There is no such restriction in the law. The relevant section reads like this, section 3:

> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to: ... Cause a digital electronic product to display misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss.

So of course there can still be a notice, it just has to be dismissable. But Apple (the main company using part pairing against customers right now) has to stop making their products unusable when non-OEM parts are used for a repair.

Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair

Yup. When somebody insists you need "genuine OEM parts" insist in response that they specify what exactly it is you're getting. Most often "genuine" means the Chinese factory put these in a box that the OEM sold to you for $40 whereas the "not genuine" ones were from the same factory but they were $20, that's just worse value, not a superior product.

Once they tell you what the actual difference is - if there even is one - you can judge whether it's worth it. Your cable is 800Mbps and the cheap one is only 40Mbps? I want a charging cable, I don't move data over it, don't care. Your part is guaranteed for 3 years and the cheap one isn't? Now I'm interested, I never had one last more than 2 years so either you're buying me a replacement when that happens again or yours lasts longer, both are good outcomes.

The problem with non-genuine parts is that you don't know what they are.

Maybe it's literally the same cable from the same factory, but without the logo. Maybe it's the same cable from the same factory, but the Chinese company decided to skimp on materials and quality control on the off-brand ones, and it's going to burn your house down after a year. Maybe it's a competing factory trying to reverse-engineer the design, who figured out how to "optimize" it by removing an "unnecessary" part, which was actually engineered in as a crucial safety precaution. You never know.

You may even buy the same non-genuine part you've been buying for years, from the same seller, and suddenly go from an exact copy to the "competing factory" case.

That's what trademarks are for - pick a part from a manufacturer you trust. Of course the legal uncertainty around replacement parts has made it so no well-known brand makes them for anything but their own products, and the anti-consumer-rights propagandists use this to argue it is an intrinsic property of "non-genuine" parts, and we must be protected from making our own choices.

If what you're buying is specified you get significantly improved visibility on the concerns you described. When it's not specified you're in the same place as before - the factory making them for the Genuine OEM is also trying to shrink the BOM by removing unnecessary parts.

Depends on the part. Non-OEM laptop memory? Fine. The failure/error rate is usually negligbly higher than OEM if at all.

Non-OEM laptop batteries? Not fine. These very reliably work less well and fail or lose capacity much sooner.

I imagine similar differences exist for many other kinds of parts as well.

Also be aware that the in the case of a TPM and fingerprint sensor there are some very important security guarantees that a part must make in order to preserve the security of the system. So it is not in fact scare mongering to try to get this right in the law and commenting about the difficulty of getting this right is not being infected by Apple follower talking points.

The replacement parts have to work, otherwise they are not replacement parts. Neither fingerprint sensors nor TPM chips are magic. There is no difficulty here.

Ok, how would you ensure this is right in the law without creating a loophole?

I think this is already covered by a different area of law: false or misleading advertising prevention.

If you buy a TPM that won’t codesign your MacBook’s bootloader (or that uses a compromised signing key) and it was advertised as an equivalent replacement to the OEM’s TPM, that advertising was false. This isn’t much different from buying a smaller hard drive for a computer: just because it works in the machine doesn’t mean it’s as big as the old one, and if it was advertised as 1TB and only stores 500GB, then the advertising is false.

It should be allowed for a system to warn about using a part that has not been certified to work in this type of situation. There is a middle ground where third party parts are allowed but they have to demonstrate that they meet a certain level of safety to not have a warning pop up.

> Side note: Be aware that baseless concerns like this echo propaganda against Right to Repair. You might have been infected by some Apple follower talking points there.

"How dare you be anything less than blindly enthusiastic about this obviously good thing, you've clearly been tricked by someone evil."

I mean … fair point, but Apple and other companies very much did spend immense amounts of money lobbying and scaremongering against right-to-repair legislation, so that’s worth drawing attention to.

https://techhq.com/2024/02/apple-right-to-repair-oregon-bill... https://doctorow.medium.com/apple-fucked-us-on-right-to-repa...

So there's nothing stopping them from having that pop up every single time you turn your phone screen on?

Just above it says:

> an original manufacturer may not use parts pairing to ... Reduce the functionality or performance of a digital electronic product

Dismissable would have to be defined, but when being annoying about it it should be possible to show that it reduces the functionality. It would be clearly against the spirit of the law, but sure, Apple already risked management jail time by ignoring court orders so they might try stuff here as well.

If someone damages your property, they must pay for damages.

That doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the same car you had before. The parts might be unobtainable. Or the car’s value may have depreciated enough to be less than the cost of repair.

It’s sucky that you are “forced” to acquire new parts or car, but that’s life. They will pay you the fair amount for damages, not necessarily restore exactly to the previous state.

Hm. There is no restriction in the law about showing the OEM status of parts in general was how I wanted my sentence to be understood. A permanent notice and limiting functionality is explicitly forbidden, but it follows that a dismissable notice (or something like a popup notice triggered in a settings menu) is allowed.

Yeah, this still seems problematic in the case of a device being sold and represented as original. Though I suppose this is always a risk we take buying used.

Do you feel the same way about generic drugs being substandard?

Not personally, no, though I am surprised to learn in this thread that it's apparently an issue.

I do know with cars, replacement parts sometimes have fitment issues that cause body shops hassles, driving up labor costs, and having replacement parts devalues a desirable car. (on the other hand, so does ANY bodywork, even with OE parts).