Smithsonian Magazine:

The idea of planned obsolescence is nothing new. But the use of “repair prevention” as a method of making products obsolete is growing, say right to repair proponents. Many companies that manufacture electronics—anything from laptops to refrigerators to your car’s onboard computer—now have restrictions that prevent consumers from having them fixed anywhere besides a licensed repair shop. Some companies use digital locks or copyrighted software to prevent consumers or independent repair people from making changes. Others simply refuse to share their repair manuals. Some add fine print clauses to their user agreements so customers (often unwittingly) promise not to fix their own products.

And:

Companies have a two-part incentive to make their products difficult to repair. First, if they control repairs, they can make money off of them. This benefit is increased by the fact that a company that monopolizes repairs can set higher prices than the market would otherwise bear. An authorized iPhone battery replacement for an out-of-warranty phone costs $79. The unauthorized iPhone battery replacement I had done in a Hong Kong electronics mall, where there’s plenty of competition, cost me about $30. A DIY iPhone battery repair kit from iFixit costs $34.95.

And:

Earlier this year, many iPhone 6 owners found themselves with nonworking phones after an Apple iOS update detected that they had had repairs done at an unauthorized shop. Without warning, the update put their phones on permanent, unfixable lockdown. (After a public outcry, Apple apologized and offered a fix to the problem, saying it was meant as an in-factory security test and not intended to affect customers.)

Obviously, this problem goes well beyond MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads, well beyond Apple. Everything you own with an embedded chip is fair game. So is everything with custom, difficult to replace parts. The article focuses on the money side, the motivation for companies to make some products difficult or impossible to self-repair. But a more compelling issue is the incredible amount of waste that goes along with replacing instead of fixing or upgrading.

On one side, Apple has stepped up its recycling efforts, funding Liam the recycling robot, for example.

But there are stories like this Washington Post article:

A bill that could make it easier to fix broken phones, computers and tablets was killed in the New York state legislature on Saturday when the session officially ended. Opposed by tech giants such as Apple, Cisco and Xerox, the bill would have forced companies to release electronic parts and design manuals to independent repair shops. If passed, the bill could have been a boon to repair technicians and “right-to-repair” advocates nationwide.

My 2 cents? Companies that make things need to either make them easier to truly recycle (as Apple is doing with Liam) or make it easier for folks to fix themselves.