Louis Rossmann Wants More People to Care About the Right to Repair

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.

Talking With Louis Rossmann

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?

LOUIS ROSSMANN: I try to avoid talking about it, and I try to show people. So instead of telling people, “Here’s why you should care about this issue,” which sounds like lecturing, what I’ll do is if I’m done fixing something for a customer and they say, “The Apple Store told me $2,000," and we could do it for $200, when they’re giving me the hug and saying, “Thank you for getting back all of our baby pictures” or something, I’ll say, “Here’s how close you were to this never happening.”

I like to tell them, “This is the document that I used to fix your device.” When they ask me what was wrong with it, I’ll tell them, “By the way, you should know that Apple tells the company that makes this chip not to sell it to me, and if everybody in that chain listened, I would not be able to fix this, and you wouldn’t have any of your data back.” So I always try to show people and get them excited about what it is I’m doing.

Got it. I have over 1,000 repair videos on YouTube where I show people how to do what I do, and there are people that say, “I was working at Walmart for seven bucks an hour, and I picked up a soldering iron and started fixing boards on eBay, and now I make triple what I did before.”

There are people that fix their own things, so not just making careers for people, but maybe somebody saved themselves some money by doing a repair themself. Or when I fix something for somebody that otherwise wouldn't have been fixed or that they were told couldn’t be fixed. I always try to get people personally invested because lecturing people about it just doesn’t make it very fun.

The Ownership Problem

Your organization has a wall of shame, almost, of examples of things that companies have done to take away the ownership of a product. Because that’s really what it is, right? It's like you buy something, you expect to be able to own it and do what you want with it, but that's not always how it plays out. To your mind, what are some of the more egregious instances of companies not letting you know what you want?

Some of my favorites are some of these thermostat companies. One of them sent out a firmware update after the company went bankrupt that required that you pay $117 a year to get some of the functionality that you had beforehand. So it’s not even necessarily when a company has a device that has a specific date when it’s gonna turn off. It’s when they realize, “We need to make more money, so we’re gonna change what it is we’re offering you after the sale.”

When I started doing this, I was just talking about right to repair for Apple devices, which is what my small shop worked on. I saw it from my small lens. I focused on the items where I knew exactly what was going on, and I really thought, “This is a problem that only affects me.”

It wasn’t until about 2017 when I went to Nebraska for this legislative hearing that I realized that it really is not just something that affects my small field. I was in a room filled with farmers that were talking about all the problems they were having with their tractors, and I remember going, “Where’s the right-to-repair?” And someone says, “This is the right-to-repair room. Everybody has this problem now.” And that’s when I started opening my field of view up to everybody who has this issue.

As time went on, my channel stopped just discussing right to repair, and it started discussing how right to repair is a small element under this umbrella of ownership. And ownership being taken away is, in my opinion, the real problem.

Your inability to fix what you own is one thing, but also the fact that everything is turning into a subscription, that the things that you buy must connect to the manufacturer’s server in order to work, which means that they can disable your product at any time. It’s all small things under this large umbrella of ownership, and that’s slowly being taken away from people over the past 10 to 20 years.

Farmers and Early Wins

I wanna go back to the farmers because they have been on the vanguard of this. They have been in a years-long struggle with John Deere specifically, trying to get the right to repair their own tractors. But there have been some breakthroughs recently. Do you mind talking through wins like that, like how either that movement or other movements have actually been able to make changes happen?

I think a lot of the change so far has been change that occurs at the cultural level more than the legislative level. Some of these changes have been memorandums of understanding where the company says, “OK, we won’t do this particular thing.” When I speak to farmers, it’s very much the same version of what I deal with in my business, where you’ll see a headline where a company says they’re supporting repair, and then you actually look into the details of it, and it’s really very surface level.

One of the examples I have of this is with Samsung. They had released this independent repair program, and they made screens and batteries available, so you could buy a battery. But the battery cost over $200 because they glued the battery to the screen, and if you wanted to buy it, you had to buy both of them together. A $200 to $250 battery is pretty useless to a lot of people who have a phone that’s worth $200 when it works.

And one of the issues that I’ve found when I'm speaking to farmers is, at the end of the day, they still have the same problem that they did. They’re still using cracked Ukrainian software to be able to work on their tractor themselves without having to take it back to the dealer. So there’s still a lot of work to be done.

An Inflection Point

Right to repair is in the news more frequently than it used to be. Some outlets, like WIRED, have covered it for a while. Our writer Boone Ashworth has talked to you before and covered it quite a bit. But it seems to have reached national prominence in the last year or so. Is there an inflection point that you can point to?

I think it’s been a slow burn for the past 12 years. CBC News did a piece on Apple in 2018. That was a really fun one for me. I remember the producer came to me and said they wanted to do a piece on how Apple is bad with upgrades. I remember saying, “Upgrades are not very fun, but also the piece is starting with the conclusion. You’re starting with doing a piece on Apple being bad, and there’s no fun in that. What if you do this: Find a broken machine, take it to Apple, record what they say, take it to me, record what I say, and let the story write itself.” And they said, “Well, what if they give a good answer?” I’m just smirking like, “Just let the story write itself. Have faith.”

They took it to Apple. They said, “We gotta do the motherboard,” all this other stuff. I see that it’s a bent pin in a screen cable because whoever had worked on it before had likely tried to misroute the screen cable when they were plugging it into the board, so they were stretching it, and they shorted pin one to ground, which caused the backlight to go out. So I take a tweezer, bend it back, and it works. It was featured on national news.

There’s some other inflection points, like in 2016 when Apple had asked if I would take down one of my videos showing where a fuse was. There was a video I did showing you how to fix a MacBook Air if you get some liquid around the trackpad, and your trackpad and keyboard stop working. There’s a zero-ohm resistor. It’s kinda like a fuse that will blow in that area so that the entire machine doesn’t die. So I showed how to replace this thing. At 55 seconds in the video, I’m showing where the fuse is in the motherboard, and they asked me to take the video down, and I’m like, “I don’t want to. File a DMCA claim.” That got some attention.

I started a nonprofit to try and do this more professionally and push this forward in a more organized manner.

Do You Have to Fix It Yourself?

I think a lot of people might say, “That sounds good, and I’m behind it,” but the idea of a fuse, a motherboard, those are things people aren’t always comfortable messing with. It sounds intimidating to someone who’s not steeped in tech. Is that so in practice? Has it become easier to fix stuff even as companies make it harder?

The right to repair doesn’t mean that you have to fix something, nor does it mean that you have to go incredibly deep to fix the issue. If you’re the type of person that wants to pay somebody else to fix it, I respect that. If you wanna replace the entire display assembly, meaning the entire lid on the laptop because that’s easier for you, and you’re willing to pay an extra $100 or $200 to buy the screen preassembled, go for it. If you wanna replace the LCD cell, which is just the front layer that makes the picture, which is absolutely miserably difficult to do-but you can buy that part sometimes for 30 to 50 bucks-do that too.

I am not telling people that they should have to fix anything, and I’ll never shame somebody because they decide to buy something new or have somebody else fix it. Right to repair simply means that you have the right to fix it if you want, or send it to the manufacturer, send it to a third party, or buy something new if you don’t want to fix it.

Ironically, most of the devices in my house that don't work, I don't wind up fixing them. I wind up buying something new, because after 12 or 15 hours a day of fixing other people’s stuff, I just don’t have it in me to fix my own. The wall of laptops I see behind you are a testament to that.

So recently, for instance, my air conditioner broke, and I was willing to pay somebody to fix it, and he ghosted me three times. And the company said, “We don't fix them. We can give you a new one for $10,000.” And I look at the cost of the unit that I have and it’s $2,500, and I’m just like, “What?” So I opened it up and I realized the contactor, which is a relay, it’s the thing that every time your thermostat says “turn on the AC” it sends 24 volts to this thing, and then that turns on the 240 volts going to the AC. It was filled, absolutely filled, with fire ants. I don’t know why fire ants love 240 volts. They really love it even though it’s not good for them. And that was kind of fun for me. So at that moment, I wanted to fix it because I was boiling hot, and it was taking forever for somebody else to.

Now in this case, there was not a lot that was stopping me. My unit is so old that I was actually able to find the schematics for it online, so if I wanted to buy parts for it, I could. And that's really all most people are asking for. I'm not saying that you have to do a motherboard repair yourself, but it would be nice if somebody who's qualified to do so is not blocked from being able to do so.

Now, it’s not Apple’s job to make it easy for me. It’s not their job to design their product in a way where I have a more luxurious experience while I’m doing the job. My job is gonna be difficult, and that's part of the game. Technology is consistently evolving. Where right to repair comes in is when I try to talk to the electronics distributor that sells all these chips, and I say, “I wanna buy this,” and they say, “You’re not on the list. We can’t sell to you.” That’s where right to repair comes in and says that’s not OK.

Companies will say-and I know this because they say it to us all the time when we go to them with stories about this-tha