I love my old iPhone 14, but I’m starting to face the facts: It’s going to die. The battery is about to go; apps take longer to load than they used to. Some of it I can fix. I can go to the Genius Bar and swap the battery. Maybe I could even do it myself; that’d buy me some time. But eventually, Apple won’t support this wildly expensive device at all, and there’s not much I can do about it.
Apple did start offering self-repair services a few years ago, but it involves renting nearly 80 pounds of equipment and requires you to use official parts. When all is said and done, it doesn’t save you that much money versus just going to the Apple Store. But if I buy a screen or a camera component from a third party, there’s a chance my iPhone is gonna lock me out of certain features because it doesn’t recognize it.
This problem goes far beyond iPhones. Manufacturers have put similar locks on all kinds of gadgets, from video game consoles to cars to smart home devices, making them hard to modify and even harder to restore after some firmware update renders a certain feature unusable.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people think this isn’t fair, that there should be a better way to do it. I think at this point it’s safe to say it qualifies as a movement, one that unites under the banner of “right to repair.” Built around the radical idea that when you buy something you should be able to truly own it, right-to-repair advocates believe consumers have the right to maintain, fix, or modify any piece of hardware they’ve purchased. The movement has gained even more traction now that AI makes it even easier to hack the software powering consumers’ devices.
To find out what’s next for the right-to-repair movement, I went straight to the source: Louis Rossmann, a YouTuber and consumer rights advocate who recently organized the Own Your Shit tour, which went around the US earlier this year to call for the death of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits users from bypassing digital restrictions put on devices by manufacturers.
Rossmann and I talked about more than just Section 1201. We also discussed the US midterm elections, putting out bounties to find product fixes, and what will happen as the right-to-repair movement collides with the rise of AI.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BRIAN BARRETT: Louis, thank you so much for being here. You’re someone who spends a lot of time not just evangelizing over “right to repair,’ but I would imagine introducing it to people who don’t know what it is. How do you do that?
