Tag: repairs

If You’re Going to Make Something, Here’s How to Make It Robust

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Christopher Tidy was 10 years old the first time he took apart an engine.

The carburetor—the block of machinery that supplies a gas engine with fuel and air and helps to spark ignition—was a mess. It was blocked with thick layers of congealed fuel and dust. Tidy saw the problem and just happened to have some tools nearby and a burning curiosity about how exactly this thing worked and what he could do to fix it. That quickly turned into an attempt “to assemble a kind of Frankenstein engine” out of the parts of many discarded petrol engines. He disassembled the rumbling machine piece by piece until he found the offending parts, then doused the carburetor in gasoline, followed by water and dish soap, then scrubbed it clean with a toothbrush. The carburetor sat shiny and clean on his shelf until he sold it to someone looking for the right part.

Since then, Tidy has continued to feel inclined to disassemble things with his hands, see how they work, and, hopefully, make them work better. Quickly, he realized that it is not always quite so easy to just gleefully take something apart.

Product repairability is an issue that is building to a boil. Advocacy groups like iFixit and PIRG have campaigned on making products more repairable in the US, Canada, and across the world. The European Union has advanced legislation in recent years that compels companies to let users repair their own devices. These efforts have led to companies like Apple and Samsung implementing repair programs that make it easier for customers to fix their own phones, tablets, and other small electronics. Still, humans generate an astronomical amount of waste every day, mostly because we tend to throw broken things away rather than figure out how to reuse or repair them.

Tidy wants to help that process, and to come at it from the source: by focusing on product design, and trying to provide a framework for how that can be steered in a more repairable direction.

Since tearing apart that first engine, Tidy has focused on fixing stuff throughout a career in engineering and academia. (Aside from a brief jaunt in the late 1990s where he helped design a robot bent on destruction for the show Robot Wars.) He studied mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, and went on to teach engineering and work on projects at schools in Germany, Russia, and at the Field and Space Robotics Laboratory at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now 42, Tidy runs a volunteer repair workshop in Ladybrand, South Africa. It is not a business, just a space that he uses to tinker or help others repair their lamps, trucks, and toasters.

After years in that workshop, Tidy has put together some big ideas about how to build more repairable products.

Think Different

Tidy’s manifesto for better product design.

Courtesy of Christopher Tidy

Tidy hopes to inspire product designers to focus on making long-lasting products from jump. It is an endeavor that he understands after a career of designing products and seeing how wasteful the process is. The trouble is that a product designer has to bring a product to market at a certain price and under a certain development budget, and what they have to prioritize doesn’t always translate to a long-lasting final product. Mechanical engineers developing a product can feel like they’re being pulled in many different directions, Tidy says, focusing primarily on consumer preferences, speed of manufacturing, and keeping costs low. Designing with repair in mind often gets forgotten. Tidy wanted to do something to fix that.

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December 2, 2024
The Right to Repair Movement Will Keep On Fixin’

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“The big question is, can we continue this pro competition populist movement?” Wiens says. “Can populism really infect and take over both parties? Because both parties have been very corporate for so long.”

That populism may translate to consumer-focused measures in the new Trump era, but it isn’t certain. Vance has talked at length about his support for more competition in the tech market, as well as policy that would aim to break up big companies like Google. Trump has also signaled his opposition to some of the Big Tech companies—often the ones that have upset him personally—but in his last term generally made lives easier for corporations and the wealthy with tax cuts and favorable legislation. The administration may be up for helping to push policies that address the right to repair efforts. (Though we’ll see how the newly created government efficiency department helmed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy decides to prioritize government spending.)

“Are we going to enable an era of increased competition, which will make America more resilient on so many levels, or is Trump going to go with his billionaire buddies?” Wiens says. “We just don’t know with Trump.”

Of course, the US isn’t the only battleground for reparability movements. The European Union will also drive legislation on product design and repair requirements that will ripple out to devices sold elsewhere. Nathan Proctor, the senior director of the campaign for the right to repair at the nonprofit interest group PIRG, says the best strategy is a varied one that incorporates repair allies from all over.

“I’m probably not going to put too many eggs in the federal basket,” Proctor says. Instead, he says that PIRG is focused on repair efforts on a more local or state level. “There are a lot of other great state and local lawmakers, other folks that really care about the right to repair. And there’s a lot of opportunity to keep going. I’m not counting anything out.”

Ultimately, both Wiens and Proctor say they will continue their fight no matter what political turmoil swirls around the White House and Congress. And appealing to a wide range of political views will certainly help. For example, Proctor cites efforts that PIRG has made to work with veterans groups to advocate for more repairability in the armed forces. Because it turns out that even active duty military and medical equipment aren’t immune to software locks and being bricked by service updates that the user can’t fix themselves.

“We just have to get to work,” Proctor says. “I don’t want to prognosticate, like, ‘Oh, everything’s fine.’ Because I don’t know that. I don’t have that information. But I do know that no matter what hand gets dealt, we have things that we can do to speak truth to power and to protect our communities and to move things forward.”

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November 18, 2024
Google Is ‘Thinking Through’ How to Make the Pixel Watch Repairable

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If you break the Google Pixel Watch—whether the first-generation smartwatch from 2022 or the latest model launched earlier this month—there is no way to repair it through official channels. Instead, if you successfully make a warranty claim, Google will send you a replacement unit instead of repairing your model. This lack of repairability highlights the company’s inexperience in the smartwatch space. You can take a broken Apple Watch to Apple to repair cracked glass or replace the battery, and the same is true for Samsung’s Galaxy Watches.

There’s some good news though. At a Climate Week NYC panel focused on repairable technology—hosted by Back Market and moderated by One5c—Nicole Azores, a manager of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google, says the company is thinking through the design of the Pixel Watch to make it more repairable.

“Watches and wearables are still fairly nascent and we are thinking through how to make this repairable,” Azores said on the panel. “We’re thinking about repairability on a broader scale, not just on phones and tablets, and we want to make sure that all of our products eventually become repairable. I think watches being so new as a category, there are some design elements that need to be considered on how we make them repairable.”

When Can You Fix It?

Azores did not provide any additional information, including a timeline. Consumer tech products typically have a two- to three-year development time. But it’s unclear whether this more repairable framework will show up in the Pixel Watch 4 next year, or even later than that. Google has stuck with the same design for its Pixel Watch over the last three generations, though the Pixel Watch 3 launched in two sizes for the first time.

This is the first time the company has publicly commented on the irreparability of its smartwatch. Until now, Google representatives have typically said the company has nothing to share when repairability concerns are brought up.

The Pixel Watch is a latecomer in the world of smartwatches, but the software it runs—Wear OS—has been around for a decade (formerly called Android Wear). Google managed the operating system, as manufacturers like Fossil and LG made the smartwatches themselves. That changed in 2022, when Google released its very own smartwatch, following its effort to jumpstart the waning platform alongside Samsung and Fitbit.

Google reportedly captured 8 percent of the wearable band market share in the fourth quarter of 2022, the timeframe of when the first Pixel Watch launched. Research group Canalys says the company shipped 880,000 Pixel Watches in that period (the rest are Fitbit devices).

Just the Starting Point

Lack of repairability will doom many of these watches as electronic waste to the landfill, which according to a recent UN climate report, has already reached a crisis point. In 2022, there were around 137 billion pounds of e-waste, and only less than a quarter was recycled. By 2030, e-waste is expected to grow by 33 percent, outpacing the recycling rate.

There are ongoing efforts to enforce repairability in tech. Last year, the European Union passed regulations requiring smartphones and tablets to have longer-lasting batteries or easier methods for users to replace batteries using common tools beginning in June 2025. While it doesn’t have to comply with this legislation, Apple’s new iPhone 16 debuted a new adhesive that makes the battery inside easier to remove,

Whether it’s in the Pixel Watch 4 or Pixel Watch 5, this design change is a win for consumers. Now Google needs to focus on improving the repairability of Fitbit’s wearables. Despite the prevalence of its trackers, the company doesn’t have any repair centers to send your device in for fixes.

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September 24, 2024
The iPhone 16’s Battery Is Easier to Replace, Finally

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This only affects new smartphones launching in the EU after June 2025, which means the iPhone 16 does not have to adhere to this law. The regulation doesn’t just touch on batteries though. Manufacturers need to sell critical spare parts for 7 years and offer at least 5 years of software updates. These laws often influence other regions, hence why Apple is likely testing this battery replacement process in its latest phone. It’s unclear if the new adhesive would be fully compliant with the EU’s regulations.

“The point of the legislation is that it won’t most likely require [Apple] to completely change the design of the product,” says Ugo Vallauri, codirector of The Restart Project and a founding member of the Right to Repair Europe coalition. “As long as they can supply the spare part as well as the tools needed to perform the repair and it can be performed by a generalist person—someone with some level of competence—they would not need to change much further, which can be potentially be seen as a weakness of the legislation. We will see what happens in that respect.”

Matching Game

But easier battery replacements are just one part of the story. Apple is notorious for “parts pairing,” the policy where it uses software to identify and approve parts. Apple will disable certain features if it finds the part wasn’t sourced from Apple’s official channels—even if the part comes directly from another iPhone. For example, as iFixit’s website says, if you replace your iPhone’s screen with a genuine but second-hand part, your device will lose access to Apple’s True Tone and auto-brightness features, even though the screen will otherwise function normally. You may also see warning messages for replaced parts that Apple cannot identify.

New laws in Oregon and Colorado prohibit the practice of parts pairing to discriminate against otherwise compatible parts, and Apple earlier this year said it would expand repair options to support used genuine parts starting this fall. That now applies to the Face ID sensor in the TrueDepth selfie camera—you can now swap this component from one unit to another without compromising security, safety, and privacy, according to Apple.

Apple also says now if you use a third-party part that isn’t available in its cloud-based calibration servers, the phone will try to activate the part and make it work to its full capability. It will also show the repair history of the device within Settings and list which parts have been replaced. Any used Apple parts will now be able to be calibrated after you install them, and these and will appear as “used” parts in the device’s repair history. That means features like True Tone will finally be enabled for third-party displays, and you’ll be able to see health data for third-party batteries. The front camera and lidar scanner will also stay operational if the module is replaced.

“I’ve always felt like the goal of right to repair is to create the incentive for these manufacturers, who are the ones good at making stuff, to prioritize or at least incorporate repairability into their objectives,” says Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). “And once they do, they are actually coming up with new ways to make things easier to fix in ways I couldn’t have predicted or thought up. It’s exciting to see Apple engineers coming up with solutions for making things more fixable.”

Lock Step

Photograph: Apple

But there’s a new concern on the horizon with iOS 18 rolling out to Apple devices: Activation Lock. You might be familiar with this if you have erased an iPhone in the past but forgot to remove your Apple account details, essentially locking a new owner out from the device unless they have your password. In iOS 18, this Activation Lock feature now extends to iPhone parts. The idea is that this will deter thieves from stealing iPhones to sell parts. If the iPhone detects that a used part has been installed, it will ask for the original part owner’s Apple account password.

Proctor says the number one complaint he’s heard from device refurbishers is around Activation Lock—these companies have devices legally acquired from donations or recycling programs, but they cannot do anything to unlock the phone. (Apple has ways to bypass Activation Lock if you have proof of purchase documentation.)

“We need a way to verifiably say this is not a stolen part,” Proctor says. “I really respect and appreciate and understand the value of the way Activation Lock thwarts theft, but there’s got to be some middle ground where a reputable recycler doesn’t have to shred working parts and working phones. It’s ridiculous. It has the potential to undermine any environmental gains from all the other stuff that they’re doing.”

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September 19, 2024
Apple Is Making It Slightly Easier to Repair Your iPhone

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Apple will make it a little bit easier to get an iPhone fixed with used parts, marking a reversal of long-standing, strict rules around swapping out iPhone parts.

The change, announced Thursday, will begin with “select” iPhone models this fall (The Washington Post reported it will cover iPhone 15 and newer). It comes as states move to ban parts pairing, which requires a company’s software to recognize and approve a replacement part. The practice has long frustrated third-party repair shops, as well as at-home self repairers, and lawmakers around the US are looking to ban it.

Apple has long argued that parts pairing is necessary for security and functionality. Using other parts can cause iPhone features to malfunction. For example: replacing a cracked iPhone screen could lead Face ID to break. When today’s announced change takes effect, the company will allow used iPhone parts to work “just like new genuine Apple parts,” the company says.

But the changes don’t apply to aftermarket parts, a distinction that frustrates right-to-repair advocates. “This is a strategy of half-promises and unnecessarily complicated hedges designed to deflect attention from legislators intent on banning the practice altogether,” says Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, a company that sells tools and kits for tech repairs.

iFixit ran tests on the iPhone 15 and found that swapping many parts led warnings to pop up on the screen or features to break. Replacing the front-facing camera, for example, resulted in malfunctions for Face ID and auto brightness. Apple says that genuine parts, once installed, will fully calibrate to the device when the changes take effect.

Last month, Oregon became home to the first right-to-repair law banning parts pairing. The law takes effect in January 2025. Colorado lawmakers are considering a bill that would also ban parts pairing, and a hearing on the bill is scheduled before the state senate Thursday. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on these measures.

“Let’s be 100 percent clear: This move is because of state lawmakers pushing back on this practice,” says Nathan Proctor, senior director of the campaign for the right to repair for the Public Interest Research Group. “This move does not happen unless state lawmakers are saying, ‘We don’t want to do this.’”

Apple also began offering some manuals and tools for people to repair their own devices in 2022, and it expanded those after California passed a law last year requiring manufacturers to make these materials available.

Apple did not immediately respond to a question about what parts will be covered when the change takes effect. The company says it has spent the past two years working to make some parts, like Face ID or Touch ID, reusable. “Future” iPhone releases will be able to support used sensors.

Apple announced updates, too, that may make iPhone theft less appealing in the future. The company says it will lock iPhone parts from phones reported as stolen or lost, limiting their ability to calibrate to a different iPhone. It also will begin showing people in their settings if a part on their phone is a new or used genuine part.

These changes are a significant reversal of Apple’s long-held stance on third-party repair. But repair advocates see these moves as the bare minimum, not a revolutionary flip. “This was a fully untenable, unethical practice to begin with,” Proctor says. “I’m glad it’s started to be restricted, but we need laws that prevent this from happening on any device from any manufacturer, not just a couple of phones from one manufacturer.”

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April 11, 2024
I’m a New Homeowner. An App Called Thumbtack Has Become a Lifesaver for Me

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Never in my life did I think I’d own a home, but I was fortunate enough to close on my first house last fall. Yet as I moved into my new space—after nearly a decade of renting in New York City—I was overwhelmed with anxiety. Anything and everything that went wrong in the house was now the responsibility of my wife and I to solve. Is something wrong with the boiler? Find someone to fix it. Got water damage? Find someone to fix it, fast.

I’m a little handy around the house. I recently installed a smart thermostat and smart shades, I painted several rooms, and I successfully followed the California patch method to fix some holes in my drywall. Most of these experiences start with me watching several YouTube videos (HomeRenoVision is excellent). But there are a lot of jobs I just don’t feel comfortable doing myself. That’s where Thumbtack comes in.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

It’s like the Yellow Pages and Uber mixed into one app built for homeowners, where you can find and hire a professional in your area for nearly anything you need to do in your home. There are vendor reviews from other customers with photos of the completed work, plus you can chat with and book these experts through the app. Thumbtack as a company has been around for more than 15 years, so its database is enormous—there are 300,000 local professionals across the US. Best of all, the app is free; the company charges professionals a matchmaking fee, and it doesn’t place any pressure on you to pay them through its app.

Today, Thumbtack is unveiling a new version that evolves the app from a way to find home professionals into a project manager for your home. I’ve been playing around with the new update over the past week—it’s only rolling out for iPhone right now, with Android to come in a few months—but it’s already giving me a little more peace of mind.

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One Task at a Time

The previous owner of my house left several business cards and leaflets for plumbers, roof specialists, and the like in a few of the drawers. For some of the initial work I wanted help with, I tried Googling the details of these people as well as researching local handymen, but it was hard to get a sense of how much a project would cost if I hired them, and whether or not they’d be reliable. That’s when I remembered it was my home inspector who recommended Thumbtack.

Ever since then, I have used the app several times in the past few months. I’ve hired an electrician to install new outlets and my security cameras. I’ve had some folks come to move and install a washer and dryer, to recaulk baseboards, and even to mount a TV. Thumbtack is built for homeowners, but there are certainly a few things renters will find useful as well, like if you need help assembling furniture, mounting items, or moving.

The app does a great job of auto-filling my queries and pointing me to the terms industry professionals use. Thumbtack’s director of product, Alexis Baird, says the new update also leverages Meta’s Llama 2 large language models to better map your searches to professionals, who may use more precise terms and proper lingo in their profiles to showcase their expertise.

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April 2, 2024
Oregon’s Breakthrough Right-to-Repair Bill Is Now Law

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Oregon governor Tina Kotek yesterday signed the state’s Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far.

The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams.

But Oregon’s bill goes further, preventing companies from implementing schemes that require parts to be verified through encrypted software checks before they will function, known as parts pairing or serialization. Oregon’s bill, SB 1596, is the first in the nation to target that practice. Oregon state senator Janeen Sollman and representative Courtney Neron, both Democrats, sponsored and pushed the bill in the state senate and legislature.

“By eliminating manufacturer restrictions, the Right to Repair will make it easier for Oregonians to keep their personal electronics running,” said Charlie Fisher, director of Oregon’s chapter of the Public Interest Research Group, in a statement. “That will conserve precious natural resources and prevent waste. It’s a refreshing alternative to a ‘throwaway’ system that treats everything as disposable.”

Oregon’s law isn’t stronger in every regard. For one, there is no set number of years for a manufacturer to support a device with repair support. Parts pairing is prohibited only on devices sold in 2025 and later. And there are carve-outs for certain kinds of electronics and devices, including video game consoles, medical devices, HVAC systems, motor vehicles, and—as with other states—“electric toothbrushes.”

Apple opposed the Oregon repair bill for its parts-pairing ban. John Perry, a senior manager for secure design at Apple, testified at a February hearing in Oregon that the pairing restriction would “undermine the security, safety, and privacy of Oregonians by forcing device manufacturers to allow the use of parts of unknown origin in consumer devices.”

Apple surprised many observers with its support for California’s repair bill in 2023, though it did so after pressing for repair providers to mention when they use “non-genuine or used” components and to bar repair providers from disabling security features.

According to Consumer Reports, which lobbied and testified in support of Oregon’s bill, the repair laws passed in four states now cover nearly 70 million people.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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March 29, 2024
The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point

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The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, joining an alarmingly large mountain of defunct TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, routers, electric toothbrushes, headphones. This is “electrical and electronic equipment,” aka EEE—anything with a plug or battery. It’s increasingly out of control.

As economies develop and the consumerist lifestyle spreads around the world, e-waste has turned into a full-blown environmental crisis. People living in high-income countries own, on average, 109 EEE devices per capita, while those in low-income nations have just four. A new UN report finds that in 2022, humanity churned out 137 billion pounds of e-waste—more than 17 pounds for every person on Earth—and recycled less than a quarter of it.

That also represents about $62 billion worth of recoverable materials, like iron, copper, and gold, hitting e-waste landfills each year. At this pace, e-waste will grow by 33 percent by 2030, while the recycling rate could decline to 20 percent. (You can see this growth in the graph below: purple is EEE on the market, black is e-waste, and green is what gets recycled.)

Courtesy of UN Global E-waste Statistics Partnership

“What was really alarming to me is that the speed at which this is growing is much quicker than the speed that e-waste is properly collected and recycled,” says Kees Baldé, a senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and lead author of the report. “We just consume way too much and we dispose of things way too quickly. We buy things that we may not even need, because it’s just very cheap. And also these products are not designed to be repaired.”

Humanity has to quickly bump up those recycling rates, the report stresses. In the first pie chart below, you can see the significant amount of metals we could be saving, mostly iron (chemical symbol Fe, in light gray), along with aluminum (Al, in dark gray), copper (Cu), and nickel (Ni). Other EEE metals include zinc, tin, and antimony. Overall, the report found that in 2022, generated e-waste contained 68 billion pounds of metal.

Courtesy of UN Global E-waste Statistics Partnership

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March 20, 2024