> The right to repair should be the obligation to repair, if we want to avoid drowning in trashed electronics

B-But, turnover?...

In other words: I'd gladly let some losers drown in trashed electronics, if it means that I (me!) am making a big juicy profit! I'm the only thing that matters to me.

Happily aided and abetted by "Everyone else should hold onto their old gadgets for 5 or 10 years, but I (me!) need the latest and shiniest, because I DESERVE IT and I'm the only thing that matters to me.

> We need to build products to last, and make sure we can fix them when they break.

That is unfeasible within the current paradigm. The entire economic model is geared around low-lifespan products. If everyone suddenly started buying a new phone every 10 years minimum, and there are exactly zero technical reasons why that shouldn't be the case, entire supply chains would implode.

I'm not saying this is bad, quite the contrary, but it's going to be a whole lot harder than just setting up a "Right to Repair". Still, it's a start.

Every year you have a cohort of people entering adulthood. It's not like everyone buys phone today and then nothing for 10 years.

There would still be substantially fewer orders each year if phones could be guaranteed to last 5-10 years, and the whole setup of some companies is based on a short renewal cycle.

Nevertheless, to take climate change and recycling seriously, that impact on companies and supply changes is exactly what should be happening.

This is all driven by unsustainable lifestyle of the rich.

New younger partner(s) every year or so that have to be impressed.

New apartments

New cars

New yachts

New outfit every day

Private jets

Their are bored to their tits and need all the money to feed their vanity which then drives short product cycles and so on.

I personally would probably opt for having people showing such behaviour sectioned.

The right to repair should be the obligation to repair, if we want to avoid drowning in trashed electronics

The electronics don't always end up in landfill because they are broken and can't be repaired. People, for instance, would toss perfectly fine phones or laptops in the bin simply because they bought new ones and can't be bothered flogging the old ones on eBay.

Another thing is the electronics in those products are not open. The CPUs on the phones, memory chips and other chips could be repurposed, but there are no datasheets available etc.

Maybe a 5 year old phone is too slow for being a phone today, but its guts could be perfectly fine for controlling your garage door or automating plant watering in your garden.

You may say, yes dude, I am going to desolder the phone CPU, design a PCB, write a firmware so that my garage door opener is in my full control and I know it does not send my personal information to Winnie the Pooh. I am going to spend good three years researching and learning and commit fortune to prototypes, while not going out, forgetting about holidays and family.

Maybe you wouldn't do that, but there is a lot of people who would.

I think once the device becomes obsolete (no longer sold), the manufacturers should be obliged to release all documentation so the device could be repurposed or supported by third parties.

To be fair it's trivial to control a garage door with an ESP8266 or similar, certainly no need to have the guts of a phone.

The phone is already a decent form factor, all we really need is unlocked boot loaders, and some binary support for the soc.

That was a bit of exaggeration, but even an old phone CPU would have magnitudes better performance and memory on tap than ESP8266. This means it would probably be capable of running inference for some simpler models in real time. Hooked up with a camera it could only open the door if it recognises your car or it could play a message "Welcome home , may I open the door for you?", or run some high resolution telemetry so you could calculate how long the door could be open for in the winter without affecting your heating bills too much and many more.

That memory/cpu is completely wasted on something like a door openner...

I know you were exaggerating somewhat, but there are real cases where the phone could be a reasonable thing to reuse (currently using two old iPhones as roving NDI cameras for a streaming setup for instance).

Calculating how long the door should be open is easy - it should always be open for the shortest possible time.

"The right to repair" exists but so much these days is designed to be irreparable because more cash is generated by making everyone buy a new device. Originally if your computer died then you had to just unplug the CPU and plug a new one in or replace the capacitor connected to the AC transformers via a chunky diode. Phones were often fixed by just replacing the microphone and record players worked better when the wooden disk needle was sharpened.

Originally everything was designed to be fixed.

Originally everything was designed to be fixed.

More subtle than that, I think... less designed to be fixed, as not designed not to be fixed. Processors and memories - expensive parts - were fitted in sockets, so the *could* be replaced (including at final build stage, if necessary) and coincidentally upgraded.

Now you end up with thousand-plus 'pin' components, with no practical way of using with a socket; you get components soldered to boards in the search for ultimate thinness; you get final sizes for e.g. memory decided at manufacture... I'm sure it's only coincidence that all of these have no practical method of repair, so you have to buy a new one if it breaks. Even the most advanced hobbiest will quail before large BGA packages.

> "I think once the device becomes obsolete (no longer sold), the manufacturers should be obliged to release all documentation so the device could be repurposed or supported by third parties."

I think this is a great idea, but I also think it would be one of those bits of legislation that would become incredibly complicated to avoid spilling trade secrets, define what a smartphone actually is (or is it all handhelds? or all chips/tech?) what counts as "no longer sold" (company can just whack the price up to a billion billion pounds or only sell to traders who have every cert under the sun) and what counts as "all documentation" (though giving the benefit of the doubt we all know what documentation means colloquially - it would still be a pain to define under law).

Not to mention, how this might affect software/firmware. If the audio driver for example is used in other devices, releasing the documentation is possible (probably already done) but releasing the actual code which would be required to modify the device for other use would mean releasing proprietary info if I'm not mistaken.

Mostly I want this kind of legislation so all the 3DS games become legal to play again instead of "no legal way to obtain and play except buying a 3DS that already has them on"

....we could just buying shiney we don't actually need.

Phone. Secondhand, now 6 years old

TV Cheap HD, no 10 years old.

HiFi 30 years old (with Bluetooth receiver on the aux)

iPad mini 4

Laptop must be 10 years old as is the desktop.

Monitors about the same.

I may at some point update the iPad to a bigger newer model, but that'll be second hand as well.

Could not agree with you more. I haven't bought a new car, pc, laptop, phone, camera, hi-fi... in decades, and I'm very happy with what I have.

Yes. This.

There is a lot of bashing of big evil corporations but in the end they give the public what it wants, and what the public wants (no not you, dear reader, and not me, but most people) is New Shiny every couple of years. And if most people replace their stuff that often, then it is pointless to make stuff needlessly repairable. This is true not just in consumer electronics but in consumer tat generally. Fast fashion, anyone?

We have met the enemy and he is us.

In UK WEEE regs, theoretically make recycling of electrical waste easy.

In reality, it isn't.

If your phone (or whatever) does have a take back service, any mention of it is probably (in real terms) hidden amongst reams of paperwork, or lurking on a website in beware of the leopard territory.

So, your average UK punter sees only recycling option as a trip to the nearest municipal recycling centre.

.. this can be a PITA e.g. needs a booking, many miles away, potentially inaccessible via public transport (my nearest "tip" only allows vehicles on site, if you are one of the (many) low income people with no vehicle then its problematic visiting on foot as pedestrian access banned - a (carless & I was unable to give him a lift as I was away) mate of mine successfully took some stuff to the tip on his bicycle though, arguing that it is a vehicle)

.. so lots of e-waste ends up in the bin.

(Not helped by pointless "single use" crap like disposable electrical vapes)

My local tip has a no walk in policy and its stupid! Very petty minded of them. However the green bin men in my area will now collect batteries and small electrical appliances. You just put them in a bag and put them on or next to the green bin.

As someone with a slight security paranoia my major issue with recycling phones and tablets is ensuring they are completely blank of all my information. I have a pile of old discs from old PCs but the PCs have been recycled long ago. The only phones or tablets I've taken to the tip have been dismantled, heat gunned and the flash chips broken apart. A service that offers secure destruction of old phones/tablets would be very useful. I'm still iffy about second hand phones as I've seen some horror stories about second hand PCs still having the original owners data.

I'd also put money on companies mining landfill sites for metals within the next 10 years.

There's a huge difference between phones and PCs.

If a PC hard drive has only been quick formatted, or if Windows has just been factory reset, then it's trivially easy to recover the data that has previously been on it. Literally just run something like PhotoRec on it and you'll get back pretty much anything that's not on a sector of hard drive that's been written over. No special skill or gear needed. That's why you've heard horror stories about data being recovered from second hand PCs.

It's a far, far more complicated process to recover anything from a phone or tablet that's been reset. It's not something that anyone can just have a go at and see what they can find, you need to have an inkling that there's something there you want to find.

I've recovered discs before after partition table corruption and apart from being really slow it was very easy.

As most phones and tablets use emmc for mass storage this is pretty much just an SSD with a file system and if you quick format it like old spinning rust the data is still there. What I don't know is exactly what methodology the phone software uses to 'wipe' itself. I have recovered data from a corrupted microSD card so recovering an emmc memory isn't going to be much harder. Also as most of these flash based devices use wear levelling they might leave freshly 'deleted' areas for a while before overwriting.

Sure you can recover data from a failing or corrupt hard drive, IF it hasn't been fully formatted/D-Banned/overwritten. The physical health of the hard drive, or the state of the partition table, is a separate issue from how intact the data is. PhotoRec can recover data in a partition agnostic way anyway.

Recovering from the internal storage of a phone or tablet is nothing like recovering from an SD card. You put a SD card into a PC, it mounts it as an external storage device.

How are you going to get your PC to do that with the internal flash memory of a phone?

https://www.minitool.com/mobile-recovery/free-android-recovery.html

This tool claims to be able to recover a factory reset phone. If the phone still boots then you can access the filesystem and it appears that using debugging mode you can actually get some low level access. I'm only going by what I'm reading though. If you could dd the raw blocks off the internal storage you could potentially recover deleted but not overwritten files.

There is also a tool called droidkit and fonepaw from my quick search.

If someone is REALLY determined you desolder the emmc chip and read it with your PC.

As jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid points out if your phone is encrypted then you just need to secure overwrite the key, which I hope is stored in another chip, and suddenly the data recover gets VERY hard. Old phones likely won't be encrypted.

"What I don't know is exactly what methodology the phone software uses to 'wipe' itself"

If you mean the"panic button" self wipe, or the sort of thing you initiate remotely if the phone is lost then I don't think it actually does a full erase. The contents have to be encrypted in advance and all the "wipe" does is overwrite the decryption key on the device. So the data is still there but encrypted with a key that is no longer available.

I don't think that's the same as doing a hardware reset though.

On hard drives (spinning rust style) in addition to multiple junk write cycles (if disk still functioning to write to), I drill many holes through HDD casing, and soak in salty water for many days to get some .

I do similar on phones (obv factory reset first), basic dismantle and some drilling then soak in salty water for days to further damage components.

.. Then they are ready to go to the tip, as scrap electronics.

Very little other than industrial shred is 100% secure but "good enough" for me - and as I have no phone or PC banking (no apps on my phone with any card or account details) any data that can be grabbed is fairly worthless - don't even use browser "offers" to save my username / password combos, so nothing of use there.

This recent tip story shows why security paranoia is a good idea

https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/investigation-launched-west-bridgford-recycling-9172437

.

I fully support any campaigning and lobbying for the right to repair, but what we need is regulation for how devices are designed and manufactured. Companies should be being fined or taxed up the wazoo for making stuff that breaks and can't be repaired.

if it was up to me, the amount of duty that had to be paid to import devices made by any particular company would be directly proportional to their iFixit repairability score. You want to make a phone out of glass and design it so the damned screen or battery can't be replaced? you're free to do that, but it'll be a luxury product at luxury prices, and it won't be the phone that every network pushes people to take with their contract.

It's an inevitable consequence of cheap products. We recently had a six year old 65" TV repaired, and it cost ~£300 (about £100 was the callout fee). It wasn't a complicated repair, but spare power supply boards are no longer available for that model, so the guy had to take it away and do some component-level repairs. Now the fact is that you can get a new low-end 65" TV for about £300 now, or a comparable model to the LG that broke for just a couple of hundred more. So it was just barely worth fixing, anything smaller than 65" wouldn't have been worth it. Any repair requiring any significant technician time is going to get expensive very quickly, so printers, TVs, phones, kitchen gadgets costing less than a couple of hundred quid, it's just never going to be worth paying someone to fix it once it's out of warranty. So if it breaks, it's headed for the tip.

As I have stated before, tell it to Microsoft that is making us dump millions of PCs because windows 11 does not support older hardware.

Oh please. We haven't had any "right to repair" store bought kit for decades! Most products are typically glued shut at the factory, so when the rechargeable battery conks out you can't open the device to replace the battery. I've got a shaver, a phone and an E-book reader, all of which are still fine except that the battery has reached its maximum number of charge/recharge cycles. But none of these devices has any screws in it, and any attempt to pry them open will either cause serious damage to the casings, thus ruining the look of the device, or break off the internal clips that are designed to snap shut forever. This is nothing new: in 1999 I had this problem with my Palm V organizer that had been glued shut at the factory. I'd used it a lot so the battery conked out before this type of device was obsolete, but I couldn't keep using it or replace the battery. Nothing has changed since. It's all had to go into the bin, much as I hate that.

Then there's the lack of spare parts. I had a very nice coffee maker (a well-known brand, too) that had been sitting in the box for about 6 months while events beyond my control turned my life upside down and I had to move three times in half a year. Finally I got it out of the box, plugged it in, and enjoyed it very much... Until after about 3 weeks the heating element suddenly packed up. By then the warranty had expired, the manufacturer had replaced it with another model, and replacement parts were no longer being stocked. So into the bin it had to go.

Right now I'm refurbishing a Bosch stove/loven combination that came with the house we bought. It's fine, except that the spark igniters for the oven no longer work after the previous owner had something in there that boiled over badly and covered the whole thing in hot (and therefore corrosive) grease so the spark electrode has corroded away. It's about 10 years old, but even Bosch (not exactly a Chinese fly-by-night sweatshop in Wang Dong province) can't supply the replacement electrodes anymore. And because the oven burner is located underneath a heat diffusor plate you need the spark igniter; you can't get to it with a match or barbecue lighter. So unless I can find another model igniter and MacGyver that into service somehow(fat chance) this whole expensive kitchen appliance is now just a boat anchor.

Electronics are not that much different. Nine out of ten appliances, from microwaves and dishwashers to my "industry grade" vacuum chamber sealer, use an FPGA to control the whole thing. When that goes (and it does go, far more often than you'd think) you're stuffed because you need the PROGRAMMED replacement component, which you can't get because they're not supplied as a part. At that point replacing the entire electronics board is your only option, but even if (and that's a big if) the manufacturer can supply it at all, you'll usually pay so much for it that simply replacing the whole dang appliance makes more sense from a money standpoint.

Right to repair? Don't make me laugh.

It's becoming a green-washing lifestyle choice that allows its practitioners to feel good about themselves.

Tut tut The Reg for just bolting on some self-appointed RTR spokesfolk - yet again! - onto an article about a UN report. If you're not clarifying the situation then you are muddying it. If you don't know what you're writing about then ask - there is some experience and wisdom in amongst the commentards. Use critical thinking - distinguish yourself from an LLM search assistant.

(Sent from a refurbished phone. My laptop is ten years old, my desktop and monitor second hand. I bought for £15 from a charity shop a 50" Sony Bravia TV with weird artifacts - ie not an obvious issue with the panel - and fixed it by replacing the TCon PCB). I reserve my money for good beer, shoes and underwear, which I buy new.