The right-to-repair movement has spent a decade making the wrong argument. Its most vocal advocates frame the case around what happens to a device after you are done with it: an environmental argument about downstream consequences. This is understandable, and it is strategically disastrous, because it asks you to repair your phone as a gift rather than as a straightforward act of financial self-interest.
The actual argument is better. It concerns what happens to your money while the device is still in your hands.
When a device cannot be repaired, ownership is a polite fiction. You have possession of the hardware, but the manufacturer retains a veto over its useful life. The moment a battery degrades past usefulness, a screen cracks, or a software update ends support on an arbitrary date, the device enters its grace period. You are renting it at the price of full ownership. The fee is collected retrospectively, at replacement time, rather than monthly. The total cost is identical. The billing schedule is just different.
This is not a side effect of modern manufacturing. iFixit has tracked repairability scores across consumer electronics for over a decade, and the direction is consistent: newer models are harder to open, batteries are more difficult to replace, components are increasingly bonded rather than bolted. The decline correlates closely with shorter replacement cycles, which correlate closely with manufacturer revenue. When repair is designed to be impractical, the manufacturer has written the next purchase order on your behalf.
Parts pairing adds a second mechanism. On several current smartphone and laptop lines, replacing a component with an identical third-party part triggers a firmware warning or reduces functionality. The part is not inferior. The check exists to route repair revenue back through the authorised service channel. This is not an engineering constraint; it is billing infrastructure wearing an engineering costume.
The financial arithmetic is straightforward. A EUR 1,200 mid-range laptop replaced every three years costs roughly EUR 400 per year of ownership. A Framework laptop, designed to be upgraded and repaired with standard parts, costs around EUR 1,400. A Fairphone, built on the same logic in the mobile category (see our companion guide to the Fairphone 6), sits at a similar premium. Hold either for ten years, which is realistic when a battery swap costs EUR 30 and a RAM upgrade is a five-minute job, and the annualised cost falls to roughly EUR 140. The device with the higher sticker price is the cheaper device. The difference, taken over a decade, is a substantial transfer from your balance sheet to a manufacturer’s service margin.
The legislation now beginning to address this is useful for a precise reason. The EU Right to Repair Directive, adopted in 2024, requires manufacturers of specified product categories to make spare parts, tools, and repair information available at reasonable cost. The US REPAIR Act (H.R. 1566) pursues similar ground. Neither law requires you to repair anything. They require that you have the option. The value of an option is asymmetric: if you exercise it, you capture the upside of cheaper ownership; if you do not, nothing changes. Legislation that expands your options without narrowing them is rarely working against your interests.
The repair debate is, at its core, a property rights debate. When a manufacturer can end the useful life of a device through a scheduled software cutoff, or can monopolise the repair channel through firmware, the question of what you actually own becomes uncomfortably hard to answer. You have a device. You do not have a fully-owned asset. You have something closer to a depreciating licence.
This connects to a principle examined in The Subscription Trap and in Owning Less, Better: the most important distinction in any purchase is not the price you pay today but the degree of control you retain tomorrow. Repairability is how physical objects express that distinction. A hand tool with replaceable parts and a lifetime guarantee, as covered in our multi-tool buying guide, is the simplest available proof: designed to last because durability is the selling point, not a concession. The same logic extends to laptops, phones, and every device category where planned obsolescence has become the default.
Buying something repairable is buying the full asset. Buying something non-repairable is buying a time-limited licence dressed as a purchase. You pay more over time for the licence, and you get less. The environment is not the reason to care about this. Your own balance sheet is.
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