> 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.
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.