Manufactured e Waste

I own the most repairable, sustainable, and ethical laptop for sale today. It is cheap to maintain and upgrade if I were to want to. And it was built with the idea that it could last my lifetime. And I’m here to tell you that you should not buy it. Unless you don’t already have a laptop, and you cannot find a used laptop for sale in your area, you should not buy what I believe to be the best laptop ever made. This may seem like a bizarre and contradictory thing to say. Why would I say something is the best, while also saying no one should buy it. My reason is that my laptop solves a problem that only exists because of a mindset, that is largely not based in reality, and was instilled in us by corporations who want us to buy more things.

I want you to think about something for a moment, what do you use a laptop for? Is it for work? For play? Is your laptop just a glorified Facebook machine? Modern laptops are engineering marvels, that can do some amazing things. New ones come out every year, each generation being leaps and bounds more powerful than the last. And yet what do you use all of this power for? I don’t know about you but on my laptop I spend most of my time in a browser or a email client. These are tools that computers could run in the 90’s, all be it, much slower. My point is that the capabilities of our laptops have greatly increased, but our use cases have not changed much at all.

Sure there are people who are true power users and need every bit of performance that their computers can muster. But true power users make up such a small percentage of all laptop buyers. Take my mother for example. She does her work mostly on a laptop. Her job consists of excel spreadsheets, teams calls, and power point presentations. I would wager that yours or someone you know has a job with similar needs. And the thing is my mom does not need a new laptop. She has used the same surface pro for 7 years. And the only reason she got a new laptop recently is because the battery life on her old one was getting annoyingly short. Her complaints weren't that the screen sucked, or the keyboard felt outdated. It wasn't even that her old computer felt slow. Her complaint was that it died too fast. That is a stupid reason to have to buy a new laptop. The unwillingness of laptop manufacturers to make repairing basic things like batteries easy on their old products leads to the mountains of e waste that is produced every year.

Despite what tech companies might want you to think, this is not your fault, or even your problem. My mom is not a bad person for wanting to have a laptop that doesn't die before lunch. The burden of sustainability should not fall on the consumer. Most people who buy a laptop do not care what chip is inside of it, or what new fancy technology it has, they just want a machine that can do the tasks they want and need to do, without getting in their way. And the benefit of laptops in recent years being so good is that, any laptop made in the last 6 years is more than enough for a vast majority of people. Making the second hand market make sense for the people that just need a browser.

There is one downside to the second hand market that I already touched on earlier. Battery life. A laptop that has been used for a long time will see a decrease in battery life. And if the laptop is as used as my mom’s was, then the battery and in most cases the laptop will have to be replaced. But that does not have to be true. The reason that you can’t replace the battery on your laptop is not because it is technologically impossible, it is because the company that made your laptop didn't want you to, in most cases so that you would buy a new laptop from them.

This brings me to my laptop. I am the proud owner of a Framework laptop 13. The quick rundown of it is that every single component of this laptop from the CPU, to the USB ports can be replaced by me. I can buy all the components from the manufacturers website, where they also have helpful videos showing how to repair/upgrade the laptop that I own. Companies like Apple and Dell want you to believe that what I just wrote is not possible in a thin and “beautiful” looking device. The thing is however my laptop just looks like a normal laptop, you would have no idea that it is unique in the space unless you knew the brand name.

We are choosing to live in a world where our technology is thrown away after just a couple of years. The problem I have is that the “we” I referred to is not you and me. It is the companies that make up the most rich and powerful in the world that decide for the rest of us to live in this future. Apple and Microsoft would love nothing more than to have people buy a new laptop every year, increasing their bottom lines. What I’m trying to convey by writing this piece is that there are ways of changing these habits without giving up the things we love about our modern technology. We can have both repair-ability and usability, there is no need to make a compromise.

My laptop is amazing, and I truly believe in the mission of the company that makes it. But what I believe in even more, is that we should use our technology for as long as possible, and resist the urge of capitalism to buy the new thing each year. If we can do this as a society I believe that we can see a positive change in our world, one issue at a time.