Okay, let's start by admitting something. I don't think the right to repair movement is some pure, flawless crusade. And I definitely don't think innovation is a simple, one-dimensional good. That's the problem with this debate—people treat innovation like it's always this shining goal we should sacrifice everything for. But what kind of innovation are we talking about? My position is that, yes, the right to repair can hurt a certain type of technological innovation. Specifically, it hurts the business-model innovation that has made devices thinner, more integrated, and more disposable. When companies can't rely on planned obsolescence or proprietary seals to guarantee a steady stream of new sales, their financial incentive to innovate in that particular way—making things harder to open, harder to fix, harder to keep alive—diminishes. Look, I get the other side's point. They'll say that open standards and repairability force companies to compete on actual quality and performance, which is a better kind of innovation. And in a perfect world, maybe that's true. But we're talking about the real, messy market. The innovation we've seen in smartphones, for example, in miniaturization and seamless design, often comes directly from locking components together, using custom screws, and gluing batteries in place. That's a design choice enabled by knowing the user won't be inside the device. Forcing a right to repair shifts that engineering priority. It adds constraints. And constraints can stifle the most ambitious, boundary-pushing forms of product design. If every device needs to be built like a 1990s tractor, open and modular, we might never get the next leap in wearable tech or ultra-compact devices. The movement creates a friction that, intentionally or not, slows down the frantic pace of certain kinds of technological change. It's a trade-off. We might gain longevity and consumer rights, but we lose the unencumbered freedom for designers to pursue form over function, which is where a lot of what we call "innovation" has been happening lately.

SteelManner makes a compelling case about economic savings and the automotive precedent. And I won't dismiss it. The automotive example is a favorite for the right-to-repair side, but it's also a perfect example of the trade-off I'm talking about. Cars are, by and large, incredibly conservative in their fundamental architecture. The basic platform of an internal combustion engine, a transmission, and a chassis hasn't radically changed in decades precisely because of that ecosystem of repair and standardization. The truly disruptive innovation in that space—electric vehicles—initially came from a company, Tesla, famous for its vertical integration and resistance to third-party repair. The constraint of repairability does shape the kind of innovation that flourishes. You say innovation includes sustainability and longevity, and I agree. But that's a value judgment, not a neutral fact. The market, left to its own devices, has largely innovated towards convenience, form factor, and new features, not thirty-year lifespans. My point is that the right to repair movement, through legislation, actively works to hurt that particular engine of innovation. It says the innovation of a perfectly seamless, unibody device that you trade in every three years is less valuable than the innovation of a modular, fixable one. That might be a good societal choice! But we have to be honest that it comes at a cost. When you add the constraint of easy disassembly, you absolutely remove certain design pathways. We can argue whether those pathways—glued batteries, fused screens—are good or bad, but their pursuit has undeniably driven the rapid miniaturization and design elegance we've seen. Forcing a shift in priorities will slow that specific race down. It might start a new, better race toward repairable elegance, but in the transition, the frantic pace of the old race stalls. That's the friction I'm talking about. It's not that innovation dies; it's that the particular, profit-driven, cycle-obsessed innovation that has defined consumer tech for twenty years gets a wrench thrown in its gears. And depending on your perspective, that wrench might be the whole point.

Here’s what I’ll admit. I’ve got an old tablet sitting in a drawer. It’s basically a brick because the battery swelled, and the thing is sealed shut with some kind of adhesive that feels like industrial superglue. Part of me hates that—it feels wasteful and arrogant. But another part of me remembers how cool it felt when I bought it, how impossibly slim and light it was for its time. That design came from a choice. And my whole point is that the right to repair movement, however justified, makes that specific choice harder. SteelManner, you’re reframing this beautifully, arguing that we’re just swapping a bad constraint for a good one. And I agree that “make it unrepairable” is a lousy design goal. But you’re skipping past my core observation: the market, for better or worse, has consistently rewarded that lousy goal with massive profits, which then fund the next round of R&D. You call the upgrade cycle “superficial,” but that cycle pays for the basic research into faster chips, better displays, and new materials. It’s a messy, inefficient engine, but it is an engine. When you say engineers can rise to the challenge of making repairable wearables, you’re probably right in the long term. But in the short to medium term, you are absolutely imposing a drag. It’s not a false choice; it’s a temporal one. The innovation curve for “seamless and compact” will flatten as resources and brainpower are diverted to solve the new puzzle of “seamless, compact, and easily disassembled.” That’s a net slowdown for the kind of progress we’ve grown accustomed to. You keep coming back to cars, but that’s my point too. The repairable ecosystem solidified a dominant design for over a century. The radical break from that design—the EV—came from outside the traditional, repairable framework. I’m not saying repairability kills all innovation. I’m saying it inherently stabilizes a product category, and stabilization is the opposite of the frantic, sometimes wasteful, but undeniably rapid churn we see in consumer tech. So we’re left with a value judgment, just like I said. Do we want to cool down that frantic churn in exchange for longevity and user sovereignty? Probably. But let’s not pretend we’re not trading away anything. We’re trading one type of innovation—the kind that gives us a new, slightly thinner phone every year—for another. And the former type, for all its flaws, has a certain momentum that right-to-repair laws will blunt. That’s the hurt. It might be a good hurt, like pulling a thorn out, but it’s still a feeling of loss.