What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this.
Massey, Fendt or similar could really differentiate themself and take market share on the back of this I suspect.
Especially with online world having reached farmers as the dealer networks increasingly mean less when you can order equiptment and spares online so JD loses some of the strength they hold by their dominating physical presence alone.
> What I don't understand is why a couple of the higher quality tractor companies have not started pushing hard to brand "we support repair" and having available online manuals and software to support this. This seems a perfect marketing/product platform for an underdog that also believes this.
My understanding is basically all high-capital machinery makes a _lot_ of money from support contracts and repairs.
I think there is an idea to do something like this anyways, but it legit feels like something that needs to happen out of the goodness of your heart because you _are_ just leaving money on the table.
-This is very much my (anecdotal, but from several companies in the subsea business, ranging from huge multinationals to small fry almost mom-and-pop shops) experience, too: Service work is basically seen as a licence to print money.
Contract negotiations for newbuilds are cutthroat, the most important parameter being price, price and price. Hence margins are as you'd expect.
Except when it comes to service work, as service rates, parts cost &c are hardly ever touched upon in contracts, probably seeing as they will be relevant for the lifetime of the product, which may run for decades.
Hence the contract merely states that the supplier must _provide_ service and parts. Which we do. While we laugh all the way to the bank.
Of course, if you become too greedy, a customer is likely to start sourcing any parts not uniquely made by you elsewhere and try to have whoever they can find locally install them. Hence some sobriety is useful when determining service rates and parts markup, but the general principle is:
You do newbuilds so that you can get a large installed base to reap service income from. Newbuilds are sold at the slimmest of margins, sometimes even at a loss. You'll recoup it when they start using the gear, anyway.
The "break-even on initial install, make profit on recurring revenue" model is common in a lot of industries.
I've worked for engineering service companies where they'll take on a design at minimal profit, in order to secure the manufacturing contract that's worth far more. Or a medical device company that would provide the instrument (normally sold for around $750k) at cost, in exchange for a lucrative supplies & consumables contract that would be needed for over a decade of operation.
I honestly think there's more money to be made in services, generally speaking, than in manufacturing.
I also worked with subsea companies for a long time, and can concur - they'd do anything to get new engineering and manufacturing contracts, then make the margins later on aftermarket service. It wasn't a secret either, people were quite open about it.
Oh, it is no secret, I believe everyone lives well with this approach - it is a tacit understanding, I think. Customers work hard to bring initial cost down as far as possible, even bringing up in contract negotiations that 'Hell, you'll make this back in service, anyway!' - seeing as when said is said, done is done, the equipment is installed and doing its thing - having downtime is so expensive that no matter what our service rates are, it is money well spent.
Anecdotally, I once was in Rio de Janeiro just wrapping up some service work on a vessel in the Guanabara bay (Fine-tuning a number of variable frequency drives had puzzled one of our FSEs no end, so I was called out from engineering to see if I could make it work out).
Anyway, a service request came in from a vessel also in the bay; rather than waiting for the home office to wake up and process it, I asked the crew on the ship I was departing from to simply zip me over to the vessel in question; less than fifteen minutes after they had reached out for help, I was on board and started looking into it.
They insisted on paying the $5,000-ish fee we usually charge to send someone from Norway to Brazil, despite my being just half a mile away - as they had expected it to be at least two days before someone could arrive; instead, they were back on-hire again in less than two _hours_.
I used to work for Rolls-Royce Marine, but have since jumped ship (or walked the plank!) and now work for a smaller, independent company manufacturing all sorts of offshore handling equipment.
I am of the firm opinion that life is too short for working at large corporations. Obviously, YMMV.
Yeah but didn't they make a lot of money from support contracts before bullshit DRM? So isn't the difference between making a lot of money and a lot more emoney with DRM?
And if that's the case can't a defector break from the DRM paradigm and offer tractors without DRM so they still make a lot of money at a minimum, but likely more due to picking up more customers?
Like to put it in other terms can't they make up for the difference with increased volume, which drives down per unit production costs and takes money from John Deere?
Like why can't someone be the Kirkland brand of tractors?
Knowing nothing about tractors, but there always was a strong push from vendors to not allow repairs by the user.
In the olden days it would be weird shaped screws and stickers with "warranty void" kind of bright red wording everywhere that would impact their bottom line. Then potential denial of repair or extra costs ("out of warranty") if they could find any plausible reason to attribute the issue to your intervention where you shouldn't touch.
I'd see the introduction of DRM as a way to enforce rules that were already there, more than a radical change to their business model.
So yes, I'd expect a lot of resistance to moving to right of repair.
Tractors are durable goods. They are not replaced often. Becoming the Kirkland brand of tractors means taking a major hit to sales for years in the hopes that it comes back to you in decades. It means betting the entire tractor business on this, essentially.
You'll notice there are no Kirkland brand furnaces.
Without knowing about the industry, I like to wistfully think that a cooperative would be the way to structure a company that cares about this. Not just worker-owned, but customer-owned as well. If you're buying an asset you expect to last decades, having a stake in the manufacturer doesn't seem like a completely bad idea.
It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry. In most companies, the difference between workers and owners is that the owners provided the capital to get things started.
A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for final assembly.
A factory worker, while a lot more skilled than a day labourer working on a farm, does not have access to the kind of capital needed to start a big factory. So how does it happen? The people who have the billions of dollars in capital needed to start the factory aren’t just going to give shares to workers they hire.
Credit/VC? Or you start a co-op dairy / farm / repair shop and work for centuries towards arriving at where JD is today (by which time big corps would have moved a few centuries ahead).
VC works plenty well. It's a business deal. 100% of a $0 business is $0, so in exchange for enough money to jump start the business that you don't have the funding for, you give up some equity so that in the eventuality that you're successful supplanting John Deere, your investors get paid out. That's how the system works.
No, it doesn't work. If you let VC invest then you cease to be a worker co-op, you become a regular business.
Worker co-ops have only one class of member: worker-owners. People who do both the day-to-day work and are part owners of the business. Unless the VC people are willing to show up and start punching the clock like everybody else, they are a different class: owners who don't work. Worker co-ops disallow that class of membership by definition.
So select for investors who can stomach a specified return, so the company doesn't have to IPO, but can instead buy them out. After the coop is able to generate revenue to and is able to buy out the initial investor's initial investment, and give them a return between 10 and 100x, it reverts to being a traditional coop.
So the solution is to invent a time machine, and go back in time to the days before factories (or internal combustion engines) were invented and stuff was manufactured (with "man" coming from Latin for "hand") by hand in cottages, and start your co-op then.
I was under the impression that tractor manufacturing was down to bolting together bought in components at this point, such as the various Turkish Perkins engine + ZF gearbox + Carrero front axle + random cab companies cab, with a bit of fabrication to make parts to hold it together. A coop building a highly repairable tractor could make this their value proposition by publishing the diagrams for the fabricated parts, and the full list of parts they bought. There's little reason that a fairly normal fabrication shop couldn't be making tractors, and making them competitively with mainline manufacturers
To add to that: if I'm purchasing a hugely expensive piece of capital equipment that my business depends on, it's nice that I can repair it myself when I have downtime, but if I need it up and running tomorrow, it's probably worth it to bring in the repair tech who does it day in, day out and can get it done a lot faster than me.
That local fab shop would now have to provide 24-hour on-call service, which is a completely different business.
> it's probably worth it to bring in the repair tech who does it day in, day out and can get it done a lot faster than me.
Indeed, and that is cheaper than keeping a guy on staff that can fix your equipment.
The biggest farmers I know keep someone on staff. The next tier down use outside repair services. And the smallest guys (I am a small time farmer, emphasis on small) repair their own stuff.
So in the context of myself and my own needs right to repair is crucial. But I can argue for the right to repair in general as well: Flexibility is key, in light of creaky supply chains.
no, there are loads of mechanics anywhere that will happily work on things, they are simply prevented from working on many aspects of modern vehicles because it is made impossible by the manufacturers
The problem with any cooperative feels like a human one. Keeping everyone informed and active communicants. People like to forget about things when they're stable.
A coop loses so much value when it just becomes a one email a year affair with "Hey, it's that time to vote for things again!"
This is a problem in every social/political organization which is not ruled by interested minorities. So, co-operatives, voluntary social activity clubs, democratic NGOs/associations, professional societies, etc. Democratic states suffer from this also, although it's arguable whether they're not ruled by interested minorities to begin with. In fact, the unfortunate public-opinion manipulations we see in national and international politics are also often present in smaller, local organizations, albeit in less-well-funded and less-spectacular form.
Agreed, but from a distance it sounds like farm machinery might be something that keeps interest and involvement, as it's so critical to operations.
I'm somewhat influenced by the descriptions of various farming organisations in Seeing Like A State which I recently read. There is a lot of active cooperation, experimentation, knowledge sharing etc. around crop varieties.
The real pie in the sky stuff is figuring out open designs that are durable but not so complex as to be totally out of reach.
I cannot claim to know the relative difficulty of such a task, or relevant regulations. But if there were some standard designs that multiple manufacturers were involved in, I bet parts would stay in production for a very very long time.
Back in the day, Dad ran a photocopier dealership.
He had a team of highly-paid salesmen (and they were pretty much all men) driving around the countryside convincing school principals and the like that they needed new photocopiers.
The profit margin on the machines was basically zero.
But the salespeople earned their keep, because every large photocopier sold also had a service contract that charged a fee for every copy made.
The game was up by the early 2000s when the stand-alone photocopier was replaced with networked laser printers, but while it lasted it paid for a lot of salespeople’s fancy cars, boats, and overseas holidays.
> But the salespeople earned their keep, because every large photocopier sold also had a service contract that charged a fee for every copy made.
And without the service contracts, schools are fucked when the printer breaks down. Like, here in Germany, a single copier can run through entire crates worth of paper in a day.
It's absolutely ridiculous how fossilized our education system has become. We should be using laptops and tablets loaded with e-books and digital worksheets. No one cares about handwriting anything outside of school any more.
no - laptops and tablets with e-books break the attention span of students from minutes into only seconds.. Humans are able to see things that change constantly, but there is a cost. Secondly, abundance past a certain level creates apathy and overwhelm. Third, there is a realization that giving any screens to children below a certain age is just basically harmful to regular brain development.
That's a >$3,200 fill-up (give or take volume pricing, with your own larger container). And I thought driving a class A motorhome with a 150 gallon tank hurt to fill up!
well, certainly a customer that feels screwed will hate to bring you money, so even if you can force someone to get customer support from you will hate you, and eventually when they can get out, they will, no company is exempted from this reality, people like to feel companies care about them and their product or service makes their lifes easier, else they fly away, but i think those who push this shitty ideas are more likely directives born in rich environments, they don't understand the customer and try to optimize to cut corners instead of trying to be relevant on the market, or shall we say, they rest on their laurels
Check out Project Farm on YouTube to get a sense of what the average farmer is like in terms of engineering mindset.
They would love this.
Farmers are smart. When your combine breaks during harvest, you can't just grab another or wait a couple of days for the repair guy to show up -- you need it fixed now. That's not easy.
Not to mention, understanding your soil, your crops, the weather, how they interact, how to handle everything from planting up to post-harvest processing... it's not an easy job.
And this starts at a young age, because all the kids help out on the farm, too. You know why licenses for vehicles aren't required on private property? Farms. Early-teenagers need to be able to drive around a truck, then a tractor, etc.
Farmers also need to understand animal biology (for those who raise animals) and reproduction, the local, state, and national commodities market (and sometimes the international market too), pests and invasive species (plants, insects, and animals alike) and the diseases they can bring, and hydrology. A modern farmer is an engineer, an economist, a biologist and a wilderness expert all in one.
While I know HN likes to put farmers on a pedistal, and we should all appreciate the people that literally grow our food, the reality isn't that most farmers are "highly educated" in these things, but know barely enough to scrape by
While that is true for most smaller farms - there simply is no way a small farm can afford the capital expenditure of someone who could be working day-to-day spending years in study, it still holds true that farmers by necessity are excellent jacks of all trades. You simply do not make enough money off of the farm to rent professional help whenever something goes wrong.
Just one data point - when the clutch on our 1994 (methinks) Case tractor broke a few years ago, the quoted cost for having a new one installed was close to $5,000. My father-in-law and I spent two days splitting the tractor, refurbishing the clutch using a $250 kit and reassembling it. No expensive or fancy tools, but a lot of headscratching and educated guesses, plus we needed to craft a couple of rather large stands and jigs using timber already on hand.
The $4,750 thus saved is more than we make annually from renting out the fields to a nearby farmer (We just live on the farm, we're not working the land nor having any animals anymore.)
I believe this situation is rather typical on smaller farms - you have to make things work on your own or with the help of friends and neighbours, or you're SOL.
Coincidently my grandfather was replacing a clutch in a Case tractor when I was at the family farm over Christmas. Little older (I believe from the 80s), but probably not that different since you mentioned splitting. The transmission forms part of the structure of the tractor, so replacing the clutch meant the tractor was literally in 2 pieces, each supported by block and tackle in the farm shop. It was odd seeing such a big machine split in half like that.
My grandfather spent his career working on heavy machinery for a government agency and then in retirement has been maintaining all the farm equipment for my uncle. In the summer I helped him replace the complex system of belts in a hay baler. He’s in his mid 80s and was crawling around inside the machine. My job was just to stand there and keep the belt from twisting.
That only saved you $4,750 if your time is worth $0/hr. Assume it was two eight-hour days, times two people, or 32 hours of labor. If you make $149/hr, it's cheaper for you to pay the quoted cost. If you don't, it's cheaper for you to do it. Which it sounds like it was. But thinking you just "saved" $4,750 doing it yourself isn't the right way to look at it.
> If you make $149/hr, it's cheaper for you to pay the quoted cost.
If you're salaried at Google for 40 hours/week with no paid overtime and no side gigs allowed, the median value of your time is $149/hr but the marginal price is $0/hr because working an extra hour doesn't make you any extra money.
I suspect farming is similar - it's not like you can take that free hour, add 4 square feet to your field and produce $149 more wheat.
Depends, at planting or harvest time not working on planting or harvesting when the weather allows costs a lot more than $500/hour. However in the middle of winter there is plenty of time where the farm has nothing you need to do and so the value of your time is zero.
The reality on farms is repairs aren't a one off they're constant .. farming as a business is literally working the land at the critical times and dovetailing working the equipment and the business in between the pure agricultural work.
Having a hundred repair jobs a year that might be each be quoted between one and ten thousand sound about right for medium scale farm here, and the bulk of those would be done "in house" .. welding up jigs, repairing sprayers, building sheds, moving silos, putting in gas, power, water lines etc .. all par for the course.
You just helped me realize the real value of the Open Source Ecology project and ones like it. I've always thought they were neat, but when you add up all the cost of the raw materials and "vitamins" (stuff you can't easily fabricate), plus the necessity of a quite well kitted out shop, it's often not necessarily cheaper than buying the equipment used and fixing it up yourself. But the simple designs make all those field repairs way easier. Also understanding every nut and bolt on the system as you build it creates an intuition about the system holistically.
I considered bringing up that point, but figured it was implied by the post - believe me, no small-time farmer makes anywhere near $149/hour, I doubt it would even be $14.90/hr - so effectively, you can assume your work to be worth $0/hr as a first-order approximation.
Hence I do engineering instead. The farm is just an expensive hobby. :)
$150/hr is $300k TC, and the vast majority of people don't make that. (I don't.) Let's say the average farmer makes $45k/yr or $22.50/hr. $22.50*32-hours of labor = $720. So $250 for the part and $720 for the labor = $920 vs $5,000. Still up by $4,080, but then we also have to add in the increase in knowledge and skills that came from performing the work yourself. Let's say automotive school costs $1,000, and that the hands-on work was instructive and counts for a quarter of that, so that's $250 from doing it yourself so that works out to be $4,330. Which is a pretty good deal!
Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
>> Homesteading is a dream of mine, but I may be too rooted in the comforts of working in tech for it. Maybe if I win the startup lottery.
-I guess that depends on how you define homesteading; I quite enjoy myself living on a farm with no animals larger than a cat (And I could do without the cat, thankyouverymuch!), having a day job in engineering and spending some - well, a lot of - my sparetime picking up useful skills, like how to fix a tractor on the cheap, forestry, digging trenches, building sheds, maintaining said sheds, filling them with firewood, repaving roads...
I have the good fortune of having my in-laws living next door, though; they've been running the farm since forever and I pick up all sorts of useful things, not to mention they still put in a ton of work. I wouldn't even be able to keep the land from degrading unless we had them to help us out; so homesteading, even by a quite loose definition of the term, means you'll have a hard time doing it part-time.
Hence winning the startup lottery first probably is a good idea; then you can (with any luck) outsource some of the back-breaking stuff, too.
The sector is way more centralized than what you'd think by looking at the tractor brands you see around. Massey-Ferguson and Fendt are both AGCO brands. Besides them and John Deere, there's CNH Industrial making Case IH and New Holland tractors. I expect all of the three make a lot of their revenue from the service business, so there's not that much incentive to be disruptive.
I don't understand this either. I can tell you that after a decade of advocacy on ag Right to Repair, not once has a manufacturer reached out to us and asked how they could improve repairability. As a Kubota owner, this disappoints me.
Fortunately in the electronics world, we have Framework and Fairphone. And Nokia making noises around improving repairability. Google and even Samsung launching independent parts programs.
One of the ag manufacturers should break off and take the lead. It's not going to be Deere, or Case, or New Holland.
Massey, Fendt or similar could really differentiate themself and take market share on the back of this I suspect.
I love the idea. I wish that were a thing but I suspect that it would be seen as a lack of profit model and businesses are more competitive than ever now.
I have a 1947 Fordson 2n tractor and there is a large community of people that support it as well as a couple 3rd party parts manufacturers that make parts for many old tractors. I suspect that even if Ford wanted to manufacture parts there are not enough of us to make it profitable. Adding to that modern tractors are much more complicated and have many more parts.
It would be really cool if some college were to take on a project to build the "most capable" yet "simplest" tractors that could do everything the modern fancy computer driven tractors can do but using as few parts and as simple and generic parts as possible and then license everything in a way that businesses could not make it proprietary. Perhaps I have an odd fantasy. Open Source Hardware so to speak. If it were to become popular enough perhaps that college could fund their entire department making human and robotic driven simple and pragmatic tractors if for no other reason than bragging rights. "Our $100K tractor can do everything your $2M tractor can do and more." Bonus if it has some Easter-egg hardware like many hidden beer bottle openers.
Perhaps colleges could get DARPA and similar funding in the name of international and national security for each country to create something like this to Feed the World as food scarcity becomes more of a thing. Make farming profitable again.
pretty sure they all work off the dealer system and expensive repairs are part of the money making scheme. Differentiating yourself by volunteering to make less money isn't something your shareholders want.
I guess it would also mean higher upfront price to make up for losses in servicing. And I guess farmers don't want that.
The current situation is market driven and I guess "repairs will be more expensive/planned obsolescence" is more engaging than a higher price.
And I think that's where a government has to intervene. Even if the situation is the one that suit manufacturers and customers (even if they don't admit it), it is not the best for the environment and collectivity in general, so regulation is in order.
Parents on tons of ridiculous tractor related concepts prevent this. We badly need patent reform or outright abolishment of parents. Parents are the greatest source of monopoly in America.
A tractor manufacturer's customers are the dealers, not the end users. Just like the auto industry, most of the margin of dealers is made in service and repairs.
Maybe there is something about the agricultural tractor (or similar industry) sector where the amount of research and development, manufacturing, sales, support investment it takes, on top of the sales prices/duration, customer dynamic, product lifecycle, etc involved means that the few players who can do it need to earn some margin through service to stay alive profitably.
Of course, maybe they're just money grubbing capitalists.
But I think there's more factors than meets the eye, and this behavior is not without cause.
Otherwise, as you say, plenty of players should be clamoring to offer a fix-it-yourself brand that people would flock to and be loyal to.
Maybe sometimes there are real reasons for the way a market and a product are structured.
I think it's that unlike other industries, simply giving up and letting DRM control farming is kind of scary.
The people who care if you're allowed to flash the firmware on your bluetooth earbuds are few and far between, but the people who dislike the idea of some remote party being able to use math and law to turn off food production... That's pretty much everybody.
So they're all money grubbing capitalists. But as money grubbing capitalists go, these are among the bigger threats.
I suspect that John Deere and friends will find a way to challenge this in court and -- if they eventually lose -- find a way to maliciously comply with the law. Their behavior has been actively hostile to their customers for years, and they have zero incentive to change.
Like Apple's repair kits mentioned in another comment, I suspect their strategy will involve providing tools that cost nearly as much to rent as it would take to buy a new machine. Then, only the most well-capitalized farmers will be able to afford to lock up the extraordinary amounts of cash required to perform their own repairs.
Without legislation that absolutely eviscerates their monopolistic business practices, I would be shocked if anything changes for the average farmer.
Apple's repair kits are a weird comparison here. The rental is $49, and that's probably at cost or close to it given the shipping costs both ways for a 79-pound box.
There's nothing malicious compliance about it... it's just a pain in the ass to repair modern ultra-light and ultra-efficient phones the "right" way.
What the phone repair companies want is to be able to buy parts (without all the weird rules that apple has for licensed companies now).
The repair shops can figure out how to glue a screen to a housing on their own. The problem is they can't buy new parts, and they can't swap used parts because of software locks.
Apple very much found a way to allow repairs while preventing it from being profitable, and it's likely John Deere will (try to) do the same.
Like Apple's repair kits mentioned in another comment, I suspect their strategy will involve providing tools that cost nearly as much to rent as it would take to buy a new machine.
That reminds me of how much things have changed since the "good old days". I have some service manuals for mid-century equipment that don't need much in the way of special tools, and where one is needed or would be helpful, they tell you how to make one.
> In January—the beginning of the legislative season—Deere and the American Farm Bureau Federation signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), promising to give farmers access to some previously restricted repair materials. And on the very day of a critical hearing, Case IH and New Holland signed their own memorandum of understanding at the last minute, a desperate attempt to smother the bill. However, legislators determined that both MOUs were vague, incomplete, and unenforceable. Suspiciously, they also required that members of the American Farm Bureau Federation cease advocating for Right to Repair laws.
As a farmer, I was extremely angry to hear that the Farm Bureau negotiated with these terrorists. Their MOUs were not worth the paper they were written on, and I am glad to see some legislators saw through their machinations (as mentioned in a sibling comment here).
The Farm Bureau should be ashamed for its part in this, and this caused them to lose my own trust that they will represent farmers in other important matters. It actually makes me embarrassed to be a member.
Good coverage of the issue by news outlets, including naming John Deere specifically, would be far more effective not only at motivating Deere to improve their practices, but also helping the populace at large to understand the problem, build popular support for good legislation, motivating legislators to deal with the problem, and motivating other companies to avoid copying Deere's example.
Naming and shaming individuals (besides a CEO) within a company is unnecessary, and can cause destruction to lives, families, and communities that have nothing to do with the problem. It also overestimates the individual agency these people hold over what is most often a cultural and policy issue at a company.
> Name, shame, and industry blacklist Deere product managers.
Why would you give them that kind of free advertising?
Do you think the people that hire them don't want them to behave in that way?
It's like trying to shame a door-to-door salesperson for being too pushy. All you're doing is advertising that he's really good at his job.
'Name and shame' is a feel-good knee-jerk to social problems that need to be solved by legislature. There's always going to be assholes who will try to turn a quick buck by burning their reputation for a profit.
That makes me think about the sequence from Wolf of Wall St, where there's a very negative article posted about Jordan Belfort's practices, and Jordan Belfort is feeling ruined, but then the next day, the article had a positive effect on the firm's recruiting efforts. Turns out the negative attention encouraged cutthroat salesmen to join the team in the hopes of making a lot of money.
What the movie fails to underscore is the attention from the SEC that the article also brought, which is what lead to his downfall.
Let the assholes turn their quick buck. Karma will get them in the end. Meanwhile, the rest of us want to know who to avoid working with. If someone wants to go work for Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Anthony Levandowski, or Elizabeth Holmes, they're welcome to go right ahead. I'm happier knowing their stories so I don't end up working at one of their companies.
No, it won't. The universe isn't just, there's no scales that get balanced out, and people the world over have very comfortably built and kept their empires and fortunes by planting their boots firmly on the bodies of others.
And fighting right-to-repair isn't even in the same league as the actually evil shit that people do.
Does the governor not need to sign it? Or has it been signed already? Because I wouldn't be celebrating yet until it's signed into law (if even then). NY's right to repair law was destroyed at the governor's desk at the 11th hour. [1]
W.r.t. the first bullet point, I don't think NY was any different - AFAIK the governor didn't "mess" with it (despite the reporting making it look that way); she just didn't sign it until the legislature revised it.
New York's chapter amendment process is totally novel in my legislative experience, haven't come across it anywhere else. Gives the governor a lot of power.
I was extremely disappointed [1] when I learned about Hochul's last minute nerfing of right to repair and I'd be curious to learn more how the governors office acquired that power. IANAL but thought separation of powers was supposed to be guaranteed by the Constitutions, both US and NY. What happened?
"I don't think NY was any different - AFAIK the governor didn't "mess" with it (despite the reporting making it look that way); she just didn't sign it until the legislature revised it."
I think you might've missed the point of the discussion? We're comparing what powers the governor of each state has, with respect to signing legislation in general.
I was about to say the same. It appears the NY bill was ineffective from the jump and wouldn't have amounted to more than pageantry for the companies refusing to give such rights. It was a good thing that is was killed at the last minute.
Gov. Polis is one of the most effective governors in the US overall (handled COVID-19 threats to disease and economic risk better than every governor, IMO) and someone who understands technology. He co-founded two tech companies and exited both for nine figures each time.
My guess is that Polis likely helped shepard this bill along.
EDIT:
Gov. Polis also signed the first right to repair law for wheelchairs in 2022.
I don't get this article - he wants to replace the battery... to do that he has to replace the screen. he then complains that he has to use this big device to suck the screen off?? he wanted to do the repairs... these are the tools to do the repairs. he'd be writing the same exact article if they sent him crappy versions of the tools to do the repairs...
I'm pretty sure you don't need those exact bulky tools to do the job. The main issue is that repairers can't get original parts. What apple now does is borderline maliciously compliant, by sending you the parts but also forcing you to pay 50$ for tool rentals.
Honestly, that’s kind of cool to get the entire repair rig. I doubt it’s worth it for them to differentiate based on the of work done, so they just send the entire kit.
I don’t mind that Apple does this if anyone is allowed to make their own repair rig as well.
That article is bunk. Louis Rossmann and others in the right to repair community have praised Apple for providing these repair kits. They let you do factory-quality repairs.
What the author of that article doesn’t realize is that all of Apple’s modern phones are waterproof. To achieve that factory seal against liquid ingress requires fancy adhesives. You can’t open these things with a jeweller’s screwdriver. It takes highly specialized equipment to open the device and then reseal it when you’re done replacing the battery.
What would you do with the kit? Replace other parts in other phones and start a business? Aren't you still beholden to Apple for authenticating the part to the phone every time?
They ship you the tools their stores and authorized third parties seem to use to do a proper quality repair.
Yeah it’s heavy. But you don’t buy it, it’s lent to you (via a hold on your credit card).
I know people complain about this but should they send the battery in an envelope and say “good luck”?
Even if they design the phones to be more repairable (which I know many hope for), nothing can change the design of the phone you bought 2 years ago. And what Apple is doing is miles better than what they were doing before.
This seems like a good step, but the piecemeal approach is aggravating. Are they going to pass a separate right-to-repair law for every industry and product category, one at a time?
"Last year, they passed the first US Right to Repair bill since 2012, protecting Coloradans’ right to fix their own powered wheelchairs"
This is absurd. They need to pass comprehensive right-to-repair legislation and then amend it as problems and loopholes emerge.
I agree. But the way to get a comprehensive solution is to understand the technology changes that have changed our world profoundly, and why current law is no longer sufficient.
To wit, humans have invented invisibility, and now we must deal with a wide range of surprising repurcussions of this technology.
Now, we don't have real invisibility, but we do have functional invisibility. Every chip, and and every piece of software, is invisible to the user. This is entirely novel and could not have been anticipated by the framers - who very much cared about innovation and invention, given that the patent system is described in the Constitution. But the invention of invisibility changes the calculus of product creation and distribution profoundly, to the point that it may require an Amendment to address fully. I suggest something along the lines of "If you sell an Invisibly Small Good, then you Must provide to the buyer a Microscope also".)
Right to repair is a great thing, but it seems like we need to be honest about this business and its customers. Agriculture, at least in the US, is primarily a government subsidized big business. Many if not most John Deere customers are corporations that like having their operating fleets be maintained and managed with help from the provider. The farmers getting screwed are smaller operators who are far less profitable for John Deere and really should seek or develop other options if at all possible.
Comparisons with Apple hardware are not very good because Apple is primarily a consumer brand. Apple does in a sense sell fleets to companies and schools, but most rely on other companies to configure and maintain their computing gear. The market for laptops is very different from the market for large tractors.
ultimately you can repair an awful lot of things, so... suppose some small metal bracket holding something up has begun rusting because something scraped the paint off, or hit it, and its also a bit bent.
this piece of metal costs $50 or so from the manufacturer, which admittedly is borderline theft, but what can you do?, while i have the cab off the tractor, i may aswell replace it. I could opt to strip the paint off, either by using toxic chemicals, or abrasively. But now I need to also do a little welding to fix it up, then sand it down again, degrease it, and give it a new paint job. This took me around 2-3 hours to do. Do we repair this item or chuck it in the scrap pile?
Surely this particular piece of well-intended regulation will go work out exactly as hoped for, and won't have any unintended consequences that stifle things in the longer run.
We’ll get to see! With Europe, Biden and some states on one side; and more-reticent states on the other.
As HBR put it,
“Will manufacturers follow a margin strategy and raise new product prices to capitalize on easier repair? Will manufacturers follow a volume strategy and cut new product prices to lure consumers into replacing instead of repairing a glitchy product?”
Or, in places without it, will farmers resort to crudely deleting emissions-control because it interferes in the long-term?
Massey, Fendt or similar could really differentiate themself and take market share on the back of this I suspect.
Especially with online world having reached farmers as the dealer networks increasingly mean less when you can order equiptment and spares online so JD loses some of the strength they hold by their dominating physical presence alone.