This has the same problem I've seen with other such proposals: it joins together "you should have the legal right to repair" with "manufacturers should be forced to make only devices with modular replaceable parts". The latter sounds good in theory, except if it means thicker, heavier, less optimized devices. By all means offer such devices, but don't take away the option of devices at a different point on the tradeoff between modularity and thin/light/optimized.
You should absolutely have the legal right to open, tinker with, repair, or otherwise mod any device you own. That doesn't mean prohibiting the legal right to manufacture, sell, purchase, or use devices whose design trades off simplicity of repair for some other property that people purchasing it want more.
> except if it means thicker, heavier, less optimized devices
Speaking specifically of my MBP Retina, and looking inside, I fail to see how eg. a soldered NVME would make the laptop any thinner. There is plenty of space created by the much thicker heat sink, leaving room for a bunch of components to be modular.
The reason all these components are soldered in is to make it hard for users or small shops to do quick repairs and cheap upgrades.
You must buy a new laptop for a RAM upgrade.
Apple negotiates with component suppliers as a single buyer, drives the price of components down, keeps all the savings to itself, and re-sells the components at an exorbitant markup.
It is ridiculous for anyone to think this has got anything to do with quality.
A modular battery would make the laptop bulkier. If a modular NVMe drive wouldn't, it's because other components have already have. And beyond that, you should be comparing to an Air or MacBook, if we're talking about devices that have been optimized at the expense of modularity.
Also, soldering down RAM means you don't have to include support for negotiating the properties and quality of arbitrary RAM sticks, which you'd have to do with socketed RAM; that can mean booting faster and providing more performance.
There are good reasons to design components to work specifically with other components. There are also good reasons to make devices more modular. Both have value, to different users with different use cases.
> There are good reasons to design components to work specifically with other components. There are also good reasons to make devices more modular. Both have value, to different users with different use cases.
If your point is that there is a trade-off to modularity, I'm not sure who it is in response to. It's obvious that modularity has a tradeoff. And I don't see any significant group in this conversation contending that. Nobody is asking for a user-replaceable RAM on an iPhone.
My own point (and R2R's I think) is that Apple, in most cases makes hard to repair products not as a tradeoff in favor of simplicity/compactness/robustness, but to increase profit.
> If your point is that there is a trade-off to modularity, I'm not sure who it is in response to. It's obvious that modularity has a tradeoff. And I don't see any significant group in this conversation contending that. Nobody is asking for a user-replaceable RAM on an iPhone.
I've seen many people in "right to repair" discussions arguing for legal mandates that every device must have a replaceable battery, for instance. That goes beyond having the right to repair, and into restricting the manufacture of devices.
If we start legislating technical architecture, we limit the possibility of innovation and competition, and we drastically reduce the chances that anyone will ever dethrone any of the current market leaders by building something nobody saw coming.
> I've seen many people in "right to repair" discussions arguing for legal mandates that every device must have a replaceable battery, for instance.
That's actually a good example of choosing the right tradeoff in demanding right to repair. Again, people are asking for replaceable batteries, not interchangeable RAMs (which would effectively disallow SoCs). This seems to limit the downsides of regulation to pretty much nothing.
A common worry about regulation is that it'll snowball [0] and stifle innovation. But R2R isn't asking for generic regulation. It is asking for specific and imo sane things like replaceable batteries. That is not too much to ask.
[0] As in: "If we give them batteries, pretty soon they'll ask for generic SoCs on phones" or something like that.
You should absolutely have the legal right to open, tinker with, repair, or otherwise mod any device you own. That doesn't mean prohibiting the legal right to manufacture, sell, purchase, or use devices whose design trades off simplicity of repair for some other property that people purchasing it want more.