Fifteen miles north of Tamale, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region, Ibrahim Alhassan, master television repairman, is crouched over the back of a twenty-five-year-old television picture tube. He has a soldering iron in one hand, a circuit board in another. As he explains it, the set’s manual volume and channel controls are broken. So he’s replacing it with a board that he’s jerry-rigged specifically for this purpose, and which will give the owner remote control—as well as volume and picture controls. The total repair bill is five dollars, not including parts, which are hard to obtain in the Northern Region and can push the price to seven or eight dollars. It’s a good value. Around here, a secondhand tube television of similar vintage starts around fifteen dollars.
Alhassan’s shop is located on a dusty red-dirt road that runs the length of a residential portion of Savelugu, a farm town of around forty thousand people. Most of the buildings are made from mud walls; some are round, with thatch roofs; some are square and topped with corrugated steel. Television antennas poke up from almost every building, except for the town’s main mosque, which is topped by golden cupolas. Many residents have mobile phones, but they’re primarily feature phones used to communicate via text message, and—for some—engage in basic mobile banking. Broadcast television and DVDs remain the primary form of screen entertainment, and Alhassan ensures that the shows go on.
“DVD players are popular,” he explains as he works. “I receive lots of those.” He’s a handsome fifty-year-old, slightly unshaven, his eyes red from (I assume) staring too long at circuit boards. But fatigue doesn’t wear away his good mood and easy smile.
“You fix DVDs, too?” I ask.
He turns to Wahab Odoi Mohammed, a Ghanaian American trader of used U.S. electronics, and says something to him in Dagbani, the language of this region. Then he turns back to me and says, “I’m in electronics. I know boards and voltage meters, so I can do it.”
“How many televisions do you fix per day?”
“Five per day, depending on the problem.”
Tamale, a town of, officially, 350,000 people, has more than a hundred TV-repair businesses, with many doing far more than five repairs per day. Conservatively estimated, that’s hundreds of secondhand televisions repaired weekly in this sparsely populated section of West Africa. In the big cities of Ghana and Nigeria—the most affluent parts of West Africa—the electronics repair shops are more common than Starbucks in Manhattan. Conservatively estimated, that’s thousands of secondhand televisions repaired weekly. Multiply that across developing West Africa, and that amounts to tens of thousands of secondhand televisions—most imported from Europe, the United States, and East Asia—repaired weekly.1 For anyone worried about resource conservation, that’s a rate of reuse that far exceeds that in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Tokyo, or any other developed area that prides itself on sustainability (and upgrades relentlessly). Turns out, product durability isn’t just about making it right the first time.
Ibrahim Alhassan outside of his television repair shop in Savelugu. It’s a central gathering point in the neighborhood, often filled with friends, relatives, and fans.
Alhassan is typical of West Africa’s DIY repairmen (and they’re uniformly men). His family lacked the resources to pay for education beyond middle school, so he was apprenticed to an electronics repairman in Kumasi, a center of Africa’s secondhand trade located roughly 250 miles south of Savelugu. Then, with the aid of his master, he set up his own business. Here in Savelugu, he has the respect of his neighbors. As we chat, one jumps in to declare, “We all have faith in him, that he can fix things.”
In one respect, however, Alhassan is a bit of a throwback: he works on old tube televisions at a time when much of the world, including the bigger towns of Ghana, has moved on to using (and fixing) flat-screen televisions. “How old are the televisions you fix?” I ask him.
Alhassan leans in close to the circuit board and carefully solders a connection. He works at a thick wooden table covered with cables, tools, a long power bar, gouges, and burn marks. “As old as forty years,” he says, nodding in the direction of a small Sony Trinitron awaiting his attention on the ground. Behind him, two heavy wooden doors open to an unlit space filled with dozens of televisions piled atop one another, boxes of circuit boards, and assorted picture tubes. He’s been in business since 1992. By the looks of it, his collection dates back at least that far.
“The hardest thing for the television repairmen is parts,” he explains. “We don’t have parts stores. So if we need a part, we get it from the old televisions. I have many, and so do my friends and old apprentices. If I need a part I don’t have, I see if they have it. They all have old televisions like me, and they can check if the board is still available. Then we trade, and I do the repair.”
“And if you can’t find the part?”
“No repair.”
I hear this repeatedly in Ghana: a chronic lack of parts prevents devices from being repaired and used longer. It’s a leading reason that old devices pile up in sheds, in front yards, and even on roofs (there’s an old television and a cassette deck holding down part of Alhassan’s corrugated metal roof).
Seated next to Wahab, and listening intently, is Robin Ingenthron, CEO of Good Point Recycling of Middlebury, Vermont. He’s a gregarious fifty-seven-year-old with intent eyes and a camera. But Robin’s not here as a tourist. Rather, he’s doing research on West Africa’s extensive repair economy. For years, he’s legally exported used electronics to developing countries, including Ghana. Wahab is one of his customers, and the two men are keen to expand the trade beyond whole devices like televisions to the parts necessary to keep them running even longer.
“Do you repair flat screens, too?” Robin asks.
Alhassan examines his soldering. “My former apprentices learn the tech and teach me and my friends. We get together once per week. Learn and have a good time.” He looks up from his work. “I’ve witnessed people with flat screens. In my opinion, flat screens don’t last long.”
That’s certainly the case in developing countries like Ghana, where the underdeveloped electrical utilities are prone to brownouts and other problems that can damage the delicate electronics in a flat-screen television. For Robin and Wahab, that’s the immediate and long-term opportunity. If the television manufacturers won’t sell the parts to Ghana, they will.
I step out from beneath the metal awning that shades Alhassan’s workspace and snap a photo of the televisions and parts piled up between Alhassan’s home and the one next door. As I check the photo on my camera’s screen, Robin walks over. “It’s like the Ozarks in the seventies,” he says, referring to the part of rural America where he grew up. “Bunch of old junk cars sitting around for nothing but the parts.” As Robin knows as well as anyone, that “nothing” is worth something. He also knows, as well as anyone, that repairable devices are worth more.
In 1829, Lydia Maria Child, author of The American Frugal Housewife, offered this common-sense advice to her readers:
Keep a bag for odd pieces of tape and strings, they will come in use. Keep a bag or box for old buttons, so that you may know where to go when you want one.2
In the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, domestic manuals like Child’s offered a range of tips designed to aid women in the pursuit of household thrift. In those days, thrift wasn’t a matter of choice or virtue. It was a necessity. The essentials of daily life—clothes, kitchenware, tools, furniture—were expensive and intended to last for years if not lifetimes. Repair was a way to ensure that they did. Sewing a button required less labor and fewer resources than making a new shirt. Saving random strings saved the time and money necessary to buy string on a trip to town (or order it from a catalog). In 1829, having a bag of string and a bag of buttons was common sense.
Two centuries later, that’s generally not the case. As a member of Generation X, I might be among the last Americans to have memories of mothers who kept bags of buttons. And those bags of buttons typically had more to do with domestic habits passed between mothers and daughters than any need for midcentury household thrift. My mother’s mother, on the other hand, knew thrift, and it traveled with her from rural Iowa and South Dakota to Minneapolis. My aunt, Rita Sandstrom, recalled it for me via Facebook Messenger late one night:
She had a sewing kit with all sorts of supplies in it: darning eggs (which I used for fixing holes in socks—especially my dad’s); many types of sewing needles, pins, safety pins, many wooden spools of thread in every color and thickness (they’ve been made of plastic for years now), metal thimbles, pin cushions, measuring tape, seam ripper, tailor’s chalk and, of course, lots of various buttons.
Aside from hobbyists and perhaps the deeply committed knitter, that lifestyle has disappeared from America. By the time I was a teenager, the price and utilization of clothing was falling rapidly in the United States, negating the argument for mending at home. As an adult, I’ve hung shirts with missing buttons in the closet and forgotten them in favor of a new one.
Of course, household thrift based on necessity hasn’t totally disappeared. From the beginning of the automobile age, weekend mechanics saved money—and their cars—by doing repairs and modifications at home. For car owners who had the money (and an aversion to grease), independent garages and repair centers emerged. For those with even more money, and cars under warranty, the expensive authorized service center thrived. From the auto manufacturer’s standpoint, the various repair options and price points served their interests, especially as cars moved off warranty. After all, nobody is going to buy a Ford if the only place they can get the tires rotated and a new oil filter is the dealership.
The proof, if any was needed, is found in the South Bronx on a cold Saturday morning in late March. Robin Ingenthron parks his black Honda on the street beside a brick self-storage facility, and Wahab Odoi Mohammed and I step onto the street with him. A few car lengths away, a bronze Hyundai station wagon is rolled off a flatbed tow truck into a forty-foot shipping container bound for a West African port. By noon, at least two more cars will be in that container, levitated and secured by chains.
“Over here,” Wahab says as he confidently strides down the narrow dirt alley beside the storage facility. It opens to a long dirt parking area filled with dozens of cars, dozens of shipping containers, with a forklift zipping between them, and a handful of bundled-up African men. “This place is ninety percent Ghanaian,” he declares. “They ship all over West Africa.” We pause beside a black 2017 Honda Sonata whose front end is crushed and flattened, the hood bent upward slightly, its paint cracked. “Doesn’t matter,” Wahab says as he lifts the hood. “The engine is okay.” Inside the vehicle are boxes filled with repair parts to make the vehicle new again. Doing the repair would be cost-prohibitive in the United States. But it’s no problem in Ghana, where much of the automobile repair business specializes in fixing up imported accident cars packed with parts.
“How much does a car like this cost at auction?” Robin asks.
“It depends,” Wahab says. “This one maybe less than five thousand dollars. Then fifteen hundred dollars to ship. Maybe six thousand for the duty. By the time it’s all done and repaired, maybe fourteen thousand. That’s less than the cost of a new or used one.” Wahab would know. When he has time and money, he cruises internet auction sites in search of vehicles totaled in U.S. auto accidents. They’re listed by insurance companies keen to recoup some value from the loss. Among the most enthusiastic buyers are West African traders. In 2017, 48,899 used cars were exported from the United States to Nigeria, 12,434 went to Ghana, and 12,130 went to Benin.
Suleiman Jawula, a charismatic Ghanaian American, wanders over. He’s a public-school teacher who runs a lucrative side business shipping cars to Africa and the Middle East from this lot. “My people, they want a car for when they go home to visit,” he says. “So I help them.” He and his crew can pack and ship eight shipping containers in a day—or roughly thirty cars. That’s not easy. We open a container and see a car hung from the ceiling with chains, just inches from the car that’s fixed by chains below it. Behind them are two more. For years, this particular method has delivered cars unscathed (beyond their preexisting accident damage) across oceans. In years past, when this lot was larger, crews could pack forty containers per day—or as many as 160 cars.
Wahab is a regular customer. When he wins a car at auction, he or Suleiman arranges for it to be shipped to the South Bronx and packed for shipment (a courier typically charges between five hundred and a thousand dollars, depending on where in the United States a car is located). When it arrives in Ghana, Wahab arranges for the vehicle to be repaired, and then he either sells it immediately or drives it around until he tires of it and a new one arrives from the United States. It’s a lot of turnover: Robin loves recounting the afternoon that he had to get out of a car in the middle of Tamale, Wahab’s hometown, because Wahab had just sold the car in which they were riding to a person he’d encountered on the street (the transaction: Wahab’s 2015 Ford Fusion for a 2011 Chevrolet Cruze, seven thousand dollars, and some land).
“Wahab,” Suleiman declares, “I have a pickup for you.” The four of us walk over to a badly dented 2007 Toyota Tundra.
“How many miles?” Wahab asks, looking inside.
“Forty thousand,” Suleiman answers.
Wahab looks at me and says, “He’ll want around five grand for it.”
Suleiman smiles.
As the others chat, I wander by myself, pausing beside a wrecked BMC Mini, a Camry, and a beat-up F-150 pickup, all of which have been packed with repair parts for the trip to West Africa. Then I come across a Chevy Equinox SUV with its driver side completely collapsed from an accident and the front end compressed from what must have been an even worse impact. I grew up in a family scrap business focused on recycling cars. On a good day, we’d crush sixty, many of which looked better than this Equinox. So far as I’m concerned, it belongs at a scrapyard. I look through the windows and am not surprised to see that this vehicle isn’t filled with parts. “Wonder what the deal is,” I say to Robin, who is nearby.
“Maybe they’re sending it to be parted out.”
“The parts are worth more money than the car,” Suleiman says as he approaches with Wahab. “I have clients.”
In 1994, the U.S. government required manufacturers to include computers for monitoring and controlling emissions in all cars and trucks. To maintain those computers, and the engine components to which they’re attached, manufacturers created software. Lawmakers foresaw trouble: manufacturers and their dealerships could, in theory, use that software to place independent repair shops at a competitive disadvantage. As a result, Congress required manufacturers to make those tools available to any repair business that requested them. That was farsighted, in light of what was to come.
During the next twenty-five years, computers became increasingly critical to the operation of automobiles. Today even the cheapest of budget vehicles includes electronic controls for the engine, automatic transmission, antilock brakes, and cruise control. Predictably, auto manufacturers have tended to restrict essential software diagnostics and tools to their authorized dealerships and service centers, with negative consequences for consumers. For example, some airbag sensors can be reset only with the manufacturer’s software after they fail. If an independent garage doesn’t have that software, the car owner is forced to seek service at the dealership—or drive around with a broken airbag.
Auto manufacturing isn’t the only industry to restrict access to repair. Many of the same anti-repair practices are common in the consumer electronics and appliance industry.
Consider the practices of Apple.
In recent years the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer has systematically disabled iPhones that had their home buttons replaced by independent repair shops (imagine if Ford remotely disabled your car engine because your power locks were fixed at a local garage, not a dealership);3 sued an independent Norwegian repair shop for using secondhand iPhone repair parts;4 and sealed up its phones and computers with unusual screws that—for a while at least—most independent repair shops didn’t have the drivers to loosen.5
And those are just the one-off occurrences. As a general practice, Apple refuses to make service manuals or parts available to independent repair shops or consumers (even for relatively simple procedures like an iPhone battery switch). Why does Apple take these steps? On January 2, 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed a public letter to Apple’s investors in which he cut the company’s quarterly revenue outlook for the first time in fifteen years. Among the reasons cited was a steep decline in iPhone sales due to eleven million iPhone owners opting for a temporary twenty-nine-dollar sale on battery replacements rather than a far more expensive upgrade.6 The company has subsequently raised the price of an iPhone battery replacement, presumably to a level that will make an iPhone owner ask: “At that price, doesn’t it make more sense just to buy a new phone?”
How many Apple devices are left unrepaired because the company’s anti-repair (and battery replacement) practices drive up the cost of ownership? In the world’s towns without Genius Bars or Apple-authorized repair centers, how many phones sit in desk drawers unrepaired? And what will happen to devices that break after Apple stops providing its authorized repair centers with the tools to fix older devices (a particularly thorny problem in developing countries that buy older, secondhand devices)?
If today’s consumers could simply treat phones, laptops, and other devices as luxuries, this would be the proverbial “first-world problem.” But the twenty-first century is a connected age, and electronic devices are essential to functioning in daily life. Ensuring that these devices last longer, via repair, won’t just be an environmental imperative. It’s also a common-sense imperative, the kind of household economy that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to nineteenth-century keepers of button and string bags.
Robin Ingenthron was raised in rural Arkansas by an academic father descended from newspapermen and a mother descended from—in his proud words—“true hillbillies.” Ever since he was young, Robin tells me, his grandfather was teaching him “how to fix stuff,” starting with cars. “The main thing that he would tell me is”—he switches into a higher-pitched, old-timey voice—“ ‘all of this is going to be incredibly important to you, young man, knowing how to fix stuff.’ ”
We’re seated in Robin’s home office in Middlebury, Vermont. A large picture window looks out on a half acre of green lawn and then mile after mile of forest. Robin’s wife, a professor of French at Middlebury College, just left for work and we’re onto a second cup of Robin’s black coffee.
I suggest that his grandfather’s advice about repair is from a different era. He corrects me. “I think it’s advice from poor people. People who are poor fix stuff. I was raised that the smartest thing you can do is buy a rich person’s broken thing,” he says. “The best deal you can negotiate is when the rich person doesn’t know how easy it is to fix it.”
The recycling business, and its relentless pursuit of value in what others view as worthless, was a perfect fit for Robin. After college, he served in the Peace Corps, worked at a small recycling company, and eventually worked his way into a job as the recycling director for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. During his tenure, he was assigned an unenviable task: set up recycling infrastructure to support a state ban on the dumping of old tube televisions and monitors into landfills. He did it by relying in part on recyclers interested in purchasing the televisions for reuse—either as whole televisions or as parts. “You just had to look at the prices that were being paid to know that TVs have value,” he tells me as we drive across Middlebury to Good Point Recycling. “They aren’t waste.” It was a good deal for everyone. The State of Massachusetts saved money, the repair industry got parts and televisions, and consumers could feel good knowing that their unwanted devices were “recycled” in a manner that ensured the highest environmental outcome: reuse.
A few years later, Robin quit his state job and followed his wife to Middlebury, where he established Good Point Recycling as a business that, among other things, collected used American computer monitors and sent them to places where they could be reused.7 One of his biggest markets was China, where, he learned during one visit, massive factories remanufactured those old computer monitors into tube televisions for emerging markets. He recalls a single broker in Los Angeles “purchasing fifty thousand used American televisions per day” for the Chinese remanufacturing industry. Eventually, many of those refurbished monitors were exported back to the United States as new devices, giving the rich man the opportunity to buy back his broken thing at a premium.
We pull up to a brutalist concrete building in a leafy industrial park that, in addition to Good Point Recycling, is home to the largest hard-cider brewery in the United States. Robin leads me inside Good Point. Forklifts zoom back and forth, loading boxes and barrels of metal and televisions and other electronics into trailers. It’s a tight space filled with large washing machine boxes full of old monitors and pallets of old computers.
As we stroll, two large photography umbrellas flash. Elias Chinchilla, a longtime employee, is pointing a camera at the parts he’s just extracted from a forty-eight-inch Samsung television manufactured in 2017. “Looks like it had the shit kicked out of it,” Robin says of the shattered screen set off to the side. The likely story is that somebody dropped it, realized it would be more expensive to repair than to buy a new one, and left it for recycling at a local government collection station. In Vermont, Good Point has the contract to recycle those devices—and it will. But only after the $25 worth of Samsung parts (that’s the ballpark guess in the warehouse) are extracted and listed on eBay. Most of his customers are repair businesses in North America, but the company ships around the world.
Robin has been recycling for years, and business is booming. “But the thing that keeps us growing while other electronics recyclers go out of business is the eBay business, the part business.” Most of Robin’s recycling competitors still look at a television as a package of potential raw materials. Robin sees a package of stuff to keep televisions working. He’s not alone. The biggest television-parts business in North America (Shopjimmy.com) breaks down 1,000 to 1,500 televisions per day and generates tens of millions of dollars in revenues from the extracted parts.
Cannibalization isn’t a new concept in the world of repair. As Robin reminded me in Savelugu, it’s the side business of any auto junkyard (and sometimes the main business). Around the world, it’s often the best—and sometimes the only—option to pull off a fix.
What’s particularly frustrating, at least for those who like the idea of a thriving repair industry, are the lengths that some manufacturers will go to scare customers into not attempting a repair on their own. For example, it’s the rare consumer who hasn’t encountered a sticker warning not to open a device or the warranty will be voided.
Kyle Wiens, who is speeding much too fast downhill (actually, downmountain) on Highway 101 from his home in Atascadero, California, hates those stickers, and in recent years he’s played a key role in raising public awareness of the fact that they’re illegal.8 Just as bad, from Kyle’s point of view: they’re an outright violation of basic property rights. “If you buy something, you should be able to do what you want with it,” he all but yells as he keeps his eyes focused on the traffic he’s passing. “You should be able to fix it. I mean, it’s yours!”
Kyle, thirty-five, is the boyish CEO and co-founder of iFixit, a sixteen-year-old, 170-plus-employee San Luis Obispo, California, company that aspires—in Wiens’s words—to be “the repair manual for everything.”
The business model is a unique one. iFixit (with the help of an army of volunteers) creates repair manuals for devices that don’t have them and posts them to its website, where anyone can access the information for free. As of this writing, there are more than thirty-eight thousand manuals (and counting) for products ranging from the latest Samsung Galaxy Note smartphone to the Oral-B Vitality electric toothbrush. To monetize this massive informational giveaway, iFixit sells repair parts and tools, as well as software and consulting services. In 2016 the company generated $21 million in sales.
In some respects, iFixit is the twenty-first-century analogue to Lydia Maria Childs and The American Frugal Housewife. Just as nineteenth-century frontier women lacked complete information on how to manage and fix their stuff, so too do contemporary Americans overrun with technologies. “How many objects are in a home?” Kyle asks as he exits into San Luis Obispo. “Is it a thousand? Ten thousand? It’s an order of magnitude more than it was fifty years ago. And yet the economics don’t work for there to be a local espresso-machine repair guy. So either consumers have to figure out how to repair things themselves or …” He shrugs.
Kyle’s ambitions for iFixit are vast. “Last year more than one hundred million people visited our site in search of repair information,” he says. “We estimate that for every repair that we ship out of the building [in the form of parts], there are one thousand to ten thousand repairs just using our manuals. And we ship hundreds of thousands of parts every year.” His goal is one billion repairs per year. At that point, he figures, iFixit will impact the U.S. economy as much as Home Depot has. “[People know they] can go to Home Depot, get their parts, and talk to someone who can tell them how to do the toilet. [Home Depot has] changed the fabric of American society, and that’s what we want to do. We want to change the fabric of American society so that repair is a viable option for people.”
To bring that goal to fruition, the company does far more than offer free repair guides. It cultivates the media. For example, every year, iFixit flies some of the company’s best techs (and sometimes Kyle) to Australia so they can be among the first in the world to buy and take apart the new iPhone models. By the time consumers in the United States—Apple’s biggest market—wake up on an iPhone-release day, iFixit has already posted a slickly produced guide to tearing it down and assigned a “repairability rating” to the device. By early afternoon of the release day, every significant tech publication in the world, as well as many mainstream media organizations, has run a story on the teardown and the assigned repairability scores.
The resulting coverage has not only boosted iFixit’s profile well beyond what’s normal for a 170-employee repair parts and tool company, but also boosted the very idea of “repairability” into the mainstream.
From the inside, iFixit’s headquarters doesn’t look like a former auto dealership. Polished concrete floors are divided by desks, boxes filled with parts inventory, and exposed wooden columns that support a second floor and a sweeping staircase. As he shows me around, Kyle stops at a desk covered with hundreds of neatly stacked iPhone-size boxes. Each contains a new iPhone 6 screen, freshly delivered from a Chinese manufacturer that reverse engineers iPhone parts. It’s not a genuine part—only Apple has the new ones—but it’s all but identical, cheaper (especially if you do the repair yourself), and one of iFixit’s better-selling items. Before the screens can be listed as merchandise, however, they need to be tested: an unshaved young man in a black baseball cap unboxes each one, plugs it into a partly dismantled iPhone, and runs a set of tests to ensure that it works. The vast majority do. “We think of ourselves as a quality filter on China,” Kyle explains. “We get stuff and test it.”
Around the corner is a small warehouse filled with individual parts, iFixit-branded tool kits, and all-in-one tool-and-part kits for doing straightforward jobs like battery replacement. “The key to this business is being able to get the parts, good parts,” Kyle says as he stops and opens a box containing a kit for changing an iPhone 6s battery. “Sometimes we get them for a while, and then we can’t. Beats headphones were something that was good for us and we could get parts. Then Apple bought them and we couldn’t.”
Like any company that sells stuff, iFixit spends a lot of time thinking about what its customers want. Sometimes the answers are easy and obvious. Everyone likes nicely packaged stuff (even iFixit’s refurbished parts are packaged attractively). But it’s much more difficult to answer the bigger questions that animate iFixit: Are consumers willing to invest time, money, and effort to extend the lifespans of the objects they own? And if so, which ones?
The answers are never static and require iFixit to parse reams of data, from consumer surveys to device-bestseller lists. Sometimes the themes that emerge are dark for a company devoted to expanding repair options. For example, the sticker warning consumers not to open up their television is a manufacturer’s obvious (and probably illegal) effort to bend consumer psychology toward its preferred repair outcome: none, or one at an authorized service center. So, too, for that matter, are smartphones that lack hatches for easy battery replacement, cars that can be diagnosed only with software owned by a dealership, and a $39.99 tablet computer made by a manufacturer without a website, much less troubleshooting tips. iFixit’s role, in a sense, is to bend that psychology back to a place where a consumer feels empowered to take control of her or his stuff.
Kyle offers me an example in a small office on iFixit’s first floor. On a workbench is an open iFixit-branded toolset, as well as several additional tools scattered about. Kyle grabs a screw head in the shape of an oval. “So I was invited to do a teardown at Barcelona Design Week in 2015,” he explains. It’s the sort of thing that he’s asked to do all the time, thanks to the intense popularity of the company’s Apple teardowns. I’ve been to recycling conventions where Kyle and his teardowns are promoted like feature keynotes.
Which is what happened in Barcelona, where he was provided with tools, a large audience, and the expectation that he could work quickly.
“It ended up being a coffeemaker teardown,” he recalls. It started out well, but in the midst of it—with everyone watching—he came across what looked like a rivet. “I’d asked the maintenance guy for a drill to get it out,” he says, and then his voice tenses with a laugh. “And then I realized it was a screw. A new type of screw!”
Who uses a screw that looks like a rivet? Somebody who doesn’t want you to turn that screw. Or, as Kyle puts it, that oval screw was designed and installed “as a means of frustrating self-repair—it’s anti-user.” That’s a problem for anyone, anywhere, who wants to repair a coffeemaker. “So we developed this driver to open it,” he says, placing it back in the toolkit.
That’s one way to bend consumer psychology away from the manufacturer (or, more modestly, boost the coffeemaker repair industry). But from Kyle’s perspective, becoming Home Depot requires more than screw heads and free manuals. It requires the kind of social change that can be engineered only by governments and the companies responsible for making unrepairable stuff for the consumer economy.
Is it possible?
There’s reason to believe that it is.
On July 31, 2012, the Massachusetts legislature passed legislation requiring automobile manufacturers to provide the same information and training to independent garages as it does to authorized dealerships and service centers. Three months later, 86 percent of Massachusetts voters supported a referendum that required essentially the same thing. Having spent years lobbying and campaigning against consumers and independent repair, the auto manufacturers realized they were on the losing side of an argument that was about to go national. Rather than face fifty different “right to repair” laws, the automotive industry entered into negotiations with the associations representing independent repair garages and auto parts makers. The result was a nationwide 2014 agreement requiring twenty-three major automakers to provide access to their diagnostic and repair information systems (for vehicles dating back to 2002) to any repair shop or owner with a computer.
A similar law or agreement that applies to makers of consumer electronics and appliances is long overdue, and would have a profound and lasting impact on the growing clutter that’s found in homes around the world. Basements filled with broken vacuum cleaners and junk drawers filled with broken phones wouldn’t necessarily disappear. But there would be less reason to accumulate, because devices would be, by nature, upgradeable, repairable, and resalable. It’d be an indirect government stimulus for secondhand.
For example, I own an Apple iPad Mini 2 that I purchased in 2014. I use it daily to browse news apps and to check occasional sports scores. Five years on, it continues to perform well. There is, however, one problem: after several years, the battery can barely hold a charge for twenty-four hours. Obviously, there’s no battery door on an iPad. It’s sealed up.
As I searched online for repair options, I learned that Apple might be the answer I was seeking. As far back as 2010, the company offered this solution to iPad customers with bad batteries:
If your iPad requires service due to the battery’s diminished ability to hold an electrical charge, Apple will replace your iPad for a service fee.
In other words, Apple has made it so difficult and expensive to replace an iPad battery that Apple itself thinks it’s more economical to simply get a new iPad. When I visited an Apple store in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a Genius Bar attendant confirmed that remains Apple’s practice. He told me that Apple doesn’t actually replace iPad batteries; instead, for the bargain price of ninety-nine dollars, it switches out my old one with a new or refurbished one. Apple appears to be making the calculation that so few consumers actually bother to replace their iPad batteries that it’s worth the hit.
But what if, unlike me, a consumer doesn’t have easy access to an Apple store or its handful of authorized service centers? What if that customer lives in Mandan, the seventh largest town in North Dakota? There’s no Apple store there. Apple has a mail-in option for U.S. consumers, but that requires waiting days for the iPad to get to the service center and back. It’s even worse for international customers. What’s the resident of Savelugu, Ghana, to do with the used iPad Mini he acquired that now needs a battery switch?
There’s no official iPad Mini repair manual online. But iFixit has one, and even sells a kit to help consumers perform the repair. Through no fault of iFixit, it’s a daunting job. The first problem is that Apple seals the iPad shut with adhesives that can be loosened only with repeated applications of heat (say, a bag of rice warmed in a microwave), and—in iFixit’s manual—six strategically placed guitar picks to help lift the cover, carefully.
When I spoke to Kyle Wiens about iPad Mini repairs, he sighed. “That’s one of the toughest. You can wreck the thing if you’re not careful.” That seems to be the consensus when I looked for independent repair companies willing to replace the battery: nobody wanted to do it. I also asked around in Malaysia, where I currently live, and found one repair shop that was willing to give it a try … for the equivalent of $150. As it happens, used iPad Mini 2s are available in Malaysia for less.
A consumer right-to-repair law would have two key provisions. First, manufacturers must be required to create and post online information for the disassembly and repair of any products that they make available for sale. Second, manufacturers must be required to sell the same parts and tools (including software) to consumers and independent repair shops that they provide to authorized service centers (and to do so on fair and reasonable terms).
Initially, right-to-repair laws would ensure that more consumers are able to access repair in their communities. That’d lower the cost of repair, especially for technology, and encourage consumers to seek options for lengthening the lifespans of their stuff.
But the more profound impact will be on the design of products. So long as manufacturers aren’t required to explain if—or how—their products can be repaired, they have no incentive to make them more repairable. But the moment that Apple or any other consumer electronics company is legally obligated to make repair parts and manuals available to shops and the public, it has an implicit incentive to make those parts marketable. And they’ll do that by making devices easier to repair.
Right-to-repair laws will have an even more profound impact on low-cost manufacturers (say, of the $39.99 tablet computers sold at 7-Eleven). At the moment, nothing is preventing them from dumping their unrepairable, badly made products—especially in places like Africa, which need low-cost tech. But if a country has a right-to-repair law, they won’t be able to do that without first creating a service plan for the device, in the form of parts distribution and manuals. That requirement will, in short order, lead to better quality.
In fact, it’s already happening.
Just off Interstate 80 in Lebanon, Tennessee, is a massive building owned by FedEx Supply Chain, a subsidiary of shipping giant FedEx, that provides business services, including product returns and recycling. I’m met there by Andrea Falkin, senior manager at Dell for North America environmental affairs and producer responsibility. She takes me past security and upstairs to a sprawling, windowless production floor that looks a bit like a mechanized Sam’s Club with higher shelves, more conveyor belts, and workflow. It’s here that FedEx receives returned Dell devices from around the world; assesses them for potential repair, refurbishment, and resale; and then ships them off again. “Thousands per day,” she tells me. “The idea is to reuse. We financially reward FedEx for reuse, penalize them for scrapping.”
Dell doesn’t do it for fun. When a device arrives in Lebanon, it’s already a loss. A consumer bought it and—for reasons ranging from a defect to a change of mind—doesn’t want it. For Dell to recover as much remaining value as possible, they need FedEx to opt for reuse, not recycling.
Andrea pauses on the perimeter of the factory floor. “That’s the parts inventory,” she says, pointing at a two-story island that fills up a portion of the room and contains inventory worth, during my visit, a cool $21 million. “If you have a Dell that’s out of warranty, the parts come from here,” she explains. “You can go online and order it.” One source of those parts is the computers arriving from around the world. If they can’t be repaired, they’re cannibalized, the parts cataloged and held until someone inevitably wants them. Dell makes parts available to anyone with a credit card and a shipping address (repair manuals are free on its website).
In fact, Andrea knows more than most people about computer parts. Before she joined the environmental side of Dell, she was an engineer involved in designing Dell computers. As she recounts this period in her career (she has memories of inspecting Dell parts in southern Chinese hotel rooms before they were sent for production), she smiles a lot—especially when she encounters devices in Lebanon that she helped design (“my babies,” she calls them).
Which is often. At one point, she stops to point to a Dell desktop that she identifies as “circa 2005 and 2006, and we had big arguments about this.” She slips her fingers beneath a latch and lifts off one side of the computer case. “You can’t just build it for a man’s hand; you need to build for a woman’s hand too. That’s inclusive design,” she says and puts the case back. “We kind of have this joke around the engineers at Dell,” Andrea says. “It’s that you have to take apart one of our products before you get to design one.” I don’t get the joke, but I do get the point, as underlined by Andrea: “Taking it apart makes you ask questions. Are there better ways?”
FedEx certainly hopes so. It has a financial incentive to repair and refurbish as many devices as possible, as quickly as possible. To do that, Dell has adopted a set of design principles that make things easier to take apart. For example, whenever possible, Dell uses fasteners like screws, rather than glues and other adhesives, to hold its devices together. Devices that are adhered shut are hard to open and often break in the process; screws, on the other hand, simply unscrew.
It’s not just FedEx that profits from Dells that are more repairable. Dell’s customers also profit if they can fix things themselves rather than send them out for authorized service. Of these customers, the most critical are corporations, many of which buy thousands of devices at a time and evaluate their purchases in part on whether their own IT departments can service the machines. If repair is expensive because of bad design, that’s an opportunity for a competitor to sell a more repairable computer that costs less over the life of the machine.
Near the end of my tour, Andrea stops near a pallet piled with perhaps fifty older Dell desktops. “These are off-lease machines, returned to Dell,” she explains. “Dell made money off them for one to three years, and now it’s time to make more. They’re sold by the pallet.”
“Who buys them?” I ask.
“Someone who needs a great deal,” she says, shrugging. “Could go overseas, could go to a start-up, could go to an overseas start-up.” She gestures for me to follow her to the exit. “We used to scrap them. Now we don’t.”
Recognizing the potential in secondhand markets led Dell to design products that can last longer because they’re profitable. Right to repair is a means of encouraging reluctant companies uninterested in secondhand to rethink their approach, and hopefully adopt Dell’s. If they don’t, they’ll face the consequences of falling behind competition committed to a profitable device afterlife.
That future is coming faster than many consumer electronics companies want. As of 2019, more than twenty U.S. states are considering right-to-repair legislation (unsurprisingly, Apple and many other leading consumer electronics companies vigorously oppose them). Kyle Wiens believes it’s just a matter of time before one passes it, and the consumer electronics industry scrambles to settle, like the auto manufacturers did after the Massachusetts law. Europe is even further along. Several European governments (including Germany’s) and the European Commission have already accepted, officially, the principles behind right-to-repair legislation. At some point in the next several years, Europe will make them law. In time, those laws will boost the secondhand markets, filling them with goods maintained well enough to be sold and resold, over and over.