E-waste - The main reason people throw electronics away is not because they break, but because they become obsolete. In electronics, the next generation of products is almost always faster, smaller, and more energy efficient. Hence why we have landfills full of old beige computer towers that are fully functional and user-repairable, yet nobody wants.
Dampened innovation - When you tell companies they have to build things a certain way, you remove the option for something better to evolve. Once you pass a law, it's almost impossible to get it removed, and who knows what the future will bring (eg. biodegradable electronics, miniaturization on a microscopic scale, etc)
Increased costs for consumers - baring the extra engineering/documentation costs (which aren't trivial), any requirements to supply spare parts for X years would be insanely expensive. Forcing companies to create small quantity B2C supply chains and retail channels for consumers to purchase individual parts on obsolete models would be an absolute nightmare.
Disincentivized R&D - if you're forced to create manuals that tell your competitors how to clone your products and also let them easily buy all your parts, why invest in creating something unique? You'll just be cloned by an army of chinese competitors even faster. Just sell commodity crap hardware and focus on branding.
Entrenching incumbents - incumbent big companies may simply use this regulation as an opportunity to entrench their position in the marketplace. If they can make it harder for upstarts to get off the ground, that's good for them! Anytime a company is coming out in favor of legislation and "restrictions" on their business, beware.
Whatever folks' objections to these reasons may be, this does seem like a great accounting of logical and well-reasoned objections to this legislation, which is what I was looking for. Sounds to me like it'd be important to properly consider this issue to at least do some mental gymnastics as to what the possible objections could be.
This is an issue I myself have had to consider. Personally I'm no fan of government interference in this matter even if I'm not a big fan of Apple's practices as a whole. While I'm on board with the ideas behind R2R, I can't in anyway support an imposition of producing spare parts or manuals by legislative writ.
In the long run, it would probably be ineffective as well. Most of the big companies would probably ignore the law and/or sue the state. I'm sure there'll be first amendment issues citing compelled speech with regards to being forced to produce manuals.
1. It complains about downvotes, which is one of many reasons your post is grey.
2. The main reason people throw electronics away is not because they break, but because they become obsolete: Big [citation needed] on shorter time scales. For longer time scales it's intuitively true but irrelevant. With Moore's law being toast, most hardware upgrades are extremely incremental. I don't get any more battery life on my iPhone XS Max than I do on the 6+ it replaced, it's not any more responsive, etc. Beige boxes haven't been a thing for decades. But, people holding onto their devices longer would absolutely result in less ewaste.
3. When you tell companies they have to build things a certain way, you remove the option for something better to evolve: That depends entirely on the nature of the requirements. Nobody's talking about the government dictating the whole BOM. No innovation is being stifled by requiring, say, user-replaceable batteries, unless we're talking about innovative ways to pad the company's bottom line. Let's not lose sight of the fact that repair-hostile design absolutely benefits the company and only the company at the end of the day.
4. baring the extra engineering/documentation costs: which are already done internally, so those costs are irrelevant. Every company that does repairs has documented repair procedures for their own people already. They can put PDFs on a freaking website. No idea what you mean by "extra engineering costs".
5. forcing companies to create small quantity B2C supply chains and retail channels for consumers to purchase individual parts on obsolete models would be an absolute nightmare: That's somewhat fair, but there's no reason it needs to be any more of a retail channel than their ship/replace stuff already is. The infra is already in place, they're just shipping out parts instead of full devices. I think the word "obsolete" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.. a 2 years old phone is only "obsolete" by manufacturer fiat, because they can make more money by marketing tiny, incremental upgrades and simply refusing to support the still-useful device.
6. You'll just be cloned by an army of chinese competitors even faster: Not fast enough for this to be an actual concern. Shitty chinese clones happen with a quickness even today, yet for some reason people still spend billions on name brand devices. I do not foresee this meaningfully changing. Trademark/import law is still a thing, after all.
7. incumbent big companies may simply use this regulation as an opportunity to entrench their position in the marketplace: This is a weak meta-situational argument used by all big businesses against any and all business regulations. I do not see why this case is special.
>No innovation is being stifled by requiring, say, user-replaceable batteries
This is exactly my point. You have good intentions and are trying to solve the problem.
But by doing so you've just made a dangerous authoritarian decision for the future of all computing. Who knows what form batteries will take in the future, especially as power needs are reduced. Look at how much less power the M1 SOC takes vs. Intel chips and multiply that by 10. Now think of all the new form factors that would be enabled by this, and where your law might be a hinderance in 20+ years (yet impossible politically to repeal).
New tech is fragile. All it takes is one guy in legal to say "too risky, violates X law" and said experimental product is set back a decade or two.
> Shitty chinese clones happen with a quickness even today, yet for some reason people still spend billions on name brand devices. I do not foresee this meaningfully changing.
I don't have the same crystal ball to predict the future, I guess. How can you be so sure? Because America is the best at everything and will always be the best? History is filled with predictions of a future that never came to be.
Overall, I'm sympathetic to the cause, but I think the RTR movement is a little too dogmatic and authoritarian for my tastes. If the market wanted the same things as RTR, companies would already be creating their products this way and minting profits. The market isn't perfectly efficient, but it mostly is.
...and if Apple is wrong, and people actually do care about user-replaceable batteries, you should run out and start a RTR-friendly hardware company tomorrow and win the market!
The "safety!" argument against RTR is disingenuous. Just as the "landfills!" argument in favor of RTR is also disingenuous.
Nobody on either side actually believes those things (regardless of how passionately they claim to). They are both fallacious appeals to get disinterested people emotionally wrapped up in the topic.
RE: safety, people getting hurt trying to repair stuff happens already and will still happen post-regulation. Right to repair will not result in more injuries.
RE: landfills, most people don't throw stuff away because it breaks. They throw things away because newer models are more powerful, faster, smaller, more efficient, or aesthetically "cool." Right to repair will not result in less landfills.
1. This law is extremely broad and covers any "digital electronic equipment". Since everything has a computer in it nowadays, it's hard for a person to even understand what industries this covers.
This is unnecessarily much broader than the original intent. Right to repair was mostly pushed for by computer repair shops, who mostly work with consumer electronics. The New York lawmakers acknowledged there was some problem with this, that's why they excluded everything medical or automotive. But every other industry is still effected and it will have unintended consequences. They excluded only cars and medical devices, but did they still intend for this to apply to boats, planes, construction equipment, missiles, building access management, even pipelines?
The Colonial Pipeline must have some "digital electronic equipment" that controls it. How likely is it that if all the maintenance manuals for that stuff are released, people will find some security-by-obscurity there? Computer repair shops are not going to repair oil and gas pipelines, so is there any reason these manuals need to be made publically available?
2. Everything this law requires is going to be made public, it won't just be for independent repair shops, and that may not be in the public interest. The law acknowledges that for security-related information, there may be a reason not to make it publically available. It says that "such documentation, tools, and parts may be made available through appropriate secure release systems." But they can't actually enforce that. The law says that manufacturers have to provide these maintenance manuals for free to any "independent repair provider", which could be a 1-person company, and the right to repair folks already stated they want to dump everything online. So all this confidental information will get leaked immediately and there's nothing the manufacturers will be able to do about it.
3. Security. For electronics, security-by-obscurity is all over the place, you can find it everywhere. Devices always need some privileged mode for things like testing, administration, or maintenance, and it's hard to do that securely on processors that are as cheap as possible for business reasons.
Consider e.g. building access control, like the keypads on apartment buildings. These have a need for someone to be able to unlock the door in unusual situations, e.g. for maintenance, building administration, or for firefighting. Instead of a TLS stack, they probably have some obscurity-by-security keycode, like pressing #12345 to enable the maintenance mode. This would be documented in a maintenance manual and not provided to most end users. When the right to repair folks dump this manual on the internet, it's going to help criminals a lot more than repair shops. Repairs to apartment keypads are rare, but thefts from apartment buildings are very common.
This same thing will happen with a million other devices that no one has thought about yet. If the manufacturer created some features that the user is not supposed to access, there's probably a reason for that. But all this stuff will be recorded in maintenance manuals, and making it public won't really benefit users as much as it will harm security.
