A cold wind was whipping down the street when I pulled up to the concrete apartment block in Cambrils, Spain. I parked, pulled out my phone, and texted the repairman that I had arrived.

I had only been in Spain for a few weeks when the hinge supporting my laptop screen gave out, causing it to flop around like a broken limb. I had already made the trek from the village where I was staying to the nearest repair shop once before, but the repairman’s first fix (epoxy that reinforced the hinge) only lasted a few days. I dropped it off again, but there was a catch for the pickup this time — Spain being Spain, the shop had closed early for the weekend, so the repairman offered to meet me at his house. 

That’s how I found myself idling on a random side street, half-expecting the repairman to emerge from the shadows with my laptop tucked under his trench coat. The reality was far less noir: He showed up, handed over my computer, and wished me luck. The fix, he told me, was temporary — he didn’t have the right part and couldn’t get it.

Once I was back in the U.S., I mailed the laptop in for repair under an Asurion insurance policy that I was now feeling pretty good about having bought. The company told me it would be fixed soon, but two weeks later, an Amazon gift card for $720, the original price of the laptop, landed in my inbox with a note: “It’s beyond repair. But we’ve got you covered.” The move felt both patronizing and dismissive: I’m sorry for your loss — go buy yourself something nice.

My laptop hadn’t failed catastrophically. It was four years old, functional, and broken in a very specific way. Repair shouldn’t have been impossible, and yet every step of the process nudged me toward replacement. This experience revealed a broader shift in how modern products are designed, sold, and owned — one that increasingly treats repair as optional and replacement as inevitable. 

Not (quite) a conspiracy

My first hunch that my “impossible-to-fix” laptop hinge was emblematic of something bigger came when I complained to my friends about it. They each had a similar experience to recount. One said the cost to repair their cracked iPhone screen was 50% the price of a brand-new phone. Another said the repair for their refrigerator’s broken compressor almost equaled the cost of a new fridge. They echoed my frustrations: No one was excited about their forced “opportunity” to upgrade, and no one liked the idea that their almost-functional product was now languishing in a landfill somewhere.

I later learned from iFixit, a community-run repair site, that the hinge on my laptop model was an infamous pain to fix, with one repair person writing that it was their “absolute least favorite repair ever.” I started to wonder how something as seemingly simple as a hinge could be so difficult to replace. If a company can design a whole laptop — or iPhone or refrigerator — couldn’t it also make the products easy to maintain? Are manufacturers making repair difficult on purpose?

That suspicion has a name: planned obsolescence. It refers to deliberately shortening a product’s usable life so consumers have to replace it sooner than they otherwise would. It’s not just a theory, either. The most famous historic example is the Phoebus cartel, an early 20th-century alliance between lightbulb manufacturers who agreed to limit the lifespans of their bulbs to force more frequent replacements. As Aaron Perzanowski, a legal scholar and professor of law at the University of Michigan, told me, today’s tech companies have the same incentive: “Everyone who’s going to buy an iPhone already has one. Growth comes from selling new devices to people who already own an older version.”

“It’s not designed to last. It’s designed to be cheap.”

Wayne Seltzer

Antitrust laws prevent companies from collectively conspiring against customers like the lightbulb manufacturers of the Phoebus cartel, but individual companies have a variety of other incentives for making devices with shorter lifespans — aesthetics, speed to market, manufacturing costs, and consumer taste can all play a role. 

Wayne Seltzer, a longtime repair advocate and lead organizer at the U-Fix-It Clinic in Boulder, Colorado, has spent years teaching people how to diagnose and fix their broken stuff. He told me that planned obsolescence isn’t really about engineering failure so much as reinforcing a cultural shift that values disposability and convenience over durability. “You can go to Target to buy a $5 lamp that burns out in a week,” he says. “It’s built badly, but it was only $5, so who cares? If you try to fix it, you’ll see it’s built like crap. Everything is glued together, and it’s really not worth the effort. It’s not designed to last. It’s designed to be cheap.”

At the premium end of the market, design creates a different obstacle to repair. Ned Hošić, the founder of Boston iPhone Repair, an independent repair shop, has worked on Apple products for more than a decade and has seen those changes firsthand. “To make phones thinner, sleeker, and waterproof, designers pack so much into the motherboard that even replacing a screen or battery can be difficult,” he says. For some products, Hošić tells customers they’re better off buying a new one. “If someone brings me AirPods, I tell them to go buy new ones, because the entire product is sealed shut and repairing it isn’t worth it.” 

Increasingly, the barriers to repair aren’t just physical. Software is now embedded in nearly everything, from phones and refrigerators to tractors, and it’s treated as intellectual property. That means you may own a piece of hardware, but not the programs that make it useful. Access to software updates or features can be expensive, limited, or revoked, leaving devices that are still in perfect physical condition unusable or not worth the subscription cost.

Hošić told me that when he installs an aftermarket iPhone screen, the phone triggers a warning suggesting something is wrong, even though the repair works perfectly. “Now I have to reassure the customer that the repair is legal and legitimate,” he said. “If I had Apple’s pairing software, the warning wouldn’t appear.” In cases like these, repair isn’t exactly impossible, but it’s quietly discouraged, reinforcing the same outcome as more familiar forms of planned obsolescence: replacement over repair.

Perzanowski doubts that Apple engineers are scheming to design flimsy hinges in some Silicon Valley version of a smoke-filled room. But the reason products are difficult to repair isn’t as important as the impact of this difficulty: You end up replacing the old device. “Whether it’s deliberate or the result of other factors, the effect on the consumer is the same,” says Perzanowski.

For some, being shut out of their own devices feels like more than an inconvenience; it feels like the loss of something fundamental. In response, a growing movement has emerged to challenge the status quo and defend the right to repair.

The fight to repair

In 2010, Gay Gordon-Byrne was working in the computer repair economy. That year, multinational tech company Oracle introduced a new policy: Only Oracle could repair its hardware. The company stopped selling parts, tools, and repair documentation, creating a monopoly on its repairs. Customers could pay the price it quoted for a repair — assuming it even agreed that a device was fixable — or buy something new.

As similar restrictions spread, Gordon-Byrne moved from repair work into advocacy. Today, she is the executive director of The Repair Association, a nonprofit trade association that represents repair businesses and advocates for right-to-repair legislation. “We’re not saying consumers shouldn’t be allowed to buy junk, that manufacturers can’t redesign products every year, or that they need to expose trade secrets,” she says. “What we are saying is that people should be able to repair the things they own and decide who does the repair.”

For most of modern history, Gordon-Byrne’s view wasn’t controversial. Ownership came with basic freedoms: to use, resell, lend, or repair what you bought. You didn’t need a publisher’s permission to share a book or a manufacturer’s approval to fix your car, no matter how much the auto industry might prefer a world without used car lots or independent mechanics. That understanding of ownership has quietly changed. As repair has become more restricted, consumer advocates have begun pushing back.

As of early 2026, eight states have passed right-to-repair laws covering consumer technology, with many more considering similar legislation. These laws generally require manufacturers to make repair tools, replacement parts, and documentation, including some software code, available to consumers and independent repair shops on fair and reasonable terms. In the U.S., they do not impose design constraints on manufacturers, though some regulations in the European Union do. Perzanowski says that major shifts in public opinion are what have been pushing these bills through: “It took a few rounds of legislation, but in California, Apple frankly got beaten by a bunch of nonprofits, volunteers, and a couple of law professors.” 

Repair shouldn’t have been impossible, and yet every step of the process nudged me toward replacement.

Industry groups, however, argue that right-to-repair legislation — at least in its current form — isn’t the right solution. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which represents consumer electronics companies, points to the growing variety of state laws as a problem. “We now have eight state right-to-repair laws, and no two are identical,” says Katie Reilly, the vice president of environmental affairs and industry sustainability at CTA. “That patchwork of legislation creates real challenges for companies trying to comply across jurisdictions.” She also stresses that repair is a priority for the industry, noting that “we’ve seen significant commitments to expand authorized repair networks and make tools, parts, and documentation more widely available.” 

On paper, some of those efforts appear to respond directly to lawmakers’ concerns. But Hošić is skeptical. When I asked him about Apple’s Self Service Repair program, an initiative that lets independent shops buy official Apple parts, he described it as largely symbolic. “It looks good in front of Congress,” he says, “but it doesn’t meaningfully help me make more repairs.” Apple, Hošić explains, will sell him parts under the program, but at questionable prices. “An iPhone 15 screen can cost around $350, which is roughly what a customer would pay to have Apple perform the repair itself. I can offer a high-quality aftermarket screen for half that.” Participation also ties a repair shop to audits from Apple, even years after they leave the program. 

Others read the same consumer behavior very differently. Alex Reinauer, a policy analyst at the libertarian-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues that right-to-repair is a solution in search of a problem and that many customers upgrade by choice rather than necessity. Rather than legislation, he favors market solutions that give people who truly care about repairability the option of buying products that prioritize it. As an example, he points to Fairphone, a modular smartphone designed to be easily repaired by its owner. Fairphone has earned devoted fans and glowing press, but it remains a niche product with limited availability outside Europe. “I am rooting for Fairphone,” says Reinauer. “I’d like to ask how it would be easier for them to enter the market and be a viable competitor.”

Perzanowski doesn’t dispute that consumers often upgrade by choice. At the same time, he says that survey after survey shows overwhelming public support for the right to repair. “Being against the right to repair is akin to being a flat Earther, numbers wise.” For him, this evident mismatch between public sentiment and the reality of the marketplace is evidence that we need legislation. “We can’t really understand what the consumers want until we create a legal environment and give people the ability to act on the values they say they hold,” says Perzanowski.

Debugging design

The right-to-repair movement might be gathering legislative steam, but the more I read and talked to people, the more I noticed a communal resignation surrounding today’s tech: This is just how things are now. As Hošić noted, some of the features we value most simply make repair harder, but the idea that repairability and certain features are mutually exclusive doesn’t sound right. If innovation can deliver better devices, can’t it also be pushed to solve this problem? Seltzer says it’s not a question of engineering, but of priorities: “When they say you can’t have a waterproof phone with a replaceable battery, my answer is ‘make a waterproof phone with a replaceable battery.’ If repairability mattered more, design would follow.”

For me, and I imagine many other consumers, the frustration isn’t limited to the difficulty of repairs itself, though — it extends to the smoke and mirrors surrounding the whole repair process. When I tried to find out why Asurion couldn’t repair my laptop hinge, the clearest answer I got was that the part was “no longer available.” They wouldn’t even tell me which specific part it was. I also had no idea when buying the laptop that a hinge would prove to be its downfall — I would have loved to have known the product’s expected lifespan and how hard it would be to repair up front. France is working to make this information available to consumers through its durability and repairability indexes, and as Gordon-Byrne told me, “Ideally, repairability scores would be on every product.”

That future, she admits, is likely still a long way off. But a mix of legislation and public pressure could start to change the status quo, making it easier for people to choose repairability over replacement, if that’s the path they want to take. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that that’s a future worth working toward. Ultimately, most of us are somewhat dependent on these devices, whether we want to believe that or not, and ownership of them shouldn’t end the moment something breaks.

This article is part of Big Think’s monthly issue The Roots of Resilience.