Repair is cheaper, greener and better for the people who do it.

Last month my laptop stopped charging. It was five years old, which in the logic of modern electronics makes it elderly, and the first shop I took it to suggested, kindly, that it might be time for a new one. The second shop, a two-person repair counter off the canal, replaced a worn charging port in forty minutes for 38 pounds. I am writing this column on it now.

That small experience has hardened a view I have held for a while: that our default response to a broken laptop is backwards. We replace first and ask questions later, when we should be repairing first and replacing only when there is genuinely no other choice. Repair is cheaper for the owner, much greener for everyone, and it sustains a kind of skilled local work that we are in danger of losing.

The arithmetic is not close

Start with money. A mid-range laptop costs somewhere between 600 and 900 pounds. The faults that most often send a machine to the bin are a tired battery, a cracked screen, a failing keyboard or a damaged port. In Calder’s independent repair shops, these jobs typically cost between 40 and 180 pounds. Even a full screen replacement rarely reaches a third of the price of a new machine.

Then consider the environment. Most of the carbon footprint of a laptop is spent before you open the box, in mining the metals, making the chips and shipping the finished product. Keeping a machine in use for seven years rather than four cuts its lifetime emissions per year of use by roughly 40 per cent. No recycling scheme, however good, comes close to the saving of simply not needing a new one.

Finally, there are the people. The repair counter I visited employs a former telecoms engineer and a young woman who taught herself soldering during a long spell of unemployment. There are around twenty such shops in the city. They pay local rents, train apprentices and keep money circulating in neighbourhoods that have lost banks and post offices. When we buy new instead, that money leaves the region almost entirely.

“Half my customers come in expecting to be told it’s finished. Most of the time it’s a part that costs less than a takeaway,” said Nadia Freudenberg, who runs the repair counter and has fixed, by her own count, more than eleven thousand devices.

The fair objections

I accept that repair is not always possible. Some machines are built with batteries glued in place, memory soldered to the board and screws so unusual that only the manufacturer stocks the tools. Spare parts can be scarce or overpriced, and software updates sometimes stop long before the hardware fails. Readers who have tried to repair a laptop and been told that the part is unavailable are right to be frustrated, and right to ask why.

But these are arguments for changing the rules, not for giving up. Manufacturers design products to be hard to repair because nothing compels them to do otherwise. The Assembly’s consumer committee has a draft proposal on its desk that would require parts and repair manuals to be available for at least seven years after a model goes off sale, and would give each laptop a simple repairability score at the point of sale. It deserves support across the chamber.

What we can do now

None of us needs to wait for the law to change. Before buying a new laptop, get a quote for repair. When you do buy, choose a model with a replaceable battery and a good repair score, even if it means sacrificing a millimetre of thinness. Ask your employer, school or council what happens to their old machines, and whether a refurbishment scheme could keep them in use. Learn to replace a battery yourself; it is often a twenty-minute job with a screwdriver.

My laptop will not last forever. One day the repair will cost more than it is worth, and I will replace it without guilt. But that day should be decided by the machine, not by habit, and certainly not by a design meant to make us give up early. Fixing things is not nostalgia. It is common sense that we forgot, and should now relearn.