Sustainability has been one of the mega-trends of the economy in the last few years. In tech, one way to achieve this goal is by making devices repairable. Lenovo, currently the biggest PC manufacturer, has now predicted that the vast majority of its devices will be repairable by 2025.
Humanity only has one planet with limited resources – this simple truth is not something that used to be an important consideration when doing business. After all, for thousands of years, the amount of humans was much smaller and our usage of the planet limited. After the industrial revolution though, things changed, and today, overconsumption, climate change and pollution in various other forms threaten the human civilizaton as we know it.
Thus, sustainability has become a hot buzzword in politics and economics. For tech, this has obvious implications: Buying a new laptop, smartphone or tablet every year is not sustainable. Devices need to last longer and be easily repairable if they go defect. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what the industry has been doing in the last few years, which devices becoming ever more integrated and less repairable.
One tiny startup has been fighting against this trend: Framework with its Framework Laptop has set an example for repairability and sustainable design in the laptop market. The industry has clearly been paying attention to that: Dell has shown off its own vision of a repairable laptop, called Concept Luna, and Lenovo has talked about their own idea for something like that, the Project Aurora. Of course, it is not just Framework as a driving force for this development: The European Union is set to impose sustainability regulations on the tech industry, so there is some political pressure too.
For one of the biggest PC manufacturers, Lenovo, the writing apparently is on the wall. As The Register reports, Lenovo’s Senior Vice President and President of its Intelligent Devices group, Luca Rossi, recently spoke about the topic at the Canalys EMEA forum. Here, the executive stated that by 2025, 80 percent of Lenovo’s devices will be user repairable by 2025, with areas like the battery and SSD highlighted as components that should be easily accessible.
Another part of the puzzle for Lenovo: Reusing replacement parts by repairing them. Rossi highlights this as the “circular economy” concept put into action.
Currently, many Lenovo laptops, including their business oriented ThinkPad line with models like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (available for $1,443 from Amazon), use soldered RAM, but do offer upgradeable SSDs already. It will be interesting to see if and how Lenovo will implement those repairable designs.
Benjamin Herzig – Managing Editor – 1089 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2016
I was an ardent reader of Notebookcheck’s laptop reviews even back in school. After writing reviews as a hobby, I then joined Notebookcheck in 2016 and have worked on device reviews and news articles ever since then. My personal interest lies more with laptops than smartphones, with business laptops being the most interesting category for me. Technology should make our lives and work easier and good laptops are an essential tool for that to happen. This is why laptop reviews are not just my work but are also my passion.
