When Repair Becomes the Stupid Option

The printer did not break dramatically.

No smoke. No mechanical scream. No heroic final page. It simply began expressing itself.

Every document came out with yellow streaks and blotches, as if my Canon MF643Cdw had quietly abandoned office work and embarked on an abstract expressionist phase. I had bought it in 2022 for around S$500. Perfectly respectable. Sensible. Not exactly an emotional object, but the sort of thing you expect to perform one basic function in your home office: receive document, print document, do not give the document a yellow fever.

The warranty had just expired.

Of course it had.

I called Canon Service. They could send someone for S$163 just to assess the damage, no repair included. The technician, with the weary honesty of a man who has seen too many printers and too much of human nature, cut straight to it: the machine was just over three years old. Just replace it.

I was annoyed, but not yet in a rage. The rage came later, from a friend.

Almost as an aside, he mentioned that a full set of toner cartridges typically can cost more than a new entry-level printer. I laughed. Then I stopped laughing. Then I checked my own purchase history.

He was right.

I had replaced the toner cartridges once before. One set of four cartridges: S$521. For a printer that cost S$500.

Read that again.

S$521 in consumables. For a S$500 machine. That is not a printer. That is a subscription service wearing a printer costume.

I did not feel cheated. I felt something more unsettling.

I felt like the whole thing had made perfect sense to everyone except me.

That is where the quiet rage begins.

The Machine Was Fine. The Economics Were Broken.

There is a special category of modern irritation reserved for products that fail just after the warranty ends. It feels less like bad luck than comedic scheduling. A machine sits there quietly for three years, behaving itself, then glances at the calendar and decides: now.

The technician was not telling me to give up on the printer. He was telling me the system had already made that decision for me.

I eventually fixed it myself. This is the part of the story where I would like to sound savvy and mechanically wise. The reality was less dignified. I watched YouTube videos, asked AI for help, poked around with nervous confidence, and cleaned the fixing assembly. I essentially crowdsourced my way to a functioning printer, which is either inspiring or a sign of a civilization in decline, depending on your mood.

And somehow, it worked. The printer still sits here now. I feel a small, slightly ridiculous pride every time it produces a clean page. It is not quite a victory over capitalism. It is at least a minor rebellion against unnecessary replacement.

But the uncomfortable truth remains:

If toner cartridges cost roughly as much as the machine they sustain, the printer is not the product. The dependency is the product.

This is where planned obsolescence gets more interesting than its cartoon version. Confession: I'm not a native English speaker, and had to look up "obsolescence" before writing this. It means, roughly: building things with an expiration date, whether technological, fashionable, or financial. The naive version of the argument is: "Everything is secretly designed to break." That's too simple. Some products fail because they're cheaper, lighter, smaller, more complex, or because every day, consumers quietly vote for the lower price.

The stronger argument is this: modern products don't have to be designed to fail. They only have to be designed, priced, sealed, glued, chipped, and serviced so that repair feels irrational.

The technician was not the villain. He was probably right. That is the infuriating part.

The Light Bulb That Refused to Die

No discussion of planned obsolescence can avoid the light bulb, specifically, the one still burning in a fire station in Livermore, California.

It was first installed in 1901. It has outlived empires, technologies, marriages, product managers, and at least four generations of warranty departments. It is called the Centennial Light, and it glows with the smug calm of an object that simply refused to cooperate with the economy. It even has its own webcam, and you can watch it light up the fire station here.

The story is usually told as proof that old things were made to last and modern things are made to fail. That is emotionally satisfying but not entirely fair. Engineering involves genuine trade-offs: brightness, efficiency, heat, cost, safety, lifespan. A bulb that burns forever at 4 watts in a fire station is not proof that your LED should last a century.

But the light bulb story does have teeth.

In the 1920s, the world's major light bulb manufacturers, Osram, Philips, General Electric, Tungsram, and Associated Electrical Industries, formed what became known as the Phoebus cartel. They engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb, cutting rated lifespan from 2,500 hours down to 1,000, and in doing so, gave birth to planned obsolescence as a business strategy.

That doesn't mean every modern product descends from that cartel. But it proves one important thing: product lifespan is not only a technical question. It is a commercial decision. A product that lasts too long can become, in some business models, an inconvenience. A customer who repairs the old one is a missed sale.

The engineers didn't design failure. The incentives did.

My Childhood Had one Washing Machine

I grew up in Germany with a Miele washer and dryer that seemed less like an appliance and more like a piece of furniture.

It was there when I was a child. Still there when I was a teenager. Still quietly doing its job when I left home at 19. Nobody treated this as remarkable. It was just what a good machine did.

That memory now feels almost exotic. It also needs one honest caveat: that Miele was simpler, heavier, less energy-efficient, and almost certainly repaired at some point by a technician whose skills were common then and are rare now. It probably weighed as much as a Volkswagen and required no software updates because it had no software. Nostalgia has a way of editing out the inconvenient details.

Still, something has shifted.

Today, I look at household appliances across Hong Kong and Singapore, fridges, wine coolers, air conditioners, washing machines, and the rhythm feels different. Things breaking after roughly seven years. Not always. Not scientifically. But often enough that it stopped feeling like bad luck and started feeling like the expected lifespan of modern domestic machinery.

A fridge fails. An AC gives up. A washing machine begins making a noise like a small helicopter trapped in a metal box. Someone comes to inspect. The diagnosis arrives with a shrug. Either the spare parts no longer exist, because the manufacturer stopped stocking them years ago. Or it is technically repairable, but the repair costs more than a new machine. The conclusion is always the same: not worth it.

And in cities like Singapore and Hong Kong, there is an additional complication: newness carries status. These are places that move fast, renovate frequently, and treat the newest version of things as a quiet social signal. The price of a perfectly functional kitchen is not broken equipment. It is an expired aesthetic. Someone decided the cabinets looked last year, which is a different kind of obsolescence entirely, and arguably more insidious.

Companies Are Not Helping

Here is something most people don't know: in many countries, manufacturers are only legally required to stock spare parts for between two and seven years after a product is discontinued. After that, they can simply stop. No parts, no repair, no choice.

This is not a side effect. It is a policy.

Samsung, to pick one well-known example, has faced repeated criticism for discontinuing spare parts support on appliances within a few years of launch, leaving owners of otherwise functional machines with no repair option. Apple spent years making iPhones with batteries that were glued in, screws that required proprietary tools, and software that would flag non-Apple replacement parts as unauthorised. It took regulatory pressure from the EU, and years of public frustration, to move the needle even slightly.

Fast fashion works the same logic at a different price point. A H&M jacket is not designed to last five years. It is designed to last one season, to be replaced by next season's version, and to cost just enough that throwing it away feels almost reasonable. The product is disposable by design. The replacement cycle is the business model.

In each case, the game is the same: make ownership temporary, make repair difficult, and make replacement feel like the sensible choice.

We are not imagining this. The system is working exactly as intended.

The Quiet Rage of Throwaway Life

The world generated 62 billion kilograms of e-waste in 2022. That's roughly 7.8 kilograms per person on earth. Only 22.3% was formally recycled in an environmentally sound way. The Global E-waste Monitor projects this could reach 82 million tonnes by 2030.

That is not a data point. That is how culture shifts, one individually rational choice at a time.

The EU adopted a Right to Repair directive in 2024. Its aim: to make repair a genuine option, not an eccentric hobby for stubborn people with screwdrivers and too much time. Legislation alone cannot fix a culture trained toward replacement. But the direction is correct. Singapore and Hong Kong, with their infrastructure, density, and civic ambition, should be paying close attention. Both cities are extraordinarily good at removing waste. The next stage is preventing value from becoming waste in the first place.

My printer is still alive. This should not feel like an accomplishment. But it does.

It survived because I got annoyed enough to try. Most people make the rational choice. And the rational choice, multiplied by millions of rational people, produces an outcome that is collectively insane.

We are not innocent in this story. We complain about disposability while consistently rewarding cheapness, speed, novelty, and convenience. We say we want durable products, then buy the lighter, sleeker, cheaper, newer one. We hate waste. We also love the little dopamine sparkle of the unboxing.

I know I do.

So perhaps the question is not only why companies make things hard to repair. It is also why we accept it so easily. Why we have become so fluent in surrender. Why ownership has become so conditional. Why a working object can become obsolete simply because the economics around it have turned hostile.

And here is the part that haunts me more than the toner bills:

A culture trained to discard objects quickly may also be training itself to discard other things quickly. Relationships. Commitments. Careers. Institutions. The logic of replacement does not stay neatly inside the product category.

Maybe the next luxury is not the newest gadget.

Maybe it is the thing you can open, understand, maintain, and repair.

Maybe the future should not belong to smarter machines alone.

Maybe it should belong to people who have decided to stop being stupid with them.