Right to repair is a fight between power and choice
Imagine smelling coffee on your MacBook keyboard, well your guessed it right. Your friend just poured some coffee on to your MacBook accidentally a few minutes back. The first thing that could potentially come to your mind is the cost of getting it repaired.
The device might work for a hour or two, but the repair is inevitable. As usual, you can take it to your nearby Apple store and then the game starts.
Choice
It depends on how old your MacBook is and whether you have an insurance like an Apple Care purchased. If you’re covered by the care or warranty, you can get it fixed depending on the terms and it could be even free.
But what If you don’t have both?
At that point of time, you gotta pay almost the same amount of getting a new MacBook or at least half of it depending on the damage. Well, that’s the case in general, and it totally depends on the type of damage.
Recently, Julian, a reporter from WSJ claimed that her broken MacBook was offered two options and it was super confusing. In order to fix her MacBook she gotta pay $799 wherein a fresh one costs her $999.
Power
Well, that’s when power comes in. Apple has the power to charge the repair price of a MacBook to almost near to the price of an original one, because people are ready to buy.
Not just Apple, the case is same for Google products and few other giants as well. There is a serious concern here, and the choice of customer is limited to the options provided by the company in many ways.
Maybe, that’s one of the reason why the government is putting hands into it.
Right to Repair
The US government is discussing various measures to ensure right to repair for any product that you buy from the market. The government is asking manufacturers to make things clear.
Most of the third party repair shops cannot fix a problem with a MacBook or similar devices because they don’t have access to genuine spare parts, documentation or information about the chips or hardware used inside it and most importantly, the knowledge to work over it.
Generally these are achieved by accessing the information that the company provides. This also helps manufacturers sell more spare parts, but it looks like the business end is pretty unclear here.
Giants like Apple is definitely making a huge chunk of money by providing repairs with genuine parts ensuring safety, protection and trust.
Apple has mentioned that allowing third party repairs could breach security of the device and could even blow up, if things are not rightly done especially in the case of a battery fix.
The fight is between the consumers, manufactures and repair professionals. In general right to repair is necessary to provide choices to customers, because they also get the choice of repairing it with Apple in case of an Apple product, but at the same time protecting the manufactures interest is also important in the eyes of the government.
Let’s wait and watch for the winner.
