New Post: Beyond Right to Repair

  1. Sell spare batteries in a dummy phone, a phone that is convincing enough to comply with the transport company requirements but not too expensive to manufacture. :rofl:
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Haha. Well it should be possible to solve without a Mickey Mouse phone.

I personally don’t think the only option should be to buy a spare battery when making the original Librem purchase (if outside of US), not least because it is always better to buy a fresh manufactured battery when you need it, but Purism are selling globally, premium products with high price points and advocating longevity. There could be a fair number of Librem 5 owners outside of the USA that purchased without a spare battery and will find in 3 years time they’ll need a replacement battery and unable to buy one outside of USA, rendering the Librem 5 e-waste; it’s a problem which hopefully Purism will address in the future.

The good thing is this is a problem other businesses selling globablly have faced and solved.

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Yes

Or, as you yourself said, “excuse for a US trip” :slight_smile:

In the recent past I needed to get a replacement battery for my digital camera. I had to poll a large number of suppliers before I finally found one that used a transport company that would agree to send me the battery, and that’s just within my own country.

As you wrote, this isn’t an urgent problem. It will be a few years before early adopters are looking for a replacement battery and hopefully by then Purism has got the logistics for that sorted out.

At the Librem 5 price point, particularly under the latest or soon-to-be pricing, Purism should be throwing in a free entry level Android phone, which can be used as the battery container, as long as they can find such a phone that has a replaceable battery. :wink:

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Real options for ordering batteries can be a warehouse in Europe or delivery by sea.

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As I am using my L14 laptop with a cracked screen for over a month now since I last heard from your support team — telling me they’re all out of replacement screens — good to hear Purism is all for Right to Repair :stuck_out_tongue: .

Any developments on that front? Or are L14 screens even scarcer than L5 units? :slight_smile:

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Or it can exist with an external monitor that can be found in a thrift store for a few bucks.

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(Generally speaking I would prefer my threads aren’t hijacked with support requests, but I’ll give a quick reply here in the hopes that we can get back on track.)

I’m sorry you cracked your screen. If I am reading your reply correctly, you seem to be implying that we are hypocrites because we advocate for Right to Repair, but we don’t currently have replacement parts in stock, during an unprecedented current supply chain crisis that has made it challenging for us to even keep our Librem 14 in stock to begin with. Was that what you meant?

We are still trying to get through the Librem 14 backorders, but we finally are getting to a place soon (ideally in a few weeks if everything goes according to plan) where we will be completely caught up on L14 backorders and L14 will be in stock and well-supplied for the future. I don’t think we will be able to have a lot of spare parts on hand until some time after we hit that point, not sure when.

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What do you think, of course I am using it with an external monitor. That’s not the point.

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No, if I thought you’re hypocrites I would have ceased my librem subscription and tried to dump my spot in the L5 queue on someone else. What I assume is that you’re in the largest part affected by the ongoing crisis, but that you could have, perhaps, responded better to a degree. Of course, as an ordinary user I’m on the outside, so I cannot gauge to which extent the latter is true – it’s just a feeling based on little things.

Assuming you’re doing the best you can considering the circumstances, it’s a little bit ironic how in times of troubles some of our principles can clash with each other. The right to repair also means that the parts must be in sufficient supply for the foreseeable future, but I guess liberated electronics and parts are still too exotic occurrence in the sea of closed hardware for this to be possible. And I further suppose if you’d gone for off-the-shelf solutions, the production would suffer less. I was surprised, though, that it is not possible to procure L14 type of screen from a different supplier.

Anyway, good luck.

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This is something I elaborate on in my post but this is the problem with “Right to Repair”–it really is only about preventing companies from suing you for DMCA violations if you attempt to repair a device you own that they have locked up. At best it might move beyond that to require some companies to make their products a bit less difficult to repair (and allow 3rd parties access to repair parts if they exist). Unfortunately it doesn’t have much to do with granting the ability to repair.

My argument is that the ability to repair moves beyond just avoiding a lawsuit, or even access to repair parts, and into access to source code, as over the longer term, one large thing that fails in consumer electronics that causes people to replace them is software, either because the company has abandoned it and no longer provides updates (like with smartphones), or because the company (or its cloud service) is no longer around, turning the device into a brick.

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