See the section titled “What the Magnuson-Moss Act Does Not Require” of the FTC’s “Businessperson’s Guide to Federal Warranty Law”[1] to understand why this is not even close to “enforcing right to repair”. Aside from the fact that the FTC can’t enforce a right to repair law that doesn’t exist, the promise to enforce the Magnuson-Moss Act doesn’t even scratch the surface of what right to repair aims to accomplish. For example, farmers who have famously campaigned for right to repair for years (decades?) aren’t covered by the Act because their equipment is for commercial, not consumer, use.
Edit: Even though I think it’s beyond ridiculous to paint this as “right to repair” I am absolutely going to report Microsoft’s Xbox to the FTC for their egregious Magnuson-Moss violations. Maybe that stupid sticker will finally disappear.
>I am absolutely going to report Microsoft’s Xbox to the FTC for their egregious Magnuson-Moss violations. Maybe that stupid sticker will finally disappear
I sell video games and consoles for a living, and probably repair about 20-30 of them each month.
Based on my experience, the reasons that Microsoft don't want you poking around in your Xbox when it's under warranty are completely valid.
For any console that hasn't been tampered with, the fault is almost always one of only two or three things that can be diagnosed nearly instantly and repaired in around 15-30 minutes with a near-100% success rate.
For a console that has been tampered with by an end-user, suddenly the list of things that could have gone wrong multiplies by an order of magnitude. The diagnostic procedure goes from a simple 1:1 mapping of symptom to fix to a broad tree of debugging steps. The total process can easily take multiple hours and end up nowhere, depending on how many YouTube videos and Reddit threads the previous owner followed blindly.
Of course, the consumer is not going to admit that they're an idiot who transformed their console from a simple fix to something that's beyond economic repair, so either Microsoft has to provide them with a brand new machine or they will face legal action/scathing reviews online.
Short of warranty stickers, what are Microsoft to do?
> Short of warranty stickers, what are Microsoft to do?
Make opening their products accessible so that people can do it without damaging what they own. PCs are like that. Car parts have no such warranty stickers (that I am aware of).
Stickers are much more cultural than actually preventing damage. Furthermore, you can have stickers that decay over time and void your warranty without you even touching them (those nefarious apple humidity stickers for instance). It is entertaining to see Steve from gamer's nexus bashing warranty stickers at every opportunity.
Further, provide documentation and support for, and sell spare parts to, users who want to fix their consoles (at least, in the case of procedures that a user could reasonably perform)
I'm a home bicycle mechanic, and all manufacturers of bike components do this.
Fair point with the car example.
I guess Microsoft could just suck it up and refuse to repair consoles under warranty if the user FUBARs them through bad repairs. They wouldn't be happy, but car people seem to be able to live with it.
> On the other hand, if repair is easy for third parties, warranty becomes far less important.
Exactly. Not a single car I've owned has been under warranty, and that's been entirely fine by me, because I can always take it to a shop or take it to a mechanically-inclined friend or fix it myself. Likewise with desktops and laptops; there's been no need for a warranty if I can fix it myself, and until recently (what with the "let's make everything as pointlessly thin as possible" craze) that's almost always been the case.
>you can have stickers that decay over time and void your warranty
They claim it voids your warranty. It does not.
This is an important distinction. Ask them for the warranty repair, if they refuse send a demand letter. If they blow you off take them to small claims court.
> Make opening their products accessible so that people can do it without damaging what they own. PCs are like that. Car parts have no such warranty stickers (that I am aware of).
Soon that will be a bad example! Cars are quickly moving in this terrible direction. You used to be able to wrench them yourself, but every model year there is less and less serviceable by your friendly shade-tree mechanic. If the manufacturers are not stopped, we'll soon need to take our cars to the "Authori$ed Repair" centers or Dealer$hips to perform even basic maintenance.
This is true, but also many cars, especially in the electric space, are extremely reliable apart from battery degradation and UV damage.
Not saying you shouldn’t be able to get independent repairs, but more reliable cars mean less overall maintenance and I’m willing to pay slightly more at the less frequent service interval.
> This is true, but also many cars, especially in the electric space, are extremely reliable apart from battery degradation and UV damage.
This is going to end soon, as EVs gain more traction.
The end goal of value engineering in businesses under competitive pressure is to create a product that's as cheap to make as possible - meaning products evolve to be the worst possible garbage that still clears the "fit to function" bar. EVs don't break much because they're a new class of technologies. Companies will continue to "optimize" them by removing the amount and quality of materials going into their cars, until they start to break just as much as regular cars.
Accessibility is not only about opening a case, but accessing things that require maintenance, like coolers.
It seems unreasonable to me that manufacturers prevent users from even cleaning their devices without voiding warranty.
On top of that, stickers are a lazy answer to the problem of damaging an equipment because of the so called unqualified tempering. An appropriate answer to that in my opinion would be to make parts cheap and available so that users can go to a third party workshop to have their systems cleaned, checked and repaired, so they don't have to do it themselves. This is why right to repair is also important.
My comment's context was the response to AussieWog93 original comment. I think his point is that unqualified tampering with the internals probably should void the warranty. A user is qualified to clean the cooler, and do other basic maintenance.
A good example is when someone follows YouTube videos to mod their xbox with 1/4 inch wood burning tool rather than a soldering iron.
The right to repair also means if you break it, you own both halves. It is the right to risk. If I want to run SteamOS on an Xbox, let me try at least. If I succeed, let me resell the modified form. Buyer Beware in the social network age. Don't make that illegal.
>Why shouldn't I be able to "tamper" with something that I own?
Of course you should be able to. You shouldn't expect someone else to repair it for free when you botch up the job completely, though.
>If they weren't so hostile to modification and repair, the failure rate of people trying to do things themselves would go down quite a lot.
Having opened up consoles from the NES era right through the Xbone, I don't think it's fair to say they're hostile to repair. There is a good supply for just about every part that fails commonly in every console from the last 35 years.
Anti-repair technology like serialization is limited to the parts that could be comandeered to enable "backups", and the systems themselves are fairly simple for a skilled person to navigate through. Ribbons will typically have clips at both ends (DS being the notable exception) and common "problem parts like" fans, laser modules and HDDs are always easy to remove and replace (with the exception of the laser/HDD in the OG Xbox). The newer consoles do use BGA and 4+ layer boards, but that's to be expected as it keeps the BOM cost and size down.
Not hostile to repair?! You quite literally needed Torx screwdrivers of differing sizes. Especially back in the early 360 days they were only available in town at like Sears back then, or ordered from China.
Also, specifically on the xbox 360 of which, I repaired hundreds over the years, with the rrod and ylod- It was super clear M$ only wanted it sealed (to the point it couldn't even be cleaned- leading to more problems) to hide their shenanigans. The placement of the GPU on the board ensured that eventually the heat (on suuuuper cheap chinese lead-containing solder) would cause the solder to liquefy and ball up, ruining it as it absorbed all the dust and dirt. In fact the solder was so shitty this was why people were wrapping them in bath towels to reheat and remelt the solder to get their console temporarily working again.
Ps2 had this problem with YLOD but not as endemic.
The only real. Solution was to replace the solder with one with a higher silver content, and mount a bracing X-bracket to the bottom of the MB to secure the GPU.
The parts you say make them easy to repair? Those are the off-the-shelf things to keep their overhead down, they actively try and stop you from even maintaining your console.
NES, Atari, SNES, PS1 had none of these issues. But as soon as they started cutting corners and shit, here came the 'warranty void if removed' stickers.
You know software vendors love this garbage too. Does no one remember when Destiny 1's source was snagged and lo and behold the lies were uncovered. Their solution? A new TOS that forbade you even looking at their code.
I can't speak on the new generation of consoles but their track record means I trust zero hardware or software vendors until they earn it.
> Not hostile to repair?! You quite literally needed Torx screwdrivers of differing sizes.
The rest of your comment not withstanding, this seems fine to me. You're a lot less likely to strip or damage torx heads, especially when opening it up multiple times, and needing a few head sizes for a few screw sizes is pretty reasonable. They're a pretty standard shape, even if not necessarily in the median person's toolbox.
Contrast that with, e.g., Apple producing the tri-lobe screw -- a worse product not close to standard in any circles.
> You shouldn't expect someone else to repair it for free
Why are you repairing anything for free? This really sounds like a you problem. Stand up for yourself, charge reasonable rates and stop calling people idiots.
This thread is specifically complaining about the warranty seal being a violation of the Magnuson-Moss Act:
> Here are some examples of prohibited tie-in sales provisions … “This limited warranty shall not apply if the warranty seal has been broken, removed, erased, defaced, altered, or is otherwise illegible,” where a device cannot be repaired without such effects.
In some countries, it's law that warranty work is for free. Of course, it's built into the cost of the unit, but they can't charge when the claim comes in.
Yes, in NL for instance. If you buy a new car and wrap it around a telephone pole during the warranty period, the manufacturer is not going to pay for the repairs.
Point being: not all repairs are due to manufacturing defects -- and neither are defects the only reason to repair something. After-market modifications are also an important part of right-to-repair legislation.
So how about we don't rely on trusting the car hardware on this? Let's test it externally, and treat it as any other kind of technical problem that makes a car illegal to drive.
Cars undergo regular checkup. Add emission tests to the requirements. Deny road-worthiness status for cars that fail.
Add spot emission checks to traffic stops - police stops you for speeding or broken headlamp, they can also take 30 seconds to stick a probe into your car's tailpipe. Fine people for violations and possibly take away road-worthiness status, depending on how badly emissions exceed the standards.
Basically, make it illegal to tune your car in a way that breaks emission norms, and (with spot checks) make cheating not worth the effort.
(This would be only temporary anyway; once most cars on the road are electric, the few remaining ICEs won't emit enough to matter - and any attempt to make them pollute noticeably will be easy to spot with an unarmed eye.)
What you say is very valid - You get stuff you own and under warranty repaired for cheaper.
But if that all is true, wouldn’t it be better if that list of problems/solutions were forced to be public? And people would be left to try, if they wanted to, to fix it themselves?
I personally think Governments should encourage this kind of endeavors from their citizens as that fosters the kind of people who could become better innovators and ultimately benefitting all.
Otherwise you benefit the company that produced it and maybe licensed repair shops. I know it’s supposed to benefit the consumer in the end for cheaper prices, but I have a feeling this is not what ends up happening and corporations and middle men eat those profits.
If there is one thing cursory observation of global economics makes obvious, it is that states that have more entrepreneurs and innovators become the best to live in in the long term, and I would imagine they would attempt to craft their laws to encourage that.
>I personally think Governments should encourage this kind of endeavors from their citizens as that fosters the kind of people who could become better innovators and ultimately benefitting all.
I definitely get where you're coming from.
Personally, I got into electronics because my Nintendo DS broke and my parents wouldn't buy me a new one. I now have a EEE degree and a pair of businesses that I would have never been able to set up without the STEM knowledge that I was forced to learn to get emulators on my PSP etc.
Publishing good repair guides would definitely be a positive step in the right direction that encourages more kids to do the same and actually succeed. The knowledge out there on Reddit, YouTube and forums is mostly incorrect, harmful and spread by people who don't actually perform the repairs themselves. iFixit is good but sparse, especially for older hardware.
I've thought about uploading some videos to YouTube going over both the theory and practice of diagnosis/repair, but I doubt I'm the first person to come up with this idea despite not being able to find any of them. I suspect that the algorithm will favour content from creators with high production values, good presenting skills and a regular upload schedule over and above expertise in an extremely specific area of electronics repair.
This. Your customers are not idiots, they're non-experts who chose to try to repair something on their own, possibly learning something in the process. Good for them! Sometimes they might succeed, sometimes they get stuck and bring it in to a professional. You are entitled to tell them, in a non-accusatory tone, that due to previous repair work that was attempted the job will take longer and you charge by the hour.
That's the risk they accepted when trying to DIY and there's nothing wrong with that.
Your example makes the opposite case: it seems trivially easy to see whether a failure is the result of user error (legitimately invalidating the warranty) or inherent defect/failure.
People have no idea how nasty serialization of parts is going to get if it isn't stopped by new legislation. You'll be lucky if you don't have to buy your socks and shoes from the same vendor in 2030 :-(
The issue isn't merely the same vendor, but having to buy parts bundled together. Good luck replacing your hard drive/RAM/whatever separately from the rest of your machine without blessing from the manufacturer.
Ehhh...I mean with the way things are evolving - it is very likely your long term storage, short term storage, and CPU will all be on the same chip/package. Expecting to be able to replace the components individually will largely be a relic of the past. I see it more as the evolution of overall computing. I mean in the early ages of computers you could replace individual transistors...then you could replace individual logic blocks...a new adder! Etc...as the technology shrunk and become more integrated, our concept of a "computer" evolves. Legislating things like "a hard drive and ram must be separately replaceable" will sound as implausible in a few years as "each transistor needs to be individually serviceable" does today.
But this is the inevitable, and desired, future of integrated circuits, with more and more being bundled into the SoC. Integration has always had, and will continue to have, very real and desirable benefits to the consumer.
A curious counterexample of this that's existed for decades is the motherboard. Once one part breaks on that you're throwing out a lot of functioning parts.
I've often wondered why the boundaries were defined where they are for its responsibilities. What was it like building PCs before the concept of a the current motherboard architecture existed?
I'd be surprised if you couldn't get the parts to repair a normal desktop motherboard. But as far as I know there aren't really any repair shops that work on stuff like that. Likely because the motherboards in most desktops are fairly cheap and easy to replace. On laptops, the main board is the most expensive part. More so ever since everything started being soldered on instead of socketed.
Maybe the solution is to getting people to repair desktop motherboards instead of tossing them is to turn the cost to the environment of generating e-waste into an actual monetary cost. (Though I can't say I know how you'd do that since making e-waste disposal cost money will mean that people will just dump that stuff in the normal trash)
I've replaced many VRMs, capacitors, etc, over the years--even a PCIe socket I melted once. It's been a few years since my overclocking days where I'd burn this stuff out, but it was pretty easy to replace most things on those boards, assuming you were semi-capable with a soldering iron.
In other words, it's possible someone at Wired was paid or duped into making an article that suggests "It's all good now, no need to keep fighting for the right to repair"
The commercial exception is very strange. So I can simply say my product is intended for commercial use only and then ignore the law, regardless of actual end use?
Is this the real reason why "commercial grade" is a thing?
The premise is that consumers do not have the resources or leverage to adequately protect themselves (before and after purchase) from businesses. The premise doesn't always match the reality that imbalance still often exists.
It’s not necessarily a Magnuson-Moss violation (though it could be, if repair service and parts aren’t provided for free) but because the “warranty void if removed” is always untrue it’s an “unfair or deceptive business practice” prohibited by Section 5 of the FTC Act.
Edit: Even though I think it’s beyond ridiculous to paint this as “right to repair” I am absolutely going to report Microsoft’s Xbox to the FTC for their egregious Magnuson-Moss violations. Maybe that stupid sticker will finally disappear.
[1]https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/bus...