Right to Repair Legislation in 50 States
Right to repair legislation has now been introduced in all 50 states, a milestone that, despite not all passing, shows the power of the grassroots political movement. Thursday, Wisconsin became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair bill.
So far, right to repair laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon. Another 20 states are formally considering right to repair bills during this current legislative session. The rest have previously introduced bills that have not passed; so far we have seen that many states take several years to move a given right to repair bill through the legislative process.
And in some instances the bills have been watered down post-passage, like in New York, where Governor Kathy Hochul buckled to company lobbying to make the law much weaker while also exempting many of the most problematic industries.
Elsewhere, state governments just aren’t really enforcing the laws so far despite no shortage of corporate violators. Reformers can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve yet to see a meaningful enforcement action against a major company in any of the states that have passed such legislation.
Previously:
- Longevity, by Design
- Oregon Passes Right-to-Repair Law
- Apple Lobbying Against Right to Repair
- Apple Supports California Right-to-Repair Bill
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Just this week I retired my 2012 MacPro that I modified several times adding DRAM, changing the CPU sled, adding a USB-C card, etc. I kept it current using OpenCore Legacy Patcher, which worked well. I doubt that the Mac Studio I replaced it with (along with an external Thunderbolt drive cage) will last as long but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.
I miss the days with Macs could have their memory and disk drives swapped. There is no reason that this couldn't be possible today save for Tim Cook's squeezing consumers for every cent. 2TB SSD for the Studio from Apple costs €750. A top end 2TB SSD from Samsung, €150. Hell, when I bought my MBP they wanted €25 for the power cord that used to be included. Or €25 for a USB-C power brick that used to be included with the iPad. If I didn't have so much Mac-only software I would've moved on by now. That said, I'm thinking my next laptop might be a Lenovo. At least those still let you replace the drive and memory if needed.
Glad I was abled to replace the spinning HD with an SSD on my 2009 Mac Mini 10 years or so ago as it was at a time Adobe still allowed you to assign their software to a new device / drive. Now they have shut down the activation servers so I cannot transfer the £700 worth of Photoshop CS4 to Cylinder Mac Pro I recently got on eBay - which is a shame.
Luckily the Mac Mini shows no signs of packing in - so I keep it in a cupboard and bring it out when I need to design a flyer or Poster. Fortuitous that the Thunderbolt ports on the Mac Pro are compatible with the Mini DisplayPort on the Mini so it's a cinch to swap.
I wish there were laws to force companies to make fully paid for Software transferable but, in truth, I reckon the OS would break things anyhow and I got good value out of the £700 going back 20 years - and as long as the Mini keeps going I still do.
I use Lightroom on iPad for my regular, non-design focussed, photo editing so I'm not a complete anti-subscription luddite.
