Mambo Taxi

Right to Repair is big news. Change is finally coming this July, and I'm sure more changes will follow.

This is a good podcast (and transcript!) interview with the founder of iFixit. I really want to see electronic repair shops everywhere, and a hell of a lot fewer electronics with only minor problems shipped off to to be broken down to base components!

First Person Podcast interviews the CEO of iFixit

"Governor Kathy Hochul of New York signed the country’s first broad right to repair bill into law. What will that law change for me as an average consumer?

"The New York law says that starting in July of 2023, all new products have to have those fundamentals — service information, parts and tools available. So if a manufacturer has a repair network for a product — if Apple is running Genius Bar repairs, if Samsung has a repair network for their devices — then they have to make available that same parts, tools and information to the rest of us.

"The environmental impact of manufacturing the things that we have is significant. The phone that’s in your pocket, which weighs like eight ounces, took over 250 pounds of raw material dug out of the ground to make. If every American were to use their phone just a year longer, it would be the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road. And so to have a world that is disposable — like, you’re talking about literal mountains dug out of the ground every year just to keep up with our gadget habit.

"What if we could just save the world through sheer laziness? It is actually a lot of work to get a new phone and transfer your contacts and your apps over and everything else. If you could just — like, if you drop in a new battery in your current phone, it will feel like a new phone. So that’s my counter. It’s like, let’s spend our time doing other things rather than configuring new technology all the time.

"And so let me be clear, the right to repair does not mean that you have to fix all of your own stuff. It means that it should be possible for you to get it fixed somehow, whether you have a friend who is tech savvy or excited about opening things up and wants to do it, or if you want to take it down to a neighborhood repair shop. You think about — what is the nexus of a small town America? You have a gas station, you have a grocery store, and a car repair shop.

You should probably also have an electronics repair shop. So I think we have an opportunity to create the neighborhood that we want to live in. And so I would encourage people, whether you fix something yourself or not, think about spending a little bit more money on repairs and less on buying new things."