Power Metal by Vince Beiser

Author:Vince Beiser [Beiser, Vince]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Better Than Recycling

As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, US president (1953–61)

Chapter 10

New Lives for Old Things

It didn’t seem like a life-altering event when Kyle Wiens accidentally dropped his Apple iBook off his dorm room bed one day in 2003. The laptop landed on its corner, where the plug connects to the machine, and when Wiens picked it up, the little light indicating that electricity was flowing into the computer was dark. Wiens guessed the problem was a loose wire or broken soldering joint, something that should be pretty easy to fix. He was a handy guy, an engineering student at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. His grandfather, who had attended the same school years earlier, had given him a soldering iron as a present when he left for college for just such small repairs.

Wiens tried to open up the machine and take it apart. He was confounded almost immediately—there were all kinds of small tabs and latches, and the whole apparatus was bafflingly complicated. Wiens had worked in an Apple Store in high school, so he knew there were repair manuals that could walk him through what needed doing. He tried hunting one down on Google, but, to his astonishment, couldn’t find one.

So, he just winged it. With the help of a friend, Luke Soules, he took the machine to pieces on his dorm room floor. It took them two days, and they lost a few screws and broke a few latches along the way, but they finally managed to find the broken connection and mend it with a drop of fresh solder. They put the computer back together, and it worked fine.

“Why was that so hard?” Wiens wondered. Why couldn’t he find anything online about how to repair his laptop? He did more research and learned that the problem wasn’t that nobody had made Apple repair manuals available on the internet. The problem was that websites that had posted such manuals had been ordered to take them down by Apple. In other words, one of the world’s leading consumer-tech companies was actively working to make it harder for consumers to fix its products.

“That really pissed me off,” Wiens says. “The idea that this information was forbidden fruit did not sit well.” He’d paid good money to buy his computer from Apple. It wasn’t theirs anymore. It was his. Why shouldn’t he be able to fix it?

It was time, Wiens decided, to fight for his rights. Specifically, his right to repair.

Sooner or later, all electronic products will stop working. Some part will get fried. Some internal system will slip out of whack. Entropy will inevitably collect its due. What do you do then? If the product in question is a car, no one would answer, “Recycle it and get a new one.” Recycling that car would mean

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