Has the Era of Fixing Your Own Phone Nearly Arrived? (theverge.com) 62
A new article on the Verge argues that the era of fixing your own phone "has nearly arrived."
When I called up iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, I figured he'd be celebrating — after years of fighting for right-to-repair, big name companies like Google and Samsung have suddenly agreed to provide spare parts for their phones. Not only that, they signed deals with him to sell those parts through iFixit, alongside the company's repair guides and tools. So did Valve.
But Wiens says he's not done making deals yet. "There are more coming," he says, one as soon as a couple of months from now. (No, it's not Apple.) Motorola was actually the first to sign on nearly four years ago. And if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts to consumers — like it promised to do by early 2022 — the era of fixing your own phone may be underway. Last October, the United States effectively made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now, the necessary parts are arriving.
What changed? Weren't these companies fighting tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute? Sure. But some legislation is getting through anyhow... and one French law in particular might have been the tipping point.
"The thing that's changing the game more than anything else is the French repairability scorecard," says Wiens, referring to a 2021 law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are — on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 — right next to their pricetag. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores — but Wiens points me to this press release by Samsung instead. When Samsung commissioned a study to check whether the French repairability scores were meaningful, it didn't just find the scorecards were handy — it found a staggering 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher.
"There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal.
Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. "It feels cheeky to say 100 percent... but none of this happens unless there's a threat of legislation... These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs and now they're all announcing them," Proctor notes.
But Wiens says he's not done making deals yet. "There are more coming," he says, one as soon as a couple of months from now. (No, it's not Apple.) Motorola was actually the first to sign on nearly four years ago. And if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts to consumers — like it promised to do by early 2022 — the era of fixing your own phone may be underway. Last October, the United States effectively made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now, the necessary parts are arriving.
What changed? Weren't these companies fighting tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute? Sure. But some legislation is getting through anyhow... and one French law in particular might have been the tipping point.
"The thing that's changing the game more than anything else is the French repairability scorecard," says Wiens, referring to a 2021 law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are — on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 — right next to their pricetag. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores — but Wiens points me to this press release by Samsung instead. When Samsung commissioned a study to check whether the French repairability scores were meaningful, it didn't just find the scorecards were handy — it found a staggering 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher.
"There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal.
Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. "It feels cheeky to say 100 percent... but none of this happens unless there's a threat of legislation... These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs and now they're all announcing them," Proctor notes.
I can already do it (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a Fairphone 4. One reason was that I absolutely insist on a battery I can change myself without problems. I will not even look at a phone or laptop that does not have that. Another is that I can repair most things by just ordering the parts and putting them in. Sure, this is not a very sleek device. But I do need a "sleek" phone as much as I need heavy gold chains or an expensive car. I really have no need for any personality prosthetics. I am well aware that many people can be made to make irrational buying decisions by that route though.
But why can't we build our own phones? (Score:2)
The Fairphone 4 is a great alternative. However I'm wondering why we still can't easily build our own smartphones. I'm not even talking about things that you can put in a tacky 3D-printed case inside your pocket. I'm talking about the ability to just build, say, a mini-PC with trailing cables and the like (like the Intel NUC or Raspberry Pi) that can do everything a smartphone can do, from texting, chatting, navigation to interfacing with mapping services.
Tethering without the tether. The software is there
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Some Linux distros can be used as phones. It just does not work well. Too few users, too few developers would be my guess.
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You can put as much cell-network interfaces in your computer as you like.
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Making a phone call is easy. Sending a text is easy. Making a connection to the Internet, also easy. Managing to do all these things simultaneously is where the stuff gets complicated quickly.
I see your point about the enormous difficulties on the software side. However, I'd already be happy if I can easily make a phone call from my computer using a standard SIM card, making the receiver think I'm using a dumb phone perhaps. In short, I'd be happy if I could rig up my own virtual dumb phone. I'm using gammu [wammu.eu] to send and receive SMS via a 3G USB dongle. Do you know of something similar for voice calls (without using a dumb phone to manage the connection)?
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I have a Fairphone 4. One reason was that I absolutely insist on a battery I can change myself without problems. I will not even look at a phone or laptop that does not have that. Another is that I can repair most things by just ordering the parts and putting them in. Sure, this is not a very sleek device. But I do need a "sleek" phone as much as I need heavy gold chains or an expensive car. I really have no need for any personality prosthetics. I am well aware that many people can be made to make irrational buying decisions by that route though.
Every time I looked at fairphone it was pretty clear that the repairability and upgradability is mostly theoretical. They often have few spare parts and every couple of years they release a new model with parts that are incompatible with previous models.
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One reason was that I absolutely insist on a battery I can change myself without problems. I will not even look at a phone or laptop that does not have that.
That's why I have a Samsung Galaxy S and my girlfriend an iPhone. We both insisted on phones where we can change the battery without problem. Same with our Surface Pros both of which are on their second batteries (that were actually surprisingly cheap).
Now I think what you meant to say is you were looking for a phone to suit your particular skill level.
The era vanished with the arrival of the iPhone (Score:4, Insightful)
Then all those modern touch screen disposable Chinese pieces of sh1t like the iPhone came along and self-repairing went out the window to a large extent
Re: The era vanished with the arrival of the iPhon (Score:2, Insightful)
It was waterproofing that made phones unfixable, and that was driven in part by the manufacturers knowing that if they made thier phones waterproof it would be harder to change components, and they would sell more phones
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What's the use case for a waterproof smartphone anyway? Do we really have to be online even when we take a bath?
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Kitchen use and leaving them in your trousers when washing clothes or in the rain are important.
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What's the use case for a waterproof smartphone anyway?
There's this thing called "outdoors". Some people are there for work, some for leisure. Occasionally, water just falls from the sky in significant amounts. Crazy, I know.
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Thanks for the tip! So now I've tried "outdoors", yet I didn't see any falling water. There was a big, warm, round light on the blue background. So, I guess that renders your argument invalid?
Re: The era vanished with the arrival of the iPho (Score:2)
20 years ago I heard from mobile phone repair companies that water damage was a huge pain for them, for buyers and for networks.
for example : A short circuit was a silent failure that could happen hours after the device had been in the bathroom during a steamy shower.
Handling complaints for such faults was hard, and the water damage exception in warranty terms was unacceptable to buyers as they could not see any water damage unless they dropped the phone in the toilet/outdoors.
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Mine once felt into the toilet, and once into the bathtub.
Besides the fact of not being water proof (resistant) it survived.
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Pretty much. It is rare that a waterproof phone is beneficial, because you need to actually be able to recover it from that water. For a few splashes, wet pocket from rain, etc. you do not need waterproof at all. I guess this is one more "feature" that can be used to sell things to the clueless and rip them off better.
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My girlfriend was dancing in a discotheque.
The sweat was enough to ruin the camera lense from the inside.
With a bit more knowledge we could have fixed that ourselves, as the phone was easy to open, if you knew how.
But alas, we gave it to a repair shop.
So there are plenty of ordinary day cases how liquid/steam/sweat can get inside a phone.
Water resistant (Score:5, Informative)
It was waterproofing that made phones unfixable,
Which, by the way, is utter bullcrap.
Phone which are rated water proof and have replaceable parts are a thing (just not at Apple), they just use well placed gasket/sealing rubber/etc. to insure water is kept out of some critical parts.
"Sports" photo camera are a nice example of electronics that both feature replaceable batteries (it's a camera. Field replaceable battery are a standard feature, unless you like to stop your photoshoot midway and ask everybody to wait while you plug the camera in a charger) and is still water proof (it's supposed to be used outdoor / during sports) thanks to good rubber sealing of the the various trapdoors. Olympus Tough serie is an example.
The most extreme example or reparable electronic that is also waterproof is e-Ink readers from Kobo:
They are just like older electronics (think PDA) except the manufacturer has sprayed a waterresistant layer on the electronics.
You can just as easily open them as any other electronic (e.g.: as a Palm OS PDA from a decade or two before), and just as easily replace and swap part.
And if you happen no to have breached the waterproof layer (or just put another protective layer of your own on top of the electronics you needed tweaking) ("Hot glue fixes everything(tm)") the device is still as water-proof as before.
Having some level of water resistance and no replaceable battery is almost litteraly an Apple-specific thing. It's a combination of:
- plain laziness: they just don't care.
- lawsuite-averse: some clueless users will definitely manage to replace their battery wrong, not properly close and seal everything water-tight, and destroy their device, coming back to complain to the manufac turer.
- economic reason (aka "planned obsolescence"), in addition of being a lot simpler to make, non-replaceable user batteries increase the chance that once a device is old and doesn't hold charge as well as before the stupid user will simply throw it away.
In short, "waterproofing" was the excuse, "unfixable" was the primary goal.
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Yeah that was my whole point, you just expanded my argument
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Which, by the way, is utter bullcrap.
Phone which are rated water proof and have replaceable parts are a thing (just not at Apple), they just use well placed gasket/sealing rubber/etc. to insure water is kept out of some critical parts.
No it's really not. Gaskets and seals take space and require pressure. There's a reason phones with replaceable components that are also waterproof are *significantly* thicker than phones which are glued together and do the same.
Having some level of water resistance and no replaceable battery is almost litteraly an Apple-specific thing.
Oh wow. I think you actually may think that Apple is the only company manufacturing phones. *dumbfounded*. Sorry kiddo, but water resistance and no replaceable battery is basically the standard on the market.
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Having some level of water resistance and no replaceable battery is almost litteraly an Apple-specific thing.
It actually is not. As you can replace the battery in every Apple device.
It is just not like an old Nokia phone where you just slide away a cover, unplug the old and insert the new battery.
No idea what is wrong with you stupid Apple bashers.
When I'm in Paris, a random Chinese Electronic shop with change any battery in any phone for somethign like $25. When I'm in Germany I have to have luck to find s
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It's not that hard to make something that can be disassembled waterproof. You just need a gasket and a tiny amount of silicone grease.
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I don't agree, I had a waterproof Motorola smartphone that was held together with little screws, I see no reason why a phone being waterproof means it can't be fixed. Waterproof phones can be opened just like any other phone.
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Right to pair but affordable (Score:2)
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Very true. The touch on my Pixel 4A stopped working. Need a whole new display component to repair it. Replamcents, even direct from China are $150 at least. Thats almost 40% of the purchase price ($350). Plus there is the risk of damaging the phone further as everything is glued together and there are just oodles of fragile ribbon cables and finicky connectors. Some phones get cheap replacement parts but not all.
What about OS updates? (Score:3)
It doesn't help much as long as the OS is only updated for 2-3 years. LineageOS might be available but the support usually disappears after a short while, leaving you stuck without neither warranty nor updates. I'm careful with my phones and keep the battery between 20 and 80% so it's always the lack of security updates that makes me buy a new phone.
Re: What about OS updates? (Score:2)
I tried to buy an old Asus tablet, I couldn't get said to run on it and there were no new versions of roms with Android I could put on it. I suspect Google and Microsoft are in bed with hardware manufacturers to invalidate old hardware to generate sales
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it's always the lack of security updates that makes me buy a new phone.
This is one area where Apple wins. I have had my iPhone for six years and still get regular updates.
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I feel like that's just been the standard for all ARM based devices like phones. Are there ARM based phones that can just be "installed" with a generic version of Android/Lineage? That's a deliberate choice right on the part of all manufactuers and chipmakers right, there's no purely technical reason that has to be case? Or is that partly a Linux thing where theres no availbility from component makers to provide bespoke drivers into a generic kernel for all the cameras and doodads.
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All those doodads might as well have proprietary drivers. It's RMS's printer driver problem writ large.
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Project treble really helped with this.
https://android-developers.goo... [googleblog.com]
I have a ZTE Axon 7... abandoned right on 2 years by the manufacturer. It was never popular, so lineage support was bad. But thanks to Treble, it has versions of Android through Lineage 17.
It was Treble supporting hardware but the last software was pre-Treble, so it had to be repartitioned, and the vendor partition on my phone is actually from a OnePlus 3 (same SOC, had a Treble release).
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Yes, once we get rid of the obvious hardware-based planned obsolescence (e.g. the unremoveable battery), software-based planned obsolescence is going to come into light. Unfortunately the French "repairability scorecard" does not yet take that into account as far as I know.
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Better question: Who cares? We used to care back when OS updates introduced mind-blowing new features such as multi-touch and copy/paste, but these days there's enough consumers out there who don't bother updating their phones even when their phones prompt them to.
OS updates just aren't compelling. Even security updates aren't compelling given the complete lack of actual negative impact due to phone malware in the west (which largely amounts to stealing data to which consumers reply with a yawn).
Until you g
What i want to see is, (Score:4, Interesting)
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The problem with that is that both the hardware and the UI of a phone are not close enough to traditional computers. In theory you can install a lot of linux distros on some phones, they just stop being phones and become tablets with an awkward form-factor instead.
I expect this situation will change, but it will take some time, I would expect a decade or so.
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You more or less just described the PinePhone Pro.
Repair needs to happen (Score:2)
It's bad for consumers and it's bad for the environment if we have to throw our phones away every 2 years. I suspect that people in the future will look back on this time is the most wasteful time period In history
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It's bad for consumers and it's bad for the environment if we have to throw our phones away every 2 years. I suspect that people in the future will look back on this time is the most wasteful time period In history
Indeed. If there are people left to look back.
Article is a lie (Score:5, Interesting)
I could list some reasons why TFA is a lie, but I'll let right-to-repair guru Louis Rossmann explain what is actually going on here better than I could:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Regulation at its finest. (Score:2)
Let's hear it for regulations requiring important information to be immediately available at the time of purchase.
Helping consumers more easily make informed buying decisions is one of the few kinds regulation I don't think anyone can honestly argue against.
For most, self-repair is a fantasy (Score:1)
What features would be happily relinquished for an at-home repairable phone?
Form factor? Water-proofing? Reliability? Durability? Warranty?
But I waaaant everythingI!!
Like most things these days, a small percentage of people that make the loudest noise
make it appear like everyone can get the free beer they demand.
You break your phone, swap it out for a new one. It's not like they are a rare commodity.
E-waste? Yeah, like you really care. Look around at your possessions, it's all headed for a landfill eventual
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Its deliberate (Score:2)
Having recently repaired a couple of Apple devices, (ipad pro 12.9, iphone 5s)it was obvious to this old hardware tech that they were deliberately designed to be difficult to repair, and not just due to the use of glue. Heat makes glue removal relatively easy, however a gasket could do the same waterproofing.
A charge port that required soldering under a microscope to replace, and to strip the unit completely to do so to where a single internal connector as they used in previous models could have been used,
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Ipad pro 12.9 gen 1 requires micro soldering to replace the charge port as do later iphone models.
As for the i-phone, the 5s is more difficult than the 6s. Its more difficult than it needs to be, and deliberately so.
See the cable, the opposite end to the charge port is a multipin soldering job, and requires a microscope to complete.
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/i... [ifixit.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Way to miss the Context. (Score:2)
You also left out the front facing camera, microphone, proximity sensor at the top of the phone in your description of your “expert” repair knowledge, all of which are tricky to say the least. My point was that it is more difficult than it *needs to be” i completed the repairs successfully anyway.
Ive been repairing electronics for 50 years, and these were the worst to work on I’ve ever encountered. That is a deliberate choice made by Apple.
In comparison Android phone I have fixed wer
Make phones more serviceable (Score:2)
Getting parts is not the only problem. We need phones that are assembled with screws instead of glue. The internal parts, especially the battery, should be swappable without tools. The first few Samsung Galaxy phones had very good serviceability - they know what to do.
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Best was Motorola (Score:2)
According to this page: https://uspirg.org/feature/usp... [uspirg.org]
Motorola was the only phone company that got a B. No one else got higher.
Not surprising that Motorola was the first company to sell parts to fix their phones, given that theirs is the easiest to fix.
Thank god for the EU (Score:2)
Because you can be sure that this French law will soon be EU law for 500+ million rich Western consumers.
What I find amusing that it's really, really really ALWAYS in the EU countries that common sense laws that protect either the consumer or the environment or both come into existence and never NEVER EVER in the US.
Instead in the US you ALWAYS have a situation in place for decades where lobbyists of a monopoly are making sure that no competition can enter. Generally the situation in the US is ALWAYS a piec
era-of-fixing-your-own-phone-nearly-RETURNED? (Score:2)
Phones from decades ago could and were fixed pretty simply, being mechanical and electrical devices generally attached to the wall. Their batteries lasted years, too.
Oh, did you mean mobile phones?
It did years ago (Score:2)
No, and yes (Score:2)
I fixed my own phone, a galaxy s7. Parts are readily available. But it is not for the faint of heart. The fundamental problem is that these things are held together with glue, i.e. adhesives. Internally, they use screws, so don't tell me it would be too expensive to hold the whole thing together with screws with gaskets replacing the adhesives.
My s8 needs a battery. I'm going to let a pro shop do it. It's just not worth my time and effort.
I find it fascinating... (Score:2)
We live in a world where customers, and their preferences, are ignored or simply shit on so often that when a study comes out stating customers don't like it, IT'S FUCKING NEWSWORTHY.
Nobody else finds this even the slightest bit strange or eyebrow raising? We have had to repeatedly attempt to pass laws and have been screwed over for *decades* now by greedy companies who just purchase favorable politicians and then write the laws for themselves. We have an entire party that thinks this is "freedom" because "