Why would anyone believe that spare parts would need to be provided at cost? I’m a proponent of right to repair, but that would be an absurd over-step (and be a strong force to ensure that no spare parts are available to anyone).
The bill actually says “at costs that are fair to both parties,” not “at cost” as in losing money. You’re arguing over what ChatGPT imagined the bill said (and GP posted without verification), not what it actually said.
IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included?
With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."
I remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time.
The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.
There's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it.
Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).
Manufacturers can already legitimately say the additional price for 1 spare part for a $5 part is actually $250,000 dollars because the last mould has worn out…?
Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.
Tough luck then. The point of the law is to make it easier for people to repair the things they rightfully own. Not kill business by requiring all companies to indefinitely manufacture parts for anything they’ve ever sold.
Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.
It makes actively preventing repairs (including via software restriction, which happens today) illegal. It clarifies that it is the responsibility of the company providing the product to in good faith facilitate 3rd party repair of the product by providing parts and documentation fairly. This is sadly not the norm for electronics goods hence the whole movement in the first place.
250k for a single mold if they don't have drawings of the final size of the last is reasonable - high but reasonable. Building molds is still a lot of trial and error that CAD cannot help with. Plus time for one off on an assemble line is not cheap since it is often half an hour of nobody in the factory working except the two people switching out the mold. once you have a mold you can make thousands and so the cost ammortizes out if you need that many.
my company has looked into spending billions for a chip fad of obsolete processes just to get some no longer in prodction parts. So far not worth it.
Actually this is probably the best way to ensure that price gouging does not happen. The fixed and NRE costs are already included in the price of the original device. Charging those again for replacements would be double-dipping. And the law still leaves it up to OEMs to decide how to cost the replacement, so there's some wiggle room there. This is an intelligently crafted bill.
I don’t agree that Gillette making a profit on razor blades is “double-dipping” and certainly not in a way that I want to prevent.
The main point I made is the upthread summary (which appears to be unreviewed ChatGPT spew, adding noise rather than signal to the discussion) of the law is incorrect in an obvious way that the actual bill is not.
The razor blades thing is a problem specifically with the patent system.
The intent of a patent is that you invent something useful and get a temporary monopoly over it as the incentive for the invention. The premise is that the value of the patent is proportional to the value of the invention, and therefore the incentive we want to create for inventing it. If you invent something which is no improvement over the status quo then nobody is going to pay you a premium for it.
The problem comes when you patent an interface, like the connector between a razor handle and a blade. Because then even if the connector is nothing special, the replacement blades have to use that connector and then you get artificial demand for the connector, not because it's such a great connector but because the customer is in the market for blades for their existing razor. It's a mechanism of cheating the patent system by collecting a premium disproportionate to the value of what you invented.
This is even worse in tech products because a phone costs a lot more than a razor, so if you need a part, the amount they can stick you for because there is only one place to get the part is proportional to the value of a $900 phone instead of a $7 razor. And on top of that, they're not trying to sell you replacement parts, they're trying to turn your existing phone into slag so they can sell you a new phone.
Which is why the most important thing is that you can get repair parts from third parties, who both provide competition for parts and actually want to sell them because their primary business is selling repair parts instead of selling new phones.
One proposal I keep mentioning for copyright and patent reform is they can never apply to data formats or digital/physical interfaces. Also, an exception to reverse engineer those for compatibility. That combination might combat a lot of problems.
Comparing consumables like blades to replacements like screens is intellectually dishonest. Those two are not the same thing and there is no merit to your argument.
To play devils advocate here, maybe the idea is that if the part is not eligible for third party sales by way of patents etc, then the manufacturer should not be allowed to simply charge more for a replacement part that that of a newer model?
