Shareholders press Microsoft to expand right of repair efforts

Microsoft’s Xbox and Surface hardware may be getting easier to repair, according to a press release from shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow. According to the announcement, Microsoft has agreed to assess and expand repair options for its products “by the end of 2022”. Concretely, the company is committed to:

• Conduct a third-party study assessing the environmental and social impacts associated with increasing consumer access to repair and determine new mechanisms to increase access to repair, including for Surface devices and Xbox consoles
• Extend the availability of certain parts and repair documentation beyond Microsoft’s network of authorized service providers
• Initiate new mechanisms to enable and facilitate local repair options for consumers

These are all pretty vague warranties, and they don’t mean that your next Xbox or Surface tablet will suddenly become fully user-usable. But the commitments at least suggest that in the long run it will be easier to get parts for these devices when they break, and it will be easier to find a store that can do the repairs without needing to go. directly to Microsoft. According to a report from Grist, a summary of the third-party study will be shared with the public by May 2022.

Microsoft made these commitments in response to a June 2021 shareholder resolution from As You Sow, a nonprofit that “promotes[s] corporate environmental and social responsibility through the defense of shareholder interests, the formation of coalitions and innovative legal strategies. traffic jams and industry opposition. Shareholder-led initiatives like this one are a more direct, albeit piecemeal, way of solving the problem in the meantime.

Microsoft’s hardware division has taken small steps to make its products easier to repair in their most recent iterations, including Surface laptops with fully accessible guts and replaceable SSDs on select Surface Pro models. But these changes only look like improvements because Microsoft has done so badly on this front for so many years; as documented by teardown sites like iFixit, multiple generations of Surface Pro are nearly impossible to open without destroying. And as we detailed in our Surface Pro 8 review, it’s hard to find SSDs small enough to fit in the tablet’s replaceable SSD slot.