English 
Russian 
Japanese 
German 
Spanish 
The U.S. trade war may have an unexpected cost: repairability.
Even if you haven’t been following the rollercoaster ride of U.S. tariffs closely, you’ve probably heard about the expected price increases. Or maybe you’ve heard our argument that as new items become more expensive, repairs become a more cost-effective option. Before the tariff cuts were announced, we helped The Wall Street Journal estimate that the cost of producing an iPhone would rise 54%, with a new phone costing more than $2,000.
But Apple successfully negotiated an exemption for consumer electronics. Did you know that the exemption doesn’t cover parts?
That’s a big problem for repairs. Let’s talk about why.
Expensive spare parts
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Tariffs apply to parts for things we already own. People will only repair things if it’s cost-effective. And for many people, repairs cost about half as much as replacing their devices. The expected 30% tariff on Chinese-made parts will make repairs less attractive than new products, which are tax-free.
A lot of electronics parts are made in China, but not all. If you haven’t researched smartphone sourcing, it’s more complicated than you might think: iPhone glass is made by Corning, which has production sites 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, Netherlands, Turkey, UK, and UAE. So Apple could keep glass prices roughly flat by moving production to countries less affected by tariffs.
But if your existing laptop is made in China, then all replacement parts are also made in China. Tariffs may encourage manufacturers to produce new products domestically, but no one is going to set up a new parts production line for a three-year-old laptop. The parts supply chain is closely tied to the origin of the product. There are many reasons for this, and even extremely high tariffs cannot change this situation.
Even for new devices, some components are almost exclusively made in China. Battery manufacturing has long been almost completely monopolized by China. Apple has taken steps to diversify its battery manufacturing and move some production to other countries, but this process is slow and expensive.
And, perhaps most importantly for repairs, diversifying manufacturing now will only affect new products.
No one in the world will start production of iPhone 12 batteries in 2025. The process is too difficult, too dangerous, and too expensive to be worth doing just for spare parts, and the profit margins of such a business are lower than those of new products, and the distribution costs are higher than new products.
This is undoubtedly good news for Apple, because it can sell more new devices to users faster. But for you and me, it’s an expensive and annoying penalty, since we either have to pay for more expensive repairs or have to replace otherwise good phones and computers instead of repairing them. If you live in the northern or southern United States, it might be more cost-effective to get your phone repaired across the border.
Or maybe it’s cheaper to import a phone and then disassemble it for spare parts.
Harvesting old parts
One thing is certain, though. The crackdown on repairability makes the “right to repair” even more important. If new spare parts are prohibitively expensive, it’s even more important to salvage parts from old phones and computers. This makes protectionist practices like parts matching even worse, because it effectively prevents us from reusing them by locking recycled spare parts to the original device.
There are still a lot of unknowns here. Will big tech companies be able to import their own spare parts tariff-free? This could cause more trouble for independent repair shops, which would suddenly have to double the price of services like screen replacements. Will big tech companies absorb the extra costs to make their new products more attractive than repairs? Will people stop importing spare parts? This would cause demand to soar, and prices to rise with it.
We don’t know. But we do know that taxing repairs will only hurt small businesses and individuals like you and me.