planned obsolescence

Unrepairable phones and laptops are one of the scandals of our throwaway society. But the pushback is building – and the coronavirus crisis has added more pressure for change ‘Imagine you showed someone a smartphone 20 years ago. You said: ‘Here’s this thing, it’s going to be awesome, and it’ll cost $1,000. But the manufacturers are going to glue the battery in, and you’re supposed to get rid of it when the battery wears out.’ You would have thought that notion was completely bananas.” Nathan Proctor is talking via Google Hangouts from Boston, Massachusetts, about an allegedly central feature of modern manufacturing known as planned obsolescence . This is the idea that some of the world’s biggest companies have been selling us products either knowing full well that they will only last a couple of years, or having deliberately built a short lifespan into the itemor its software. As we throw away machines and devices damned as out of date, the result is a growing mountain of e-waste. Last year alone, it was reckoned that more than 50m tonnes of it were generated globally, with only around 20% of it officially recycled. Half of the 50m tonnes represented large household appliances, and heating and cooling equipment. The remainder was TVs, computers, smartphones and tablets. In Norway, the supreme court is deciding on the battle between Apple and Henrik Huseby , the owner of a small phone-repair shop, and the company’s pursuit of claims about “counterfeit” replacement screens that he insists were taken from old Apple devices. Meanwhile, the European commission has recently announced plans aimed at ensuring that a range of products will be “recyclable, repairable and designed to last longer” as part of a plan to halve waste across the EU by 2030. “We’re not going to fix this problem person by person, changing how we treat smartphones. The companies that make millions of smartphones should just not make them to break.” A few computer companies do better (“HP and Dell provide access to firmware, spare parts and tutorials – they’re really good, as far as we can tell”), but their actions heighten his exasperation that many tech corporations are reluctant to follow suit. Meanwhile, the coronavirus crisis has brought our need for greater resilience and sustainability into sharp focus. Proctor noticed this from the start. “A lot of new equipment – whether it’s your electric fan or iPhone or networking equipment for your school or office – comes from China,” he says. “And because Chinese manufacturing was affected first, a lot of wholesalers saw a pretty significant increase in the demand for used equipment – whether that was laptops that schools were trying to redistribute so that kids could do homework, or hardware so that people could handle more remote operations.” But wholesalers and refurbishers found much of the equipment was locked against reuse because of manufacturers’ systems. “You can buy the hardware, but you don’t have the permissions to use it without getting some kind of new service agreement. So that’s another problem.” Symbols of the extent to which companies make user repairs of their devices either impossible or extremely difficult are everywhere. iPhones are partly held together by Pentalobe screws, which are immune to standard screwdrivers. Some Amazon Kindles are constructed using glued plastic casing that is all but impossible to prise open. The reluctance of big companies to release information about the workings of their products is a constant source of frustration. All this is being closely watched by a Brussels-based organisation called the European Environmental Bureau . One of the groups’s key staff members, 28-year-old Jean-Pierre Schweitzer, tells me the EU’s plans for digital devices promise to extend the rules that apply to such household objects as fridges and washing machines to laptops, tablets and smartphones. “We’re talking about really serious requirements, which include things about spare p