The Right To Repair Your Computer’s Devices

Imagine if your car gets a flat tire or broken window. Imagine the car manufacturer made it so that a flat tire or broken window meant you had to replace the whole car. What a crazy and wasteful idea that would be.

Unknowingly, millions of customers are buying computers from companies like HP, Apple, and others where the equivalent is occurring.

Recently in Maple Ridge we had customers who brought us Apple’s, and HP’s with broken screens.

When going to replace or repair these screens the process to open and or replace was fraught with hostile design features meant to intentionally thwart 3rd party repair of these machines.

The apple merged the screen glass with the LCD itself. So if you cracked the surface you now needed an $800 screen assembly. Our Pitt Meadows customer was not pleased. A small chip in the glass could not simply be replaced with a new $80 piece of glass like they did a couple years earlier.

But that was not all. To remove the broken glass, Apple made it so a razer blade had to be carefully dragged around the whole perimeter of the screen. And if you went more then 10mm they had it so you would cut the Antenna. The glass lip was so thin itself that if you twist the blade you crack the glass.

Like I said, a few years earlier, this took 10 minutes and $80. Today, the new model Apples, the same issue takes 2 hours and $800.

And when we look inside, Apple’s are no longer able to claim the qualitative claims they once had when Steve Jobs was around. This kind of hostile design is deeply unfair to the customer and its anti-competitive.

Similarly, HP (Hewlett Packard) has mastered the art of planned obsolescence by using a plastic that by 5 years of age, is so brittle and weak, it can no longer hold the screws of their computer cases together. They know this happens. It has been this way for over 10 years. Especially their entry level laptops bought at big box stores.

Efforts are being made continent wide to try and get politicians to acknowledge this increasing problem.

In Maple Ridge we have good repair people including ourselves, however as we are mostly small companies we have no major voice in the political realm. We need local Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows to reach out to politicians in our ridings and let them know that you want ‘RIGHT TO REPAIR’ to be a political issue.

Why? Because one day it may be you facing a $1000 repair/replace situation instead of a $100 simple fix at the local computer geek shop.

2Tech is here not only to help you with your hardware/software, but to try and help you politically in urging you to acknowledge that the behavior of big tech is indeed a political issue as well.

RIGHT TO REPAIR should not be taken from you and us simply for the greed and control of these multinational behemoths.

Call us to discuss this or any other issue. We serve Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows.