- 306
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- Telesphoreo
What are your thoughts on right to repair and the general trend towards loss of consumer rights? Do you think we'll ever have an advantage as consumers ever again?
Right to Repair
- Thread starter Telesphoreo
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What are your thoughts on right to repair and the general trend towards loss of consumer rights? Do you think we'll ever have an advantage as consumers ever again?
sucks but in our current economic system companies have no reason to do anything other than for profit, so stuff like this will inevitably happen. unless the government steps in, this will continue indefinitely i fear
- 277
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- videogamesm12
We are collectively losing our rights as consumers to do what we want with the products we pay for, and I believe this is a fucking awful trend that we should be fighting tooth and nail against by any means possible.
Right to repair encompasses more than just about being able to fix your own shit, it's about being able to take control of the product you invested in and bend it to your own will and use it however you please. You bought it, you own it. This by definition hurts the bottom line of every big company whose income now comes from making new overpriced products, who want you to pay thousands of dollars per year to get a new phone/computer even though your current one works just fine and sometimes gives you more control. So, what they do is that they make shit intentionally break after a certain period of time (sometimes even intentionally designing it to fail weeks or even days after the warranty that you paid even more for runs out!) so that the cost of getting the product repaired officially outweighs the cost of just getting a new one. If you try to get it done more cheaply by doing it yourself using cheaper but still high quality third party parts (@Alco_Rs11 once replaced the motherboard of his laptop which cost $100 to get the part himself and replace it manually, compared to the astronomical price of $1.3k through official channels), the retarded fucking firmware of device these days will intentionally brick parts under the guise of security even though it is clearly intended to discourage people trying to fix what they bought and own. If we do nothing to stop this shitty trend while we still can, we will send a very clear message to these big companies that we don't care and that they can tread on us all they want.
This general shift in anti-consumer attitudes that big tech companies have been adopting is part of what pushed me to develop a staunch conservative attitude with both hardware and software. I used a shitty budget phone for about 5 years before I was forced off of it primarily because the damn thing had a replaceable battery and it was a reliable phone that went through hell and back, even if it was an outdated and inefficient piece of shit. Modern laptops are practically impossible to feasibly repair since you have to disassemble the whole damn thing just to replace the drive or RAM whereas before you could just remove a few screws to take a cover off and then be able to access the part directly. The quality control in modern versions of Windows have fucking leaped off a cliff and now you can't even have basic things like a black title bar, the ability to not have your computer reboot and possibly brick itself because of an update, an element of actual fucking privacy, or god forbid you want to use something that isn't Microsoft Edge.
TL;DR - I massively support right to repair and consumer rights in the face of shifting anti-consumer attitudes and you should to. When shit breaks, we should be allowed to fix it since we bought it and therefore own it.
Right to repair encompasses more than just about being able to fix your own shit, it's about being able to take control of the product you invested in and bend it to your own will and use it however you please. You bought it, you own it. This by definition hurts the bottom line of every big company whose income now comes from making new overpriced products, who want you to pay thousands of dollars per year to get a new phone/computer even though your current one works just fine and sometimes gives you more control. So, what they do is that they make shit intentionally break after a certain period of time (sometimes even intentionally designing it to fail weeks or even days after the warranty that you paid even more for runs out!) so that the cost of getting the product repaired officially outweighs the cost of just getting a new one. If you try to get it done more cheaply by doing it yourself using cheaper but still high quality third party parts (@Alco_Rs11 once replaced the motherboard of his laptop which cost $100 to get the part himself and replace it manually, compared to the astronomical price of $1.3k through official channels), the retarded fucking firmware of device these days will intentionally brick parts under the guise of security even though it is clearly intended to discourage people trying to fix what they bought and own. If we do nothing to stop this shitty trend while we still can, we will send a very clear message to these big companies that we don't care and that they can tread on us all they want.
This general shift in anti-consumer attitudes that big tech companies have been adopting is part of what pushed me to develop a staunch conservative attitude with both hardware and software. I used a shitty budget phone for about 5 years before I was forced off of it primarily because the damn thing had a replaceable battery and it was a reliable phone that went through hell and back, even if it was an outdated and inefficient piece of shit. Modern laptops are practically impossible to feasibly repair since you have to disassemble the whole damn thing just to replace the drive or RAM whereas before you could just remove a few screws to take a cover off and then be able to access the part directly. The quality control in modern versions of Windows have fucking leaped off a cliff and now you can't even have basic things like a black title bar, the ability to not have your computer reboot and possibly brick itself because of an update, an element of actual fucking privacy, or god forbid you want to use something that isn't Microsoft Edge.
TL;DR - I massively support right to repair and consumer rights in the face of shifting anti-consumer attitudes and you should to. When shit breaks, we should be allowed to fix it since we bought it and therefore own it.
- 277
- IGN
- videogamesm12
I'm not sure if this is a good place to put this kind of news but it does have some relation to right to repair so fuck it, whatever. I may make more posts like this to document anti-repair measures taken by big companies in the future, depending on how I feel and how appropriate it may be.
Likely because the video unintentionally highlighted the laughably disproportionate price-to-quality ratio of the pre-amp (a lot of parts are seemingly DIY off-the-shelf components encapsulated in shitloads of plastic), Tom Evans responded to Mark's video in a blatant abuse of the copyright system by filing a copyright takedown against it causing Mark to get a copyright strike. On December 6 (likely around the same time the video was taken down), Mark posted a video to his channel in which he discussed the copyright claim, mentioned that there is a huge lack of information as for what exactly was so infringing that the video had to be taken down, and almost passively aggressively mocks the quality of the product in his typical humorous fashion. Honestly, one of the funniest parts of the whole video near the end was when he "accidentally" included a piece of cardboard that was used to hold the casing together.
The right to repair community and audio community soon caught wind of the situation. Louis Rossmann uploaded a three-part series going over the situation as it developed and doesn't try to obfuscate his hate-filled contempt towards Tom Evans and companies like it for daring to fuck with people's rights to knowledge about how the products they pay for work and how to repair when they inevitably break. He signal boosted Mark's content by re-uploading the deleted video to his own channel (with permission, of course) with an introduction to the video beforehand giving some context and coldly warning Tom Evans to not fuck with him. Here's the first two parts since they are purely commentary:
This is where the situation stands now. I learned about Mark through these videos and subscribed after giving some of them a watch because I found them interesting and I like how he presents them with a charming personality. You can check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHhLyDll3hYHC0pyjbWFJA
Audiophile equipment company copyright strikes video by independent repairman
Sometime earlier this year, a customer experienced a problem with their $20,000 phonographic pre-amp (some audiophile crap) by Tom Evans Audio in which there was some buzz on the left channel. They sent it to the company to be repaired and after the product got fucked up in transit, was told it would cost thousands of dollars to repair. The customer thought this was unacceptable and told the company to send it to repairman Mark Maher, who happens to have an educational YouTube channel called Mend it Mark where he documents his repairs with a delightfully kind and courteous attitude. Mark made the video about the pre-amp in which he diagnosed the issue and successfully repaired it after disassembling and reverse engineering the pre-amp to the point of creating a custom service manual for it (despite Tom Evans sanding off the labels of certain components).Likely because the video unintentionally highlighted the laughably disproportionate price-to-quality ratio of the pre-amp (a lot of parts are seemingly DIY off-the-shelf components encapsulated in shitloads of plastic), Tom Evans responded to Mark's video in a blatant abuse of the copyright system by filing a copyright takedown against it causing Mark to get a copyright strike. On December 6 (likely around the same time the video was taken down), Mark posted a video to his channel in which he discussed the copyright claim, mentioned that there is a huge lack of information as for what exactly was so infringing that the video had to be taken down, and almost passively aggressively mocks the quality of the product in his typical humorous fashion. Honestly, one of the funniest parts of the whole video near the end was when he "accidentally" included a piece of cardboard that was used to hold the casing together.
The right to repair community and audio community soon caught wind of the situation. Louis Rossmann uploaded a three-part series going over the situation as it developed and doesn't try to obfuscate his hate-filled contempt towards Tom Evans and companies like it for daring to fuck with people's rights to knowledge about how the products they pay for work and how to repair when they inevitably break. He signal boosted Mark's content by re-uploading the deleted video to his own channel (with permission, of course) with an introduction to the video beforehand giving some context and coldly warning Tom Evans to not fuck with him. Here's the first two parts since they are purely commentary:
This is where the situation stands now. I learned about Mark through these videos and subscribed after giving some of them a watch because I found them interesting and I like how he presents them with a charming personality. You can check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHhLyDll3hYHC0pyjbWFJA
Last edited:
- 306
- IGN
- Telesphoreo
Streisand effect goes hard here. I'm glad this is being re-uploaded. Fuck companies who try and suppress this kind of information.
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