Fix it or ditch it: the evolution of repair culture
The last decade or so of the smartphone has brought major advances to the world of modern computing and how we communicate with each other. Think about a simple situation, like meeting someone at a pub. Before the smartphone, if you were meeting a friend somewhere, you’d organised it beforehand and you just assumed they’d show up. There was no way to communicate with them if they’d bailed, or were running late, or that they were bringing someone else along with them. Like most efficient technology, we forget how much easier they make our lives until they break and it feels like you’ve lost a limb. So how do we manage our tech consumption and repair culture going into the next decade of the smartphone?
Tech repair culture
Pre-2000, there were repair shops for everything. From shoes, clothes and vacuums, you could get pretty much everything fixed. This was still true for the start of the start of the smartphone revolution. We were all using phones that were much more fragile than the Nokia 3310 which would break the floor rather than itself if you dropped it. But as we quickly learned, our iPhones (and other smartphones like it) were quite sensitive to knocks and bumps, resulting in frequently smashed screens, water damage, and reduced battery life.
As a result, unlicensed kiosks started popping up in shopping centres everywhere, specialising in fixing your freshly smashed iPhone within an hour or less at a fraction of the cost of the price Apple charges.
The crackdown from Apple
As expected, Apple and other smartphone providers aren’t too happy about the prevalence of third-party providers fixing their products. Apple in particular is getting more aggressive, serialising their components within the latest iPhone 12. This means that only the exact camera, home button, battery etc. that came with that phone will work with the phone. Replace the camera, you lose portrait mode. Replace the battery, you won’t be able to see what percentage it’s charged to — unless it goes back to Apple themselves (or if the retailer is a registered repairer).
The assault on local repair shops by Apple has been ongoing, with Apple stating that they wouldn’t fix an error on a phone that has had parts replaced by a third party. This was overturned in a landmark case in 2018 that resulted in $9 million in penalties to be paid by Apple.
The shift in consumer behavior
Consumer behaviour has seen a major shift in the last ten years alone, with e-waste in particular growing, rising to 7.3 kilograms per capita, the largest volume ever recorded, growing significantly from just 5 kilograms in 2010. Even more shocking is the fact that only 1% of all items purchased are still in use six months later!
Not only is our environmental footprint growing bigger, but the repair industry alone is at major risk. In June 2019 there were over 65,000 repair and maintenance businesses in Australia. Statistics have not been refined for 2020/2021, but we would guess that a lot of these businesses were significantly impacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some might not have recovered. With less people visiting shopping malls across the world, the environments these businesses thrived in are shifting dramatically. Our CEO, Brad wrote about this in some more detail, sparking the conversation around the death of retail.
So where to next?
So where do we go next with our throwaway culture? We’ve seen a major change in our perception of value in such a short amount of time — it’s not looking great. Population growth coupled with rapid urbanisation and economic development will push global waste to increase by 70% over the next 30 years to 3.40 billion tonnes of waste being generated every year.
Environmentally sound management of what happens to the product shouldn’t just land in the hands of the consumer to do the right thing with their waste. The responsibility does need to be shared by the producers, to develop products that are sustainable, aiming for a closed loop system that doesn’t rely on the consumer recycling the product. Recycling programs, reducing emissions and a thriving secondhand market are excellent programs in place by a variety of tech companies to help tackle this issue. With this rapid burst of change occurring in less than two decades, how will we continue to tackle the war on waste and see our repair culture evolve over the next two decades?
Originally published at https://www.hutsix.com.au on April 8, 2021.
