The Tech Master’s Tools
Would you dare to self-repair? (image: Apple).
As of next year, Apple is introducing kits that will allow customers to repair their iPhones and laptops at home. In a big win for the right-to-repair movement, Apple has finally relented on its draconian self-repair rules and will let people replace screens, batteries, and cameras on some of its products themselves without voiding their warranty. Currently, sheepish owners of cracked screens et al have to pay through the nose for an official Apple repair service.
Along with the creatively titled “Self Service Repair” scheme, Apple will also provide third-party phone repair shops with “official” parts. Because currently, as anyone who has bought a dodgy non-Apple charging cable (so, everyone) knows, their products seem deliberately designed not to work with anything other than genuine Apple hardware. Apple has committed to offering “more than 200 individual parts and tools” for sale, including manuals that customers can peruse before deciding if they’re brave enough to carry out a home repair themselves. For now, it’s only the iPhone 12 and 13 included, with plans to open the scheme up to Macbooks with M1 chips next.
The move comes after a series of expensive lawsuits, including a $3.4m settlement in April 2021 for a planned obsolescence claim brought by 150,000 iPhone users in Chile who sued the tech company in Cupertino over an iOS update that throttled people’s batteries. This followed the $500m pay-out for a class-action lawsuit brought in the US around the same issue. Portugal is now also gearing up for a lawsuit.
Still, it’s a big change from a company that’s been almost farcical in its commitment to planned obsolescence. Every September, like clockwork, Apple announces new versions of its products for people to upgrade to. There are conspiracy theories that everyone’s technology starts running a little slower in the leadup, just to whet their appetites. I still laugh at the running gag in the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (back when we were still on the iPhone 6) that had people’s phones spontaneously combusting in their hands on the day the new model rolled out.
There’s a perennial chicken-and-egg argument around planned obsolescence. Some economists argue that it’s customers’ rapacious demands that keeps the poor companies beetling away at ever newer and shinier tchotchkes to keep the ravenous masses happy. Most environmentalists argue that it’s the companies and the capitalist system keeping consumers in a cycle of perpetual need when the goods that are central to their daily lives need regular replacement.
The origins of the term definitely come down on the side of the planned side of obsolescence. In 1932, an American real estate agent named Bernard London captured an economic Zeitgeist that’s still going strong almost 100 years later. In an article titled ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence’, London chastised the “hysterical” public who were “using everything they own longer than was their custom” in response to [checks notes] the deepest depression of the 20th century.
It was imperative, London argued, that American citizens return to buying the latest car in order to kickstart the economy. London’s idea on how to motivate people to recommence pre-depression levels of over-consumption was, to put it delicately, mad as a box of bees. He wanted the government to declare everything from shoes to houses “legally ‘dead’” after a few years and destroy them to force people to buy something new. You can read the full manifesto here, but it comes with a content warning for racist language.
Things have never become that extreme, but I can’t be the only one with a drawer full of battered iPhones that are demoted when someone else in my family gets a newer model and I receive a hand-me-down. It’s a drawer stuffed with guilt and the knowledge that each one is full of precious metals and rare earth elements mined out of the planet’s crust at untold human and environmental costs.
This is what the right-to-repair movement is fighting against, arguing for companies to sell open-source technology that makes it easier for people to fix what they have, rather than be funneled towards buying a brand new replacement. It’s an ethos at odds with an economy fuelled by endless growth, but one that suits a world with finite resources and a looming climate crisis. So, being able to fix your iPhone at home is a start, at least.
Words India Block
Source The Verge