This new EU law sounds to be a good idea, and I of course welcome it, but I guess, this will not work well practically for commercial goods, or not better than currently.
I'm doing repair of electronics, mechanics and virtually all things in the house nearly my whole life, i.e. for over 50 years. For 2 years, I did T&M repair and calibration on a professional basis.
Nowadays, I am a Component Technology Expert, and manage as well changes and termination of components (PCN / PTN).
In the Automotive Industry, spare parts have to be provided by the Tier1's (suppliers of the devices) to the OEMs (car manufacturers), for 10..15 years after end of series production at least. That depends on the OEM, some luxury cars have longer delivery / aftermarket obligations. As cars are an expensive good, it makes sense to provide spare parts for a long time. Cars were designed to last for a long time, and they have a very high quality level, therefore the rate of defects over time is low, quite predictable, so one can make safe forecasts of needed spare parts.
If you have cheap commercial goods, that does not make any sense, at first because the repair cost very soon make it BER = Beyond Economical Repair, 2nd because the spare part handling costs quickly are not profitable any more for the device manufacturers and 3rd because due to lack of appropriate quality systems and lack of Robust Design, test and validation, the probability and amount of defects can not be predicted.
That 3rd problem is the true reason behind the so called "planned obsolescence". I guess that practically no company / engineer would purposely design in a somehow limited lifetime of his product. Robust Design development and so forth costs a lot of money and experience, which cheap manufacturers usually don't have.
The other aspect in this context is the construction of the device, which either enables its later repair, or even inhibits replacement of wear parts.
It would have been better, if the prohibition of latter methods would have been more strictly and more detailed described in the EU law.
In Automotive Industry, the Tier1 usually manufacture the devices, which they deliver to the OEMs, only on demand. That also applies to Spare Parts.
For latter, they use electronic and non-electronic components from actual production of the Tier2's (component suppliers), plus all the stocked parts, which have been already terminated by the Tier2, (PTN = Product Termination Notification), plus stocked tools, test and programming equipment, and so on, to produce spare parts on the still running actual production lines. I.e. the production lines need to have a certain downward compatibility.
You also have the possibility, to stock the whole finished device, but that kind of storage is very expensive, as it has to be done under special environmental conditions, and especially electrolytic capacitors inside the device are a problem.
Anyhow, handling of stock and the re-production in small quantities makes the spare parts very expensive, at least a factor of 10 and much more of the original price.
Component Level Repair (which requires schematics and special tools) is of course not available to the end customer.
That's as well the problem with T&M equipment, for HP since the 1990ties already. So you can nowadays only get repair on board level, i.e. the manufactures will sell the whole board, or will only allow the repair by himself.
More valuable Commercial electronics/mechanics like White Goods (Bosch, Miele, Siemens,..) here in Germany already provide quite reasonably priced spare parts for 10 years after EOP. Using their own repair service is often BER as well.
A lot of DIY documentation can be found on YT, as they do not offer schematics for repair on Component level.
That is the central culprit, that neither manufacturer is obligated to provide construction details, even not for commercial repair shops, which could limit or inhibit their loss of IP.
In the EU law, there is currently a very limited number of commercial applications which have to provide repair and spare parts for a longer time. It's really tricky to define useful extensions, where it makes real technical and commercial sense to create such a big effort.
As the EU probably will overdo this idea, as always, small and cheap devices will not be available any more on the market, or those companies sell their stuff w/o ever providing the spare part and repair service, and might terminate their business after end of series production later.
As well, I think that there will be no real controlling process, whether and how well manufactures obey this new law, or not.
Frank
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