If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it

Rebuilding our tech’ world through repair

Gather around my friends and hear a tale of woe. In 2021, I was sitting in my kitchen with a five month old puppy on my lap. In front of me, was a 2016 MacBook Pro. The laptop had stopped working after a catastrophic short circuit from the power supply at the USB C port. It wouldn’t turn on and my local PC repair shop couldn’t help getting it working. My task was to extract the 500GB SSD drive after all of my backups had failed.

Apple quoted me around £500 to extract my data. That’s a bargain of one UK pound per GB! Hooray! Still, to this day, there is no aftermarket adapter to allow this proprietary connector to work outside of an Apple Store.

We all have stories like this one. Perhaps you were victim to the butterfly keyboard fiasco of the 2016 generation of MacBooks? Perhaps you wanted a fan replacing on a Mac Pro only to be told it wasn’t possible without ripping open the entire machine? And I’m not just pointing the finger at Apple here: Microsoft’s Surface line of computers were notoriously difficult to repair until recently, while smart watches and running watches are full of proprietary connectors and are glued together meaning any attempt to repair them will fail.

Recent years have seen a substantial shift in the behaviour of some consumer tech’ brands, pushed on by the increasing vocal right to repair movement. However, so locked are most of us into our particular tech’ ecosystems that we’re…