California Announces Right to Repair Bill

[Maura]

MacRumors reports that California has announced that it will be teaming up with several other states to introduce a new Right to Repair bill, which will mean that smartphone manufacturers will have to offer repair information, replacement parts, and diagnostic tools to owners of smartphones as well as independent repair businesses.

The plans were announced by California Assemblymember Susan Talamantes Eggman, who said that the California Right to Repair Act will give consumers the ability to choose where they want their smartphone to be repaired, stating that this sort of choice is “a practice that was taken for granted a generation ago but is now becoming increasingly rare in a world of planned obsolescence.

Executive director of Californians Against Waste, Mark Murray, said that smartphone manufacturers and home device makers are “profiting at the expense of our environment and our pocketbooks.”

Seventeen other states have already launched their own Right to Repair bills, including Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Apple and its competitors have been actively campaigning against such bills in some of the states in question.

Image: iFixit

Source: California to Introduce 'Right to Repair' Bill Requiring Smartphone Manufacturers to Offer Repair Info and Parts

 

[zstairlessone]

How does this bill address a third party repair and warranty? Should the manufacturer maintain responsibility after Fred's Crab Shack and Phone Repair shop hacked a phone up trying to repair it?

 

[scifan57]

How does this bill address a third party repair and warranty? Should the manufacturer maintain responsibility after Fred's Crab Shack and Phone Repair shop hacked a phone up trying to repair it?

Apple would not cover any third party replacement parts or damage caused by their installation or use. They would still cover any original parts on the device. For example, I installed a larger hard drive on my MacBook Pro but my AppleCare+ still covers the rest of the computer.

 

[zstairlessone]

I understand how they deal with this on laptops and anything they make designed to change out parts. The problem isn't that a third party changes out the screen, it's that the third party causes a static event, or damages something internal, or the cheap screen causes voltage spikes damaging internal components and the customer wants Apple to repair the secondary damage...

If you don't think this will happen...

 

[scifan57]

I understand how they deal with this on laptops and anything they make designed to change out parts. The problem isn't that a third party changes out the screen, it's that the third party causes a static event, or damages something internal, or the cheap screen causes voltage spikes damaging internal components and the customer wants Apple to repair the secondary damage...

If you don't think this will happen...

It would depend on whether or not Apple could determine if the damage was pre-existing or caused by defective third party parts or a botched repair attempt.