What you need to know
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has spoken fervently in favor of the Right to Repair movement.
- He has published a 10-minute cameo in which he stated Apple wouldn't exist without a very open world of technology.
- Apple has lobbied against bills to make it easier to repair products because of concerns about security and third-party data access.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has stated he fully supports the Right to Repair movement, and that the company wouldn't even exist without "a very open technology world."
Wozniak made the comments in a 10-minute video posted to YouTube by the Repair Preservation Group that you can see below. Wozniak's comments were made in response to a Cameo request from Louis Rossman of the Rossman repair group.
In the video he states that without his upbringing in a "very open technology world" there wouldn't have been an Apple, harkening back to how old radios and TVs came with diagrams and instructions for every circuit and design, letting families, even ones that weren't technical, repair their hardware.
Wozniak said that it was time "to recognize the right to repair more fully", and that companies were trying to stop it because it gave them "power and control over everything", adding "I guess in a lot of people's minds, power over others equates to money and profits."
Questioning who devices belong to he stated that if people knew what they were doing and could follow the steps of others lots of things could be repaired at low cost, "so why stop them?"
The news follows reports that US President Joe Biden is planning to direct the FTC to create right-to-repair laws aimed at mobile phone manufacturers. Apple has previously lobbied against such measures over concerns they could give "unvetted third parties" access to user data.
