Your Single Use iPhone

In this topsy-turvy world of ours, one thing I can always rely on IS MY IPHONE. — [screaming] — AH, I'M FINE. I'M VERY STRONG. UNFORTUNATELY, I've broken the absolute out of my cell phone. And I'm not alone. In 2023, something like 78 million Americans damaged their phones in some way, and many of those people discovered a shitty little phenomenon. It's such an expensive pain in the ass to repair your phone that it often doesn't cost much more to buy an entirely new one. And this shitty little phenomenon makes a certain type of dude extremely happy. Well, sadly, inconvenient and high-cost repairs are not an accident. Tech companies are constantly trying to increase their revenues, and one of the best ways they've found is to keep an iron grip on who's allowed to actually do repairs if something breaks. If they can restrict the repair process and make sure they're the only ones who can actually do it, well, maybe it costs a little more, huh? Maybe you got to use our certified technician. Or maybe we just set you up with a nice new phone. And it's not just phones. The same pattern is becoming increasingly popular across America, from refrigerators to tractors to headphones to laptops and a bunch of stuff we thought we owned until we tried to repair it. You don't own the software, so when something goes bad, you still have to go back to the dealer to get it fixed. And I'm not talking about you popping your cell phone open with a screwdriver. Actual repair shops are not allowed to fix your stuff because billion-dollar corporations don't want the competition. Tech companies are adding unbreakable digital locks to the software or refusing to sell replacement parts or just bricking any device that's been repaired with off-brand equipment. I'm sure it does wonders for their Q3 numbers, but Americans are now sending billions of pounds of electronics to the landfill every single year while spending their dwindling cash reserves on new equipment. We have now largely lost the right to repair our own things. But a stalwart group of freedom fighters has been diligently advocating for the right to repair their property for decades, and against all odds, they've made some real headway against the immovable object that is big business. Hi, I'm Raleigh Williams, a guy with a climate science and policy degree and some little shards of iPhone screen in my face, and this is a video about the fight for the right to repair. Welcome to ClimateTown. Okay, the right to repair story is bigger than just smartphones, — but they offer such a delightful window into what consumers have lost that we're going to start out talking about them. And just to say it, in terms of technological advancements, the smartphone rocks ass harder than basically every other invention. the steam engine, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, and especially cars, the smartphone beats them all. We're shooting this episode on a smartphone. You might even be watching this on a smartphone. They are useful, they're highly advanced, and they're everywhere. — [bell] — They're also a fairly recent invention. A lot of you children watching this might not remember, but the iPhone is less than 20 years old. The baby from Modern Family is older than the iPhone. In 2007, former Apple CEO and man who put the turtleneck back on the fashion map, Steve Jobs, announced that Apple was combining their unbelievably profitable iPod with a phone and the internet to make the iPhone, and people lost their minds. — Rich DeMuro with CNET TV in New York City at the Apple Store where the iPhone is set to LAUNCH LATER TODAY. EMPLOYEES WERE HIGH-FIVING CUSTOMERS. That guy obviously high-fived way too hard. Take it down a notch, guy. Even Steve Jobs, just a regular CEO, got so famous that when I tried to wear a black turtleneck in San Francisco years after his death, everyone made FUN OF ME. WHY? WHAT ARE THEY MAD ABOUT? IT'S HE he doesn't own the black turtleneck. As new generations of the iPhone came out every single year, — Beyond a doubt, one of the most beautiful things we've ever made. — The most beautiful product we have best iPhone The best iPhone. — The most advanced, the most powerful, the best iPhone, and it feels even better in your hand. — Customers began upgrading their phones with every new model rather than waiting for their old phones to actually stop working. The constant new releases combined with Apple discounts and

upgrade deals to help convince customers to give up their old phones before they really needed to. Another contributing factor to constantly getting the latest model of phone was the alarming number of iPhones that were malfunctioning after just months of use. It was as if they were being built to not last that long. Around the time the iPhone 8 came out, customers with older models of phones found that their devices were mysteriously slowing down. They began to wonder if maybe Apple was mysteriously sabotaging their devices to get them to buy a new one. — Apple was hit with a class-action lawsuit today after admitting that it intentionally makes older models of iPhones work slower. — Turns out consumers weren't just imagining things. Some other iPhones really were slowing down. — What do you make of all this? Well, it's great if you don't like to GET PHONE CALLS. IT BECAME A FULL-BLOWN SCANDAL, AND A bunch of people sued Apple. And Apple was forced to agree that even though they never did anything wrong, they would offer cheaper battery replacements and pay hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements even though they never did anything wrong. And the reason why this is important is because people loved the cheaper replacement batteries. Rather than having to buy a new phone that year, something like 11 million people sent their current phones and about 30 bucks off to Apple and got replacement batteries. And now they didn't have to charge their phone five times a day. The system works. Apple, however, saw things a little differently. The replacement batteries represented a loss in new iPhone sales of between 8 and 10 billion dollars. And Apple CEO Tim Cook specifically cited the battery replacements as a major driver of slower sales in 2019. And I really wish this was an isolated incident or that Apple decided that maybe they'd take one for the team and not try to squeeze every single dollar out of their customers at all costs. You know, let them repair the that they bought. But the thing is, Apple loves selling you new And it feels even better in your hand. — care if it's a new phone or computer or tablet or new fake pen for your iPad. Their insane meteoric cash flow depends on you buying new. So they make it really hard and really expensive for you to repair their And thank god you don't have to take my word for it cuz there's already a YouTuber who's been talking about this for more than a decade. He's an Apple repair expert, folks. I'm talking about Louis Rossmann. Apple tries to get you to purchase a new device instead of repair your old one. — You take that SSD, you slide it into the new motherboard, you put the screw in, and the customer retains their data. This is not that hard, and there is no excuse for any Apple Store to say that they cannot preserve customer data when it is they're repairing a machine. — There was a bent pin in a cable of a laptop, and they wanted $2,000 to fix this. I fixed it on camera in 30 seconds by bending back the cable. — Rossmann owned a repair shop right here in New York for years, but in his spare time, he would make incredible YouTube videos exposing Apple's repair practices. Like this one titled Apple Genius Bar Strikes Again, Stop Doing This to Your Customers. — When they opened it up, they said one of the pins that connects the charging port to the battery was bent, and they needed to replace the logic board, and that would cost me $475. — This thingy has to go through this thingy, and then it'll work. When we opened the machine, it was like sitting like this, and that's why the battery wasn't working. They really told her 475 bucks for this horse It wasn't plugged in. — Yeah, Apple was charging almost $500 to plug in the battery. Uh, are you hiring? I'm sorry, kill me. And he's got hundreds of videos. — If you've been watching my channel for any length of time, you may have realized that these are not exactly the best-built devices. — They take things that I already know how to do. They force me to do them their way. — I'm going to find myself some Everclear and a bottle of Fireball, and I'm going to start over again tomorrow. — There's also a fantastic genre of TV news where an undercover reporter takes a broken laptop to the Apple Store. They get a quote, then they take that same laptop to Louis Rossmann and see if he charges way, way less. And wouldn't you know it, he super does. $9. 99 to fix the Pro. — And the genius I spoke to basically suggested I just buy some new machines instead. — Louis Rossmann has been an advocate about the right to repair. His price quote, $325 for the Pro. And honestly, that's peak journalism for me personally. Apple tries to jack up the price, Rossmann can just fix it right away. That's the kind of news I want to see. And look how happy this woman is. It's on. But then we get to the heart of the problem where the reporter brings a second broken laptop in, and this time Rossmann cannot

fix it. What about that MacBook Air? No. When you combine the factor that it looks like this with the fact that I don't have all the information I need to do my job, I I'd say screw this. Not because he wasn't good enough to fix it, but because Apple is preventing him from being able to fix it. You see, in order to fix anything, you basically need two things: the parts and a way to know where the parts go. And for a long time in the case of Apple, they didn't want to give you either one of those things. For a third-party repair shop to get the diagrams for Apple repairs, they'd have to rely on leaked documents from Apple employees who are putting their jobs on the line. And this isn't like Edward Snowden breaking open government surveillance, this is some guy named Todd from the Genius Bar who's just sick of charging people $650 to fix their charging ports. And even if you did have the parts, and you did know where they go, if you repair a phone without Apple, like in the case of the iPhone 6, your phone might get bricked with error 53, which renders your phone useless if you replaced the home button. And even after they stopped doing that, you could still run into problems with a thing called parts pairing. Basically, in 2017, Apple added a software check to the iPhone code which would verify that each part of your iPhone was documented and properly approved. If suddenly some new screen showed up, your phone would give you an error message that something has gone terribly wrong. Even if that new part works perfectly, your iPhone might go on a hunger strike until you repent and pay Apple to repair it for you. Or better yet, why not just get yourself A BRAND NEW PHONE? NOW, so far we've been mostly talking about Apple, but they're not the only ones getting rich from making repairs difficult. They happen to be VMVPs. That's a stupid headline. the MVPs, but the league they're playing in is deep. Let's talk about tractors. It is a problem that's been plaguing America's farmers. The tractors, planters, and other gear they rely on can sometimes break down, but in many cases, they're not able or even permitted to make repairs, even on equipment they own. For years, John Deere restricted farmers' abilities to fix their extremely expensive tractors. They even claimed that these farmers didn't even own the tractors, they just bought the rights to use them. So you can have a tractor that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if something breaks, even if you could fix it yourself, you have to wait to pay an authorized John Deere repair person to do it for you. Cuz if you try to fix it yourself, you're about to run headlong into an iron wall that is John Deere software. And my friend, you're not winning that fight. That software is jacked as hell and mean. That software going to rip YOU TO SHREDS. HULK HOGAN. SO IF FARMERS WANT TO REPAIR THEIR EQUIPMENT, they have two choices: do whatever John Deere tells them and pay whatever bill they get, or hack into their own tractors. There's pirated software out there from uh Eastern Europe that guys are utilizing to try to get around this to be able to work on their tractors themselves. I believe the software I got is a hacked version of John Deere's system. This man is a hacker, which, in his defense, does make sense because The Matrix was filmed in Omaha. And one of the things he would have had to pay to fix on his tractor was an alarm that goes off every 10 minutes for a part of his tractor that he never uses. Ha ha, awesome way to treat the guys who grow all the food. And then there's medical equipment, like the ventilators hospitals relied on during COVID. When those started breaking and hospitals were desperate for fixes, a company called iFixit posted the repair manuals online for free. But then one of the ventilator manufacturers named Steris decided that was copyright infringement and demanded the manuals be taken down. And in case you've memory-holed it, this was during one of the worst pandemics in human history, and people needed those ventilators to not die. And there's also defense contractors restricting repairs the US military can do on their own equipment. The military is firing missiles at whoever they want, but if an oven breaks on one of their boats, they've got to wait for a certified technician to show up so that person can fix it. I mean, this is a wild one, and it really underscores just how bipartisan the right to repair really is. You've got an anti-war Senator Elizabeth Warren dapping up a Navy Admiral over their mutual hatred of not being able to repair their own equipment. Thank you for championing this right to repair initiative. It's so vital. I really appreciate your enthusiasm for making a change. — Even McDonald's ice cream machines were

being prevented from making McFlurries because this company weaponized a copyright law and was barring franchise owners from fixing the broken machines that they bought under penalty of a lawsuit. Oh, you just wanted to make some ice cream in your ice cream machine? Sorry, Jack, you're being sued into the Stone Age. Them's the breaks. And these obvious problems stacked themselves up across countless industries. But then, something weird started happening. People started stacking themselves up, too. Inglorious cheerleader pyramids full of pissed-off consumers who just wanted to repair the that they bought. A movement was taking shape, and it was called the right to repair. And like, that's a great name for it. They nailed it. No notes. Right to repair, that's what it is. And as the outrage grew amongst the millions and millions of people who were being negatively affected by anti-competitive repair restrictions, the movement drew more and more attention from the twin guns of news coverage and scathing articles in major publications. I was being held hostage by the equipment manufacturer not allowing me to repair my own equipment. By 2012, the dam had broken, and Massachusetts passed a right to repair law for cars. Within a couple of years, states like Wyoming, Minnesota, Kansas, and Tennessee were lining up their own right to repair law. Farmers will soon be able to fix their own farm equipment. It's a big deal. But you have to remember, they're fighting against some of the biggest corporations in the world. They have entire departments dedicated to making sure those bills don't go anywhere, and those love to lobby. So when Nebraska added their own right to repair bill to the agenda in 2017, this time focused around tractors, Apple jumped in to try to convince state regulators that Nebraska would become a mecca for hackers if they went through with it. I'm sure Apple was just very worried about their one Apple store. AT& T also piled on. The way the bill is drafted, it says that any product that is sold and used in the state of Nebraska. If I'm the big guy, what I do is I just don't sell my products in the state of Nebraska because they have to be sold here. If it's online, I don't sell to anybody who has a zip code in Nebraska. And if I'm a little manufacturer, I move out of the state of Nebraska. And lo and behold, that bill WAS TABLED INDEFINITELY. BUT AS MORE AND MORE STATES WERE ADDING their own right to repair bills to their agendas, Apple realized that they couldn't do this alone. They were going to need their own tech lobby group. But not just any old tech lobby group, they needed an old tech lobby group. So they went straight to the yellow pages and found a dot-com era group known simply as TechNet. TechNet lobbies for dozens of major corporations like Apple and Google and Microsoft, but they also work with some of the little guys like Clear, the incredibly annoying shadow TSA at the airport that you have to pay for better lines that was developed by two hedge fund guys who were like, "Oh, hey, let's have people pay us, and then also we'll take their personal and biometric data so we can make a giant facial recognition database we can then sell to hospitals and stadiums and really wherever we want. We love being tracked. " Please shut up, Tony. Don't bring it back up to 50. Okay. No, stop. Stop the process. But it's cycling through, Tony. It's almost back up. — Damn it, Adam, stop. What you're seeing on the monitor isn't real. Do what she says. In 2019, when Massachusetts was debating their own car-focused right to repair legislation, TechNet was on the scene. And thanks to Louis Rossmann again, what would I do without him? Thank you so much. It was easy to find a video of TechNet's opposition testimony. If the problem that we're seeing here is a concern for consumer choice, I think that it's been demonstrated today that there is consumer choice. You can go to your original manufacturer to get a repair, you can go to an authorized dealer to get a repair, or you can go to an independent uh repair shop to get a repair. Um there's plenty of consumer choice. Consumers can choose which electronics they buy, and they can choose whether if they don't like uh certain uh manufacturers to choose other ones in the future. Okay, the main argument is that there should be no need to restrict how much billion-dollar corporations can control independent repair shops because independent repair shops exist. And to be fair to this woman, she seems to barely be in her body. I don't know where her soul is, it's not there, and wherever it is, I hope it's having a really nice time. And I know the world is controlled exclusively by lobbyists, but when you actually see the lobbyists, it's how are we losing to these guys? I guess I want to conclude just by mentioning that Massachusetts has always prided itself in being pro-innovation and

passing this legislation would send the unintended message to the business community that if you innovate and you create that you no longer have that value to yourself and that it's allowed to be shared with others. So I encourage the committee to think thoughtfully about this before advancing this legislation. Thank you. If you don't let us do whatever we want, whenever we want to, we're not going to do anything at all. Will that MAKE YOU HAPPY? WHY WOULD WE BUILD ANYTHING if we can't CONTROL EVERYONE WHO BUYS IT? HUH? Use your head, okay? If I build a house, even if I sell it, that's my house forever. Okay? And I will lock the doors if I don't like what you're doing in there. Then it was Louis Rossmann's turn. Before I get started, I think it's important that I address a point that Mrs. Fisher just brought up, which is that there are many people that are seeking to profit from this legislation, and I agree that it's an important point. I think it's important to look at who paid to be here today versus who is being today. The laws that are being used to say that I shouldn't have access to a document that says where the fuse is or if I show this where this keyboard fuse is that I could be in trouble and have my business in jeopardy is a law that was created 50, 70, 90 years ago when the culture was different. Back then, if you open your refrigerator, you open your television, there's a schematic there that tells you how to do all of this. The last excuse that I heard was this has been denied in every state but Boston. Why Massachusetts? Wouldn't that have been a great attitude to have 250 years ago? — Thank you for your testimony. — And that Massachusetts legislation was passed by a dominant majority. 75% of voters voted yes. That is ridiculously high for US politics. We call a presidential election a landslide when one guy gets 50% of the vote. 75% is huge. I DON'T BELIEVE IT. AND THEN LESS THAN TWO YEARS AFTER THAT, New York became the first state in the nation to pass right to repair legislation that covered digital technology like cell phones and computers. It was called the Digital Fair Repair Act, and it got passed through the state Senate by 59 to 4 and the state assembly by 145 to 1. And I always love seeing the two one. You know, what was that guy's deal? Anyway, this bill actually seemed really good. But the thing is, lobbying doesn't just end at the vote because between the time the bill was voted through and it actually got put into effect, TechNet had some recommended changes. According to a great article from Grist and The Markup by Maddie Stone, the tech industry got absolutely blindsided by the law and was scrambling for protection. Between the vote in June and Governor Kathy Hochul actually signing the law in December, TechNet held frequent meetings with Governor Hochul. TechNet and Apple even asked the governor directly to veto the bill, while Microsoft just constantly tried to reach out to her office like a bunch of losers. And when TechNet couldn't get the veto, they sent the governor a list of proposed edits to a bill that, let me remind you, had already been voted on. And it seems like Hochul just took a bunch of the TechNet edits and inserted them into the law pretty much word for word. Here's one of the original sections, here's the TechNet edit, and wouldn't you know it, here's the final version that was signed by Hochul. So a promising bill to protect the right to repair had been watered down by tech interests. And now a lot of the people who it was supposed to protect were not even covered. According to Jessa Jones, a major right to repair advocate who runs a repair shop in upstate New York, the law got changed to allow manufacturers to release repair tools that only worked with the parts they themselves made, which is a nice fat loophole. And here's a quote from her. If you keep going down this road allowing manufacturers to force us to use their branded parts and service where they're allowed to tie the function of the device to their branded parts and service, that's not repair, that's authoritarian control. And I haven't even mentioned that a lot of the other industries that love to control repair like farm equipment and appliances had already lobbied themselves out of the bill before they voted on it. So even though getting something passed is definitely a step in the right direction, what the are we doing here? — Employees inside of Apple don't even understand what the company is doing. According to internal emails, when The New York Times was going to run this right to repair piece, high-level Apple employees asked for clarification on what their stance was. Apple's director of communications wrote, "With one hand we're making these changes and the other is actively fighting right to repair legislation moving in 20 states without real coordination for how updated policies could be used to leverage our position. " And then an Apple spokesperson added, "The larger issue is that our strategy around all of this is unclear. Right now we're talking out of both sides of our mouth and no one is

clear on where we're headed. " Which, you know, can't argue with that one. — And it feels even better in your hand. So we're often stuck buying things from massive corporations who want to choose how we use and maintain those things while sometimes still suggesting that maybe they still own the things that we bought. So if we can't trust companies like Apple or John Deere to let us choose how we fix our items, what are we going to do about it? Well, to start, there actually is some good news on the right to repair front. When the FTC was led by Lina Khan, she challenged some of these repair monopolies like the stranglehold on McDonald's ice cream machines. And the law that was being used to prevent those repairs was actually changed. So now these machines can start turning vats of slop into ice cold this. And honestly, if the machines are still broken, I'll just take the slop. I like it better that way. It goes down faster. Anyway, the FTC also challenged Harley-Davidson and Westinghouse and even put out a report called nixing the fix, which generally tore down some of the classic arguments companies use to control repairs. These victories came after years of advocacy from people just like Louis Rossmann and Jessa Jones and organizations like iFixit and PERG. We can support these people and groups as the fight goes on, link in the description, and we can also actually try to fix our own stuff with their help. Maybe the next time your iPhone battery craps out, you take it to a local repair shop. And maybe that's even the Geek Shop right here in Brooklyn where we filmed part of this video. There's also local clothing repair shops when you get a hole in your pants like the one I always get right here. It's always crotchal and I'm not sure why. I think it's cuz I have big thighs. Anyway, you could also go to a local repair cafe where some of the kindest people in the world will sit around for hours and help you fix whatever you bring in. You can also just wear pants with a little hole in them. They're still over 99% pants. And no, this section's not about pants. You can do this with a lot of things in your life. There's a man named Irv Gordon who drove his Volvo over 3 million miles, and the record only stopped because Irv Gordon died. The Volvo was still running great. Maybe the Volvo was the one that killed it. Just keep your cell phone longer than you used to, and that could help prevent some of the 150 million phones from being thrown away by Americans every single year. And if you look at the whole globe, that number's probably more like 5 billion phones thrown away every year. And those 5 billion phones get tossed in with the tens of millions of tons of e-waste we produce every year, and it really seems like we're going to have to do something about that very soon. But that's its own video. Let's wrap it up with a parting message. And it's actually the same parting message that owners of the tabletop personal assistant robot Jibo heard. You see, the company that made and sold Jibo went out of business, and they just decided to break everybody's $900 little helper. But before Jibo signed offline for the very last time, it played this over the speakers to a bunch of unsuspecting people. — [clears throat] — While it's not great news, the servers out there that let me do what I do are going to be turned off very soon. I want to say I've really enjoyed our time together. Good night, Jibo. Thank you very, very much for having me around. Maybe someday when robots are way more advanced than today and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said hello. Wow. Absolutely devastating, Jibo. And now an ad. For pretty much my entire adult life, I've had this mustache. It's one of my defining features, and I'm genuinely worried my dog wouldn't recognize me if I shaved it off. And to keep this mustache from becoming a full beard, I usually just use a trimmer because I don't like shaving. It hurts and it leaves little tiny cuts and bumps all over my face and neck, and worst of all, it makes me say like that where I sound like a whiny little boy. But the thing is, a lot of my shaving issues come from bad razor design. See, the typical razor has a bunch of blades that are loaded on little springs so they bend and scrape when you're shaving. But what if there was a better way? A simpler way? Folks, I'm talking about Henson Shaving. Forget that wobbly stack of blades they've got to pressure into cutting hair. Henson was designed by aerospace engineers to give you a single beautiful razor edge that's set at an optimal angle and then locked solidly in place so you get a shave you can actually rely on. But to make sure they're not full of I'm going to shave my face for the first time in years, except for the mustache, obviously. They're not paying me mustache money here. —

— So, if you're looking for a smarter way to shave, go to Henson Shaving Punto com {slash} climatetown or use code climatetown for a 2-year supply of blades with the purchase of a razor. Is that right? That's right. Henson Shaving. I guess they're not full of And that's the end of the episode. Thank you so much for watching. And thank you to Aaron Persinoski for writing the book The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own. And of course, thank you to Louis Rossman for his hundreds of videos and years of incredible advocacy. We put a link to the book and the YouTube channel in the description. Check them out. You will not be wasting your time. And also, if you want to support this channel, we have a Patreon page where we put behind-the-scenes clips, footage from our live shows, monthly town halls, blooper reels Immediately do gonzo arms. And of course, access to the climatetown landline. This is a real phone that sits on my real desk. We'll give you the number. You can call it. And if I'm in the office, I will answer it. People's most common reaction is confused. Anyway, climatetown is a fully independent channel. We have no investors, no outside owners, except of course a couple of Larry Ellison's kids. The only way we can stay independent is through our patrons. So, if you're a patron, thank you so much. And if you're thinking about it, I say go for it. Okay, thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Okay. Okay. I know a lot of you are like, how do how are there two of them? This is actually the dummy version. They're also a pretty recent invention. A lot of you Oh, hello. Can you Can't tell if I have really strong fingers or weak fingers. If only there was some machine. Fingerometer. All right. Oh. Cut that. Was an alarm that goes off every 10 minutes as some joyous children run to the baseball field in a slice of Americana that's been dead for 70 years. I'm Raleigh Williams, and this is the news that old people think is true. Back to you, Debbie. — I have not tried marijuana. Uh I have never used it at any time. — Did you hear that pop? Night fever.