Fixing your own gadgets, from HomePods to Harmony remotes

Today on the flagship podcast of home theater remotes: repairing broken gadgets and why you should do it. 01:55 - David Pierce talks with Nic of Nic’s Fix, a repair service specializing in Apple’s original HomePod. Nicsfix.com New Apple HomePod 2023 Comparison and Teardown; Is it better? Is it fixed?? 28:15 - Alex Cranz talks with Quin at Harmony Remote Repair, who offers fixes for the discontinued universal remote from Logitech. harmonyremoterepair.com Logitech officially discontinues its Harmony remote 47:07 - iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens joins the show to talk about the state of fixing your own stuff and what’s next in the fight for the right to repair. Rebble with a Cause: How Pebble Watches Were Granted an Amazing Afterlife | iFixit News New York breaks the right to repair bill as it’s signed into law Email us at [email protected] or call the Vergecast hotline at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Alex Cranz?

  Hello, and you are listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Home Theater Remotes, and I'm your friend Alex Cranz, and I am currently sanding my ploopy. My ploopy is a 3D-printed trackball. I've talked about it on the show more than once. I love the thing, but sometimes the plastic gets a little rough and I gotta sand it and make it smooth. That is what I'm doing right now. But one of the reasons I really like the ploopy isn't because I have to sand it sometimes, it's because it's open source. Any part of it I want to repair or modify, I can. I don't have to ask permission. I can just go do it. And there's a ton of documentation online that lets me do it. But a lot of gadgets aren't built like that, right? Most companies don't want you to repair

• 0:50Alex Cranz?

  their gadgets. They want you to go and buy new gadgets, hopefully from them, when your current gadget breaks. So today on the show, we're going to be talking to some of the people who are out there repairing those gadgets, repairing things like the HomePod and the Logitech Harmony Remote. And we're also going to be talking to the guys that I fix it, because like us, they care a lot about the right to repair. It's a very exciting episode. You're gonna have a lot of fun. I'm gonna get back to sanding this ploopy. Stay tuned. Show's coming up right after this. Get smooth.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:56Alex Cranz?

  Okay, welcome back. As I mentioned before, we're doing a whole episode about do-it-yourself gadget repairs. Though it may not be as easy to fix your old tech as it used to be, we're still seeing a lot of independent technicians opening up things like your laptops, phones, smart speakers, and more, trying to figure out the best way to make them work.

• 3:16Alex Cranz?

  And that brings me to our first guest for the day, Nick from Nick's Fix.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  So my full name is actually Dominic Splatstoser, but you guys can just call me Nick for short.

• 3:26Alex Cranz?

  Nick started to spend his free time taking apart the original HomePod way back in, what was it, 2018? After fixing a few of the broken ones, he started his own business doing it. Nick offers a service where you can send him your busted HomePod, and he'll take it apart, repair it for you, and send it back. This is something you probably get with Apple Care, depending on what's wrong with it. But Nick offers a special feature to his repairs that most technicians don't: streaming the repair live on YouTube so you can actually watch your device getting fixed.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  That's actually one of my main focuses for my repair services is offering that experience to actually not just sit around and wait for it to show back up at your door fixed, but to actually be a little involved in the repair process and watch it happen live, ask any questions that you have about it.

• 4:15Alex Cranz?

  Talking to Nick today is my good friend and yours, David Pierce. He's going to be talking to Nick all about his HomePod repair business and his thoughts on how easy or complicated these things are actually to fix. Let's go ahead and roll the rest of this interview. Also, hi, David!

• 4:32David Pierce?

  I want to talk more about choosing HomePods because HomePods are such an interesting thing to me in that like, in a certain sense, the HomePod was like a total miserable failure of a product, right? It was like, it was like very good, but it was too expensive. Not that many people bought them. It was a whole thing. But on the other hand, every single person I know who has a HomePod is like insane about it. They love it. They're like, no, you don't understand. It sounds so much better than all of your like crappy Google stuff. People have such weird feelings about the HomePod. Why did, why did you?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's actually spot on. I'm, I'm one of those HomePod fanatics.

• 5:02David Pierce?

  Okay, there you go.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I didn't actually buy my first one when they were first released. I was actually pretty skeptical at first, but full-time, I actually work as a sales engineer at a software company and our CEO came in one day with their HomePod and that was the first time I ever heard one. And that was also the first time I ever heard anything that sounded that good. I was just absolutely blown away that, that the sound that was coming from this like small mesh object on the table was just permeating so like omnidirectionally, you know? So I'd always been fascinated with them, but I never really stepped up and spent the money on one until towards the end of 2018. I bought one from Best Buy for myself

• 5:44Speaker 02

  as like a Christmas birthday present and I absolutely loved it. I actually ordered for Best Buy like in-store pickup. So I showed up as soon as it was ready to pick up. I grabbed it, went home, set it up, used it for a few days, and then I got an email from Best Buy a few days later saying, "Hey, we noticed that you haven't picked up your HomePod. We're just gonna go ahead and ship it to you." And I was like, "Uh, okay."

• 6:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's an email you just like pretend you never saw, right? You're like, "Oh, I don't know what you're talking about. I never got your email."

• 6:14Speaker 02

  I was like, "I don't know what'll actually happen or not." So lo and behold, a few days later, a second one shows up and that's when I got to experience what, what they call stereo pair for the first time, which is what allows you to basically pair two HomePods together so that way you've got left and right channel versus just mono audio out of each one. And uh, man, if it, it, it, the math doesn't work out because you'd think just two speakers is two times better than one, but it's, it felt so much more than that. And uh, that bit me. After that point, I was, I was addicted. I started looking up how I could get my hands on these for as little money as possible. Cause you know, three hundred to three hundred and fifty bucks a pop is, it's hard to swallow, even, even for how good they are.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, it adds up.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So I went online and I found quite a few broken ones on eBay. And a lot of them were described as, you know, just won't power on. So I was like, okay, uh, let me Google around a little bit and see if anybody's actually fixed this before. Lo and behold, there was this uh, YouTube channel like Electronics Repair School or something like that. And it's, the video title is uh, repairing the most irreparable Apple product ever, or something like that.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Okay, that's tricky. That's crazy. Okay, this will be hard. Yeah, we have to melt it. Totally, this will be a long video.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  It took the guy like two to four hours or something to get into it, diagnose the actual problem, fix it, and then put it back together again. And I, I saw that and I was like, I could probably do that a little better. Most of what I learned and what I still learn to this day is, is just simply through searching the internet. Usually just Google, knowing how to search for what you're looking for. And you know, weeding through the results until you find something that you can uh, work with. And that's actually how I managed to discover the repair for uh, one of the most common issues with HomePods being death farts.

• 8:15David Pierce?

  Sorry, is that the technical term? Death, death farts? We're, we're good with this as the official term? Yeah?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  That's the one that I've and many others have been rolling with, so we're using it. So essentially, death farts are, you hear this sort of like really loud buzzing sound from the HomePod, followed by an unexpected restart. And it's easier to just call it death farts, cause it sounds like it's a very large flatulence.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  And it's usually associated with the HomePod failing shortly after, so hence the nickname. The reason why it happens is because there is too much what's called DC offset being generated by the amplifier and sent into the subwoofer speaker. For a while, nobody knew how to fix this. There was one person who theorized that it was coming from the amp chip, but again, there was no actual, exact replacement for that amp chip. And I saw that as a challenge and I took it up. I did a whole bunch of Googling, just DC offset. DC offset in amplifiers, how, what causes DC offset? And I came across this blog post that was talking about it.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  And they said DC offset will get worse with heat. And that was my eureka moment. I was like, okay, what if I take my hot air gun? And I move it around the board with my multimeter connected, watching for the DC offset, until I see that offset spike? And that gave me about a quarter sized area on the board that was really sensitive to that heat. So then what I did to pinpoint, because of the really dense component placement on these boards, I heated up my plastic tool. And I would use the hot plastic tool to touch all the different components until I saw which component specifically made the DC offset spike.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  And that's when I found those capacitors that tend to go bad over time, slowly start to filter less and less DC voltage before that audio signal is sent through the amp and to your subwoofer speaker. And the worse those caps get, the more DC voltage is generated. And when it reaches a certain point, the amp will actually detect that and produce that death fart behavior. So just a bit of Googling and trial and error and poking around allowed me to crack one of the toughest irreparable nuts in the HomePod.

• 10:39David Pierce?

  It's not bad. Yeah, so wait, you were about to tell me about the first ones you tried. I was, I was gonna ask about that too. Like, what was that first one like?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Oh, that first one, I was, it was absolutely nerve wracking. But I kept telling myself, you know, it's already broken. I don't have much to lose. This was actually before I even had any of the proper tools. At the time, all I had was a standard soldering iron. I wasn't able to actually get to the component that you need to replace effectively with the soldering iron. So what ended up, I ended up doing was taking a knife and like stabbing at the diode and breaking the Bakelite casing apart on it. And then essentially just soldering a new diode on top of the, the broken old one.

• 11:18David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Just to see, just to test if my suspicion was correct that most of these no power home pods were in fact caused by the same root issue. And that's what I discovered after buying a dozen or so of these broken ones is majority of them have the same issue. But nobody's even putting very great information out there on how to repair this or offering services. So that's, I, I saw the opportunity there and I seized it.

• 11:45David Pierce?

  Did you just do the one and then you're like, okay, this works. I can fix it?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  No, no. And so the first one was a huge relief because I was like, that feeling of like actually fixing something and bringing it back to life. I, I don't know. It's like a drug, but I felt a little more confident. So I worked on probably about a dozen more for myself. And then, uh, I, I built up the confidence and, uh, got down a decent technique that minimized damaging any parts on it, getting into it, you know? And then, uh, once I had what I felt like was a decent stockpile of spare parts. Cause I was a little worried about, you know, breaking people's stuff and not having anything to, you know, replace it in that, in that case. That's when I started surfing around social media like Reddit and YouTube,

• 12:32Speaker 02

  finding people leaving comments saying, hey, my stuff's broken. And then letting them know, hey, I'll fix it for you if, uh, you cover shipping totally free. Just to, just to get my name out there, build up a reputation. And, uh, did that a few dozen times. Started charging money for the repairs. Once I felt really confident and I started getting a lot of positive feedback on, on it. And also knowing that. That the repairs actually last, that I'm not just replacing something that's gonna blow up again in a few months.

• 13:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, alright, so walk me through the process. So one, one shows up in your workshop, it arrives, what do you do?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  So, uh, the process actually starts a little before I even have them send it in. So what I try to do is, first of all, screen the repairs before I have people send them in, because there are unfortunately still a few things that can't be fixed on them. And because there isn't a way to fix that issue, I don't have ways to fix those broken parts and then offer that as a repair economically.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  So what's on that list? What are like common things that you see that you're just like, I can't fix this, this is hopeless?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Basically, the only issue that we haven't been able to fix are software issues with the logic board. So that could be an interrupted update causing it to boot loop or become bricked. Uh, the most common symptom of this being the blinking volume buttons, that's, that's what everybody calls it.

• 13:57David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  If you're experiencing boot loops or the blinking volume buttons, any kind of software issue, since there's no way to restore the software on that, that's pretty much where I say, I'm sorry, I can't do anything unless you're able to secure another HomePod and I can do the logic board, I'll, I'll just swap the logic board for you. Every other issue, be it any issues with your sound, the bass, physical damage, and then most commonly, no power whatsoever, all of those issues we've found repairs for. And if we can't do the board level repair, then I do have enough parts on hand to just replace the part outright.

• 14:34David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay, alright, so you, you vet through this first process to figure out like, is this a thing I can do or is this not a thing I can do?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 14:41David Pierce?

  Do you tell the people you can't help? Just like throw it away? Godspeed?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  What I usually try to tell people is have hope, hang on to it if you can, and wait because maybe one day we will find a repair for this, or Apple may give us a way to repair this. And what's really frustrating with those ones is there's actually a way to connect these things to Through your computer or Mac physically via USB. Uh, if you rip off the rubber foot on the bottom, there are a bunch of debug pins and you can essentially solder a USB cable on there, or if you, if you know you are and you're, you're fancy like that, you can use that, but you can connect a USB cable to the bottom of it, plug it into your computer and then be it a Mac or PC,

• 15:29Speaker 02

  iTunes or Finder recognizes that a HomePod is connected to your machine. And Finder even gives you a button to click, says, it says, restore. So you click it and then it says, we're unable to restore the software. Uh, I presume it's because Apple doesn't have the software available on their servers perhaps. But we also don't have the IPSW file that you would normally use to restore essentially any other Apple product that, that, that already exists. Uh, including the HomePod Mini, actually, which is, it's, it's, it's kind of strange because they allow you to restore the HomePod Mini, but they don't allow you to restore the original HomePod.

• 16:09David Pierce?

  Oh, that is weird.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Possibly maybe because they didn't anticipate anybody really getting that far.

• 16:15David Pierce?

  That's, yeah, that's, that would be a very Apple-y explanation where they're like, ah, nobody's even gonna try.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  But at the same time, if for these issues with the soft, what we suspect are software issues, at least. If it was as simple as restoring the software on them, then you would think they would be able to repair those in the Apple Store. Uh, because a lot of people go bring them into the store and they say, we can't repair this, we just have to outright replace it for you.

• 16:40David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. All right. So I guess it sounds like you probably know what the problem is for most of these things before they arrive on your, on your workshop table.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:49David Pierce?

  So there's no like, sort of opening it up and poking around just to see what would happen most of the time, I would guess.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yep. So generally, if it's no power, even in that case, we've seen a few different root causes for no power failures. But generally I can take a pretty good guess based on the power draw from the wall, exactly what has failed. So like a power draw between like three and 10 watts is usually the most common failure that we We see, which is the shortage shock key barrier diode on the amplifier board. And then a lesser power draw of around one to two watts. More often than not, is actually a shorted capacitor on the logic board. Interestingly enough, we've seen different capacitors failing on the logic board. Um, but ultimately all causing the same no power issue.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  And then the third and least common being absolutely no power draw whatsoever, which is a blown fuse in the power supply.

• 17:46David Pierce?

  And how easy is it to actually get inside of the thing in the first place? Like, Apple is not exactly famous for wanting you inside of its gadgets.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Well, when I fix it and a handful of other people were first trying to get into these things. They absolutely destroyed them getting into them. Which, uh, I mean, it's understandable. It's the price you pay when you don't have any information available on how to open these up. Sometimes you gotta know to know, you know?

• 18:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  So after that, uh, there was this, uh, YouTuber and Redditor, Oh With Me Nick, who actually found a rather graceful way of opening these up without destroying them.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  This isn't very easy to do. I wouldn't suggest taking this apart unless the warranty is gone. The power cable is not replaceable, so don't try pulling it.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Actually getting inside, if you have the experience opening them up before, it's a, it's a walk in the park.

• 18:38David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Um, but if it's your first time, you're definitely going to feel pretty nervous working around certain components. You might end up actually breaking something, but having gone through a few hundred of them by now, we, it's, it's a breeze. Like I said, it takes like 30, 45 minutes to crack it open, fix it and put it back together again. So.

• 18:57David Pierce?

  How specialized are the tools you have for this? Is this the kind of person thing like anybody with a butter knife in a dream could do? Or do you have like a specialized tool set to make all this work?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Huh. Well, like it was with my first attempt at the very beginning, with enough motivation, you can do whatever you want.

• 19:16David Pierce?

  A butter knife in a dream.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. But with the right tools, nothing I have is specialized. So I've just got the standard iFixit Jimmy tool to crack open the the top plastic. And then I use the heat gun, which is a standard tool for board level repairs. And I've got a flathead screwdriver that I use to actually pry at certain parts. And then a T6 Torx screwdriver, which to that point, actually surprisingly, Apple used the same screw size. T6 for all of the screws in this device, which is quite the opposite of the 2020 MacBook Pro that I just worked on yesterday.

• 19:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's like an unusually helpful thing for Apple to do.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's such a strange dichotomy of both repairability and irreparability in the same product. Because you've got all the same screw size throughout the whole thing, but then they glue it together.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, that sounds about right. So how long does this take you normally? Like, are you are you folks' HomePods kind of in and out in a day now for the most part?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  That's what I usually do is the same day that they're delivered. I'll go ahead and set up the stream, shoot them an email, letting them know when the stream's gonna happen. And then usually within a few hours, we'll we'll get them fixed up and then the next day we'll ship them back. More often than not, I like to, after repairs, just leave them plugged into power overnight before I just call it good after leaving it plugged in briefly and then sending it back to them.

• 20:47David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. So and that that kind of makes me wonder, like, one of the things I was gonna ask you is, what should Apple and other companies be doing to make this stuff more repairable? Because I think you and I probably agree that all these things should be more easily repaired. But it also sounds like you've kind of gotten to a point where it's not that hard. It's not that arduous and that maybe, like, it would be great if it wasn't glued together. But it doesn't sound like it's a gigantic issue for you to get in and repair these things anymore. Like, do you wish that there were things Apple would do to make this? Easier on you?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yes, there's a lot of things that I wish Apple would would do, of course.

• 21:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  So, yeah, we we obviously, we know how to fix a lot of these issues now, but it still leaves a lot of questions. Without board schematics, we don't really know why these things are failing. We can only take our best guesses. Second to that, without board schematics, we don't know what we can upgrade to potentially avoid these faults from happening again in the future. But most importantly, I think it would help if companies like Apple had people dedicated to evaluating their products before releasing them and assisting them with making them more repairable before they even put them out in the first place.

• 22:00David Pierce?

  Okay. Do you worry that then they'd put you out of a job, like if it was so easy to repair, no, they wouldn't, they wouldn't need Nick to do it for them?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so, because at the end of the day, there's always going to be people out there who are out of warranty, for example, and they don't want to go and pay the premium for the first party to fix it for them. And I'm here doing it in my free time. I am more than happy to charge a reasonable rate for repairs.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  Have you gotten into doing other Apple products? You mentioned the the MacBook and dealing with that stuff like I know it's it's a deep well of unrepairable Apple products out there. How much of that have you gotten into?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. So I've always been a bit of a tinkerer and self-repairer for my my whole life. But recently, and this is what I say on my website, too, is I specialize in HomePod repairs. But I'm also open to take a look at anything that you've got that you may also want to get fixed. Be it an Xbox controller, we've had some of those in for stick drift repairs. We worked on a Intel NUC, which is like a small form factor computer.

• 23:02David Pierce?

  Sure, yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  And then last night was actually my first time streaming and working on a newer MacBook Pro like this, the 2020. Prior to that, I haven't touched anything newer than like 2010, 2011. So it was it was quite a a learning experience.

• 23:19David Pierce?

  So now that you've seen all this, where does the HomePod fit into kind of the like repairability index of all the other Apple products you've seen? Even like the HomePod Mini?

• 23:28Speaker 02

  I would put it a little less than average because of the software issues. If there's no recourse if the software goes awry on your HomePod. So for that alone, I would, I would knock it down a few points. But aside from that, hardware repairability wise, we haven't run into anything that we haven't been able to fix yet.

• 23:47David Pierce?

  So, and what about outside of Apple stuff? Like, I think you're, I suspect, like, looking at kind of the whole world of right to repair and all this stuff. Like, do you feel like there's a, there's a bright future for you as a person who wants to help people fix their stuff? Or is this all kind of trending in the everything is glued together and harder and harder to take apart direction?

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Uh, that's hard to say because it, for a while, it did feel like things were moving more and more towards glued together. But then you look at the newer products that Microsoft was putting out. It looks like they're actually making it easier to repair now. And if I'm not mistaken, they actually also have people that they, that they work with that actually tell them how to make it more repairable, too.

• 24:31David Pierce?

  But that's a good sign. I feel like Apple is going to be the very, very, very last company to sign on for this, would be my guess. Like, but it does feel like it's coming. I feel like there is, there is reason to be optimistic that by, by choice or not, Apple and others are going to have to start to play ball with, including with folks like you. Like, do you have a sense of what it would look like if Apple was like, we, we welcome third-party repairers? You know, Nick, welcome to the fold. Like, would you want that? Would you want to be involved with Apple that way?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Uh, that's the dream.

• 25:01David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  If they actually worked with their customers in, in third-party repair shops and actually, you know, identified these faults and, and took in that feedback better, that's the dream.

• 25:13David Pierce?

  Well, thank you. This was really fun. I'm really glad we got to do this.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. Glad I could be here.

• 25:20Alex Cranz?

  All right. Thank you, Nic, for talking with David for the show. It was a super insightful conversation. Obviously, since David recorded that interview, there's a new second-generation HomePod. The big HomePod is back, baby. And we talked to Nic to get his thoughts on the speaker and its repairability. Nick, of course, has already done a teardown video of it, so here's what he told us about the new HomePod.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  So, repairability does seem much easier overall. It's great to see now that everything is screwed together. There's no more adhesive holding anything, but rather in place, there's gaskets. So more people, I feel like, will be able to get these open and put them back together again without breaking things in the process. It's also really nice to see that the power cable is not only removable like the first generation was, but it's significantly easier to remove. As far as downsides, they now tie the drawstrings together to keep the mesh snug, and they don't give you enough length to untie it without the strings slipping through the mesh.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  So, we were able to stuff the mesh back into the base without it, so the end result was pretty much the same. But it is a little more tedious than it was in the first generation, where the strings were definitely just long enough for you to pull them back together and cinch that mesh back up. And then, you know, overall construction and quality of the parts themselves felt pretty good. It's different than the first generation. It feels much more like a big Mini, both in terms of the actual feel of the parts that they use, the plastics, and also how it's put together. It's exactly like the Mini.

• 26:56Alex Cranz?

  Thanks again to Nic. If you want to check out his repair service, you can go to nicsfix.com. That's a N-I-C-S-F-I-X. Only one X in there, guys. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll be talking about fixing the discontinued Logitech Harmony remote.

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• 28:37Alex Cranz?

  And we're back. Hey, guys. So, we were talking about repairing the HomePods, a product Apple is still selling and updating, but what about the tech that is now off the store shelves and no longer being manufactured? You know, like the Logitech Harmony Remote. Logitech officially stopped supporting their universal remote control way back in April 2021. It was super devastating for myself and many other Logitech Harmony Remote fans. So what happens when that remote now breaks? With a quick search, you'll probably end up on Quinn's page, harmonyremoterepair.com.

• 29:10Speaker 07

  We went to, you know, a web platform, and it took off.

• 29:15Alex Cranz?

  Quinn has been repairing Harmony Remote since 2010, more than a decade before they were discontinued. And like Nick, he gets sent gadgets from all over the place for him to fix and then send back. He just doesn't stream it. The Harmony Remote is such a niche gadget to dedicate to repairing, so we had to talk to Quinn about his experience fixing thousands of universal remotes.

• 29:39Alex Cranz?

  Hey Quinn, I'm glad you could join us.

• 29:41Speaker 07

  Hey, thanks so much for having me.

• 29:43Alex Cranz?

  I gotta say, I'm super excited. I know we were talking right before we started recording about our Harmony remotes. How many do you have that you don't repair? That you just use?

• 29:54Speaker 07

  Oh, really? Only two now.

• 29:56Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 29:58Speaker 07

  Since we've been doing this for like 13 years, you know, we sort of went through the whole gamut, you know, starting with the older Harmony 880s, 890 series, and then falling in love with the Harmony 1.

• 30:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 30:13Speaker 07

  Which is still actually my favorite.

• 30:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god, good, mine too!

• 30:19Speaker 07

  It really is.

• 30:20Alex Cranz?

  It's so clean!

• 30:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, and easy to use, and it still has a lot of physical buttons, which, you know, a lot of the older folks, I mean, that's one of the reasons they would rather get them repaired than move on to something like the Elite, or the Ultimate, or even use a cellphone now. I mean, that was the big push, was to sort of move to the smartphone platform and throw away the physical controller completely.

• 30:50Alex Cranz?

  I gotta tell you, I had a Vizio TV. There was a year, 2016, Vizio said, "We're gonna do these TVs, and we're not gonna ship a remote. We're gonna ship a tiny tablet." I could not find that tablet anywhere, and I have to use my phone, or like my Apple TV remote. It's the worst thing, like a physical remote, just superior.

• 31:10Speaker 07

  I wonder if you can use a Harmony on that?

• 31:13Alex Cranz?

  You can. I just haven't set up. I have an old Harmony 650 laying around that may or may not have some acid damage in the battery that I need to go clean up.

• 31:22Speaker 07

  Oh, hey, you know, I know someone who might be able to fix that for you.

• 31:27Alex Cranz?

  You're just helping me out so much today, Quinn, thank you. But can you tell me kind of how you got started doing this? Because you repair a lot of them. As our listeners know, the Harmony line is, for all intents and purposes, dead. There's no real development on it. Some people are still kind of working on the software. There's a demand on Reddit that I totally agree with, that they should just open source it and give us all access. But you're repairing these. You're keeping those of us who still cling to remote is good.

• 31:54Speaker 07

  Well, you know, Logitech was never interested in repairing them or even working with third-party repair shops.

• 32:04Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:04Speaker 07

  I mean, and it started back in 2010 when I was tired of having four and five remote controls. And, you know, the first thing I did was like, you know, I thought, ah, man, maybe Radio Shack has a universal remote that I can use. And I looked at it and I was like, oh, I don't like this. What else is out there? I had never heard of Harmony. So, so I Googled universal remote and there was all this stuff about Harmony, Logitech Harmony Remote. I said, what's that? So I read about it and I said, oh, my God, this thing's great.

• 32:37Alex Cranz?

  [laughing]

• 32:38Speaker 07

  You choose A and B from the Chinese menu and put it in and then download the stuff over USB. I said, this, I gotta have one. So I get a Harmony 880. It lasts about a year, I guess, just sort of out of warranty and suddenly no devices work at all.

• 32:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 07

  Nothing's responding. I said, oh, hmm, could be the IR emitters. And low and behold, the IR emitters had burned out. So I called Logitech. I said, hey, I've got this Harmony 880. It's just out of warranty. Can I send it to you to get it repaired? They're like, no.

• 33:15Alex Cranz?

  [laughing]

• 33:17Speaker 07

  We don't, we don't do that. I was like, well, I get that. Some, some, you know, some companies, it's not, you know, cost effective for them to do that. What have, you know, where can I go to get it repaired? And they're like, we don't know. I'm like, well, what can you do? And they said, well, we can give you a 50% discount coupon to buy a new one.

• 33:37Alex Cranz?

  [laughing]

• 33:38Speaker 07

  And that was just so bizarre.

• 33:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 07

  Because as you know, these are not $25 remote controls and neither are they, you know, like $30 Logitech mice or keyboards. And I think that's probably what their model was based on. It's like, we're not going to fix those. We're just gonna... You know, if somebody's gonna, if it breaks, somebody's gonna buy another one. Right. So, but, you know, the Harmony 880 at the time was like a, I don't know, $250 remote control. So I'm like, there must be other people that, that this is happening to. So I started to research it and low and behold, a lot of people had broken Harmony remote controls. Shocking. And like, nobody, you know, people were trying to fix them themselves and they were,

• 34:25Speaker 07

  or they were taking the 50% discount coupon, you know, but I just thought, my God, there must be something I can do. So that's how it started. I, I started with just a simple repair. I actually used eBay, an eBay service. I said, you know, if your Harmony's IR emitters have burned out, send us your remote and we'll swap out the IR emitters for you. And it was really reasonably priced. It was like $30 or something. And, and at first I didn't think really anything would come of it, but yes, people started sending in their remotes on an eBay platform. And I was like, okay, this could be something maybe. So, you know,

• 35:10Speaker 07

  my background is software development. I really wasn't a hardware guy at all. So I didn't know a lot, except for just, you know, a little bit of hobby soldering here and there. So I had to sort of talk to friends who were electrical engineers and, and we started opening these things up and just, you know, and then it turned out that certain things go wrong with them. Yeah. And it's always the same things. Each model actually has an Achilles heel. Ooh, interesting. Yeah. For the Harmony 650, it's the buttons. Oh. They always tend, those squishy buttons, they kind of stop working after a while.

• 35:53Speaker 07

  So it's the squishy buttons that need work. The 880, 890, their IR emitters burn out, their snap dome buttons don't work, and you get the dreaded blue screen of death on those. So, you know, it doesn't render any images, just the backlight goes on.

• 36:10Alex Cranz?

  And that's just on the remote.

• 36:11Speaker 07

  And that's just on the remote, yeah.

• 36:13Alex Cranz?

  Whoa, brutal.

• 36:14Speaker 07

  You know, and the Harmony One, well, you know, don't drop it too many times because we've done thousands of LCD replacements on the Harmony One. So we discovered this just pretty much through some research and trial and error. You know, this is just a family business. It's just me and my son and daughter and wife and everyone sort of did a little bit of of stuff. My daughter was really good at, um, you know, web design and so she helped the website go up and my wife was really good with narratives and verbiage and writing, so, and my son dabbled a little in soldering.

• 36:53Speaker 07

  So that's what happened. And in 2010 or so, we, we went to, you know, a web platform.

• 37:00Alex Cranz?

  Is this like your full-time job now? Are you, are you still software developing? Or is this kind of like a hobby repair thing you do on the side?

• 37:08Speaker 07

  It's more like a ho- and it was a, it was a hobby sort of, uh, you know, second job kind of even back in 2010, I was, I was working at the New York City Department of Education for many, many years. And I sort of did those two things at the same time. It was kind of brutal in the beginning because we had a lot of orders and so I'd be burning the midnight oil, doing it, because my thing was to really get it out within 24 to 48 hours.

• 37:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 07

  Because I knew, you know, people were like, Quinn, I, I can't live without the remote. I don't even know how to control my AV setup at home without it. Or my wife is gonna kill me. I, we gotta go back to the four remotes and I don't even know where they are, you know? So it was really important to sort of try to get these things in, do the repair the same day if possible and get it out either later that day or the next day. So it was very fast turnarounds. And then it just so happened that I retired a few years later and this kind of became the full.

• 38:20Speaker 07

  Time thing. And once Logitech stopped manufacturing them a couple of years ago, I thought that that would be the end of it.

• 38:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 07

  You know, I really did. I said, oh, okay. Well, that's that.

• 38:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 07

  It was a fun run. It was nice. Helped a lot of people. But then something strange happened. It was kind of like you have these two camps now. There are folks who said, well, I'm done with Logitech. And who knows how long they're going to keep the software backend up.

• 38:51Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 07

  And when they shut those servers down, well, then the new ones are bricks. Because they need that service up and running in the cloud. And the older ones, they'll work forever as long as you don't change anything in your in your AV setup. But the second you get a new TV or a new receiver or whatever, well, you're not going to be able to program it. So anyway, that camp is sort of like saying, well, we're done and we're going to look for an alternative.

• 39:17Alex Cranz?

  Which doesn't really exist.

• 39:19Speaker 07

  Which doesn't really exist as far as we can see. That that space is really.

• 39:23Alex Cranz?

  There's there's pretenders to the.

• 39:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 39:26Alex Cranz?

  Like, some people have attempted, but no one's really nailed it the way that Logitech did.

• 39:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, the sofa baton, I think, was one.

• 39:34Alex Cranz?

  Cavvo, I believe, was another one. And, you know, a lot of the the receiver makers, they're just like, just use our, like, plug everything into your receiver that you've spent $2,000 on and use that.

• 39:44Speaker 07

  Right.

• 39:45Alex Cranz?

  That's a little expensive for someone who just wants to run their TV and their PS5.

• 39:50Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the other camp was like, well, I want to keep this going as as long as I can. And so what happened was, since there were no more being sold by Logitech or distributors, there was only third-party markets like Amazon or eBay and everybody jacked their prices up on these used models. And so it became more reasonable now. People said, well, I'm not going to pay $250 for Harmony One. And then they found me. And so suddenly the repair business actually got very busy again. And, you know, it goes in drips and drabs, up and down. But and now we're still going strong, you know?

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  Still pretty busy.

• 40:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, we might get, in the heyday, we were getting about 15 or 20 a week. Like when we were discovered. But now we still get, you know, seven to 10 maybe a week.

• 40:51Alex Cranz?

  That's still a lot of remotes.

• 40:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So we've done, we've actually repaired about 6,000

• 41:00Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 41:00Speaker 07

  of them. And we've sold a lot of parts too, because we really encourage, you know, I'm a big fan of right to repair.

• 41:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 07

  And we put out some YouTube videos on how to change the LCDs, on how to fix buttons if you want. So some of the trouble is some of these parts are proprietary and you can't get them anywhere. But a lot of it is also kind of off the shelf stuff, or you can harvest them from a parts remote. So we encourage people to do that if possible. If they can get a, a broken one, maybe you can use the parts from that to fix what's wrong with yours.

• 41:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:41Speaker 07

  You know?

• 41:42Alex Cranz?

  We're seeing a lot more 3D printing. We're seeing a lot more going to factories where you can kind of get some one-off PCBs and stuff like that.

• 41:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:50Alex Cranz?

  Uh, from companies. How much of that do you think is going to play into the repair business for something like the Harmony Remote?

• 41:57Speaker 07

  For us, probably not, because the most common point of failure on almost all of these remotes is the LCD.

• 42:06Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 42:07Speaker 07

  For the ones that have them.

• 42:08Alex Cranz?

  And that's like a little custom.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  They are not off the shelf, you know?

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Speaker 07

  Logitech, you know, they did proprietary LCDs. As a matter of fact, for the first few years, they were happy to play ball with us.

• 42:25Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:26Speaker 07

  And they actually put me in touch with their LCD manufacturer in China.

• 42:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 42:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. First I said, listen, I'll buy, I'll buy LCD, you know, I, I had this whole thing. I said, look, you guys don't repair them. I'll repair them. Send your customers to me and I'll be your, you know, they'll love you.

• 42:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 07

  People will love you. Just, you know, I'll do the repairs. You just make sure that I can get the parts. I'll buy the parts from you.

• 42:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 07

  And Logitech was like, uh, no.

• 42:59Speaker 07

  You know what we'll do though? We'll give you a contact person in China. And you can contact them and, and you can buy directly from them, which actually worked out well for us. You know, but, but the minimum order requirement is like 4,000 LCDs.

• 43:16Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be a couple of years before you go through all of those.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  Well, that's what happened. We said, okay, well, we'll take it. We'll take a chance and we'll make like one or two buys. And now we're sort of working through them and we still have enough to keep us going for a little while. But once when the when those LCDs are gone, then that part of the business will shut, you know, and so we'll see. We'll see how far we can bring it.

• 43:41Alex Cranz?

  People will have to be harvesting them on eBay.

• 43:43Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  And shipping that along with the the remote that needs to be fixed.

• 43:47Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 43:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's brutal.

• 43:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it's like, we talk a lot about right to repair. And we were talking about it a lot on this particular episode of the Vergecast. And I think the Harmony remote for me is one of those things that really calls this out, because it is this product that is very niche, right? Like, you did about 6,000 repairs. In the grand scheme of thing, that's, that's a fairly small amount compared to like what Apple's doing.

• 44:12Speaker 07

  Sure. Yep.

• 44:13Alex Cranz?

  But every single person, you and me included, who has a Harmony remote loves it.

• 44:18Speaker 07

  They do.

• 44:19Alex Cranz?

  Like, if I don't have, if my remote's not working, if I it's like run out of batteries and I don't have any batteries in the house, that's worse than having like, the Wi Fi not working. Like, that's worse than my power being out. The frustration of losing this piece, because it is such a simple product that really just fits right in and it just does its job. And it's awful that we've like, we've lost it. And you're kind of like it. You're protecting all of these people, including myself, making sure that we can kind of carry this on as long as we can, until the servers get shut down and we can never update our remote again.

• 44:58Speaker 07

  It's true. And sometimes I think, you know, I've been doing this for a while. And you know, I kind of want to, you know, just sort of quietly start to phase it out, you know, because but, you know, I feel the love. I feel like it's I really don't want to leave folks hanging out there who still want to get these things repaired. And, you know, we get orders from Europe. We get people sending these things in from Australia, Wow. New Zealand, Germany, Iceland. The only place in the world that I've never had an order from Uh huh. is China. Oh, interesting.

• 45:41Speaker 07

  But my guess is that because they can probably fix it there themselves. Probably easier to get some of the supplies. They can get the supplies, you know, somebody knows somebody. It's easy. Everything's manufactured there on the harmonies. So. But that's it. I mean, virtually every place else they actually send them. And I sometimes I say, wait a minute, you know, it's expensive. Because when it's coming internationally, they have to pay shipping both directions to get it, you know, to get it here. And sometimes there's duties or customs fees. So I said, are you sure you can't find just a replacement locally?

• 46:24Speaker 07

  And it's usually the same story. It's that, no, they are, you know, everybody's jacked up the prices, especially since they're no longer being made. And it's cost prohibitive to buy another one. It's cheaper to ship it and get it repaired. Thank you for your service, Gwen. I very much appreciate it. Glad to help. Glad to help.

• 46:48Alex Cranz?

  Okay, we're going to be right back after this next ad. And we're going to be talking to the CEO of iFixit, Kyle Wiens.

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• 47:30Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 47:51Speaker 10

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 48:33Alex Cranz?

  Welcome back. We could not be doing a gadget repair episode without talking to someone from iFixit. It's required, right? The people at iFixit have been tearing down computers and the like for decades now and have influenced a lot of do it yourself technicians by sharing repair manuals and tips for fixing everything from laptops to phones to cameras to toys, basically anything. They've also been a big proponent of the right to repair, a movement to enact legislation to ensure that consumers' electronics also have the ability to get them fixed when they break. In December, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law the Digital Fare Repair Act, which establishes that consumers and independent repair providers have a right to obtain manuals, diagrams, diagnostics, and parts from OEMs to

• 49:17Alex Cranz?

  repair their own devices, with some exceptions. CEO of iFixit, Kyle Wiens, overall was thrilled.

• 49:24Speaker 11

  That will then open up the floodgates of access to a lot of this information, parts and tools that we need.

• 49:30Alex Cranz?

  But a few weeks before that bill was signed, Kyle Wiens took some time to talk with me about the practices at iFixit, the state of gadget repair today, and what's next in the right to repair.

• 49:44Alex Cranz?

  Kyle, how long have you been CEO? Have you been there from the very beginning?

• 49:48Speaker 11

  From the very beginning. We started in 2003, so we've been at it a little while. We've taken apart every gadget for a long time.

• 49:55Alex Cranz?

  But I've been using you guys since 2003. I had like a Pismo.

• 49:59Speaker 11

  Yep, yeah, that was one of, maybe the first repair manual that we wrote was the G3 Pismo. One of the best laptops Apple ever made.

• 50:05Alex Cranz?

  Thank you. There's a big fight on the Vergecast about what the best laptop ever made was, and I will like, Pismo.

• 50:11Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 50:11Alex Cranz?

  That's my number one.

• 50:12Speaker 11

  You can have two batteries, one on either side. I mean, a very robust, super repairable.

• 50:17Alex Cranz?

  One of the reasons I used your manuals was because I would replace the processor in it. You could replace the processor and everything else in it. So I just like, I was in my dorm room cranking it open. There is still, I think, I'm sorry to whoever lives in my dorm room at my old college, there's probably still a neon pink outline in the bathtub from where I spray painted the laptop to make it look sick. It's rough. We're not here necessarily to go down memory lane with me, although I would love to do that. Instead, I want to talk about, you guys don't just do laptops, right? It wasn't like, it started as this place for Apple devices and how to repair those devices because there wasn't a real easy way for people to do it at home before you guys came along.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  When you were still like PB Fix It, I still type in PB Fix It.

• 51:06Speaker 11

  Hopefully the domain still works. Yeah, we started as PowerBook Fix It and then, and then we upgraded to iFixit and expanded from Apple stuff to everything else. And that has been a lot of fun. I would have gotten bored with just Apple products.

• 51:18Alex Cranz?

  Well, and they're not as repairable as they used to be, right?

• 51:20Speaker 11

  Although it's getting better.

• 51:21Alex Cranz?

  You started when it was very repairable.

• 51:23Speaker 11

  We started when they were very repairable. We've had some dark, a dark decade, if you will. But I feel like we're coming out on the other side now. We're starting to see some improvement.

• 51:32Alex Cranz?

  So besides just time to move away from Apple, what really led to embracing these other devices and creating manuals for them?

• 51:40Speaker 11

  Well, so, I mean, we started with Apple products because Apple had been like going out of their way to prevent people from knowing how to fix them. And so we solved that problem. We created an alternative to Apple's repair ecosystem. We had parts, tools, and information all in one place. Make sure the information is free, Creative Commons, available for free to the world. And once we'd solved that, we started looking around, we realized, wow, this repair ecosystem that we built really is absent for just about every other product, too. And so how could we build out a free repair guide for everything? And so that's been our mission ever since, has been, how do we really fight back against e-waste and make all the things in our life last longer?

• 52:14Alex Cranz?

  How do you deal with those devices that maybe not as many people have? That there still seems to be a little bit of a demand for it, but it's, you know, like the Pebbles of the world, where there's not a lot of people going out to repair Pebble right now, but there's probably someone who still really wants to repair it and will come to you to look for it.

• 52:32Speaker 11

  Yeah, so there's a long tail of hardware, both in terms of how many they make and also sort of a long tail through time. We have a really thriving Atari 2600 repair community on iFixit.

• 52:41Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:42Speaker 11

  And there are things that you run into if you're trying to use an Atari 2600 30 years later, where, you know, like you have capacitors that fail and you have to replace them. And maybe that was a reasonable lifespan for that capacitor. But if you want your Atari to keep going. So what we find is people Google it, and you land on these communities, you get communities of people around, you know, the 12 people in the world that have that specific thing are all hanging out on the same forum.

• 53:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like I think the Logitech Harmony remote is a really good example right now, where Logitech discontinued it, the company doesn't really care about it anymore, and now there's like this big community building up and these guys who are like, that's just what they do. They just repair this one device because nobody else will.

• 53:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, and I mean, it was maybe the greatest remote of all time. So why wouldn't you?

• 53:23Alex Cranz?

  I would say yes. As someone who still uses hers, yes.

• 53:26Speaker 11

  Yeah. But like, the Harmony wasn't built with, I mean, they don't go out of their way to make it hard, but like just the battery is not something that is designed to be user replaceable. Now, you take a few screws off, you get inside, it's just a connector, it's easy to swap the battery, but it's not part of the user manual. So if you want to make these things last longer, you got to go out of your way a little bit. And I think maybe that's okay. I think sometimes we put all of the pressure on the manufacturer, you know, we're over here and I'm advocating for a repair. There's an element of responsibility from the manufacturer, but there also is a responsibility on the part of owners. If we want to be able to keep these things for a long time, we need to be able to roll up our sleeves and put some effort into keeping them alive.

• 54:05Alex Cranz?

  I totally, totally agree. How do you go about like finding those parts and stuff? Cause I think one of the things that really drew me to iFixit in the beginning was that it wasn't just you had these great manuals, but you also had like, oh, do you need these special screwdrivers? Yes. Do you need this weird obscure battery that was made for one year to work with the Pismo? I'm making that up. I don't know if that really happened, but you need that. You guys had that. Like you had this really nice, rich supply of parts, which was the other part of this component. How do you do that with all of these other devices where the population of people needing it isn't as big?

• 54:40Speaker 11

  Yes. If we're lucky, you know, the parts are out there. I needed a dial for my Canon 5D Mark III. Found the dial from someone in Shenzhen somehow. So maybe there was a factory spooled up making that. But when you get to the longer tail, there aren't. And so really your best option at that point is scavenging parts. And so we do that a lot here. Well, sometimes for like new Apple laptops, we can't get parts for them. We'll buy new laptops. We'll part them out. We also have partnerships with recyclers where we'll like rescue, like Kindle batteries is something that we can't get from Amazon. And so we rescue Kindle batteries before they go into the shredder and then we make them available to people.

• 55:15Alex Cranz?

  It was just in this moment when I realized that Kindle batteries would inevitably die.

• 55:19Speaker 11

  Yeah. Batteries, screens, and Amazon just doesn't sell parts for them. So we try to fill in the gap.

• 55:24Alex Cranz?

  Do you see that? Like, I'm so sorry to our listeners who are like, no, no, move, keep going, Alex. Don't just get stuck on Kindles. But do you see with that one, is there a pretty decent community? Because those devices are so cheap.

• 55:36Speaker 11

  They are cheap, but some of them, you know, like you got the early ones and they've got cellular connectivity. That is kind of valuable. So I think it depends, but I would say the, the cheap nature of what Amazon has done with the Kindle makes it so that I think there is less of a concentrated enthusiasm around, around making them last than there is with something like a Harmony where it's more of a unique object that is kind of a cultural artifact. Amazon has photocopied so many Kindles that, you know, you don't have the loyalty to any singular Amazon object like you do in other cases. And I think that's a shame. And I think Amazon should bear some responsibility for that.

• 56:11Alex Cranz?

  A thousand percent agree. As much as you can agree, I would agree with you on that statement. Like, I guess the other kind of component of this, we talked a little bit about how you guys get the parts and stuff. What about the software element of this? I feel like that's kind of becoming increasingly a big part of repair in a way it just never was.

• 56:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, it really is. Well, and, and we're covering, you cover the genesis of new technologies. Well, what happens with those technologies? I saw a post today where Ukrainians were talking about how the Russian equipment that they have is easier to fix than some of the NATO equipment that they're given. They're like, the NATO stuff all has computers and the Russian stuff doesn't, and so it's just easier to work on. So as we're, as we're moving into the future, as we have put software and computers and everything, how do we deal with that? And I think the Pebble is a really good example of both the opportunity and some of the challenges that you have to work with.

• 56:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 11

  So there's the Rebel community that has been out there, we've written about them extensively, where the Pebble servers shut off, and so they've set up alternate servers and alternate ecosystem that you can use. But the latest problem was that in order to talk to the new Android devices that are 64-bit, there needed to be a firmware update to the Pebble. And there's no way to do those firmware updates without having the secure signing certificate sign the update. And so this was something where it didn't matter how enthusiastic the community was, without that magic secret key, they could not push this update to the...

• 57:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:33Speaker 11

  And this is where I think it's, you know, because you think about companies that shut down, what do you do? How do we, how do you plan for taking care of these devices afterwards? In the case of Pebble, Fitbit bought Pebble, and then Google bought Fitbit, and so the secure key is open by Google. So, so someone at Google needed to sign the key, and magically it happened, it got signed. So somewhere in the bowels of Google, someone found the secure key, signed the community update, pushed it out there, and you can make the Pebble work with 64-bit Android now.

• 57:59Alex Cranz?

  How likely do you think it was that that person was a Pebble owner and was like, "I am not letting this die"?

• 58:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, and they were actually a contributor to the Rebel community. So, so this is where it's cool. You had an engineer who, you know, had been part of, you know, all the way through, and then said, "Okay, I'm gonna make this happen." I think that this is a conversation that we need to have about ownership. Like, at what point, if the company's gonna go away, or let's say that that key had disappeared in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it is in the best interest of society at that point to get that key out there so owners can use it.

• 58:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 11

  Corey Docter likes to say, "If someone puts a lock on a device that you own and doesn't give you the key, it's not for your benefit."

• 58:36Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think we're seeing that like right now with the Logitech Harmony, right? Like the Harmony Remote, Logitech still owns all the software. They still technically maintain those databases and stuff, even though technically is doing a lot of work here, right? But there's a big call in that community, just open source it. Just, just give us access. Stop gatekeeping this stuff like you're not, you don't care about it anymore. Let us have it. And the company has said, no, just flat out, we're not doing that.

• 59:03Speaker 11

  Yeah. And there, you never know, there may be an IP thicket that they have to wade through in order to free that. I wrote an article a while back called "The End of Ownership." And as you, as you move into software and there's, it's so entangled with these complex IP agreements and maybe Logitech doesn't own all the software and so they, they can't necessarily. We need to start pushing back as a society against that kind of thing.

• 59:25Alex Cranz?

  How do you, how do we do that?

• 59:26Speaker 11

  Well, the GPL is, is one way to do it. So like we found a John Deere got jailbroken at DEF CON and we installed Doom on it.

• 59:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 11

  And in the process of doing that, we realized, hey, there's all kinds of GPL code running these software-enabled tractors that John Deere hasn't been releasing into the world. I don't know the situation with the Harmony, but you can imagine like, we haven't seen, I think, enough litigation around the GPL.

• 59:49Alex Cranz?

  We saw that a couple of years ago, a bunch of companies were releasing emulators and they were basically like Sega Genesis, all these other ones. And they were using Common Creatives licensed software to do it, just quietly. And I remember speaking to a lawyer at the time and I said, "Hey, how do we stop this?" And he goes, "You sue, that's it." Like it's just on these communities. So is that something where like these communities need to be working with lawyers, developing class action lawsuits?

• 1:00:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, the communities that are involved and engaged in creating open source software that then gets built to create these commercial products have a lot of leverage and they could get more engaged. And so the, the Software Freedom Conservancy has the rights to prosecute copyright for Linux and the Wine Project and many others. And they've started to get more active. So they've actually sued VIZIO for GPL violations on their TVs. And I think maybe that's an opportunity because one problem that we have, you buy a new smart TV and it's got spyware built into it that you can't take off.

• 1:00:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 11

  It's built on the backs of all of this open source software. You should be able to get your own copy of the Vizio software and remove the spyware, compile it and install it on your own TV and run it. That's the bargain that they made when they built it using GPL software. If they built the whole stack themselves from scratch, you wouldn't have that option. But because they use GPL software, I think we have a lot more rights than we've been able to exercise.

• 1:01:09Alex Cranz?

  Is that something we should be pursuing just through litigation? Is that something that people should be pursuing through, like, I don't know, laws?

• 1:01:16Speaker 11

  Well, in the case of the GPL situation of Vizio, I don't think we need an additional law. We have the law, we have a contract. Vizio agreed to the contract when they decided to use GPL software. They're in violation of that contract. So that should be an open and shut case. Now, it's going to take a little while in the courts. We need more public attention on it.

• 1:01:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's my question is like, right now, if we want people, if we want these companies to do this, to open up the software, then we have to sue, right? Like, you have to get a bunch of people together, you have to get a lawyer together. You have to spend a lot of money on your end just to get them to say, yeah, okay, we'll open it up and maybe we'll pay your legal fees, maybe we won't. And that's a lot of onus on the customer, on the consumer. Are there consumer laws and stuff that we can be advocating for to change this?

• 1:02:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think there's an opportunity. And so that's what we've been working on with right to repair laws. The right to repair law says, hey, if you're going to make a product, you got to make service manuals, parts and tools available. So that's, I think, our biggest opportunity to open this up initially. It won't get us the software, but it will get us any diagnostic software, parts, tools.

• 1:02:17Alex Cranz?

  You know, we talked earlier about how there were these dark days where Apple devices were just super unreparable. Everything was glued in, soldered in, don't you dare crack it open, or Tim Cook would come to your house and take it away. We're out of that phase now, right?

• 1:02:32Speaker 11

  We're seeing signs of hope. We have a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, I mean, the default, you know, over the last decade, yeah, has been, has been Apple devices glued together. It's still the case with some products, but others are changing. So the MacBook Pro, I think all of us have suffered with a lack of ports on the MacBook Pro. We've had butterfly keyboards that have traumatized all of us and driven some of us to the brink of insanity. Or maybe coming out on the other side of that, they've gone back to a sane keyboard design. They're adding more ports back in. The internals of the MacBook Pro have gotten easier to repair, which is very exciting for someone like me. I actually switched to Dell laptops away from Apple laptops because I just wasn't willing to own an unreparable product.

• 1:03:15Alex Cranz?

  So Apple's kind of gone that way. We've seen Dell, obviously, is pretty repairable. Microsoft has even gotten a little more repairable after like the catastrophe of its early devices.

• 1:03:26Speaker 11

  The original Surface was just a glue-filled monstrosity. And now the new one has upgradable SSD. You can swap that out. The battery is user-replaceable. It's just a totally different Microsoft.

• 1:03:37Alex Cranz?

  What would you say is like right now, a device coming out, it's already out, maybe it's coming out soon, that is just super repairable, where you're like, damn, they understood the assignment?

• 1:03:47Speaker 11

  Well, the Framework laptop is the gold standard from a laptop perspective. It's amazing. It's got modular ports, all of that. From mainstream perspective, Dell has this concept Luna laptop that is designed to come apart very easily. That's really cool. They haven't announced anything real that you can buy based on that, but I think that concept is fantastic. But the gold standard that you can go out and buy right now is the Fairphone on the phone side of things, which isn't sold in the US, but you can import into the US and they work, and the Framework.

• 1:04:17Alex Cranz?

  And not the Steam Deck?

• 1:04:18Speaker 11

  Steam Deck is cool. Steam Deck is pretty darn fixable. Yeah. I'm sitting here, as we're talking, I'm tinkering about the Valve Index headset that we were taking apart. Yeah, I think the Steam Deck is certainly, I mean, the SSD is modular, you can swap that out. The battery is a little tricky key to access, but overall, it's designed to be a very repairable product. So I have to, full disclosure, we're working, we're collaborating with Valve, we're distributing service parts for them on that one. But they've been great to work with.

• 1:04:45Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to say my worst repair ever, and then I would love to hear yours. So, one time my sister asked me to repair her G3 iBook. Not the colored ones, but the one that came right after that was all white. And I said, sure. You know, I'd repaired plenty of Pizmos. I'd repaired a lot of computers at that point. I'd taken the whole, like, display off of a Wall Street, G3 Wall Street, and put it back on. So I felt good. And then I opened that thing up, and it was then like... It plastic then wrapped in aluminum.

• 1:05:15Speaker 11

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:16Alex Cranz?

  And then all the the screws were stripped.

• 1:05:18Speaker 11

  Oh, perfect.

• 1:05:18Alex Cranz?

  I cried and I went to our local Mac repair store and I paid them $50 to fix it.

• 1:05:23Speaker 11

  That's probably perfectly reasonable. Yeah, that was a very complex machine internally. There were lots of cables and routing. Yeah, that was around the same time the the 12 inch G4 aluminum was also kind of a similar design. It was it was hard to work on. And Apple got the memo on that, by the way. So the the subsequent machine was the the white MacBook. And it was much more serviceable. And those things still still work. We have a member of our community that still does refurbishment and and sells those white MacBooks.

• 1:05:50Alex Cranz?

  Don't say that. My mom still hasn't replaced hers and I've been trying to get her to replace it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 11

  They're they're good machines.

• 1:05:55Alex Cranz?

  Mom, do not listen to this part of the podcast. Tune it out. What would you say was your worst, like your most nightmare repair? Because I spent like three days on that damn laptop. And before I was just like, I'm done. I'm paying someone.

• 1:06:08Speaker 11

  It's always the thing that's in front of you. I should mention, like, I fixed it started because I was trying to fix my G3 colored, the toilet seat shell iBook.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  Those G3s, man.

• 1:06:17Speaker 11

  I couldn't find a service manual for it. It was very frustrating. And I ended up, you know, I couldn't figure out where all the tabs went to get back together. So I had to Dremel and cut some of the plastic tabs off to like shove the thing back together. It was not a great repair experience.

• 1:06:30Alex Cranz?

  Did it hold up? How long did it last after that?

• 1:06:32Speaker 11

  It still works. It's still a functional machine, yeah.

• 1:06:34Alex Cranz?

  You still have it?

• 1:06:35Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my gosh, that's awesome.

• 1:06:37Speaker 11

  It's fantastic. And I mean, the best devices stick around, right? They become part of us. Well, and I think this is also, you know, you think about the last phone that you had and some of the photos and some of the adventures and and the things that you did with your friends with that phone. I think we need to be imbuing a little bit more of the emotion and the experiences that we have into into our gadgets. But there's some, there's, I think we we get disconnected from that a little bit. So I'm open to ideas. How can we stay emotionally connected to these things that have taken care of us for so long?

• 1:07:04Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna ask, how do we, I, cause I know how to do it with a car. I spend that much money on a car and I'm emotionally attached to it afterwards.

• 1:07:10Speaker 11

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:11Alex Cranz?

  But, you know, my phone, I'm spending, you know, a fraction of that, but still a lot of money. And I just don't have that emotional attachment, especially when it drops.

• 1:07:18Speaker 11

  Everyone's got a phone or three in the drawer, right? Well.

• 1:07:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:07:22Speaker 11

  Samsung had a really cool idea called Galaxy upcycling, where it was the ability to wipe Android off of an old Galaxy phone and install any operating system that you want. So you could install Ubuntu, you can install Docker, and then you could use it kind of as a single purpose device. So you take your previous cell phone, wipe all your data off it, and then you could use it as a baby monitor or a, you know, like a Nest camera at your door, or you could use it as a temperature monitor. They had a cool demo using it as like a, like a Raspberry Pi controller for a fish tank.

• 1:07:49Alex Cranz?

  Love it.

• 1:07:50Speaker 11

  That's where we need to go. We need to be able to repurpose these devices and use them for more. But a seven-year-old Android is not going to have current security updates. So you can't have Android on it and it needs to be something else. Unfortunately, Samsung announced this, it was a cool project. I helped them announce it and then they killed the project and they never released the software. But that's the kind of thing that we need. We need to be able to get to the bare bones of these devices and repurpose them as general purpose computers.

• 1:08:15Alex Cranz?

  I absolutely a hundred percent agree, cause I've got an old iPhone X in this drawer right now. I would love to use it for something besides periodically testing new software builds.

• 1:08:26Speaker 11

  Yeah. And so that's on Apple, you know, release the security keys, let us install anything else on, on that iPhone.

• 1:08:32Alex Cranz?

  You know, thinking about VR, thinking about we've got all these new kinds of technology that are coming, what are some of the ones that you may be worried won't be repairable?

• 1:08:40Speaker 11

  Sure. I mean, I would say in general, my, my, my problem with almost all devices boils down to glue and batteries.

• 1:08:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Speaker 11

  And the area where those intersect the most is true wireless earbuds.

• 1:08:50Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:08:51Speaker 11

  The AirPods are the worst example, but most AirPods out there, you know, AirPod-type earbuds have glued together products with an integrated battery that only lasts for a year and a half, and then the product is disposable. This is not good for the environment, it's not good for our pocketbooks we're replacing. I have my wired headphones here that will continue to work for a decade. Your wireless earbuds that you're listening to this on will not. And that's a, that's a failing of a product category. You can't take those wireless earbuds with batteries built into them. And by the way, every time you buy a set, you have two earbuds and you have the charging case. So it's three batteries. That's three batteries that can't go into the trash, that can't go into recycling. The electronics recyclers don't want them because they don't have enough raw materials to make it worth their time. So there's no plan for dealing with these things at the end of life. And they're screwing us over.

• 1:09:35Speaker 11

  I mean, it's $159 for a set. You're going to go back every two years and buy another set? That's what a lot of people are doing.

• 1:09:41Alex Cranz?

  What's happening in iFixit land right now? What are you guys working on? I keep seeing some gadgets pop up into your frame.

• 1:09:46Speaker 11

  Yes, so to set the stage, I'm sitting here in our lab and I've got our microscopes here and I've got all kinds of cool new tools. So we're excited, we have two new tools. So this tool here, we call this the Anti-Clamp or Clampy. And this is a post suction cup. So it's a pry tool with suction cups on it and a big screw handle. And so you stick the phone in it and I turn the screw, which is silent, but you know, I'm clanking.

• 1:10:07Alex Cranz?

  So it's a clamp and on the clamp, instead of two rubber feet, there's two suction cups and then a big old blue handle on the top.

• 1:10:14Speaker 11

  And you stick the phone in and you clamp it down and then you screw, turn the screw and it opens the phone. Because the challenge with adhesive on these screens is the screens have gotten more and more fragile. It's hard to open them without breaking them. And so this tool really makes it dramatically easier to open the screen without breaking it.

• 1:10:32Alex Cranz?

  So make it easier to replace a battery and all that other stuff.

• 1:10:35Speaker 11

  To make it easier to get in and replace a battery, yeah. And the thing with adhesive, if you can apply a small amount of force over time, you're going to be a lot more successful than if you're just like jerking on it. If you're prying on it aggressively. So we're really excited by the Anti-Clamp. And then the other product, let me grab it for you. So this is show and tell with iFixit. I have disassembled, so this is a valve index controller. But to disassemble it, I have used our new Fixmat, which is a dry erase mat with built in storage trays for keeping track of things. And what's cool is it's magnetic, so I can stick screws on it and they don't fly away.

• 1:11:08Alex Cranz?

  You don't have to use like 40 different little containers to store all your screws.

• 1:11:11Speaker 11

  Exactly.

• 1:11:12Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I love it.

• 1:11:13Speaker 11

  An egg carton works. This is better.

• 1:11:15Alex Cranz?

  So if I want to go out and I'm not a writer at The Verge where I can just write my fury about right to repair, I want to go out and I want to help the right to repair movement. What do I do?

• 1:11:25Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. So wherever you are in the world, if you're in the United States, go to yourstaterepair.org, so californiarepair.org, newyorkrepair.org, and you'll find the current status of a right to repair bill in your state. There are, we're expecting about 25 bills to be active in 25 states starting in January. And then around the world, I mean, like, there's a right to repair bill in the Canadian Parliament right now that's being debated. There's active work happening at the European Commission. So repair.org in the US, repair.eu in Europe, CanRepair in Canada, and there's an Australian Repair Coalition as well. Get involved and engage with all those and they'll connect you to the resources. But like, high level, it's talk to your politicians, talk to everybody around you and say, "We want the right to repair."

• 1:12:05Alex Cranz?

  I love it. It's dumb that I can repair my car and not my computer.

• 1:12:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, the reason you can repair your car is because we have right to repair laws for cars. We don't have right to repair laws for phones. And that's the, honestly, the laws that we're proposing for right to repair electronics. We took the auto bill, we copied and pasted it, we deleted the word automotive and we ran with it. It's a good framework. It works. Like, you can get your car fixed, right? You can go to a local mechanic and get it fixed. You can go to the dealer and pay more if you want them to do it. It's perfectly fine, right? We should be able to go to the Apple Store if we want. We should also be able to go to a local mechanic, you know, iMechanic and/or, you know, do it yourself.

• 1:12:38Alex Cranz?

  Yes. We need options. That's the through line of this entire episode. We need options. All right. Well, thank you, Kyle. This was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

• 1:12:49Speaker 11

  Thank you. Chat soon.

• 1:12:51Alex Cranz?

  All right. That's it for The Vergecast today. Thank you for listening. We'd love to do more of these gadget repair episodes. So if you repair a certain kind of tech or are looking for someone to repair something for you, hit us up. You can always email us at [email protected]. And if you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, call the hotline, guys. It's 866-VERGE11. That's 866-VERGE11. We may answer a question you have in a future episode. In the meantime, there's- Tons more coverage on everything we talked about today on theverge.com. So head over there and say hi. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Nori Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:13:35Alex Cranz?

  Neelai, Richard and myself are going to be back on Friday with some more of the Verge crew to talk about all the biggest tech news of the week. Until then, I'll see you later.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:14:13Speaker 10

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:14:54Speaker 12

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