so i just had this discussion with a friend whether smartphones should be required to be repairable by law.

my answer is: probably not a good regulation. because: smartphones basically don’t produce toxins during production or when disposed, so there’s no environmental harm. smartphones cost like $200 these days (at least the new ones i buy) and these work well despite the low cost, so it’s not like you’re bleeding out financially because of smartphones. assuming a cost of living around $2000/month which is i think average for the US (?), and assuming that a smartphone lasts 5 years without repair, that means that smartphones cost about 0.2% of your expenses. Not even 1 percent.

Also making stuff repairable means adding additional screws which add weight and more importantly complexity that increase production cost.

feel free to shit on my take with “muh duh capitalism bad we need to regulate things” and i get your point with basically a lot of things like healthcare (which is really too expensive) but smartphones are a bad example for this. it’s like complaining about the weight of paper, saying that we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the freight weight of trucks by making paper used in books thinner, so that it’s more lightweight. you save like 0.000001% of the total weight of what’s carried around while also making books more fragile because thinner paper tears more easily. it’s a distraction from the important issues. it causes the illusion that regulation is bad because one regulation after another is a bad example that shouldn’t have been regulated in the first place. it’s like when the capitalists come together to think about “how do we pitch the society against state oversight?” and then they come up with 10 different weak/controversial/meaningless proposals just to give examples to the population that regulating things doesn’t pay off.