This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
When you consider purchasing a new gadget—be it a laptop, video game console or digital camera—you probably expect to have access to any repair manuals or replacement parts the manufacturer produces. Yet until recently, companies that sold electronic devices in the United States were not required to provide customers with the parts or information they needed to make even simple repairs like replacing a battery.
Last December, New York became the first state in the country to require electronic device manufacturers to make their repair materials available to the public. The digital “right to repair” law – the first such law in the country – went into effect. In July, similar laws went into effect in Minnesota and California. Over the next two years, consumers in Oregon and Colorado will also gain the right to have a large number of digital electronic devices repaired.
Repair advocates say these laws are a crucial step toward ending our throwaway culture, in which electronics are simply replaced when they break. Discarded devices typically end up as toxic e-waste, and manufacturing new devices encourages environmentally damaging mining and generates carbon emissions and other pollutants.
But these right-to-repair laws are brand new, and it remains to be seen whether manufacturers in the numerous industries affected will change their repair practices overnight. Repair advocates are closely watching the tech companies in these states, as are the state attorneys general tasked with enforcing the law.
Many manufacturers still bury their heads in the sand when it comes to the right to repair, says Kyle Wiens, CEO of repair guide website iFixit. “There are a lot of companies that haven’t thought about this,” Wiens added.
The report identified 21 devices covered by New York State’s new “right-to-repair” law, which requires electronics manufacturers to make publicly available all proprietary parts, tools and manuals needed to repair all devices first sold in the state on or after July 1, 2023. After the law took effect, PIRG evaluated each of these devices based on the accessibility and quality of repair manuals, the number of replacement parts offered by the manufacturer and the availability of commonly replaced parts such as batteries.
In general, the report found that smartphone makers provided the most comprehensive repair materials. Laptops, tablets and gaming consoles were mixed, while the digital cameras and VR headsets examined fared poorly. The authors were unable to access repair manuals for current digital cameras from Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm or Canon, while Apple offered neither manuals nor spare parts for its new VR headset, the Apple Vision Pro. Meta’s new VR headset, Meta Quest 3, also lacks a repair manual, and the supply of spare parts is very limited, the report said.
Grist was unable to locate a press contact at Canon, and an email to the company’s investor relations department went unanswered. A representative for Fujifilm North America told Grist in an email that the company’s technical service team “will provide diagnostic verification and self-repair support in accordance with applicable Right to Repair requirements.” Media representatives from Nikon, Apple and Meta did not respond to Grist’s request for comment on the report’s findings.
A representative from Sony Electronics told Grist the company has published around 300 service manuals “and we are in the process of publishing more.” The representative shared a link to the service manual for the Alpha 6700 camera, which PIRG researchers could not find in a web search when they examined the camera several months ago. Nathan Proctor, co-author of the report, told Grist Sony’s customer service department recommended that researchers look for repair information on YouTube or iFixit. That points to a larger problem, he said.
“Even companies that are complying and their customer service representatives … haven’t gotten the message,” Proctor told Grist. “It’s a very frustrating state of affairs for me.”
Proctor stressed that the findings are not a definitive analysis of whether or not a product complies with the law, which contains “a number of loopholes,” he said. (The most important of those loopholes: If a company doesn’t offer repair services in the first place, it isn’t legally required to do so — either in New York or any other state.) Rather, Proctor said, the intent was to show whether manufacturers are complying with the spirit of the law by taking steps to ensure that everyone can repair the things they own.
“We want to send a signal to manufacturers that someone is paying attention,” Proctor said. “And that they should organize their compliance plans.”
Preparing for a repairable future will become even more important as new and stricter state laws take effect. Minnesota and California’s repair laws, which took effect July 1, cover devices dating back to 2021. They also include some electronic devices that were exempted in New York, such as e-bikes and, in Minnesota’s case, business computers. (Both states’ laws, however, exclude gaming consoles, which are covered by New York’s law.)
Meanwhile, right-to-repair laws passed in Oregon and Colorado earlier this year will take effect in January 2025 and 2026, respectively. These laws close a major loophole: Both prohibit so-called parts pairing, the practice of serializing parts and using software to sync them with specific devices during repair. While some companies like Apple argue that this practice is essential to ensuring safety and optimal performance after a device is repaired, critics say parts pairing allows manufacturers to unfairly limit which replacement parts can be used in a repair. For a replacement screen for an iPhone, for example, to work properly, the screen must be purchased from Apple and paired with the company’s proprietary software tools.
Oregon’s law not only prohibits part pairing, but also applies retroactively to most electronic devices from 2015 onwards, making it the longest coverage period to date.
Gay Gordon-Byrne, chief executive of the Repair Association, an industry group representing repair companies, said it was too early to say which devices or companies might not comply with the new laws. To answer that question, the Repair Association is currently collecting data from its members on numerous products they try to repair and the challenges they face in doing so. “We expect there will be a lot of gaps, we just don’t have any information yet on where the gaps are,” she said.
Once these gaps are visible, advocates, repair workers and the public can begin bringing them to the attention of state attorneys general, who can then file lawsuits against companies that violate the law. None of the states with an active digital right to repair law has yet filed a public lawsuit against a company, but the attorneys general’s offices of California and Minnesota told Grist they are committed to enforcing the law. (The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment on the filing.)
If a state finds that a company is violating its right to repair law, the company faces fines ranging from $500 per violation in New York to $20,000 per violation in Minnesota.
Whether those penalties are high enough to convince trillion-dollar tech companies to change course on repair remains to be seen. But both Gordon-Byrne and iFixit’s Wiens see an even stronger incentive for companies to comply with the law: the embarrassment of having to pay the public back for selling unrepairable stuff.
“I think the risks to public reputation are as great as the fines,” Wiens said.
