My first Apple computer came out of a neighbor’s trash. She had bought the MacBook new a year earlier, but an incident with a dog and a drink and a chair that was much too tall had knocked out some of the keys, leaving it quite unusable. Fixing it would have cost nearly as much as a new computer, so out to the street it went. Thanks to Apple’s breathtakingly high repair costs, her misfortune had become my dumpster treasure. 

I’ve had other laptops, but this was the first one that felt like it was mine.I learned how to clean the fans, how to surgically untangle the device’s innards and peel out what was left of the keyboard. After swapping out the battery and memory, I slapped a bumper sticker on it and named it Bernie Mac, after a politician who was about to announce his second run for the White House. 

Bernie Mac was the best computer I’ve ever had, and it survived dozens of dings and drops and cat pirouettes. That’s not just my nostalgia talking: to this day, you can find YouTubers waxing lyrical about the workmanship of the mid-2015 MacBooks. When it disappeared from the Apple Store, Mashable called it “the best laptop ever made.” Years later, the Verge was still writing about the “fan favorite” 2015 MacBook Pro. 

There is something very empowering about taking the corpse of a broken machine and watching it blink back to life. For one thing, it’s easy on your wallet: repairs aren’t cheap, and Apple is notorious for marking up the cost of in-house fixes. Your conscience will also feel a bit lighter to know that you’ve stopped a few bits of silicon from being added to the 62 million tons of toxic e-waste that make their way into landfills every year. If you can fix your laptop, you reduce that quantity by a couple of pounds.

Considering how much time we spend staring at screens, most of us know very little about what happens behind them. Karl Marx said that workers are alienated from the products of their labor, but consumers are also alienated from the devices we use every day. For most of us, a computer is just a black box: all we know is that it contains some arcane technology that, like witches, cannot stand the touch of water. Being able to fix your own gadget exercises a form of power over that technology, and makes you less dependent on the company that produced it. 

There’s also something therapeutic about technical work, especially for those who society regards as “knowledge workers.” Decades ago, the writer and philosopher Robert Pirsig compared motorcycle repair to meditation. “On any repair job, ego comes in for rough treatment,” he wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “The real cycle is the cycle you call yourself.”

Working on Bernie Mac did not help me reach enlightenment, but I did learn a few things about the way our gadgets are designed. Think of the engineering choices that go into a car’s engine: Most vehicles have their batteries and oil filters located somewhere accessible, because those are the first parts that need to be maintained. If you have a sports car, though, you might find them hidden behind panels or under other components; those vehicles are not designed for the convenience of mechanics. An oil change on a Bugatti takes a whole day, and costs “from $20,000 to $25,000”—more than buying some regular cars. 

Nowadays, computers are designed more like a Bugatti than a Honda Civic. That’s partially due to marketing imperatives: If you want to make a laptop thin enough to shave with, you need to crowd some of those components closer together. 

But some manufacturers have gone out of their way to make devices that are impossible to repair. Important components are glued down or soldered together, or require special tools to remove. Replacement parts are impossibly expensive at authorized providers—or just impossible to obtain for consumers and independent repair shops. 

It’s ironic that Apple is now one of the worst offenders when it comes to device repairability. The original Apple Computer, designed by Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, was nothing but a schematic diagram, which Wozniak intended to give out for free to other computer hobbyists. Building it was the cost of ownership. Steve Jobs’ great contribution was realizing that people would rather pay for someone else to do the work.

Three trillion dollars of market capitalization later, there’s no question that Jobs’ approach was the more profitable one, but any suggestion that Apple users might want to look under the hood of their devices has gone the way of the Blackberry. Apple even has its own proprietary screws, with a star-shaped “pentalobe” slot, apparently to prevent any cross-headed Philips bastards from intruding into the sanctity of the machines’ inner recesses. 

It’s not just Apple, either. Some Microsoft products, like the infamous Surface Laptop released in 2017, are glued shut so tightly that they can’t be opened without destroying them. Moore’s Law—the observation that computer power roughly doubles every two years—pretty much requires manufacturers to plan for obsolescence. The more expensive and difficult something is to fix, the easier it is to sell you a replacement.

But following that economic logic also means that functional devices turn into expensive paperweights whenever a small part gets damaged. Imagine if you had to buy a new car whenever you got a flat tire. 

“It is really not in a manufacturer’s best interest to make parts widely available,” explained Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability at iFixit, when I recently interviewed her. “It requires having a supply chain for parts and having some sort of point of sale option for customers to buy them.”

iFixit is part of a coalition of independent repair shops, aftermarket manufacturers, and public interest groups that make up the right-to-repair movement, which is pushing for replacement parts and manuals to be available to the wider public. The company provides tools, parts, and manuals for over 65,000 devices, from phone screens to cars. (They also sold me the parts I used to put Bernie Mac back together.) Altogether, Chamberlain estimates that they’ve facilitated over 100 million repairs.

“ We believe that you should be able to fix everything you own, and that manufacturers shouldn’t be able to put roadblocks in the way,” Chamberlain added. “They shouldn’t be able to stop you from getting access to the parts or the tools you need. They shouldn’t be able to block you from getting documentation or use software to keep you from completing your repair.”

But companies like iFixit are locked in an arms race against manufacturers, who see little profit in making their machines repairable. When Apple introduced its special pentalobe screws, iFixit started selling star-shaped screwdrivers to match. Then came “parts pairing,” a system of software locks that block unauthorized repairs.If you fix your phone with an aftermarket part—or even a genuine part from a different phone—you might get reduced functionality, or be bombarded with annoying warnings saying the part isn’t “recognized.”

Some of these measures have been justified as an anti-theft deterrent or a way to protect trade secrets. But the effect is to make repairs more expensive—and new devices more attractive. “It’s such a huge waste,” Chamberlain says. “Every MacBook refurbisher we know has piles and piles of activation-locked MacBooks in their back rooms.”

The right to repair isn’t limited to phones and computers. In the last days of the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission launched a lawsuit against John Deere, alleging that the company was using its software to keep farmers from fixing their tractors. “[F]or decades, Deere’s unlawful practices have limited the ability of farmers and independent repair providers to repair Deere equipment,” the agencysaid, “forcing farmers to instead rely on Deere’s network of authorized dealers for necessary repairs.”

Some Tesla owners have already learned what happens when you try to get a repair from unauthorized shops. Your warranty might be voided, or your car might be unable to charge. If the company decides that your car is salvaged or otherwise unsupported, according to a class-action complaint currently facing the company, “Tesla not only disables supercharging on Tesla’s Supercharger network, it also prevents vehicles from accessing third-party fast charging networks.”​​ If the rest of the auto market follows, we may need to start jailbreaking our own cars. 

It turns out that overcharging for repairs is not particularly popular. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both advocated national right-to-repair legislation in their 2020 campaigns, and Massachusetts passed a ballot measure for vehicle repairs with an overwhelming 74 percent of the vote. New York passed the first right-to-repair bill for electronics in 2022, and Minnesota followed shortly after. As the tide turned against manufacturers, Apple did the last thing that anyone expected. Apparently, they caved, announcing in August 2023 that they, too, supported a new right-to-repair bill in California.

A good repair job starts like a Japanese tea ceremony. The proper rituals must be observed: first sweeping the floor, then cleaning the desk, and then neatly rearranging all the stray books and papers and old receipts. Not a single screw can turn until the working area is spotless. 

Repair work requires a certain degree of obsessiveness. Some of those screws are smaller than a grain of rice, and you only need to drop one to learn an expensive lesson about tidiness. As I start laying out the tweezers and star-shaped screwdrivers, I wonder if fixing Bernie Mac had some meditative value after all. 

But the subject of today’s repairs is not Bernie Mac. When I went to journalism school, I had to upgrade to a laptop that could handle more advanced video and audio editing software. The new computer, a 2019 model of the MacBook Pro, was sleek, elegant, and utterly hostile to modification. Even the memory was soldered in. Replacing the battery—the first point of failure for a laptop—is an eighty-step processthat requires chemical solvents. 

It also had an inconvenient habit of powering off at the worst possible time. For some reason Apple had done away with prominent battery warnings: if you weren’t paying attention, the screen might suddenly go dark just before a deadline. In my head I called the computer Pro Biden, because it kept falling asleep in mid-sentence.

But the most frustrating part was the keyboard. On a normal keyboard, there is an X-shaped plastic spring underneath each letter that pushes the cap back into place with that satisfying clack. In their unrelenting push towards a two-dimensional laptop, Apple did away with these conventional “scissor switches” in favor of “butterfly” keys—so named for a square hinge under each letter, which reduces the thickness by about a millimeter. When you push down, the wings push the key back into place. Push a little too hard and the butterfly gets squashed.

Butterfly keys have since become synonymous with bad design, and have been rightfully roasted throughout the tech world. My favorite critique came from the Wall Street Journal, written in the style of someone typing on one of the failing keyboards: “Appl still hasn’t fixd its MacBook kyboad problm.”

Eventually the butterfly plague came for Pro Biden, too. The first fix was free: Apple had been forced to replace defective keyboards by aclass-action lawsuit. The second time, a friendly technician at Apple’s Genius Bar announced that it would cost about $700 to fix my faulty “M” key. 

It turns out that when Apple relented on repairability, it did not give up as much as the repair community had hoped. It was something of a surprise when Apple came out in favor of California’s right-to-repair legislation, after lobbying against it for years. That turned out to be a judo move: By supporting the legislation, the company blunted the effects of the new law in the country’s largest market.

 “Apple likely realized that being overtly hostile to right-to-repair laws and bullying small independent repair shops wasn’t a good look,” TechDirtreported, “so it has shifted its public-facing tactics.” Another assessment in the American Prospect described it as a “bait and switch.”

Which is how I now find myself prying up keys, looking for a dead butterfly for the third time in a month. One of the concessions that Apple won, in the legislation passed in New York and California, is that they only cover new devices. Older machines—the ones most likely to need repairs—are excluded. Software locks arestill allowed.

And even with the new repair laws, you might still end up paying a few hundred bucks for a new key. New York’s repair law requires manufacturers to make parts available, but they can also provide part “assemblies.” This is why my new ‘M’ was so expensive: The suggested repair was not for a new key, or even the keyboard, but for a “Top Case Assembly”—an engineering euphemism for Half of the Fucking Computer.

Parts assemblies are another loophole by which manufacturers maintain their control over the repair ecosystem. By bundling important parts together, manufacturers “can combine [them] into an assembly that makes it so expensive,” Chamberlain said, “that even their repair shops are basically never doing the repair.” 

Ironically, those assemblies—combined with the awful design overall—cost Apple billionsin warranty repairs when the butterflies started to die off. “Apple could have saved themselves a lot of money, grief, and a ton of negative press,” wrote an iFixitreviewer, “if they just made this thing easier for their own techs to work on.”

But you can avoid all of that headache if you’re willing to exercise a little ownership. Beneath the lid of my M key, the problem became immediately apparent: An electrical contact had loosened and was now rattling freely in the housing. With a bit of double-sided electrical tape, Pro Biden once again had the full range of the alphabet. 

Freedom of repair is still expanding in state houses, as well as the European Union. Earlier this week, Washington became the sixth state to pass right-to-repair legislation when Governor Bob Fergusonsigned two bills, one forconsumer electronics and one for wheelchairs. Unlike the weakened Californialaw, the one that covers phones and laptops does banparts pairing, allowing refurbishers to reuse components from broken devices.

It seems that the pendulum has started to swing—Apple has introduced a limited self-service program, and even Microsoft has made big improvements in repairability. More than two dozen states are now considering some form of repairability legislation, ranging from cell phones to wheelchairs and farm equipment. Evidently computer nerds aren’t the only ones who need affordable repairs.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. There are big gaps in the availability of documentation and schematics, Chamberlain says, which would allow refurbishers to fix individual circuits instead of replacing a whole motherboard. And although Apple isrelaxingits limits on reused parts, aftermarket parts made by third-party companies are still off-limits. 

And repairability is becoming even more important, as the United States prepares for the effect of the Trump administration’s 145 percent tariffs on electronics supplies imported from China. (Or is it245 percent, or just 30 percentagain?) “Repair makes more sense now than ever,” Chamberlain said. “If new goods cost significantly more, fixing what you’ve already got is the obvious choice.”

Meanwhile, Apple has finally killed off the awful butterfly keys, and Pro Biden has comfortably retired to a spot in my office. It works pretty well as a desktop, so long as it’s not far from an outlet and an external keyboard. 

As for Bernie Mac, it’s still going strong.