The Inevitable Death Of My Laptop

When did you last hear someone say “My laptop is broken”? For me, it’s been a while — probably several years. What people tend to say today instead is the following fascinating phrase: “My laptop died”.

Those three words fascinate me for two reasons. Firstly, they anthropomorphize our devices — turning them from lifeless tools to something with a soul. If not a friend, then a beloved pet or at least a favourite pot plant. You can see this effect in action when you buy a new device. The relentless pace at which gadgets are getting faster and more capable means that your next laptop, camera or smartphone will ‘feel’ somehow different to your last one, even if it’s from the same manufacturer and is occupying exactly the same place in your life.

The second reason I find the phrase “My laptop died” fascinating is because it’s symptomatic of another, more concerning change in our relationship with technology. Something that’s broken can be repaired. Something that’s dead? Well, death is rather final. In 2007, the Guardian ran a feature where a trio of writers took their broken household appliances — a toaster, a DVD player and a vacuum cleaner — to try to get them fixed. “Can’t fix it. Not worth it,” the owner of the three-year-old DVD player was told when he returned it to the shop. “You’d be better off getting a new one. They cost less than 30 quid.”

Some products are intentionally built with a short lifespan to bring costs down and generate long-term sales volume. Economists call this “planned obsolescence”, and it comes with both pros and cons. On the bright side, customers get cheaper products and the ability to take their business elsewhere sooner if their purchase is regretted. They also get to enjoy the thrill of a new device more often, even if that thrill is a little dulled by its increasing frequency.

On the other hand, continuously replacing products rather than repairing them is environmentally disastrous. It creates more waste and pollution, uses more natural resources, and the replaced gadgets are rarely thrown out — instead they sit on our shelves or in the backs of our closets, sometimes for years. In an excellent 2002 article in the London Review of Books, describing why it takes so long to mend an escalator, Peter Campbell wrote:

“The manmade world of solid, real, comprehensible things is being replaced by one in which they die rather than break, and are only different from dead pets in that they lie around, uncorrupted, to rebuke us until they are taken off to a landfill site where they become someone else’s problem.”

There are some people fighting this trend. A do-it-yourself, constructivist ethic that was until recently considered somewhat old-fashioned has been rebranded into “maker culture”, where traditional woodworking and metalworking blends into electronics and robotics. E-commerce and 3D-printers put the necessary tools and parts within easy reach, while YouTube or iFixit supply tutorials on how to use them. If even that seems a bit much, there are 1000 “repair cafes” worldwide, where volunteers will try to fix your broken devices.

But if the internet is making repairs easier, then manufacturers are making it harder. Many expressly forbid any kind of tinkering or repairs with their gadgets, going out of their way to make life difficult. They refuse to publish repair manuals on the web, and send copyright takedown notices to people who do. Apple is one of the worst offenders, with its 2012 Macbook Pro redesign lambasted by Wired as “unfixable, unhackable, untenable”. Earlier this year, the firm was threatened with legal action over a policy that would render a handset inoperable if it had been repaired by a third party.

Which neatly brings us to my laptop and its inevitable death. I’m sitting at my desk typing this on a 2012 Macbook Pro that occasionally freezes and burps up disk errors. The ‘e’ key is getting unreliable, and sometimes it fails to notice that it has a battery inside. I’d love to get it fixed, but last time I tried to do so it meant being without my laptop for several days (difficult in my line of work) and an argument with the local Apple Authorised Service Provider about some damage they’d caused during a previous repair. I’m disinclined to go back.

Meanwhile, every time I look at my laptop I have to fight a little to get past the perception that it’s heavier, slower and less capable than a new model would be. That’s perhaps the most sinister factor in all of this for me — the way that this new “normal” has crept up on us over the last few decades.

I don’t have an answer. Despite Apple’s attitude to repairing, I’m still probably going to buy one of its new Macbooks at some point in the coming months to replace this one. I try to rationalise it to myself by adding up the tens of thousands of hours of service that my current model has given me over the last four years, but still it leaves me uneasy. What kind of life will it lead after that? It’ll sit on my shelf until one day — unnoticed by the world — it becomes unable to operate at all any longer.

Broken. Or, in the parlance that we more commonly use today… dead.