The right to repair has been on the cards in the US for quite a while now. Basically, it encompasses the right of gadget users to get their gizmos rectified at any ol’ repair shop, instead of having to cough up significant sums of money to get the original gadget maker to fix their product for them. And now that legislation might be expected shortly, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak himself talked about how important the right is, also highlighting the impact it has had on his life. He backed the whole movement by making a brief appearance on Cameo at the request of Louis Rossmann, who is known to be a champion of the whole idea.
Free Repair Helped Apple in Its Early Days
This comes as quite a surprise, considering how Apple Inc. is one of the biggest antis of the right to repair. Nevertheless, the Apple co-founder has said that had he not grown up in a “very open technology world”,. He went on to add that back when Apple was not really a thing, every part of the designs and circuits were easily available on paper.
The ten minutes-long appearance seemed to be long enough (no pun intended) for Wozniak to further comment on how the repair scenario has changed over the years. He said that years ago, fixing a couple of gadgets was almost a child’s play, even for “non-technical” family members. He also covered how Apple itself benefited from the “open schematics” of that time. He said that when they were establishing Apple, they could not afford to have an input or output as a teletype, and so, they had to rely on television for the signal output.
After having touched upon how the open-source tech helped him and Apple in their early days, he then turned to an important question, which demands to know why the self-repair community is being suppressed now. According to him, the right to repair sees strong opposition from companies because of its threat to their monopoly, power, and control.
Is it your computer?
He ended on a rather biting note, asking everyone, “Is it your computer? or is it some companies computer? Think about that. It’s time to start doing the right things.”
This elicited a YouTube video response from Rossmann, who asked the Apple co-founder for some monetary assistance in getting a new initiative, calling for a direct-balloting started.
