Repairable devices create a market for third-party device repair. When something on my car breaks, I take it to a person that has no direct affiliation with th

Repairable devices create a market for third-party device repair. When something on my car breaks, I take it to a person that has no direct affiliation with the company that built my car, and it is always cheaper than taking it to the local repair shop that the manufacturer runs. Always. I can also replace the parts in it with parts manufactured by yet another third party. Again, the parts of equivalent quality are nearly always cheaper than the original manufacturer's replacement parts. You can also spend more on premium aftermarket parts, if you like. I don't even want to change the oil in my car. But I can pay someone who wants to service and repair cars all day, as their job, to do it for me, rather than sending the car back to the factory to have its engine replaced every time the oil gets dirty. If I like tinkering with electronics, I could swap my own iPhone battery, and then I could also do that for other people. The problem is that Apple, Samsung, et al do not wish to share the repairs market, or allow repairs to eat into new sales, and therefore do not sell repair parts at reasonable prices or release part specifications so that third parties may produce repair parts of equivalent quality. So the only way to get cheaper than an official first-party repair is to get crappy grey-market parts. Proprietary and patented connectors that don't get licensed on reasonable terms make things worse. This stuff doesn't need to be repaired by everyone, but it needs to be repairable by someone that isn't beholden to the original manufacturer. Repairability is the consumer check on planned obsolescence.