The Unavoidable Future Of Computers

Replace vs. repair will win, whether we like it or not…

The movement that took the tech world by storm. If we didn’t already have thousands of other polarising topics to discuss among ourselves, point the finger at each other on Twitter, this would definitely be it. Forget PC vs Mac, JavaScript vs TypeScript, Intel vs Apple, AR vs VR, closed-source vs open, this — the right to repair movement — takes the crown. Takes it, keeps it and owns it. Big-time. Not because it’s just another juicy topic to chew on, but rather because it tries to address a fundamental problem introduced decades ago — planned obsolescence.

Undoubtedly, I won’t get a lot of love for making my views public on a matter that has been a core talking point for the likes of Louis Rossman, Linus (LTT) and many others. Let me be extra-clear, their efforts are 100% appreciated and welcome, as they open a valid conversation. Being a tech guy myself who used to work in a computer sales and repair shop, was the town’s go-to computer guy for years and one who volunteered at non-profits specialising in recycling and rehoming computers and peripherals, I think I have a good enough understanding and educated grasp on the context, to have a valid opinion on the matter. And I would like that to be clear. This is an opinion piece presented from my vantage-point. Alternative and opposing views are welcome in the comments, as long as they don’t come in the form of verbal attacks. Life is too short for that kind of behaviour.

The briefest ever history

It is popular belief that planned obsolescence was started by the automobile industry. Well, it goes a bit further back than that to something infinitely more common in a household, though increasingly less — the incandescent lightbulb. In the 1920s, lightbulb manufacturers had a literal lightbulb moment. He! See what I did there? 😉

The weaker they made the filament, the shorter the life of the bulb was, so they decided to guarantee not more than 1000 hours per bulb. You could essentially kill a bulb within just six weeks! It’s a good thing incandescent lightbulbs are becoming a thing of the past, as that’s barely better than the life-span of toilet paper, and we all know how crazy people went at the beginning of the pandemic. It would have been a boot full of bulbs, and another run for toilet rolls! And frankly, it would have even made sense, I mean toilet paper and light are quite complementary. It’s not a complete symbiosis, but one does need light when using toilet paper, that I think we can all agree on!

The reason I bring up planned obsolescence, is because for all intents and purposes, it is the grandfather of all causes triggering the right to repair movement. It also highlights the main cause on both sides for being pro or against the movement, and that is, for the most part — money.

A bit of context

Just like planned obsolescence was put in motion for no other reason but profit, so were many of its later forms to some extent or another. Some more subtle than others, and perhaps the most subtle one being Apple, starting with pentalobe screws, aggressive glueing of internal parts, non user-replaceable components, software locks around replacement parts, etc. It is, on the surface, a capitalist solution to consumerism and a genuine effort for sustainable and highly profitable businesses in the current world we live in. Very much like fast fashion. Most consumers stopped expecting or even wishing they could use the same device for more than 3 to 7 years. My father bought a cassette player, and it worked for over 20 years, until I messed it up because I took it apart due to technical curiosity.

The “they don’t make ’em like they used to” idiom is true in part because we — consumers — are asking for it to be.

Just think for a second. How many of us decide to get a new car, a new phone, a new laptop, a new oven, a new anything just because the one we have we’re tired of, went out of fashion, has fewer features, doesn’t go well with the new furniture and so on, and so on? Not because we have to, but because we want to. The question is, why do we? Because life happens faster. In my lifetime alone — or the 30 years of it I can actually remember — we went from tape, to CD, to DVD, to Blu-ray to streaming. My dad in the same number of decades went from tape to… tape. That’s it. For him, it was essentially 30 years of apparent stagnation, for me, on the other hand, 30 years of rushing through dizzying amount of technological changes, and it doesn’t seem to want to stop! Meta-cough-verse…

Where it all gets interesting…

We never learn, do we? History is always there to teach us lessons, incredibly valuable lessons in fact, and yet, it’s the last place we look for answers. What for some reason very few pro or anti-right to repair movement supporters seem to discuss is the concept of miniaturisation. The history of the computer, while very interesting, it’s also a source of endless learnings around the matter.

More often than not, the word computer is synonymous with microprocessor, but in my humble opinion, that’s an extremely narrow view of something that today defines our lives and had the most effect on human history since probably the invention of fire. The word computer itself seems to originate from 1613, and the first mechanical automatic computing engine was conceptualised by Charles Babbage in 1822, followed by subsequent concepts in 1837 and 1910 by both Charles and his son Henry. Let’s also not forget Herman Hollerith’s machine that for the first time ever recorded and stored information on punch-cards, becoming the great-grandfather of IBM computers.

Neither of these were however programmable. That came a tiny bit later in 1936, with the Z1 by Konrad Zuse, closely followed by the Turing Machine in the same year and the Colossus in 1943 predating of course the ABC and the ENIAC in 1942 and 1946 respectively, these latter two becoming the first ever digital computers. Without mentioning the myriad of computers that followed in their footsteps, what’s important to understand here that each of these became smaller and smaller, while also becoming more capable. They did however also stay 100% repairable because either they were mechanical, electro-mechanical or digital, using vacuum tubes. Many subsequent, even more capable and smaller computers stayed entirely repairable. In fact, it took another three decades for the first-ever microprocessor to be invented by Intel in 1971.

And this is where it gets fascinating and all right to repair supporters should start reading more carefully. Within 150 years computers have become smaller and smaller and achieving smaller computers was one of the main goals in the 1900s. What is interesting here is that nobody during those 150 years had a problem with miniaturisation. Everyone wanted it, everyone celebrated it, encouraged it, supported it, poured tons and tons of funds into it. Nobody moaned about it or at least not in any significant fashion. And it’s curious because while we got from Colossus to the IBM 5100, computers became progressively then downright exponentially less and less repairable.

Followed shortly by the integration of GPUs, NICs and sound cards into motherboards, Intel’s I810 chipset ingrates the GPU into the same component as the CPU, while the Atom series actually moves the GPU onto the CPU, something we’d call an SOC these days. And still, nobody complained. Not in any notable way. Of course, AMD followed with their APUs, and now Apple with their Apple Silicon M architecture. And suddenly, when the computer industry tries to do the same thing with the rest of the components, the world is up in arms about it. Everyone still wants smaller, lighter and more power-efficient, all the while costing less and less. Because computers do cost less and less. While the global chip shortage does inflate prices at the moment, it’s merely a blip. Overall, computers have become incredibly cheap. Even premium machines, like the latest MacBook M1 Pro, is objectively cheaper than its predecessors were. The Raspberry Pi Pico costs less than a fancy coffee, just 4 Euro! Is it repairable? Barely! Does it matter? No! It costs bloody 4 Euro!

The future is cheap and replaceable

Whether people like it or not, and frankly whether I like it or not, certain aspects of the right to repair movement make no sense and attempt to stand in the way of evolution. Anyone stating computers have plateaued is off their rockers and needs to either read a history book, take a good cold shower or a drink a double espresso to wake up. Tesla himself predicted wireless communication, all the computer giants built their multi-square-foot machines dreaming of something infinitely smaller. While your iPhone’s size hasn’t really become smaller, look at its motherboard. Same goes for your laptop and even desktop. It’s all shrinking down because printing computers is cheaper, environmentally friendlier in the long run than what we have today, not to mention the past.

The problem most right to repair supporters have is really not so much that their devices cannot be repaired, but rather the cost and the lock-in effect, the former of which is largely an effect of capitalism, while the latter is nothing new and exists in many industries. The future is however unstoppable. Just two decades ago we had CRT screens almost everywhere, today we have paper-thin foldable screens of virtually any size.

I can absolutely foresee a near-future in which we build computers out of just 2–3 printed parts, similarly to SOCs being printed today.

And if you ask me, there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, they’re not repairable, extendable, user-serviceable, but do they even need to be if the entire thing can be recycled and replaced with a newer iteration? In a world where more and more people store backups of their data in the cloud, transitioning to a new replacement device at a low cost will be even simpler than moving to a new iPhone today from last year’s generation.

The truth is, what we’re experiencing now is merely an evolutionary stage. Framework’s modular laptop, while an impressive and welcome effort (like any scientific experiment), it’s also short-sighted and with statistically no chances of long-term survival. The overwhelming reason most of us want to repair things is their initial cost. The purported “sense of ownership” is merely a side effect of purchases being seen as investments. It’s a consumerist hamster-wheel that just doesn’t stop spinning. Getting off it does not happen through right to repair movements, but rather increasing the affordability of our tools or creating technology sharing schemes that already work so well in public transportation, and not only!

The bottom line is that as long as our computers become cheaper to make, easier to recycle, miniaturisation and its unavoidable side effect of no repairability becomes the right and only direction. The alternative is stagnation, and humanity never knew how to do that. It’s not programmed to do that. It will evolve infinitely or self-destruct, and I, for one, am hoping for the former.

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Attila Vago — Software engineer, editor, writer, and occasional music critic. Pragmatic doer, Lego fan, Mac user, cool nerd. JS and Flutter enthusiast. Accessibility advocate.