Recently I decided to follow the community-driven Right to Repair which focuses on the idea that products should be maintainable by the end user. The main focus, of course, is on what Apple has been up to recently with the launch of its new range of MacBooks and iMacs.
Why it matters
The Right to Repair aims to lower costs for those of us who know how to replace parts of our own computer by allowing us to do just that. But aside from that, it also aims to keep initial costs down for users by allowing them to select lower-cost parts when buying the system and upgrade them when they can afford them.
Take my MacBook Pro for instance. It cost me £2,550 when I got it (and I wouldn't say it was worth that amount of money) as it was the top model. I need the 16GB of RAM but I could have got a cheaper model with 8GB of RAM and upgraded it later, except those MacBook Pro models didn't allow you to do this, hence why the high initial price - so in essence I had to pay a lot more to get the specification I needed as I couldn't upgrade it myself.
When you can't take something apart, you can't understand it. When it breaks, you can't fix it. When you want to do something more, you can't modify it.
So it matters for those two reasons, with the former being considered more important to people who aim to keep their products for a long time and the latter for those who want to keep initial costs down.
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