Why Apple and Other Tech Companies Are Fighting to Keep Devices Hard to Repair

A new report says the tech industry is using its outsized influence to combat environmental product standards

Apple is the largest company on Earth by market cap, and its success is derived from selling brand-new high-end smartphones consistently month after month. At the peak of its iPhone business, back in 2015, Apple sold a staggering 231.5 million smartphones. Though sales have begun to slow, that one device alone still accounts for more than 50 percent of Apple’s entire business. The company’s second quarter earnings results for 2017, reported on Tuesday, showed a quarterly profit of $8.7 billion, a majority of which came from the sale of 41 million iPhones.

But one of the reasons Apple can sell so many new devices is that we keep tossing aside our old ones, either because the battery life has grown worse or a new, more advanced model just came out. Advocacy groups say this is by design, and that companies like Apple are keeping supposedly neutral standards bodies from implementing environmentally friendly measures that could increase device longevity and cut down on the number of new units manufactured.

Apple isn’t alone here, but the iPhone has become emblematic of this mindset and what environmental groups consider excessive wastefulness. The company makes it difficult to repair its products by using proprietary screws, unibody enclosures, and other manufacturing and design techniques that make it so only Apple or computer repair experts can easily take them apart. The company also makes it notoriously difficult to replace its batteries, by gluing them to other components and burying them beneath layers of complex, sensitive parts. Instead, Apple incentivizes consumers to trade in or discard models that are just 18–24 months old for newer ones...