Right to repair New ratings could help you fix your phone rather than chuck it

The idea of a star rating for repairability of devices has been given new support during public hearings held by the Productivity Commission as experts say many devices are intentionally made expensive or difficult to fix.

The hearings, held over the past week, were in relation to the Commission’s upcoming report on the “right to repair”, and whether regulation is needed to ensure consumers have a fair chance to get old or faulty devices fixed rather than having to buy new ones.

Devices like smartphones are becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to repair.Credit:Bloomberg

Erin Turner, from consumer advocate group Choice, said at the hearings that a star rating system would incentivise manufacturers to compete on repairability.

“Consumers would really benefit from a scheme that ranked and rated products in durability and repair. Over time we would expect manufacturers to compete, where they saw that durability and repairability were factors that were influencing consumer product decisions,” she said.

“We know from experience, particularly with the water and energy labelling scheme, that if you want manufacturers to improve the quality of products you start by rating and ranking them.”

Turner said many warranty terms discouraged customers from pursuing repairs they were obliged to receive under consumer law, and manufacturers should not be able to imply devices are unfixable outside a warranty period.

“If we added all of these interventions together, we know that more people will get their products fixed, more easily,” she said.

Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of self-repair instructional website iFixit, also supported the introduction of a rating system. He said the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Samsung have been increasing efforts over recent years to prevent consumer and third party repairs.

“We’ve seen manufacturers restrict our ability to buy parts. When we go to [suppliers] and say can we buy that part as a repair part, they’ll say ‘No, our contract with Samsung will not allow us to sell that’. We’re seeing that increasingly,” he said at the hearings.

“Apple is notorious for doing this with the chips in their computers. There is a standard version of the part and then there’s the Apple version of the part that’s very slightly tweaked ... and that company again is under contractual requirement with Apple to be sole dealing contracts.”

When Wiens wanted to buy spare parts from Apple for phones the tech giant no longer serviced, he found it was scrapping them.

“Rather than selling that out in the marketplace â€" to someone like me who eagerly would’ve bought them â€" they were paying a recycler to destroy them,” he said.

Apple and others have long been accused of obstructing unofficial repairs because it eats into their profits. The need to service devices every few years leads to more frequent upgrades, or at least makes consumers pay for official repairs.

In Australia, Apple recently began offering contracts to supply parts to independent repairers, but only under strict guidelines.

At the Productivity Commission’s hearings, the Australian Industry Group’s Rachael Wilkinson said non-official repairs could hurt the reputation of device makers, and that rules recognising a right to repair should be designed to limit manufacturer liability in the case of dodgy fixes.

“One member advised us of seeing an unauthorised third-party repair where they’d actually used blue cellophane beneath the screen to mimic the look of LCD, and it had been attached using a hot glue gun,” Wilkinson said.

“That is the reality of providing carte blanche to people who are not authorised or not accredited in some way to be doing repairs.”

The Productivity Commission’s final report is due in October.

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Tim is the editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald technology sections.

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