Your Gadgets, Their Rules: We Can’t Lose The Fight for Repair

Abdullah Mustapha

June 21, 2025

It’s a real problem. You spend a small fortune on a new, high-performance tech device. Eighteen months later, just past the warranty period, a small, repairable element needs a replacement—the charging connector becomes loose, the battery dies. You learn that an easy fix is not an option. The manufacturer charges you almost as much as a brand-new model, and third-party shops just roll their eyes. Your expensive device has now become useless.

The War on Repair: How Big Tech Is Forcing You to Buy New

If this rings a bell, don’t panic, you’re not alone. We’re living in a golden age of disposable tech, but this is not a glitch: it’s a design feature. The technology giants have waged a silent war against the idea of repairing the things we purchase for decades. They’ve perfected the “closed ecosystem,” using special screws, glued-in batteries, and software barriers that alert you with a warning message when an “unauthorized” component is detected.

The corporate line as presented officially is that this is done to protect their intellectual property and ensure your safety and security. The argument presented is that only their certified professionals possess the knowledge to handle the sensitive innards of their products. It sounds logical enough at first glance, but collapses at even the most cursory examination. It’s a handy excuse to have a monopoly on the fix, channeling consumers into one direction that always ends up in the same place: buying the next new thing.

It’s not just a cost of living hit to our wallets, but a hit to the planet. The cycle of replace, not fix, has created a lot of electronic waste. These second-hand devices, filled with valuable and often toxic substances, are piling up in landfills at unprecedented rates. We’re exploiting finite resources to manufacture products that are specially designed for a limited lifespan. It’s a strategy that can’t sustain, fueled by marketing that celebrates the “new” and despises the “old.”

Fight for Your Right: Why We Must Reclaim Our Technology

Beyond the environmental cost, of course, this question raises an even deeper one: What does ownership mean in the 21st century? If you can’t open your device, if you can’t inspect how it works, if you can’t swap out a defective part, do you really own it? Or are you just renting it from the firm that built it? We’ve accepted terms of service that strip us of the basic rights of ownership our parents and grandparents took for granted.

The Right to Repair movement is our chance to push back. It’s a growing coalition of consumers, environmentalists, and independent repair shops demanding a change. They’re fighting for access to parts, schematics, and diagnostic tools. This isn’t just about saving a few hundred dollars on a screen replacement. It’s a fight for the future of ownership, for a more harmonious relationship with our technology, and for the straightforward, potent idea that when you purchase something, it should be yours. Yours alone. What do you think? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.

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