Here’s an interesting fact. Meta loses money on every single Oculus Quest headset it sells. The company doesn’t make a profit from the hardware at all. It only makes money when you buy apps and games for it. The headset is basically a doorway to a software store.

So you’d think Meta would want that doorway to last as long as possible. A repairable, long-lasting Quest would mean more years of you buying apps. Better for the company. Better for you. Better for the planet, since fewer headsets end up in landfills.

But that’s not what happened. You can’t even replace the battery. After a few years, it just becomes an expensive paperweight.

Why would a company work against its own interest like that?

The easy answer is greed. Corporations want you to keep buying new things, so they make old things useless on purpose. This idea gets repeated a lot, and it’s not wrong. But it’s not the whole story either. When you actually look into why products are so hard to fix, the truth is messier and, honestly, more interesting than a simple villain story.

There are five real reasons of why repairable products are so rare. Greed is only the first, and it’s the smallest part.

1. Companies are more disorganised than you think

Someone who worked on the Oculus Quest’s design shared something revealing. The team actually wanted a replaceable battery. But making that happen meant getting sign-off from the legal department. Legal was already buried in other work, so the battery idea got quietly dropped just because nobody had the bandwidth to push it through.

This is what corporate dysfunction looks like from the inside. A good idea exists. Everyone involved might even agree it’s the right call. But it dies anyway, because of internal politics, competing priorities, or a legal team that’s overwhelmed this quarter.

You can actually see this dysfunction if you know where to look. Try finding spare parts on Lenovo’s website. You’ll need to hunt down the exact model, then track down a serial number, then guess whether the part you want is even compatible. Compare that to buying a brand new laptop from the same site, which takes about three clicks.

That gap isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when a company’s internal incentives are built entirely around selling new devices. Employees get bonuses for shipping new products fast, not for making repairs easy. Nobody sat down and decided to make the repair experience painful. It’s just what’s left over after every resource goes toward the thing that actually gets measured and rewarded.

2. We want new things, and companies know it

A 2017 study by Match.com found that people with older phones were far less likely to get a date. Owning an old flip phone cut a person’s chances of going on a date by more than half. The gadget in your pocket has quietly become a symbol of status, and even of desirability.

Even people who genuinely care about sustainability aren’t immune to this. A UK study found that people often replace their devices earlier than needed, not because the device stopped working, but because they didn’t want to look old fashioned.

Companies have also spent decades training us to associate a certain look with quality. Thin. Seamless. No visible screws or seams. Apple has mastered this look, and it genuinely does look premium. But that same seamlessness is often what makes a device impossible to open up and repair. A laptop built to feel perfectly solid usually has glued in parts. A phone with an invisible seam usually can’t be opened without breaking something.

Framework, a laptop company built entirely around repairability, runs into this problem constantly. Their laptops are solid and functional, but the hinge doesn’t feel quite as refined, and the keyboard is a touch softer than a MacBook’s. Reviewers sometimes call it a downgrade. But most people only repair or upgrade a laptop once every few years. They touch the keyboard and screen every single day. So the daily feel of “premium” usually wins over long term durability, even among people who know better.

3. We don’t want to think about repair until something breaks

Almost nobody thinks about how repairable a product is before buying it. We buy based on features and price, and repairability becomes someone else’s problem, until the day it isn’t.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Companies understand this completely. They’ve made buying something new fast, easy, and frictionless. Meanwhile, repairing something is often a slow, confusing process that requires effort most of us don’t have room for in a busy week. Given the choice between a two minute checkout and a two hour repair hunt, most people will choose the checkout, even if it costs more in the long run.

4. Some products are just too complicated, or too new, to repair well

This one isn’t about greed or culture at all. It’s about engineering.

Compare a circuit board from the 1970s to one made today. The old one has a handful of simple parts you could actually point to and understand. A modern board is a dense, tightly packed miniature city. Even skilled electronics technicians will tell you they’d be out of their depth trying to fix one.

There’s also the problem of products that are still changing shape. VR headsets are a good example. The Quest 2 and Quest 3 look and work quite differently from each other. Compare that to laptops, which have looked roughly the same for over a decade. Framework chose laptops as their first product specifically because the form factor is stable. They can plan for repairability years in advance because they know what a laptop will still look like five years from now. You can’t do that with a product category that’s still evolving fast, because any repair parts you design today might not fit tomorrow’s version.

Camera lenses are the flip side of this story, and they show what’s possible. Some Leica lenses from the 1930s still fit on modern Leica cameras. That’s not an accident. A serious photographer’s lens collection is often worth more than the camera body itself, so camera companies have every reason to keep making new bodies compatible with old lenses. When the incentives line up, backward compatibility becomes normal. When they don’t, it disappears within a few product cycles.

5. The law often protects the wrong side

This is the one people rarely talk about, and it might be the most fixable.

A section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, originally written to stop piracy, makes it illegal to bypass a device’s software locks, even if you’re just trying to repair it. Companies have used this law to lock down everything from tractors to printer cartridges to your car, quietly deciding who is and isn’t allowed to fix what you own.

But this is also where real progress is happening.

France now requires a repairability score on many products at the point of sale, so you can compare devices before you buy, not after something breaks.

Their newer law goes further, treating repairability as a legal requirement and fining companies that lock down spare parts or repair manuals.

Something that we don’t like to admit

It would be comforting to believe this is purely a story about corporate villains cackling in a boardroom. Sometimes that villain exists. But most of the time, unrepairable products are the result of disorganized teams, misaligned incentives, our own preference for shiny new things, genuinely hard engineering problems, and laws that were never designed with repair in mind.

None of that means we’re powerless. Littering used to be completely normal in the west. Then public campaigns, new laws, and social pressure changed how people felt about it. Within a few decades, roadside litter dropped by more than half.

Repair could follow the same path. Not through one dramatic law or one heroic company, but through small shifts. Choosing brands that support repair. Asking for repairability scores before we buy. And maybe, slowly, learning to see a scratched phone or a well worn pair of jeans not as something embarrassing, but as proof that we actually used what we owned.