Several months back, Apple refurbisher John Bumstead received a batch of about 20 MacBooks from an e-waste recycler. Bumstead, who routinely refurbishes MacBooks that are more than 10 years old, shouldn’t have had a problem salvaging these computers, the oldest of which were from 2018. But only half of them were fully restorable. Five of the MacBooks were “activation locked,” meaning the prior owner had forgotten to wipe the device and nobody else could reactivate it.
And it’s hardly the only gadget maker whose tech is hard to take apart: a repair report card released last year by the US Public Interest Research Group gave Samsung and Google Pixel smartphones failing grades for ease of disassembly, while Lenovo, Microsoft, and HP laptops received poor to middling marks. By contrast, Dell laptops, which often set the industry standard for repairability, received an “A” for ease of disassembly.