The Right to Repair movement is getting a major opponent in the form of Apple, according to reports from Vice's Motherboard. And while the battle over repairing phones may take the forefront, there's much more at stake.
"Right to Repair" is legislation would require Apple and other electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts to consumers and independent repair shops. On top of that, the laws would require manufacturers to make diagnostic and service manuals available to the public.
Backed by the lobbying group Repair.org, Right to Repair legislation is currently working its way through eight state-level legislatures across the country: Nebraska, Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Kansas, Wyoming, Illinois and Tennessee. Apple appears to be focusing its efforts on the Nebraska efforts at first, perhaps because Nebraska's unique unicameral legislature (the state has no House or Senate, just one body known as "the Legislature") makes it easier to consolidate lobbying efforts.
According to Motherboard's source, an Apple representative will testify against the bill, LB 67, at a hearing in Lincoln on March 9, alongside AT&T. Collectively, the two companies will argue against the legislation as a matter of safety, saying that consumers who repair their own phones could cause lithium batteries to catch fire. It's a danger that's been in the news regularly, most recently when a fire broke out in a Samsung factory in China.
For Lydia Brasch, who represents the rural eastern 16th Legislative District and introduced LB 67, phones were way down on the list of priorities. "The primary impetus," she tells Popular Mechanics, "is that we are an agricultural state. One out of every four jobs is connected to agriculture. When you are work in farming, you are tied to weather restrictions—planting, harvesting, all have to take place when the weather is holding. When we have an equipment breakdown, sometimes there's a waiting period to get repairs down. At the same time, you're chasing daylight, and you're helpless during that period of time to diagnose, to maintain, or to repair your own equipment as you had in the past. Farmers are falling behind waiting in the queue for someone to work on their equipment."
Brasch owns an iPhone, and she points to the company's exclusive nature as another reason customers should have access to repairs. There's only one Apple store in Nebraska, and it's seventy to eighty miles away from her district.
Apple is not the only one citing safety measures. Tractor company John Deere is adamantly opposed, saying such in a letter such legislation should be voted down "to protect consumers' significant investment in equipment." Writing in the Lincoln Journal-Star, Andy Goodman, the President and CEO of the Iowa-Nebraska Equipment Dealers Association, says that LB 67 would a legal nightmare surrounding inevitable injuries on dangerous equipment. It would "create a situation where third parties injured by an improper repair performed by an unqualified technician are unlikely to recover for the damages they sustained due to the negligence of an equipment owner or third party."
When read Goodman's comments over the phone, Brasch said that farmers have worked on their own equipment "for decades, generations even." Brasch also pointed to the emerging DIY sources of information in the world as a way that farmers and others who want to make repairs can learn about their equipment: "You can go to a YouTube for something as simple as baking a cake to repairing or operating an item. I think that's the way the market is moving. We'd like this market to move with the rest of the world."
