Designed to Fail, Illegal to Fix

Now

You buy a smartphone. After two years it slows noticeably — not because the hardware has degraded, but because a software update has throttled its processor. In 2017, Apple admitted to deliberately throttling older iPhones via iOS updates, resulting in a U.S. class action settlement of up to $500 million, a 25 million euro fine in France for "misleading commercial practice by omission," and a 10 million euro fine in Italy. When you try to repair it, you encounter proprietary pentalobe screws designed to prevent you from opening the device you own. If a third-party repair shop replaces a cracked screen with an identical genuine Apple part, the phone displays "Unknown Part" warnings and disables features — because Apple cryptographically pairs each component's serial number to the logic board, making all repairs dependent on Apple's authorization and pricing. Graded on the EU's new repairability scores, Apple's phones earned a D- in U.S. PIRG's 2026 Failing the Fix report — the lowest grade among major manufacturers. You buy a printer for $49, then discover the ink cartridges cost $60 each — with replacement ink running as high as roughly $12,000 per gallon. When you install a compatible third-party cartridge at a fraction of the price, a firmware update disables it. HP and Epson have both pushed firmware updates that blocked previously working non-brand cartridges, and class actions followed.

Your washing machine breaks after ten years. A peer-reviewed 2025 study in the Journal of Industrial Ecology found that the service life of washing machines in Norwegian households has declined 45% — from 19.2 years to 10.6 years — with the steepest drop in the 1990s and 2000s. Oven lifespans have declined 39%. The authors attribute much of that decline to faster replacement rather than to engineered failure. The manufacturer discontinued replacement parts for your model three years after purchase; it took 2021 UK regulations, mirroring EU rules, to require manufacturers to keep washing machine spare parts available for at least 10 years. Your clothes are fast fashion garments built for brief use. Global clothing production doubled between 2000 and 2014, while the average number of times a garment is worn dropped 36% and less than 1% of clothing material is recycled into new clothing; more than 92 million tonnes of textile waste are generated annually, much of it landfilled or burned. Your car contains more than a thousand semiconductor chips, and manufacturers increasingly wall off the diagnostics: Fiat Chrysler vehicles since 2018 carry a secure gateway module that blocks independent shops' scan tools from clearing fault codes or running tests unless they register and pay the manufacturer for access. Your tractor's software locks you out of fixing it on your own land; it took a 2026 FTC settlement joined by five states to compel John Deere to give farmers the same repair tools it provides authorized dealers.

The FTC's own 2021 report to Congress, "Nixing the Fix," found "scant evidence" that repair restrictions protect consumers — they protect manufacturer revenue. The pattern is structural: when profit depends not on making things that last but on making things that must be replaced, durability becomes a threat to the business model and repairability becomes something to be engineered out. U.S. PIRG estimates that repair could save the average American household about $330 a year — roughly $40 billion nationally — if products could be fixed instead of replaced. Globally, 62 million tonnes of electronic waste are generated annually — rising by 2.6 million tonnes per year — of which only 22.3% is recycled, and $62 billion in recoverable raw materials is lost.