The smart glasses era is (kind of) here

27:12You can't really use this as your sole pair of glasses. You are going to need a backup pair because this charges within a case. So you can't even like plug yourself into a wire while you're working and have that work. Now you have to plug it into the eyeglass case. So you can't just use this as your sole pair of glasses. And if you get it as sunglasses, you really have to think about what situations you're going to be using this in. If you want to be indoors, it's really not going to work for you. And then if like me, you have really, really terrible vision, there's a limit as to what prescription glass Ray-Ban says they support.

27:49It's negative six to plus four. I fall outside of that. That really sucks for me. It means I have to keep wearing contacts with these and that makes life kind of difficult to manage. Because, you know, the thing I think we don't really talk about with smart glasses is that glasses are a medical device. People need them to see and you need to see at all times. So when you add a charging battery component to that, you're saying that this can't be your main glasses all the time. You need a backup. And that's very expensive in the United States, not in Korea, which is why my family all goes to Korea for glasses.

28:27But you're asking people to spend like 400 to 700 just to have two pairs of these at any given point in time, which, you know, I don't love that. I think that's a major barrier. Yeah, this is why translation lenses are the future. I know we were on a few episodes ago and Neil, I talked a lot of crap about transition lenses and the number of people who have told us that actually transition lenses are good. I support you. You are my people. And I'm sure my dad was one of them. They are absolutely necessary for smart glasses. I don't think the sunglasses, if you want to wear them in your daily life, sunglasses are not an option.

29:00But if you want to go outside and not have your eyeballs burn off, because, you know, eye health is important and UV rays are damaging, then you can't really have the clear glasses all the time. So you really do need transitions if you want these glasses to be on you at all times and to have a camera at all times. So it seems like we're not all the way there. We haven't sort of fully solved these problems there's a lot of interesting like software stuff left to do especially i think in the camera but it does sound like meta has probably made the most convincing case yet that like there's something here that the camera can be good the audio stuff can work they're working on a bunch of ar stuff that i think is going to get more interesting over time but it's like meta wants the gadget of the future to look a lot like the thing that you're wearing on your head right now right like it's a huge amount of technological work to get there but i I think I'm at least, you know, 1 % more convinced than I was before these that that's plausible.

29:55Yeah. So what I'm going to say is I have tested a lot of smart glasses in the past and I've been made fun of consistently and constantly while I wear them. This is the first time where, you know, I've had people go like, oh, hell no, this is a privacy nightmare. Get away from me. But I've had way more people go like, oh, my God, that's so cool. I'm buying them. Where do I preorder? And that, I think, is huge because I'll be real. My husband is the biggest V humble. He keeps me humble because he's always like, that looks stupid. That's dumb. Why would anyone have that? Why do you wear five watches at a time?

30:32Yeah, I have to argue my thesis. But this is the first pair of smart glasses that I've ever worn that they've gone, holy crap, I'm going to order my own pair. They are waiting to order these so they can have their prescription. And they're super excited about it. That's so weird to me. One Alex Kranz had a field day at the office, stealing them from me, taking the world's blurriest photos, just running around. They're so bad. They're so bad. But she ran around the office with these like a child. I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to buy a pair. These are so cool. And it was just like, oh my God, I've never seen someone that excited about a pair of smart glasses I've ever tested in my life.

31:11That's something to me, you know. Alex Kranz taking bad pictures is the first sign of any good gadget category. Oh my God. Just so many nostril shots on my phone. All right, V, thank you. I want to talk about these more because the echo frames are coming out. There's more to do. I think this is like the next phase of these, I think is going to be really interesting. So we're going to have to keep in touch on all the smart glasses stuff. Absolutely. We got to make the Eggsy spy dream a reality. Please, from your mouth to God's ears. All right, we got to take a break. But then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about right to repair.

31:45V, thank you. We'll be right back.

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34:23All right, we're back. Before we get to our next segment, actually, one more quick thing on smart glasses. One thing that's not on the meta smart glasses, at least not yet, is augmented reality. When Meta launched these glasses a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that in a software update next year, the glasses will turn multimodal. That's the word he used. Here's the way he described how it'll work. So the glasses are going to be able to understand what you're looking at when you ask them questions. So if you want to know what the building is that you're standing in front of, or if you want to translate a sign that's in front of you to know what it's saying, or if you need help fixing this sad, leaky faucet, you can basically just talk to MetAI and look at it and it'll walk you through it step by step how to do it.

35:06So, you know, I think that smart glasses are going to be an important platform for the future. You know, not only because they're the natural way to put holograms in the world so we can put digital objects, you know, in our physical space, but also because if you think about it, smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let an AI assistant see what you're seeing and hear what you're hearing. The smart glasses obviously don't have a screen, so they'll use your phone as the display for all that stuff. It's basically a companion to your glasses. I actually think that's super clever and a smart way to do AR glasses before it's possible to put all the hardware and software we're going to need into a decent looking pair of glasses.

35:43But the race to watch out for is between that approach and the one taken by a company like Xreal, which used to be called Nreal. You might have heard of it back then, but is now called Xreal for reasons I don't totally understand. Doesn't really matter. I've been toying around with X-Reel's latest glasses. They're called the Air, and they're essentially the opposite of the MetaSmart glasses. They're not smart at all, but they do have a display. Right now, they're basically a projector on your face. You can plug them into your phone or your game console and see your video on a big virtual screen in front of your eyes.

36:13You can plug them into your computer and use them for virtual desktops. They don't do much of anything by themselves. They're just a screen you can put on your face. They're not the most stylish glasses. They have displays underneath each lens, so they're big and bulky, but they work pretty well, actually. And I've really enjoyed using them for watching shows that I would otherwise stare at on the tiny screen on my phone or even playing games. I plugged mine into my Switch and I've been using it that way. It's very cool. So that's really the battle, I think. Can someone like Xreal add the smarts and the looks faster than Meta can figure out how to get a display into these glasses?

36:49I don't know who I'd bet on there. I think probably Meta, but we'll see. And in the meantime, which of those approaches is actually useful to the most people? Is it Meta's AI and camera thing, or is it having a display on your face? I don't know, but I am absolutely convinced that Meta in particular is ready to see this all the way through. Alex Heath on our team has done some really good reporting on the roadmap. The roadmap is long. Meta is in this for the long haul. It's going to be super interesting to watch, especially over the next couple of years, as everybody tries to figure out what anybody actually wants from these glasses.

37:23Anyway, sorry, brief diversion. Let's get to the next segment. Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill called the Right to Repair Act, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It makes it official that gadgets should be repairable. But it does so in some important, specific ways. Under the law, for any electronic made and sold after July 1st, 2021, and costing more than$50, the manufacturer of that device has to make tools, parts, software, and documentation available for people who want to repair those devices. Some of these devices you'll be able to repair yourself, others you'll take to a repair shop, and those repair shops, this is important, will be far more equipped and enabled to actually help you than before.

38:04This law is a huge win for the Right to Repair movement, which has been steadily fighting for laws like this all over the U.S. and around the world. So to help figure out what it means and what it means for how we buy and use and fix our electronics, I grabbed two people who know very well. The Verge is Sean Hollister and iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens. Sean Hollister, hello. Hi, that's me. Kyle Wiens, welcome back to The Verge Cast. Hey, thanks for having me back. So there's a lot of rates repair stuff to talk about. But first, let's just kind of catch up on where we are. And it seems like this bill that was just signed into California law is like, if you were to pick a moment that you won at right to repair, it feels like this would not be a bad one to choose.

38:47Is that fair to say? This is far and away the most broad sweeping bill that we've had. And the retroactivity is helpful. The broad applicability to a variety of products. California had an existing law that we modified. I don't know if most people know this, but California has this law called the Beverly Song Warranty Act. It's the best consumer protection law in the world, really. The Lemon Law, right? Yes, it's the Lemon Law. And it says that you have to be able to get your product service for seven years, which is longer than even Europe and other places. So the Right to Repair Law kind of modifies and improves that Lemon Law.

39:20When we think about the Lemon Law, most people think of this as like the thing that protects you from buying a shitty used car, though, right? People don't know that it has anything to do with their other electronics. Right. So in California, Apple will repair products for seven years. They don't do that anywhere else in the world. So if you have a six-year-old MacBook and you walk into an Apple store in New York City, they won't work on it. But if you go into the Apple store in LA, they will. That's wild. I genuinely did not know that. Apple has, they have what they call vintage and obsolete.

39:48And it's between five and seven years. And at five years, they cut the world off except California. And then at seven years, they cut California off. Wow. And I think that goes back to just the broader question, like how long should things last? When we talk about right to repair, you're buying a new thing or The Verge is recommending a product. Well, cool. I'm going to buy it. How long am I going to use those new AirPods for? Well, that's actually the thing I was going to ask, because you were involved in this bill from the beginning, as far as I understand, right? Like you were an active participant in crafting this legislation.

40:16That's one of the things you have to figure out, right? What is a reasonable amount of time to expect a gadget to work? Absolutely. Seven years seems to be the magic number. Why seven years? Seven years is the default that we'd like to do. Now, I should mention California's law, the right to repair law, is 2021 devices and forward. But that 2021 is kind of a one-time date. So the retroperil law over time will get better and better. The kind of compromise we negotiated with Apple was 2021, which is iPhone 12 and forward. So why seven years, though? Is that like, why not? Why not 10 or five? Like, what was it about seven years?

40:49Seven years was in the in the lemon law historically. So that's kind of and it, you know, tailored toward, you know, electronics type products. I don't think seven years is long enough. I think that's a good place to start. but like I have a 2012 MacBook Pro that still works just fine. So we're going in 11 years on that one. I think we should be talking 15 plus years, but you got to start somewhere. So the existing California law was it requires the manufacturers to keep the parts around. It requires them to maybe repair them for you. If you go get to the repair, you still had to pay them for that repair though.

41:22And they didn't necessarily, Apple didn't necessarily have any obligation to send parts to you to know that you could repair it yourself, right? Right. Yeah, that's the big difference, the big change that we're doing with these right to repair bills is it says manufacturers have to make the same parts, tools, and information available to consumers and independent repair shops that they have in the Apple store. So walk me through that, though, because there's a letter of that law and there's a spirit of that law. And I feel like the spirit of that law is pretty straightforward, right? There are a bunch of tools.

41:51There are ways to make these things more fixable. I should have the same access to somebody at Apple does. The letter of that law says that Apple can do to Sean what it did do to Sean, which is ship him like 9000 pounds worth of equipment in a bunch of Pelican cases and say, here you go, jackass, you figure it out. And that's like, that's better than nothing. There are tools that exist that you can get access to that you can fix stuff. But there's so much gray between the tools exist and you can have them to like, it is easy and doable for a regular human to fix things? Do we just have to be comfortable in that gray space for a while here?

42:26Step back and say, what are we trying to achieve? We're trying to have a robust repair marketplace where products get fixed, where they last a long time, where you have local repair shops in our neighborhoods that can fix everything that all the gadgets in our lives, where maybe we used to have TV repair shops in our neighborhoods. We don't anymore. Maybe those could come back. So it's what we're trying to get at. And then with legislation, you try to approximate pointed fixes to try to nudge the world back in that direction. And then the companies can decide if they want to wholeheartedly embrace that and really work with you to try to address the systemic causes that have resulted in the repair system breaking down, or they can engage in this sort of compliance with a maximal amount of resistance, which has been Apple's approach so far.

43:12Yes. Right to repair shenanigans. Yeah. I call it malicious compliance. Yeah, exactly. Do you think, like, California has just put every manufacturer on notice for all kinds of electronics, not just like laptops and tablets and phones, but like anything over a certain value, right? Anything over 50 bucks. Are you expecting, in general, an explosion in parts availability for these things? Or do you think there's going to be explosion in people attempting to sue companies for not making those parts available? That's a good question. I would say, you know, we're helping some companies, but I'm kind of shocked at the silence that we're seeing from the middle market from most companies.

43:49I mean, obviously you've got, you know, Samsung and Apple and Logitech and some of these companies out front that they're paying attention. But the vast majority, I mean, there's thousands of these companies and I haven't, I've only seen a handful of parts program announcements. So I think companies are behind the eight ball and need to get on it. You got until January 1. How much of this are you trying to do? Like there's a version of this where you could be sitting here thinking like, I just want a gigantic business opportunity for iFixit. I'm going to corner the market on human usable repair tools.

44:21And now that these things are available in workplaces, like I'm going to be a billionaire. My sense would be this is probably too big for iFixit to try and monopolize. But like, are you sitting at this, looking at this as a huge business opportunity for you? Well, the debate when we were working at RetroPair was like, are we going to pass laws that put iFixit out of business? Because the idea is the companies need to provide parts, tools, and information on their site. Like that's what iFixit does. That's how we've always built an alternative ecosystem for Apple products. You can go and get all that from iFixit.

44:51Now, in addition to the iFixit service manual, you can get Apple and you can get a service manual for the iPhone. So I think that's pretty cool. And just so I understand, Apple partnering with iFixit to sell stuff is not good enough under this law. Is that like Apple has to offer it itself? Is that right? It would be. It would be. I mean, that's how Samsung and others are complying. I mean, they have to provide a link to where to go to get it. So if you provide it on iFixit, that would meet the need. Some companies like Samsung is purely going through us. Others like Microsoft is selling parts directly, which is great.

45:22I think that's fantastic. That's what we've been asking for all along. So it's really cool to see it starting to happen. Have you gotten an influx of people asking you about this? I mean, you've already got Google and Samsung and Valve like very publicly. We've written about it. other publications have written, this is where do you go to get your parts for these devices? Are other manufacturers contacting you and saying, yes, do that for me too? We have some companies that we're working with, absolutely. And we're ready to go to help more. But like I said, I'm surprised we're not hearing from more, you know, like pick a random company like Bose, right?

45:56They make a lot of products. They're over ear headphones that are sold in every airport. And these batteries wear out of there after a couple of years and Bose has no strategy. We're not talking to them. They don't have parts available for their quiet comfort headphones. I mean, they have to do something. And I would say that's the default for almost all companies. So it's more the exception than the rule that they're talking to us and working with us. I'm curious what you've heard from the companies you've been negotiating with us on this front. Because I think about even a company like Apple is probably an easy one to think about, right?

46:24Because I think making a MacBook more repairable, pretty straightforward, like not easy, but doable. Like we know what a repairable laptop looks like, one where you can open it up and put in a new battery, right? Like we know what that looks like. Phone, less so, but still sort of doable. But like you mentioned AirPods and I'm trying to imagine if I'm Apple, how I literally, how I make that tiny little integrated thing with all the stuff in it in a way that complies with these laws. What have you heard from the folks who are trying to do these, especially like, you know, smaller wearable things?

46:55Like are folks throwing at you saying we can't do the thing that you're asking us to do? No, it's totally doable. I've talked with, I mean, So for the AirPods, I would point to the Samsung Galaxy Buds, which I think the Verge scored basically identically to the AirPods and said the sound quality is just as good. So the Galaxy Buds, you can pop open and swap out the battery easy. And they're like 25 bucks for a set of new batteries for them. It's great. We sell them. You can get them elsewhere. You just pop them open. There's a gasket. And that's how they all should be. So no, I don't really accept that you can't make these things fixable.

47:26It's just a matter of effort. When we got the Apple Watch, we partnered with a watchmaker, a local watchmaker, and we took it apart with him. And he was just aghast. He's like, are you kidding me? This is the most shittily designed product I've ever seen. And the architecture hasn't changed. He's like, let's take a part of Rolex and let's look at how you really do this. And you can seal these things. You can have gaskets. And the form factor is similar. The sizes are similar. These are very small components, but they can be repairable. So there are shortcuts that we take in mass manufacturing these things, but there are paths.

47:58So when we do a lot of consulting with manufacturers where we give them feedback and we also kind of teach them design for repairability practices. And our point is consistently, we can innovate our way into the future here. We can come up with new innovative technologies that make repairing products at scale at the cost that we need to hit possible. How concerned are you with easily repairable versus, you know, repairable with a lot of knowledge and the parts available? Because I just watched an amazing, amazing teardown by iFixit of the MetaQuest 3. And I watched that teardown and I said, wow, that is a tremendous number of screws, 50 screws to get to the battery.

48:38All these layers of circuit boards, ribbon cables, all this stuff. I looked at that video and I was of two minds about it. One, oh my God, there's so many layers. Do there really need to be that many layers, that many screws? But the other side of my mind was every one of those steps seems easy. It's just a lot of them. I could do that myself at home. No problem. Yeah. As long as there's documentation, you can do it. We just published our repair manual for the new Pixel Fold. It's in depth. It's like 126 steps to get to the battery. So I'm not going to recommend that be the first electronics repair you ever try.

49:11It's kind of bordering on the edge of possible. I think it is possible. were selling a repair kit for it, but I don't expect very many people to take us up on it. You get that with kind of new technologies where there's a lot of complexity. We've taken apart pretty much every VR headset since the Oculus, just because I'm fascinated by the category. Clearly, it's some element of the future. And the mechanical design is really interesting, and the sensors. And over time, you end up with consolidation. You simplify things down. I mean, the Apple Watch system on chip is they took all the discrete ICs and they just bundle them together into one silicon package and there is no more visible complexity for a fixer anymore.

49:49So you'll get there with the optics on these VR headsets over time. Yeah, I think one interesting example of that tension that you're describing, Sean, is I think like you look at the new Surface stuff from Microsoft versus like the Framework 13, right? And the Framework stuff, Sean, which I'm curious to hear your thoughts on because you've spent a lot of time with these things, is, I mean, it is designed for a regular person to take it apart and put it together, right? Like that is the point. You should be able to unscrew a thing, pull a thing out, put it back in, screw it back in, and you're done.

50:19Like that is a sort of end state of right to repair that I think is really interesting. The surface stuff is designed sort of deliberately to be harder to do than that. They're trying to find a middle ground between like you can still get at it, but it's not going to be as simple, which gives us certain affordances that we can have in design and materials and all that stuff. Is it good that we have both of those approaches? Should we all aspire for every gadget to be like the framework where I can just yank a thing out and put another thing back in? Like, where do you feel like we should land here?

50:48From my perspective, what the companies tend to argue is they tend to argue we get better component density when we don't make things upgradable, modular, repairable. And I do think there's definitely a gap between something that's simply repairable versus consumer upgradable, like a framework product where everything is its own little module. and you can put them in because there's been many many many laptops that have had modular parts technically in them but making them end user i pull a piece out i stick another piece in exactly where that went within you know two minutes flat and i have a new gpu that's definitely something new and different and and frameworks should be applauded for that um but to your question to your question like that density is less with a framework than it is with a surface they cram a little bit more into a tighter space in the surface.

51:39And I don't think that is enough justification from my perspective. I want the device that is upgradable year after year and modular and eminently repairable, but I can see why they come at it from that perspective. And I can see why they might be angry that the laws say, well, do we have to redesign our products and think how we're doing our products differently in order to meet the goals of this law? I'd love to care what Kyle has to say about that. Well, I would note the retro repair laws in the U.S. don't address design at all. So the companies can continue to design products however they are.

52:10It just says if you have a repair network for your products, you have to make that competitive. So it's really angling on that competition. You can't have a repair monopoly on your product is what California and these other laws are tackling. In Europe, they're more interested in mandating device design and banning lightning ports, which we could argue about that, but they did it. It was effective. It worked. Here we are. I've got a USB-C port on my iPhone. That's cool. And they're going to do the same thing with removable batteries on smartphones. They're going to mandate removable batteries again.

52:40If you're going to pick a place to draw a line, I think consumables are a pretty good place to draw a line. They're not saying you can upgrade the RAM in your smartphone. They're just saying the smartphone can't stop working when the most fragile, chemically-wearing component inside it fails, which seems like a good initial line to draw. Was it intentional to not think about design because i was i was thinking about sean as you were talking the difference between this and the usbc thing where they are like that is a proactive decision they're like this is what your thing is going to do and the eu is pushing on a lot of that right even some of the stuff they're doing with messaging apps like mandating that they be interoperable like they are telling people what their products will do and how they will work and so far in the u.s the right to repair stuff has not done that like it just seems like it's truly poking a bear if you to tell these companies what they have to do.

53:25And it's a minor miracle the EU got as far as it did. Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting that we got so much fight against the retrograde laws as they are because they're really pretty darn minor. I mean, you saw what Apple had to do to comply. Like, it's not a big tweak. It's just a subtle tweak. Now they've fought against us for over 10 years just on a subtle tweak. So we decided to focus on what was achievable. We talk about, in politics, we talk about the Overton window, which is the window of what politicians can plausibly do. Politicians can't go out and do something totally crazy that society would never put up with.

53:59Debatable. We elect them and then they do the things that are kind of within the scope of what is reasonable. Right. So we picked something that was within the scope of something that was pretty reasonable. It was really important to us to have bipartisan legislation. It passed almost unanimously in California and overwhelmingly in New York and Minnesota and other places. So we've been focused on on bipartisan legislation that can be consensus based, which means that there will be laws that will stand the test of time, they won't be easy to overturn. Yeah, I remember you and I talked a bunch of years ago about kind of the you were in the like, we haven't yet won one, but we're about to win one phase of the right to repair fight that there had been a bunch of almost a bunch of near misses.

54:40And you're like, it is only a matter of time until we tip over this line. And your thought was, we really just need one or two, we don't have to get all 50 states and the federal government to pass a right to repair bill. We need a couple of significant ones to make it so hard for companies to make a million different versions of their gadgets that they're all just going to play ball and it's going to work. Absolutely. With the California law, we're up to 20 % of the U.S. population has passed a right to repair law. I've heard for many years, you know, as California goes, so goes the nation. But then on the other side of this call, you're telling me that an Apple laptop is handled differently for repairs in California as it is in New York.

55:18Well, because that is a business practice and they were able to kind of drive a wedge there. I'm hopeful that when it comes to things like you have to make the repair manual online to sell your product in California, are they going to like GOIP locate people and only make the repair manuals available in California? No, they're doing it nationwide. And I think you'll continue to see that. And I would assume part of it is like, honestly, I would not put it out of the realm of possibility that apple would geo ip fence the access like i really wouldn't but the good news of it is that stuff now exists in the world for regular like you don't have to hack apple servers to get that stuff it just once it's out there it's going to be out there right and as soon as the version of that manual and the existence of those parts is seen by some portion of the broader internet it becomes too big to hide in a way that i think works for the movement that you're talking about, right?

56:11Yeah. I mean, getting this information out there, having Samsung say, this is how you open the phone. I mean, it also, by the way, helps guide regulators because when I go to them and say, hey, it's hard to open the iPad, they're like, okay, sure, Kyle. But then when we've got Apple service manual, let's say, which they haven't posted for the iPad yet, by the way, but to show like, hey, the battery is glued in and this is the process and it's this crazy hard, that makes it much easier for regulators, for academics. One of the big challenges, I think, in regulation and honestly product reviews across electronics is who's out there taking these things apart.

56:44Like when's the last time you guys took something apart while you were reviewing it? And that's not a criticism. It's just, it doesn't happen very often. It's expensive. You have to get a lot of products. I mean, we spent over$10 ,000 on iPhone 15s on launch day just to get enough of them so we could pull them apart and give you guys some kind of analysis of like, hey, if you swap the screens, the selfie camera stops working. No one would have known that if we hadn't tested it. I'm going to plug here and say I totally did take apart the Steam Deck and the Rug Ally for my reviews of those products.

57:13But yes, it doesn't happen all the time. No, and we super appreciate it. And Sean, you go more in depth than just about anybody else in the technosphere, which is really appreciated. We need to see more of that. Sean, can you talk about the Steam Deck? Actually, because I think in the realm of this sort of next phase of more repairable gadgets, I think Valve with the Steam Deck is kind of out ahead of a lot of other companies in the way that it's thinking about how this stuff should work. Is that true? Absolutely. I flew to Valve's headquarters two years ago in August, and I asked them, hey, are the parts for this going to be replaceable?

57:47And the very first hands-on that President had with this thing, this battery in here, it's a small battery. You only get your two hours of battery life, maybe. This is going to wear out. It's going to go lower and lower battery. You're going to let me replace that, right? And they were like, we have a plan to let you repair this device. We will send you more details when they are ready. Which we have learned to be dubious of over the years. Yes, the rug alley. We're still waiting to find out how you repair that one. And then it turned out that you were their partner. iFixit was their partner for the Steam Deck parts.

58:20And you could buy, I think, literally every part of this. Yeah, and it takes a long time to set these programs up. So while they were showing you off, we were hammering out the details, the logistics of how we get parts out there. But it's been really important. It's been really successful. It really shows that repair takes an ecosystem. It takes a product that can be repaired, which maybe is the challenge with some of the foldables right now is they're a little hard to fix. But then it also takes the parts and tools and the information. You have to have that whole ecosystem come together. Otherwise, people, you know, when it breaks, they sort of do the math in their head and they decide to buy a new one.

58:52Yeah. Kyle, can you explain a little more about how a partnership like that comes together? Because I suspect whether it's with you or with other repair manufacturers around the country, a lot of people who make electronics are going to be out there trying to figure out how to strike partnerships like this. So when Valve comes to you and they're like, we want to work with you on some Steam Deck stuff, what happens? Yeah. So there's a spectrum. The simplest thing is they come to us and say, hey, we want to fix the thing. We say, cool, set us up with your supply chain, introduce us to your suppliers.

59:19We'll buy from them. We'll write the repair manuals. We'll build the store for you. We just kind of take care of everything, which is what we've been doing historically. We were the largest resource for how to fix Apple products. We have been for 20 years. We don't work with Apple at all. But aside from that, we build the supply chain and we come up with the tools and we build repair kits. So you get a screen and it comes with the tools that you need to do that repair. And that's kind of our happy spot is just let us do everything. But some companies already have the information or like we work with teenage engineering.

59:47They've got some really cool audio products and they actually, they wanted to write the repair procedures. So they write the repair guides, they put them on, I fix it. And then they send us the parts. And And we're just at that point, we're just an e-commerce company for them. And that's that's perfectly fine, too. So we're pretty flexible with companies however they want. We'll kind of fill in whatever gaps they need. But we're perfectly capable of doing everything from soup to nuts. How do you properly size the repair supply chain pipeline for for users who want to buy parts through iFixit? I mean, I know that you haven't always been able to keep all the parts in stock that I would possibly want for a Steam Deck or a Pixel.

1:00:25Or I think last time I checked, you had like two iPhone mini screens in stock if I wanted to replace one of those. Like, how do you figure that out? It's hard. And we don't know how many of the gizmos are going to sell, how many are going to break. It's really challenging, right? And so you do the best that you can, and then you adapt it over time. And the tighter knit the supply chain is, the better. I'm also planning out. So, all right, we're going to stop production of this device and we're going to make the next version of it. But we have to, at that point, do what's called a last time buy.

1:00:56You have to buy all the parts that you're going to need for the next five or ten years for the device. You're just kind of guessing at that point. So, we do the best we can. And when we get it wrong, our community lets us know. That's fair. Yeah, Sean was lamenting that the Steam Deck stuff has been sort of intermittently hard to get over time. I mean, we have tools. So you sign up on the email list and we'll mail you the moment that the part comes back in. But yeah, that doesn't help when your thing is broken. And I love the part. So what's your sense of kind of what happens most immediately here?

1:01:27It feels like long run, we might start to see a change in the way gadgets are made and work. Like your AirPods might come from a fundamentally different manufacturing process, but that's going to take a while because this stuff always takes a while. Right. Maybe more immediately, like the re-rise of the local repair shop, which seems to be very clearly kind of a goal of this. Like, what do you look for as sort of the first metric of success that like this is working, this law is having its intended effect here? Well, the first and the most easiest thing is to get companies to publish all their service information.

1:01:57So that should happen. New York law goes into effect January 1. So at that point, January 2, you should be looking at companies. And if they're not posting their service information, they're out of compliance, right? And having just that basic level of insight into how are these things put together then starts to help. Then we hope to layer on parts availability and then if the pricing and consumer awareness follows. Right now, people don't fix televisions. You have a TV that breaks, just get a new one. There's no reason. These things are not glued together like AirPods. They're pretty easy to fix.

1:02:27If you have a power supply, go out on a TV. It's crazy to buy a new one. But we have to kind of retrain society that way. Yeah, Sean is going to be like deep in manual deep dive heaven for like the first six months of 2024. It's going to be he's like 100 million pages of documentation and in Sean's house. It's going to be amazing. I have to ask you about parts pairings. Back when I could report on Apple, I have an ethical conflict now, so don't report on Apple. But back when I did, I received those two suitcases full of Pelican suitcases full of Apple repair tools. And I stuck that battery in my iPhone.

1:03:00And then it told me that my battery was not genuine until I went through this procedure to make it genuine. And I know that companies like iFixit, they're worried that these manufacturers may decide to require that some part be paired with some other part, either digitally requiring some kind of special authentication that might be difficult to get, or physically, where they will only sell you a module that has all these different things on it. Can you really repair a TV if they say you need to buy the TV main board, which has all the components on it for the entire TV and you're basically buying a whole new TV?

1:03:34Do we want them to, you know, buy an entire compute board for a phone or can you buy the individual pieces? Yes. So the question here is one around control. Can a manufacturer dictate where and when devices are repaired? And so if you have a chip in the part and a chip in the main board, so let's take the display on the iPhone, for example. There's a chip in the display with a serial number. At the factory, they marry or they pair the serial number in your display to the serial number on your phone. We took two brand new iPhone 15 Pro Max units. We swapped the screens between them, and you lose a bunch of functionality.

1:04:08You lose True Tone. You lose the front-facing camera, which seems like an important feature of a phone. You lose a lot of these features and you also start to get a lot of warnings. It's pretty easy to build those kind of locks in. So that's why we're kind of raising the red flag and saying this is a moment in technology where we need to pause, we need to evaluate. What road do we want to go down? Do we want to go down a road where parts are not interchangeable, right? I mean, for the entire history of the electronics industry so far, you have two PCs, you want to swap the hard drives between them, you can do that.

1:04:39Now we're saying, well, you can't even swap screens between two phones. the entire electronics recycling ecosystem, they don't make money off the commodity. They don't make money off the gold and the silver in these things. They make money because 20 % of the devices that they get can be fixed and resold, and that subsidizes the rest of the recycling. So when you insert this poison pill where you say, well, no, actually you have two broken phones, you can't combine them and make one that works. That's really going to sabotage the economics of the electronics recycling and refurbishment industry.

1:05:09So we need to do something about that. None of the right to repair laws that have passed so far address this. The California law had some language in it that would have done that and then a compromise to get Apple to support the legislation that was removed. So stay tuned for next year, I think. I think we're going to need to do this. We cannot stop with right to repair legislation. We need to keep going. And that's the conversation we're having with all the states about next year's laws. What does keep going look like? I think it's very easy to see right to repair as kind of a binary thing. Either you're allowed to do it or or not, but what you're presenting is a much sort of longer series of steps.

1:05:44Like, what is the step after this? Yeah, so we need to get to a point where repair is practiced regularly on the ground, where the TV not only is fixable, you can get parts, but the people are, and the repair charts start to come back. And so we can't really stop working on this. We have momentum behind this, but we can't stop until we actually see the solution start having an effect on the material world. Someone very wise once told me, the Earth doesn't care about anything that we say. It only cares about when you actually take a shovel and you stick it in the ground and you start doing things.

1:06:14So we need to get right to repair from this discussion, this intellectual discussion, to practically something that impacts how long things last. Are there key states that support parts pairing and other important missing elements from the current right to repair laws where you think you've got the momentum to make it happen there? Yeah, so right to repair bills were introduced in 30 states this year. So I'm anticipating, and Minnesota is still considering it, the hope would be to make substantial progress in many of those. It's not just core electronics. We need to solve this for e-bikes. We need to solve this for appliances, for power equipment.

1:06:48There's a broad spectrum of other products that need to be covered. So I would expect, I mean, Washington is a state where the bill got really close. Microsoft actually endorsed Washington's right to repair bill, and then Apple killed it. So I think you're going to see states where they got really close. in Oregon, they were just short one vote. I think there's many states that you're going to see move quickly at the beginning of next year. The legislative season, by the way, you think about in the tech world, we have CES. Right after CES, that's when all the legislators get to work. And there's like a two, three-month kind of frenzy of activity where between February, March, April, you're going to see a lot of action.

1:07:23So your California celebratory period was very short. Very short. I mean, I can tell you all the coalition is very busy, very engaged. There's an active coalition in each state. And you can go if you want to check out your state, you can go to Oregon.Repair.org and get involved. There's wonderful. I mean, this really is a grassroots movement where like I couldn't even tell you where it's going to happen next. What's going to happen in Pennsylvania? I don't know. There's a great community there that might push forward. At the risk of basically asking you to jinx yourself, does this feel unstoppable at this point?

1:07:56Like, have we tipped into this is going to win? It's just a matter of time? We're making very good price. I mean, we've moved beyond the sky will fall if this passes stage. There was so long. I mean, Apple was wandering around Sacramento telling legislators, hey, if people can open their iPhone, they'll puncture the battery and set it on fire. And they told legislators in Nebraska that if they pass right to repair, it would turn Nebraska into a mecca for hackers. And I think those sort of like sky will fall kind of claims have clearly been proven wrong. It's the same fight we're having about the App Store.

1:08:25If you're allowed to do anything, you will give all of your money to a stranger and also burn your house down. These are the rules. Which, by the way, the App Store has banned apps that report battery status. So Apple's the only one that can tell you how many cycles are on your battery. Interesting. So, okay, so we're past that phase. Are there other sort of obvious roadblocks you're seeing that you still have to get past? So parts pairing is a large one. And then I think you have to look at implementation timeframe. Going back to 2021, is that far enough back? Some challenges around internet access.

1:08:59Should you be able to fix things if you don't have access to the internet? If you look at who uses iFixit, we are per capita much more heavily used in rural areas than in urban areas. right? Farther from access to retail locations. The farther north in Canada you go, the more people rely on iFixit. And so I think making sure that repair is robust and repeatable and that the software diagnostic tools are available to everyone is really important. It impacts far more products than you would think. You think about an outboard engine on a boat. Traditionally, you've been able to fix that without software.

1:09:34Now it's all software controlled. You talk to fishermen and they're like, yeah, I can't fix my engine anymore. Five years ago, I could, but I can't fix the one now because I don't have the software. And that's increasingly the case across everything of the software and the technology. It's making these products better in some ways, but they're not following up with access to the diagnostic tooling that we need. Have you seen any of this? I mean, when we're talking about phones, I mean, it's very hard in the United States. There's Apple and there's Samsung is predominantly the market share of all the phones.

1:10:02Most people buy from them. But when it comes to like outboard motor for your boat, do you see any kind of pushback in that realm where consumers, the people buying those things say, we're going to buy lower tech products instead of higher tech products so that we have the ability to repair them on their own? Are there manufacturers, you know, who are intentionally developing more repairable lower tech devices for those realms? You can see this in the farm equipment industry. If you take a tractor from 1995, its value is continuing to go up. It's not going down. The kind of pre-computer age of farm equipment is in high demand, and you can see the economics playing out very clearly.

1:10:44Now, I think it's interesting that you haven't seen manufacturers take advantage of it. So I haven't seen a manufacturer like Kubota go out there and say, well, we're going to make a lower-tech tractor that's easier to work on and beat John Deere at their own game. It seems like everyone is still in the cult of technology, the cult of the new, which is really frustrating. Because if one of them would break out, I mean, you see the success that Framework is having. I think there's a real opportunity for some of these companies to really differentiate themselves from the Goliaths. I think that's right.

1:11:15And it also, people root for Framework in a really interesting way. Like, there is this sense that companies like Framework are on this morally right side of history. And And I hear people in tech who would never buy a framework laptop and don't even care about laptops who are like, boy, I hope that company succeeds. Because it's like their sense is everything is better if we prove that that can work. It's proposing a different trajectory than what seemed was inevitable. What is the single part of a gadget that you are most excited for everybody to make repairable? If everybody just opens up one thing, is it screens?

1:11:51Is it batteries? It's batteries. 100 % it's batteries across everything. Batteries are consumable. Having a battery glued into a device is like buying a car with tires that are welded on. It's insanity. Go to Home Depot and they're like, hey, get the new smoke detector with a 10-year battery that you never have to change. You just throw the smoke detector away after 10 years. The smoke detector has a radioactive isotope at the center of this thing. We don't want to be throwing these away. right like why in the world would we want everything in the world to have this this chemical pouch inside it that wears out after three years it's absolute insanity we have to move away from glued in integrated batteries and everything until i mean if we get to a point where we have some magical new battery technology that lasts for 50 years okay cool we can glue batteries at that point but we're not there yet yeah i like thinking of batteries as a consumable and an otherwise very long-lasting thing is actually i think a really useful frame for how we talk about technology.

1:12:46Yeah, let's take your refrigerator that was going to last for 30 years and make it last for two and see how happy you are. It just drives me insane. And I've been watching the trend. And by the way, there are underpinning reasons. There are UL standards that have to change. It's not completely the manufacturer's fault. We're in kind of this system that has accidentally been designed that really pushes us in the direction of proprietary battery packs. Even if you do make an interchangeable battery, what standard is there for interchangeable lithium pouch cells, right? There isn't one. What size?

1:13:18If I'm like, I'm a good cell phone manufacturer, I'm going to use the standard battery size. What is that? And that's a problem that needs to be addressed at an industry level to then enable manufacturers to innovate around interchangeable interoperable batteries. I like it. All right. We should let you go. Sean, Kyle, thank you both so much. And Kyle, congratulations on your gigantic victory and your impending billionaire status as the CEO of iFixer. This is a win, I think, for all consumers, everyone who's been agitating for this for so long. I mean, we owe so much to Reddit and all of the enthusiastic folks who've written and called their representatives over the years.

1:13:53Let's not take off the gas now. We got them on the ropes, but we need to keep pushing this until we really solidify and build a solid foundation that the next wave of technology is built on. Love it. Awesome. Thank you both. appreciate you doing this. Thanks. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the VergeCast hotline.

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1:16:59Welcome back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline, as we do every week. For this one, Nathan Edwards is here. Hi, Nathan. Hello. Welcome to the Vergecast. First time. This is very exciting. Thank you. Long time listener, first time participant. As a reminder, before we get into it, the hotline number is 866-VERGE-11. Call and ask us all your questions. You can also email vergecasts at theverge.com if you'd rather not call. We've gotten really good questions the last several weeks. So thank you to everyone who's been calling and emailing. This one, we got a bunch of like charging questions this week.

1:17:29I guess it's like new gadget time. So everybody has lots of charging questions. But this one was my favorite. And the reason we have brought you in, Nathan, is because this is right up your alley. Let's just play the question. First, it comes from Kyle. Hi, this is Kyle from Nova Scotia, Canada. I was wondering if there have been any updates on the Qi2 wireless charging standard, the MagSafe sort of looking magnet thing from a while back. You guys wrote about how the new iPhone is kind of supporting it, but it didn't appear on the Pixel 8. So that's it for major flagships for now. When will we see an Android with Qi 2?

1:18:04I want my hacky magnet accessories and car chargers. I've been listening for ages. Love the show. Thanks. Okay, I love this question because it is so confused and so vague about what Qi 2 is and when it's coming, which is the exact correct response as far as I can tell to what is going on with Qi 2. So, Nathan, just start quickly at the very beginning. Catch me up. What is Qi 2 and why do we care? Okay, so Qi 2 is the sequel to Qi, which is the wireless charging standard that is in pretty much every phone. Almost everything that charges wirelessly right now, except for smartwatches, is Qi. Regular Qi, no magnets, including the iPhone.

1:18:40The iPhone also has MagSafe, which has a ring of magnets to make sure that the charger and the charging coil aligns with the receiver coil. Wireless charging is very finicky. if you're off by a couple millimeters, that takes more power, it's less efficient, is you're not going to get a good lock. The thing the iPhone's always really good at is like you get sort of close and then it just like sort of snaps in a position. That's MagSafe. Everything else is Qi. Yes. Okay. MagSafe phones will work with Qi. And in fact, there's a lot of magnetic Qi accessories that are not MagSafe certified, but they've got the Qi charger and they've got the ring of magnets and they'll stick to the back of a MagSafe phone and charge it just fine.

1:19:16Okay. That's Qi 1. Doesn't include the magnets. Qi2 is basically generic MagSafe. It's over-the-counter MagSafe. Basically, it is wireless charger with a ring of magnets around it. Apple contributed a bunch to the new standard. It's run by the Wireless Power Consortium, which is the same group that administers the Qi standard. And basically, it's got a ring of magnets. So it should be intercompatible with MagSafe to some degree in the sense that Apple doesn't have to do anything. As far as I know, they don't have to do anything to make Chi 2 work hardware wise because the magnets, although they're not exactly the same configuration, apparently, they'll work just fine.

1:19:52Okay. So it's something that's already on Apple. It's not officially on the new iPhones because it's not certified yet. This is weird, right? So like, I remember when the iPhone 15 came out a few weeks ago, Chi 2 came up. It was like, yes, briefly. Yeah. Sort of mentioned in passing. And we tried to figure out like, is this the first official Qi 2 phone? And the answer is like, kind of? It probably will be the first official Qi 2 phone. Okay. So it said, the specs said future Qi 2 support. And I reached out to the Wireless Power Consortium and I said, hey, what's up with Qi 2? Like, is the standard complete?

1:20:29Is it certified? Do we have devices ready to go? Because we've had Qi 2 chargers already have been announced. Okay. And they told me at the time, which was like mid-September when the iPhones launched, they said they hadn't certified any Qi2 devices yet because they were waiting for the test equipment. I see. To be able to certify them, they need to be able to test them and so forth. That stuff wasn't set up yet. And I pinged him again earlier this week, and he basically told me, hold tight. Okay. So I am expecting that there will be Qi2 chargers and probably Qi2 enabled on the iPhones this month, next month, maybe.

1:21:03Okay. As for the actual question, which is when will there be Android phones with Qi 2? I don't know. Nobody knows. The assumption would be that next year would be the answer to that, right? There's no good reason not to have it everywhere, right? This is the new standard. Everyone has been supporting Qi for a while. It feels like, is there an obvious reason we wouldn't see a flood of Android phones start to support this over the next year or so? I would say development pipelines. Okay. Like, I don't know. Qi 2 was officially announced, mentioned at the beginning of 2023. three. If people have had time to put the magnets into the design and manufacturing and stuff, I would say probably spring is the earliest we'd see something.

1:21:41And it also like, I agree, there's no reason not to put it in there because there's a bunch of magnetic chargers out there already. The generic magnetic Qi chargers you have now, they will charge an Android phone actually faster than they'll charge an iPhone. What? Yes, they will. This is why we get questions about charging because charging doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. It's silly. So if you have an official MagSafe certified charger, it's got a little chip in it that tells the iPhone that it's real and the iPhone will charge at 15 watts. Anything else has just a regular Qi charger and the iPhone will charge at 7.5 watts.

1:22:17And that's an Apple thing, because if you take an Android phone and just sort of hold it to the charger or use one of the third party cases that gives you a little ring of magnets in the right spot, it can get 10 or 15. Whatever it normally supports with wireless charging, it can support through that. So you'll get companies that'll be like, hey, this is a 15 watt MagSafe charger. It's a 15 watt charger and it's MagSafe compatible, but it will certainly not, unless it's certified by Apple, it actually won't do that on an iPhone. It's like 15 watts and MagSafe and or. Right. But not simultaneously.

1:22:48No, but Qi2, here we come circling back around. Qi2, the big advantage of Qi2 is it will offer magnetic wireless charging at 15 watts on any phone that supports it without having to pay extra money for the apple certification okay including allegedly iphones and the reason this is very exciting it seems to me is that if q2 is what it is promised it solves both of the biggest problems of wireless charging all at once which is the like finicky i put it down a millimeter off and so it didn't charge problem which is the single most annoying thing about wireless charging and the fact that wireless charging is much slower.

1:23:26So if I'm getting reliable connection to the charger and 15 watts, suddenly I personally can go from like mostly not telling people to buy wireless chargers for their phones because they're kind of more annoying than they're worth in a lot of cases to this actually becomes like a tenable system, right? Yes, I will say that 15 watts is still slower than wired charging in most cases and both MagSafe and any other wireless charger, there's, you know, it'll charge at the max rate when the phone is really low and it'll drop it down as the phone gets closer to a full charge to save the battery a little bit.

1:24:01I don't know what's going on with the iPhone 14 Pro because my battery level is at 88 % health after one year. That's not great. But in general, I don't know what's going on there, but in general, they will only charge, they only hit the peak wireless charging at like, if they're like under 30 % or under 50%, they'll taper off. Got it. Okay. Okay. So yeah, I think my guess would be, and this is purely conjecture based on nothing, that like maybe next summer is about the time we'll start to see real Qi devices. Because the things somebody told me a while ago that has held fairly true. Yeah, sorry, Qi 2.

1:24:34The thing somebody told me that has held pretty true is the pipeline from any announcement to devices is 18 months. So it's like from new standard exists to it starts to be lots of places, including like from reputable companies whose products you will actually buy that won't catch fire and come from Amazon with sketchy names is 18 months. And it's not always that it's sometimes a little longer, sometimes a little shorter, but that's a pretty good like rule of thumb, which would mean if if Cheeto was this January, like summer 2024 is when we might start to see a real run of like devices from big name manufacturers with some of this stuff.

1:25:09And the hope would be that they've been working for this longer than we know. And it could be sooner, but I'm not necessarily holding my breath on that stuff. Yeah, I would say that probably summer is the soonest. I would be curious to know who is going to make the first move, because if depending on which manufacturer it is, do you want to be the company that basically put MagSafe in your phones, like admitting Apple was right about something? That's a really good point. On the other hand, now that it's generic and it's not MagSafe, maybe they're all going to do like, yes, this was a great idea.

1:25:38we told you you should have given it to us or something yeah true i don't know is it going to be samsung is it going to be nothing yeah it's an interesting question i think my guess would be if i'm samsung ever since the note 7 any anything to do with batteries and charging and craziness i'm going to be just a little little slow on just going to take my sweet time on all things batteries and charging so like maybe yeah maybe it's nothing maybe it's google maybe apple just in January is like, it's Qi 2 now. Don't worry about it. And that's where we are. But yeah, I think it's coming, but it's going to keep being confusing for a while, unfortunately.

1:26:14I mean, and the first phones are going to be Apple, or going to be the iPhones that are already here because they don't have to do anything hardware-wise. Fair enough. All right. Well, Kyle, I hope that helps. Nathan, thank you. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody on the show, and thank you for listening. There's a lot more, as always, from everything we talked about at theverge.com. V's full review of the smart glasses is coming later this week. We have a bunch of really good right to repair coverage, and we'll put some links to all that in the show notes, but also read theverge.com.

1:26:45There's tons of news. Netflix is doing weird stuff. YouTube is doing weird stuff. It's just wild times in the tech news world this fall. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or gadgets you want to fix or home improvement ideas for me, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11. one. We've gotten so many fun ones the last few weeks. I really appreciate it. I think we're going to have to do a full hotline episode pretty soon. So keep all your questions coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:27:17Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about the new Apple Pencil, Google's homepage redesign tests, Netflix's gaming plans, and all the rest of this week's news. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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1:28:20We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oof, yikes. or for getting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.