I think that having the ability to repair electronics as the owner is awesome. Even ignoring my own personal desires to tinker, it’s an idea that is very much worth striving and fighting for. But codifying it into law as the right to repair, which many jurisdictions (notably the EU) are attempting to do, may end up doing more harm than good. Most of the reasons against it, such as the complication with warranties in cases of botched self-repairs, are fairly weak in my opinion. However there is a strong case that I want to focus on here, which is that repairability as a legally enforced policy may ultimately hurt consumer optionality.

First, a thought experiment. What if we mandated the right to repair on microchips, such as CPUs, SoCs, memory modules, and SSDs? They are all technically electronics, and do suffer problems from time to time. Integrated circuits today have transistors at the nanometer scale, and are not at all reasonably repairable even by professionals, let alone users. But if we really demanded it by threatening massive fines or even jail time, then the only way out is by regressing these products back to using discrete circuits, with transistors measured in millimeters. Moore’s law would be reset to and frozen in the 1960s.

Obviously this is an absurd example. But it helps illustrate two important ideas. One is that the limit of what constitutes as reasonable repairability is arbitrary and subjective. For smartphones, fixing a broken SoC is clearly beyond the limit, while replacing a broken battery seems pretty sensible. Two, the more important point, is that like most things in this world, repairability does not come free - it has its own costs, which may be enormous.

Repairability is ultimately achieved through modularity - of the design, the assembly, and the entire supply chain. Even though I cannot repair the CPU, my desktop computer as a whole is very repairable. Each of its key components - motherboard, CPU, RAM, SSDs, power supply, cooling - can be independently swapped with replacements if broken. Modularity and standardization are used to make things swappable and interoperable, yet they come with significant costs. Modular things are generally less compact, because connectors take up extra space. They also tend to be less reliable, because more components mean more potential points of failure (being more repairable somewhat makes up for this). Standards are harder to change due to their widespread adoption by disparate parties, so they are slower to evolve and innovate. Standardized modular components also carry a larger upfront R&D cost, because extra attention needs to be paid to ensure their interoperability.

Of course, in the context of personal electronics, the tradeoff of repairability in most cases isn’t as extreme as in the hypothetical example with microchips. But it’s still significant, and could increase with time. Having memory modules soldered to the motherboard lowers the repairability of a computer, but it allows for a more compact form factor. Similarly, using glue to assemble components (instead of screws) also lowers the repairability of a device, but it helps to lower the price of the product. Enforcing some level of repairability as a legal requirement risks pushing certain valuable classes of products out of existence, not just from the market today, but from ever coming to market. It’s not that preposterous to imagine that had the right to repair discrete electronic devices been enshrined as a law in the 1960s, the rise of integrated circuits could have (at least) been delayed.

In the end, repairability is just one of the many attributes of electronic devices (and products in general) that people care about (some more than others), along with size, reliability, ease-of-use, price, etc… I do not see a reason that makes it special and worthy of being singled out as a right, especially given its downsides. So why not fully let the people decide what they value? I feel that in the long run, having more options to choose from would outweigh all the benefits of enforced repairability.

With that said, personally I am very much for device repairability. I also believe that for the most part, the availability of components used in repairs should be unrestricted as much as reasonably possible. I’m just wary of the broader requirements that will most likely come with making repairability a legal right, and the negative consequences they may bring.