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.

edit:

damn i have hardly ever seen a post with 76 downvotes to 4 upvotes. i thought lemmy removes a post from the feed after 20 downvotes. well, maybe they changed it.

Anyways, a few hours later, after thinking about it again, i think what i wanted to say is that the toxicity of smartphones is the problem, but repairing smartphones might not be the solution.

Consider the following: even if you only buy half as many smartphones because they last twice as long, you would still pollute the environment through your actions, because there’s still toxins released into the environment. so reducing the problem does not solve it. i think to make a meaningful approach, one should define criteria or thresholds about how many toxins can be released into the environment. My personal approach to this is that all toxins are harmful and should be avoided, but i think that can only be done by requiring smartphone manufacturers to produce phones in non-toxic ways, without heavy metals and such. This is the actual solution because it doesn’t release toxins into the environment. Meanwhile, repairability is the illusion of a meaningful proposal because it doesn’t actually solve the problem. Meanwhile, it shifts blame on the consumer because now you’re required to feel like it is your responsibility that the environment doesn’t get polluted, meanwhile your MAGA neighbor will not care about this and happily buy a new iPhone every 1.5 years.

So what i propose is:

• Require smartphone manufacturers to not use harmful chemicals during smartphone production; such that smartphones are effectively non-toxic and can be disposed of safely through the bin, without environmental hazard.
• instead of: accepting that smartphones are toxic and will forever stay toxic (this feels like there should be a close analogy to the internet ;-) ), while also demanding that end users take care of the environment by buying less but also demanding that end users help stimulate the economy by buying more, at the same time.

More smartphones can be produced if they’re non-toxic because there would be less environmental hazard from it, so it would actually help the economy. Please consider demanding that smartphones be non-toxic as a policy proposal.

To sum it up: Non-Toxic Computing. That does not only include social media being non-toxic but also the computing hardware being non-toxic.

Thank you for the attention and sorry for the confusion at first!