#RightToRepair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than #apple whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of #ewaste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
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@pluralistic this has historical parallels all the way back to the Apple Lisa, where Apple decided to landfill thousands of perfectly good computers to avoid competition from used market. It’s in their DNA.
My favorite story about #righttorepair is about how a former employer of mine figured out how to flip a NVRAM bit in the PC Card Wi-FI decide they were using in the internal design of a peripheral appliance they were selling at a high margin for a price that undercut most of the competition, to turn their $99 “silver” model into the functional equivalent of their $499 “gold” model. (Same hardware, same software, difference was just the secret NVRAM bit set at the factory, and the label applied to the case.)
To cover their tracks, they designed the housing for the appliance so you couldn’t open it and get at the parts inside without destroying it. Eventually word got around that you could cut it open in a very specific way, then use the exposed internals to “upgrade” your PC Cards for free, but by then the parts were almost end of life, and the lost sales were negligible.
I think about that a lot when I hear stories about how automobile repair has turned into a racket.
@janxdevil@pluralistic Well, yeah. Many years ago, the burglar alarm on our car went off when we leaving a shopping center. The problem? Our car didn't have a burglar alarm. But it wouldn't let us drive it away. AAA came, and said "all these cars have a burglar alarm, it's just disabled by a jumper that they remove if you pay for it. And it's fairly common for that jumper to fail, enabling the alarm on a car that doesn't have one."
@mikeloukides@janxdevil@pluralistic I have a Honda Accord hybrid. The battery that starts the car and runs the lights and accessories kept draining while it wasn't running, leaving me stranded. After the dealer replaced the battery three times, they decided to check for "parasitic battery drain." It turned out that the dealer I bought the car from had installed a LoJack, which I had not paid for and did not know about. The LoJack was draining the battery and had damaged a breaker box.
Why does Apple hate repair so much? It's not that they want to poison our water and bodies with microplastics; it's not that they want to hasten the day our coastal cities drown; it's not that they relish the human misery that accompanies every gram of conflict mineral. They aren't sadists. They're merely sociopathically greedy.
#TimCook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple:
Not just because this lets the company gouge you on routine service, but because it lets them decide when your phone is beyond repair, so they can offer you a trade-in, ensuring both that you buy a new device and that the device you buy is another Apple.
There are so many tactics Apple gets to use to sabotage repair. For example, Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on the subassemblies in its devices.
That's why Apple's so-called "recycling" program shreds any devices you turn over to them. When you trade in your old iPhone at an Apple Store, it is converted into immortal e-waste (no other major recycling program does this). The logic is straightforward: no parts, no repairs:
Shredding parts and cooking up bogus trademark claims is just for starters, though. For Apple, the true anti-repair innovation comes from the most pernicious US tech law: #Section1201 of the #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct (#DMCA).
#DMCA1201 is an #AntiCircumvention law. It bans the distribution of any tool that bypasses "an effective means of access control."
That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some #DigitalRightsManagement (#DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal - even if the thing itself is perfectly legal.
When Congress passed this stupid law in 1998, it had a very limited blast radius. Computers were still pretty expensive and DRM use was limited to a few narrow categories.
In 1998, DMCA 1201 was mostly used to prevent you from de-regionalizing your DVD player to watch discs that had been released overseas but not in your own country.
But as we warned back then, computers were only going to get smaller and cheaper, and eventually, it would only cost manufacturers pennies to wrap their products - or even subassemblies in their products - in DRM. Congress was putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, and it was bound to go off in Act III.
Today, it costs about a quarter to add a #SystemOnAChip to even the tiniest parts. These SOCs can run DRM. Here's how that DRM works: when you put a new part in a device, the SOC and the device's main controller communicate with one another.
They perform a cryptographic protocol: the part says, "Here's my serial number," and then the main controller prompts the user to enter a manufacturer-supplied secret code, and the master controller sends a signed version of this to the part, and the part and the system then recognize each other.
This process has many names, but because it was first used in the automotive sector, it's widely known as #VINLocking (#VIN stands for #VehicleIdentificationNumber, the unique number given to every car by its manufacturer). VIN-locking is used to block independent mechanics from repairing your car; even if they use the manufacturer's own parts, the parts and the engine will refuse to work together until the manufacturer's rep keys in the unlock code:
VIN locking is everywhere. It's how #JohnDeere stops farmers from fixing their own tractors - something farmers have done literally since tractors were invented:
It's in ventilators. Like mobile phones, ventilators are a grotesquely monopolized sector, controlled by a single company #Medtronic, whose biggest claim to fame is effecting the world's largest #TaxInversion in order to manufacture the appearance that it is an Irish company and therefore largely untaxable. Medtronic used the resulting windfall to gobble up most of its competitors.
During lockdown, as hospitals scrambled to keep their desperately needed ventilators running, Medtronic's VIN-locking became a lethal impediment. Med-techs who used donor parts from one ventilator to keep another running - say, transplanting a screen - couldn't get the device to recognize the part because all the world's aircraft were grounded, meaning Medtronic's technicians couldn't swan into their hospitals to type in the unlock code and charge them hundreds of dollars.
The saving grace was an anonymous, former Medtronic repair tech, who built pirate boxes to generate unlock codes, using any housing they could lay hands on to use as a case: guitar pedals, clock radios, etc. This tech shipped these gadgets around the world, observing strict anonymity, because #Article6 of the #EUCDalso bans circumvention:
Of course, Apple is a huge fan of VIN-locking. In phones, #VIN-locking is usually called #serializing or #PartsPairing, but it's the same thing: a tiny subassembly gets its own microcontroller whose sole purpose is to prevent independent repair technicians from fixing your gadget. Parts-pairing lets Apple block repairs even when the technician uses new, Apple parts - but it also lets Apple block refurb parts and third party parts.
For many years, Apple was the senior partner and leading voice in blocking state Right to Repair bills, which it killed by the dozen, leading a coalition of monopolists, from #Wahl (who boobytrap their hair-clippers with springs that cause their heads irreversibly decompose if you try to sharpen them at home) to John Deere (who reinvented tenant farming by making farmers tenants of their tractors, rather than their land).
But Apple's opposition to repair eventually became a problem for the company. It's bad optics, and both Apple customers and Apple employees are volubly displeased with the company's ecocidal conduct. But of course, Apple's management and shareholders hate repair and want to block it as much as possible.
But Apple knows how to Think Differently. It came up with a way to eat its cake and have it, too.
The company embarked on a program of visibly support right to repair, while working behind the scenes to sabotage it.
Last year, Apple announced a repair program. It was hilarious. If you wanted to swap your phone's battery, all you had to do was let Apple put a $1200 hold on your credit card, and then wait while the company shipped you 80 pounds' worth of specialized tools, packed in two special Pelican cases:
Then, you swapped your battery, but you weren't done! After your battery was installed, you had to conference in an authorized Apple tech who would tell you what code to type into a laptop you tethered to the phone in order to pair it with your phone. Then all you had to do was lug those two 40-pound Pelican cases to a shipping depot and wait for Apple to take the hold off your card (less the $120 in parts and fees).
By contrast, independent repair outfits like @ifixit will sell you all the tools you need to do your own battery swap - including the battery! for $32. The whole kit fits in a padded envelope:
But while Apple was able to make a showy announcement of its repair program and then hide the malicious compliance inside those giant Pelican cases, sabotaging right to repair legislation is a lot harder.
Not that they didn't try. When New York State passed the first general electronics right-to-repair bill in the country, someone convinced Ny Governor #KathyHochul to neuter it with last-minute modifications:
But Apple got the last laugh. Because while California's bill contains many useful clauses for the independent repair shops that keep your gadgets out of a landfill, it's a state law, and DMCA 1201 is federal.
A state law can't simply legalize the conduct federal law prohibits. California's right to repair bill is a banger, but it has a weak spot: parts-pairing, the scourge of repair techs:
Every generation of Apple devices does more parts-pairing than the previous one, and the current models are so infested with paired parts as to be effectively unrepairable, except by Apple.
Parts-pairing is bullshit, and Apple are scum for using it, but they're hardly unique. Parts-pairing is at the core of the fuckery of #inkjet#printer companies, who use it to fence out third-party ink, so they can charge $9,600/gallon for ink that pennies to make:
But if turning phones into e-waste to eke out another billion-dollar stock buyback is indefensible, stranding people with disabilities for months at a time while they await repairs is so obviously wicked that the conscience recoils.
But it can't be the end. When #BillClinton signed DMCA 1201 into law 25 years ago, he loaded a gun and put it on the nation's mantlepiece and now it's Act III and we're all getting sprayed with bullets. Everything from ovens to insulin pumps, thermostats to lightbulbs, has used DMCA 1201 to limit repair, modification and improvement.
Congress needs to rid us of this scourge, to let us bring back all the benefits of #interoperability. I explain how this all came to be - and what we should do about it - in my new #VersoBooks title, #TheInternetCon: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
@pluralistic no other "ad-hoc" law has ever laid such a solid foundation for the fictional creation of a monopolistic market so heavily concentrated in such a small group of corporations. The #DMCA is, without a doubt, the most extreme legal expression of an anti competitive market ever passed.
Understanding that the #DMCA is the most harmful piece of legislation ever passed against consumers and free and competitive market as a whole is paramount.
@pluralistic some of the telcos and secondary brick and mortar resellers might allow refurb parts back in as part of their ‘warranty’ repair strategy. And I’m fairly sure Apple refurbs their trade ins as well. Sometime the customer is happy to be offered a new shiny however, or a rebuild- most cannot afford to go WITHOUT.
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