This is largely a result of tariffs/duties that India imposes on everything. A typical $800 laptop is going to cost $1200-$1500 in India. Combined with the purchasing power parity, a good laptop is out of reach for most people. The repair culture works entirely due to artificial scarcity. Nostalgia for repairs notwithstanding, it is a failure for the country that people can't afford a decent laptop in 2025.
India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
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Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#112This is largely a result of tariffs/duties that India imposes on everything. A typical $800 laptop is going to cost $1200-$1500 in India. Combined with the purchasing power parity, a good laptop is out of reach for most people. The repair culture works entirely due to artificial scarcity. Nostalgia for repairs notwithstanding, it is a failure for the country that people can't afford a decent laptop in 2025.
Food for thought: if a failure (of sorts) can make the successful rethink their ways of being, is that success missing the point, maybe?
A lot of ways of life in India are sustainable. In fact going the consumerist ways of West is a step in the opposite direction, given what all problems that has created for the planet. I think the motive of the piece is not the nostalgia of repairing, but how living with constraints births sustainability and how we all can learn from it (including India) and in fact foster it in a positive way :)
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#113This reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine not long ago. He’d just been laid off from a pretty good Salesforce Admin job and was already in a tight spot financially when his laptop’s motherboard fried after a voltage spike. Local shops were quoting ₹25,000–₹30,000 (roughly $300–$360), which he just couldn’t afford. Then a friend told him about Nehru Place. He sent the laptop there through someone…
Heh, my brother got his Xbox original controller fixed for ₹200 which was just misbehaving due to old battery gunk. He could have afforded a new one, sure, but the charm of having the thing get another life, is a separate kick altogether :)
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price. You already can, it's just often not economically viable in high-income countries. Lenovo have a very comprehensive parts service and provide useful service manuals. Ironically, Apple devices are the most widel…
Yeah, it's wrong to name names, except maybe Apple for assholery. This should go for any brand. > You already can, it's just often not economically viable in high-income countries. But are we sure it's only because of high labor costs?
As someone who is adept at electronic repair, I am absolutely certain that it's overwhelmingly because of high labour costs. I fix my own stuff for the fun of it, but there's no way I'd do it for a living because there are just much better uses of those skills in the modern economy. Just look at the prices for old electronics on eBay or Facebook Marketplace - unless the item is very recent, repair doesn't offer good value to the owner or a viable margin for a recycler.
People used to darn holes in their socks, but that's an eccentric hobby in a world where you can buy perfectly good socks for less than $1 a pair.
It's still a factor in the developing world. Those awful scenes of e-waste being melted down for scrap in open pits are symptomatic of the fact that a lot of devices just aren't worth fixing or dismantling for spare parts, even at third-world labour rates.
Manufacturing is heavily automated, which is the reason why you can buy a toaster or a clock radio for less than $10; without massive advances in robotics and AI, the only similarly automated end-of-life solution for those items involves a shredder and a furnace. Here in the EU, the manufacturer is responsible for bearing the end-of-life costs for electronic devices, but it doesn't really change the economics.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Asus 1215B netbook from 2009 has served me well, until it died last year. There was nothing in 2025 laptops that I would have replaced it for, the use cases haven't changed from my 2009 requirements in computing on the go with a cheap laptop like device. Its replacement is now Samsung tablet with DEX capabilities, which I will likewise use until it dies.
Cheap netbook-like devices are widely available from China these days. They'll probably be cheap enough even accounting for the new tariffs. Or you can just buy an older 'ultrabook' laptop on the used market.
The 'cheap' angle is something I wonder about, especially for the coming year with tariffs, and especially when Microsoft is trying to tell a lot of people that they need to buy new PCs to get off win10 and I doubt a huge proportion will be able/willing to do the remaining bypasses or learn another OS. It seems like a perfect storm if you're trying to be frugal, so I assume 'frugal' is going to translate into a lot of people on unsupported systems.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, most people are stuffing everything into the application layer, or worse, a web/mobile app these days and don't know how to fix anything below it. I know many "programmers" who can neither configure a SME/Enterprise firewall or switch nor build their own PC or server from parts. Also, during the 90's everything was easy to find and access. Piracy was the norm and FOSS was booming.
The field exploded though, both in terms of complexity and of number of people involved. I know many engineers that can do from compiler optimizations to web apps. I also know "programmers" that don't want to learn a new library because it stresses them. Lots of tech we currently rely on is built under FOSS model (thinking web stuff, mobile stuff, os stuff, data center stuff). Of course you must choose to use it, but…
The house of cards is build with far more than just libs.
And everything you just mentioned came at a price.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#117A few years ago, I wanted to add more RAM to a Lenovo laptop. I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot.
The laptop refused to start.
I took it to the Lenovo center and they said about 7-10 days and a minimum of Rs 10,000 (about $150 in those days).
Since this was too much for an old laptop, I looked for alternatives. Someone suggested a repair shop in Nehru Place, New Delhi
This was tucked into the back of the basement of a big tower. A tiny 10x10 room filled with laptop parts
The guy at the counter looked at the laptop, opened it up, twisted some wires around, added another few wires, and the thing was working again
Total time: under 10 minutes.
Total cost: Rs 200 - just about $2.5 today
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#118I remember up to the early 1990's we had repair shops all over Portugal, we would buy devices for life, and any kind of malfunction would be rescued at one of those repair shops, unless it was really a death sentence for the device. Now in a throw away society with planned obsolence devices, most of those shops are gone and the repair knowledge gone with them. Unless goverments fix the planned obsolence culture it is…
Stuff still is repairable these days, it’s just most of us live in countries where labor is so expensive locally it makes more sense to just buy a new one than to pay someone to replace components on a circuit board.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#119> “...For instance, we salvage parts from old laptop motherboards, such as capacitors, mouse pads, transistors, diodes, and certain ICs and use them in the newly refurbished ones,” says Prasad.
This highlights the problem of parts availability, especially for older laptops (10 years old or even older). Since no one, the original manufacturer as well as the "dup(licat)ors", is going to make parts for laptops that old.
During my own attempt to revive my old laptops, I had to buy three different keyboards, each costs around $8, from 2 different recycling shop, to "Frankenstein" a working and fairly new-looking one. And then the screen bezel and palm rest is another struggle. One total revival ended up costed me around $50 and 2 weeks, and give up on another one.
I imagine in order for laptop/electronic repairing to work reliably, manufactures needs to create standardized parts, like what happened to desktop PCs. But that hasn't happened since ...ever?
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
We (in the West, at least) live in an age of vendor lock-in. In the East, it's state lock-in but vendor freedom.
There are plenty of places where both are locked in
I suppose, but they are free to pirate Disney movies or whatever. Maybe "freedom" wasn't the right word for lack of IP protection.