The problem with non-genuine parts is that you don't know what they are.

Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the design, who figured out how to "optimize" it by removing an "unnecessary" part, which was actually engineered in as a crucial safety precaution. You never know.

You may even buy the same non-genuine part you've been buying for years, from the same seller, and suddenly go from an exact copy to the "competing factory" case.

Depends on the part. Non-OEM laptop memory? Fine. The failure/error rate is usually negligbly higher than OEM if at all.

Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner.

I imagine similar differences exist for many other kinds of parts as well.

The replacement parts have to work, otherwise they are not replacement parts. Neither fingerprint sensors nor TPM chips are magic. There is no difficulty here.

Ok, how would you ensure this is right in the law without creating a loophole?

I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to.

https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill... https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repa...

If someone damages your property, they must pay for damages.

That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the same car you had before. The parts might be unobtainable. Or the car’s value may have depreciated enough to be less than the cost of repair.

It’s sucky that you are “forced” to acquire new parts or car, but that’s life. They will pay you the fair amount for damages, not necessarily restore exactly to the previous state.

Hm. There is no restriction in the law about showing the OEM status of parts in general was how I wanted my sentence to be understood. A permanent notice and limiting functionality is explicitly forbidden, but it follows that a dismissable notice (or something like a popup notice triggered in a settings menu) is allowed.

Do you feel the same way about generic drugs being substandard?

Just above it says:

> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to ... Reduce the functionality or performance of a digital electronic product

Dismissable would have to be defined, but when being annoying about it it should be possible to show that it reduces the functionality. It would be clearly against the spirit of the law, but sure, Apple already risked management jail time by ignoring court orders so they might try stuff here as well.

I've often wondered how much cross-talk there is between the two companies, given that the Nintendo America HQ is smack in the middle of the sprawling Microsoft campus. There's got to be some, I should think.

Minor point but Microsoft does offer replacement parts and repair instructions for some of their Xbox controllers. https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/warrant...

Yes exactly. If anything, I would expect Valve to support this bill based on how repair-friendly they are. I will admit that over the years I've become a huge Valve fanboy because of their amazing contributions to Linux and making the Steam Deck an open platform, but Valve has really done a ton to make the world a better place. Yes it benefits their business too, but they definitely could have gone more evil than they did, so there's still reason to praise them.

Yeah, I figure so - they were just the first company in Washington to come to mind given that I own their product, unlike the others :)

> can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?

Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.

Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.

And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)

Either way, I think that once a law like this is on the books, it will be much easier to attack exemptions in it going forward.

I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time.

The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.

Manufacturers can already legitimately say the additional price for 1 spare part for a $5 part is actually $250,000 dollars because the last mould has worn out…?

Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.

I don’t agree that Gillette making a profit on razor blades is “double-dipping” and certainly not in a way that I want to prevent.

The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.

We could, of course, repeal DMCA section 1201, but no one in government wants to do that.

Right, but the solution shouldn't have been a racketeering scheme.

This is the risk of franchising in general. You lose a certain amount of control over quality and you put your brand at much greater risk. In exchange, you get to expand your brand much faster than if you did it under centralized control and investment.

There's also analog EFI, which was rare and expensive and otherwise not great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendix_Electrojector

The early electronic components were not reliable in an underhood environment and were not easily modified as engine control requirements advanced. Most of the 35 vehicles originally equipped with Electrojector were retrofitted with 4-barrel carburetors.

That pairing is for theft reasons - chop shops will steal a car, take the parts off and sell them. However the expensive computers are paired and so they won't work when sold this way thus making the value of a car to a shop shop much less and so helping prevent that theft mode.

Though I think there should be a process to get the parts paired after verifying the car isn't stolen. I'm not sure what that would be though.

I'm going to guess that it's actually potted in epoxy, not just a conformal coating.

Starlink is one of those 2 companies (or grandfather commenter miscounted and meant 3)

Plus Amazon's Kuiper when it eventually launches

Purely due to industry norms, no laws that I am aware of. For example Tesla makes it much harder for third parties to repair vehicles both by not making parts available and by using DRM/part-pairing/phoning-home to require authorization from them to replace some parts.

That might be an argument to reject non-genuine components, but it's not an argument to reject genuine components just because they've previously been installed in a different device. (And even if it's possible to modify a genuine component to add backdoors, this still doesn't help, since they could just modify the one that came out of your MacBook too.)

1. Consumers have no choice, so they better prefer it.

2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.

3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.

The overwhelming majority of consumers are also employees.

What's better, low prices and low wages, or high prices and high wages? The "Chicago school of macroeconomics" holds the first position. I'm highly critical of that position.

Even if you do agree with the Chicago school, there is a problem: by vertically integrating the repairs market, you take away the consumer's ability to repair their own products. The consumer is forced to pay the business to do the repairs, instead of doing it themselves for free. That's objectively more expensive for the consumer.

By allowing companies to vertically integrate repairs into their product business, we have allowed them to create an entirely new market of rent-seeking. This both monopolizes a service (preventing competition) and adds extra cost to consumers. It doesn't matter what your ideological stance is on economics: this is objectively bad for consumers.