Right to repair: all the latest news and updates

Colorado has become the first US state to pass a law that gives farmers the right to repair their own equipment. Governor Jared Polis signed the bill into law on Tuesday, requiring manufacturers to provide access to the parts, software, tools, and documentation necessary for farmers or independent repair shops to fix agricultural equipment.

“This is a common-sense bipartisan bill to help people avoid unnecessary delays from equipment repairs,” Governor Polis says in a statement. “Farmers and ranchers can lose precious weeks and months when equipment repairs are stalled due to long turnaround times by manufacturers and dealers. This bill will change that.”

Nintendo has started offering free repairs for faulty Joy-Cons in more parts of Europe, regardless of warranty status, as first reported by Nintendo Life. On a support page on Nintendo’s UK website, the company says it will fix Joy-Cons inflicted with the dreaded stick drift “at no charge” in the UK, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area (EEA) — even if the company’s two-year warranty has expired.

Although Nintendo has offered free repairs for out-of-warranty Joy-Cons in North America, Latin America, and France, it never extended the policy to the UK, Switzerland, and all of the EEA until now. The company previously only repaired faulty Joy-Cons in these countries for free if they had an active warranty, and it’s unclear how long this offer has been active. We reached out to Nintendo for more information, and we’ll update this article if we hear back. The European Commission said Nintendo changed its policy after it contacted the company.

HMD has worked to make what it says are the most common smartphone repairs — replacing a broken screen, charging port, or flat battery — a simpler process on its new Nokia G22, and it’s partnering with repair specialists iFixit to provide customers with the necessary replacement parts, tools, and guides. The Nokia G22 will be available on March 8th in the UK for £149.99 (€179 / around $180) and will be sold in select global markets like Europe but not the US.

The company joins a growing list of smartphone manufacturers that are making replacement parts more easily available to end customers. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen Samsung and Google partner with iFixit to sell replacement parts, while Apple launched its own Self Service Repair program. These companies are making spare parts easier to buy, but the actual ease with which you can repair their devices is more hit-and-miss. 

This week on The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of home theater remotes, we dedicate an episode to the right to repair the technology you own.

We live in a world where our most important gadgets are with us at all times. Because of this, we expect them to last as long as physically possible. Unfortunately, the reality of consumer tech today is that a lot of gadgets are not built with the intention of being easily fixable when they break. On today’s episode, we talk to people who are figuring out how to repair the tech we use every day so we can use it even longer, even after manufacturer support stops.

Samsung is finally adding Galaxy S22 parts and manuals to the self-repair program it established last year with partner iFixit. Just as we’re preparing for the Unpacked event that will launch the Galaxy S23, customers can now get access to genuine replacement parts for the S22, S22 Plus, and S22 Ultra, as well as the Galaxy Book Pro (15-inch) and Pro 360 notebooks.

When Samsung first launched the self-repair program in August, customers only had access to limited OEM parts like replacement back covers, USB-C charge ports, and screens for previous generation Galaxy S20 and S21 devices, as well as the Tab S7. Even with the addition of S22 devices, not much has changed in terms of what customers can officially fix.

John Deere has finally committed to giving farmers the tools they need to fix their own equipment. The company signed a memorandum of understanding with the agricultural lobbying group, American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), on Sunday, an agreement that’s also supposed to ensure that farmers can take their machines to third-party repair shops, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

For years, John Deere has been at the center of the right-to-repair debate, and not in a good way. The company put software locks on equipment that only authorized dealers can disable, preventing farmers or an independent repair shop from diagnosing and fixing a machine. It can also remotely shut down machines at any time (like it demonstrated when Russians stole Ukrainian farm equipment last year). These limitations have led some fed-up farmers to hack their tractors, something this new agreement is supposed to remedy.

Apple is raising the price of getting a new battery installed in most iPhones, iPads, and Macs, starting on March 1st. The company made the announcement on the devices’ repair pages, in small text under its price estimators, which was noticed by 9to5Mac.

How much the price hike is depends on what device you have. For iPhones, it’s simple — Apple’s site says “the out-of-warranty battery service fee will be increased by $20 for all iPhone models prior to iPhone 14.” For phones with a home button, that means the price will be going from $49 to $69, and for Face ID phones that means it’ll be going from $69 to $89. Those prices, by the way, were put in place in 2019, after Apple ran a year-long promotion where you could get a new battery for $29, to make up for its battery throttling controversy.

New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the Digital Fair Repair Act on December 28th, 2022, and the law will go into effect on July 1st, 2023 — a full year after it was originally passed by the NY State legislature. The bill establishes that consumers and independent repair providers have a right to obtain manuals, diagrams, diagnostics and parts from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in order to repair their own devices. However, the bill was meaningfully compromised at the last minute by amendments that give OEMs some convenient exceptions and loopholes to get out of obligations that many right to repair advocates had been hoping for.

One of the most controversial adjustments in the signed law is that it allows OEMs to sell assemblies of parts instead of individual components if they choose to. The bill also won’t require OEMs to provide “passwords, security codes or materials” to bypass security features, which is sometimes necessary to do to save a locked, but otherwise functionally fine device. 

Apple’s self-service repair program has just been expanded to include the company’s lineup of M1-powered desktop Macs. As noted by Six Colors, customers in the US can now order genuine repair parts for the iMac, Mac Mini, and Mac Studio. The Studio Display has also been added to the program.

You can browse the collection of repair manuals for all of these products on Apple’s website; in fact, you must go through the manual if you want to take advantage of the self-service repair program.

Almost a year ago today, Dell announced the “Concept Luna”, a fully repairable and upgradable laptop incorporating sustainable materials. With everything removable and replaceable, from the memory and SSD to the keyboard and the screen, it looked to be a similar concept to the groundbreaking Framework Laptop — and potentially a huge win for both sustainability and right-to-repair advocates. The problem: it was not anywhere close to a real thing you could buy.

Well, it’s been a year. Concept Luna is still not on shelves. Dell still has no concrete plans to put it on shelves.

Apple’s self-service repair program, which is designed to let customers repair their own iPhones and MacBooks, is launching in Europe. The company announced today that genuine Apple parts, tools, and manuals will be available to customers in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK to perform their own repairs.

Spare parts are available via Apple’s self service repair store, which features a drop-down menu in the top right to select the correct country. As with the service’s launch in the US earlier this year, customers will be able to rent tools to perform the repairs rather than needing to purchase them outright, and receive discounts by sending in their replaced parts to Apple for refurbishment or recycling.

It’s a good day when you get a free replacement for something broken. For me, it was a new controller. My old controller had its right joystick snap off in my bag. Despite the protruding nub snapping off, the analog mechanism still worked — so I reached out to the manufacturer for a replacement stick, and instead, they sent me a very nice and very new replacement. The thing is, like Carrie from Sex and the City, I didn’t want a replacement Blueberry iBook, Aiden! I just want my PowerBook fixed.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course, I am just as grateful for the replacement as I was for the Thanksgiving turkey I’m still digesting. But my request to customer service wasn’t for a replacement — it was for a part. I inquired again about the part, but they said to just dispose of the broken controller. Not a fan of wasting a good controller, I headed over to eBay and found a broken one I could source parts from. Once I got that in, all it took was 11 screws and I was able to harvest my joystick.

Samsung seems to be working on a new self-repair app to aid customers looking to fix their own devices. The company’s submission at the US Patent and Trademark Office for “Self Repair Assistant” includes a blue Samsung-style Android app icon that has a gear and a wrench within it (via SamMobile).

Samsung’s application describes the Self Repair Assistant as a “computer application software for mobile phones” for self-repair, self-maintenance, and self-installation of devices including smartphones, smart watches, tablet computers, and earbuds. The Trademark Office is currently waiting to examine the application.

A new iPhone 14 teardown video from iFixit shows a major repairability improvement: removable back glass. The video demonstrates how you can lift the rear glass panel with ease, using only a heating mat, a suction handle, and an opening pick — a huge deviation from the past few generations of iPhones that weren’t so repair-friendly.

iFixit describes the process in more detail in a post on its site, noting that the back glass is “simply secured with two screws and a single connector.” Apple appears to have used an adhesive that isn’t so strong, making it a lot easier to take off the back panel without any expensive tools. iFixit also points out that removing those same screws will give you access to the screen in case you need to repair that as well.

If something’s broken with your Steam Deck and you don’t want to try to fix it yourself, Valve now has a new option for you: you can send your handheld gaming PC to one of the company’s new repair centers to get it fixed.

Repairs for anything that’s covered by the Steam Deck’s warranty (which is one year in the US) will be free, Valve says. If your device is out of warranty, the company will offer to fix it up for a cost. If you don’t want to pay that fee, you can decline the repair and ask to have your Steam Deck sent back.

On Monday, Apple expanded its DIY repair program to include MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops equipped with M1 chips (including the Pro and Max). At least, in theory. The repairability experts at iFixit, who regularly dissect Apple’s gadgets, have taken a look at the new program, and their outlook is…mixed.

iFixit’s Sam Goldheart writes that the new MacBook Pro guides “threw us for a loop.” The issue: the documentation “makes MacBook Pros seem less repairable” than they have been in the past.

Epson gained some scrutiny on Twitter in recent weeks after the company disabled a printer that was otherwise working fine, leading to accusations of planned obsolescence. Epson knows its printers will stop working without simple maintenance at a predictable point in the future, and it knows that it won’t be cost-effective for many owners to send their home printers in for service. So why not build them to be user serviceable in the first place?

The inciting post from @marktavern mentions that his wife was unable to use her “very expensive Epson printer” after an end-of-service error message appeared.

Samsung and Fixit have launched their repair program that lets Galaxy S20, S21, and Tab S7 Plus owners buy replacement parts for their devices and access guides on how to do DIY fixes. The program still has most of the caveats that my colleague Umar Shakir pointed out when it was announced in March — it’s not launching with parts for Samsung’s latest flagship devices and there’s a limited number of repairs you can do — but it’s good to see that at least some Galaxy owners will now be able to do their own repairs at home. Samsung also says it’s planning to expand the devices and types of repairs that are covered in the future.

You’ll be able to buy the parts and tools for screen, back glass, and charging port replacements through iFixit as well as at Samsung retail and service locations, according to Samsung’s news post on Tuesday. If you buy a display replacement kit, you’ll also get a return shipping label to send the old parts back for recycling.

My Weber grill came with a warning: “The use and/or installation of parts on your WEBER product that are not genuine WEBER parts will void this Warranty.”

That’s not cool. In fact, it’s been illegal since 1975 — and soon, Weber won’t be doing it anymore. According to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Weber Stephen Products will not only have to strike phrases like that from its warranty terms within 90 days, but it’ll have to proactively, clearly, and conspicuously tell customers via mail, email, websites, and apps that the exact opposite is true.

In April, Google announced plans to join the expanding list of tech companies that work with iFixit. The repair mavens distribute parts and tools for people interested in performing DIY electronics repairs, and starting today, iFixit’s store offers genuine Google parts for a number of Pixel phones.

You can order what you need to repair everything from the Pixel 2 to the latest Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, as well as the tools to install them and step-by-step guides to walk you through the process. (Aftermarket parts are also available if you’re looking to fix an OG Pixel or Nexus device.)