Pea Bee #7: Planned Obsolescence

A few weeks ago, my laptop stopped working. I opened the lid one morning, and moments later, the display flickered and then died. It hasn’t worked since.

I bought this MacBook Air as a personal laptop six and a half years ago. Probably my first big buy after I started earning my own money. In the true millennial spirit of 2015, I went all-in with my savings on this purchase. I remember when the laptop arrived, there was a small dent near its lid hinge. But I was too impatient to wait for a replacement, so I kept it. Over the years, I’ve grown to like this manufacturing defect, it has added a personal touch to this consumer product, like a birthmark.

And I am so glad I kept the laptop. It has more than repaid for my initial leap of faith. I installed a game on this laptop six years ago, and I’ve played the same game, at the same difficulty level (easy) with the same incompetency since. I have spent so many hours of my life staring at its screen and so much scrolling, so much. In a way, this laptop has played its own small part in shaping me into who I am today, for better or worse.

I went to an Apple authorized shop to fix this laptop. Any kind of warm feelings or nostalgia associated with this piece of electronic quickly washed away on hearing the final quote given by the shop. My sentiments were not worth all that much, as it turned out. So I.. let it die.

As a normal person, I turned towards the internet to find answers to the sudden death of my laptop. I was only looking for some closure, but what I found was something sinister. Apple was recently under investigation for something called “planned obsolescence” - a marketing practice many manufacturers use to intentionally shorten the lifespan of a product with the aim of making customers replace it. In fact, they admitted that older iPhone models were deliberately slowed down through software updates.

This is so dodgy from Apple. On top of this, you can only take your Apple products to an Apple authorized repair shop, and as I found out, they charge you a fortune. This is because the broken parts of their products can only be replaced, not repaired. This is also an environmental concern as this leads to a lot of electronic waste.

This is the reason why there is a growing movement in some parts of the world called “Right to Repair”. Their aim is to make spare parts, tools, technical knowledge more available and accessible.

This is what repair.eu, a Right to Repair activist group’s mission statement reads like:

We believe products should last longer, and therefore when broken, they should be repaired. This requires products to be designed for repair as well as support for repairers of all kinds.

We are asking for the right to repair.

Both the US and the UK recently introduced rules that make it easier to repair daily-use gadgets, in spite of the Big Tech lobbying against it. They think this threatens the protection of their IP and “trade secrets”.

But there is still a long way to go. Recently, I’ve seen many of these companies push PR campaigns to show how environment-aware and durable their products are (as also seen in Apple’s recent event). Whether this is just another case of greenwashing, the jury will soon be out one way or the other.

There are not many better ways to channel the grief of losing a loved consumer product than to blame big corporations for it on the internet. But to be fair to Apple, my laptop lived a long and healthy life and some parts of it still live on the cloud. So I am not too arsed about losing it. The death of my laptop was more of a case of unplanned obsolescence if anything. Which is normal and happens not only with electronic gadgets but with most things in life. From our most worshipped possessions to the people in our lives to our own ideas - we outgrow them, or they outgrow us. Sometimes, it is better to repair, other times it’s best to replace.

And as for my laptop, yeah, I am going to miss it, but when the next sale comes around, I am going to replace it and life will go on.

A File Photo of my laptop from its prime years