Tariff Exemptions Are Terrible News for Electronics Repairability

The US trade war is likely to have an unintended casualty: Repairability.

Even if you haven’t been closely watching the US tariff rollercoaster, you’ve probably heard about expected price hikes. Maybe you’ve heard us argue that rising prices on new goods make repair an even better bet for your wallet. Before the announced tariffs were reduced, we helped the Wall Street Journal estimate that the cost of making an iPhone was about to go up 54%, bringing the cost of a new phone north of $2000.

But Apple succeeded in negotiating an exemption for consumer electronics. Did you know that exemption doesn’t cover spare parts?

This is a huge problem for repair. Let’s talk about why.

We helped the Wall Street Journal calculate the amount that tariffs were expected to increase the cost of making an iPhone. But then electronics manufacturers negotiated an exemption, one that doesn’t extend to spare parts.

Expensive Spare Parts

In short, the problem: Tariffs apply to parts for the things we’ve already got. People only choose to repair when it’s cost-effective. And many people draw that line at roughly around half of the cost of a replacement device. The expected 30% tariffs on Chinese-made parts will make repair less appealing, compared to exempted new stuff.

Lots and lots of parts for electronics are made in China, but not all of them. If you haven’t looked into smartphone sourcing, it’s more complicated than you might assume: iPhone glass is made by Corning, which has manufacturing locations in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Turkey, the U.K., and the United Arab Emirates. So Apple could keep glass prices about equal by shifting manufacturing to a less tariff-impacted country. 

Okay, but seriously,

you might want to replace your laptop battery before the higher tariffs hit.

But if the laptop you’ve already got was made in China, then all of the replacement parts will be too. The tariffs may convince manufacturers to make new products here at home, but no one is going to set up a new manufacturing line for parts for a three year old laptop. The part supply chain is tethered to where products were originally made. There are lots of good reasons for this, and even extremely high tariff rates won’t cause that to change.

Even for new devices, some parts are pretty much only made in China. Battery manufacturing has been an almost exclusive Chinese monopoly for a long time. Apple has made moves to diversify battery manufacturing and move some of it to other countries, but this process is slow and expensive. 

And, maybe most importantly for repair, manufacturing diversification now will only make a difference for new products. 

Nobody anywhere in the world is going to spin up iPhone 12 battery manufacturing in 2025. The process is too difficult, hazardous, and expensive to be worth doing for the sake of spare parts only, a business with lower margins and higher distribution costs than for new goods.

For Apple, that’s even better news, as it gets to sell people more new devices sooner. But for you and I, who will bear the cost of either more expensive repairs, or replacing otherwise perfectly good phones and computers instead of fixing them, it’s an expensive and annoying penalty. If you live in the north or south of the country, it might end up being cheaper to hop over the border to get your phone fixed. 

Or maybe it’ll be cheaper to import phones, and then part them out for spares.

Refubishing and harvesting parts from old electronics will become even more valuable with high parts tariffs.

Harvest Old Parts

One thing is certain, though. This blow to repairability makes Right to Repair even more important. If new spares are prohibitively expensive, then it’s even more important that we be able to harvest parts from old phones and computers. This makes protectionist practices like parts pairing even nastier, because it actively bars us from reusing harvested spares by locking them to their original device. 

There are plenty of other unknowns here. Will the big tech companies be able to bring in their own spares without tariffs? That could cause even more problems for the indie repair stores that will suddenly have to double the prices of their screen replacements and so on. Will the big tech companies absorb any extras to make their new products even more compelling in comparison to repairs? Will people just stop importing spare parts? That would send demand through the roof, and the prices with them. 

We don’t know. But we do know that taxing repairs is something that only hurts small businesses and individuals like you and me.