The Reason why Smartphones are Becoming Increasingly Unrepairable
Tech companies nowadays are doing their best to maximize their profit in every possible way. One of those areas is repairability. We have seen Apple software locking various components with the phone, and it has only gotten worse with the iPhone 12 and onwards. Android manufacturers are not that drastic, but they are slowly making their devices increasingly harder to repair in every revision of their products.
Companies make it in a way that it is very hard to access the phone, with multiple
style of screws in the inside, making repairs impossible for someone without a
specialized toolkit. Even if you purchase a professional toolkit, chances are
that the replacement part may not function, since a genuine one is required. There
are cases where even if you replace a part with a genuine one from another phone,
it still will not work, since it will need to be individually paired to the phone’s logic
board.
So ultimately, third-party repair shops become useless and the companies gain all
control over the prices of certain repairs. This is where “right to repair” comes
into the frame.
“Right to repair” is a movement that is pushing for this exact situation to change.
The consumer should have the freedom to repair the phone they purchased,
because it is obviously your phone. So it is of great significance to not let
companies make their phones completely unrepairable, and the “right to repair”
movement is a step in the right direction.