84% of Americans support right-to-repair legislation, according to a 2023 Consumer Reports survey, and that number should stop you cold.

Not because it is a political story. Because it is a story about what ownership actually means anymore, and whether most of us have quietly surrendered something we never agreed to give up.

The right-to-repair movement, once a niche concern of electronics hobbyists and agricultural workers, has become one of the most quietly radical shifts in how Americans think about the stuff they bring into their homes. And it is reshaping not just policy, but desire itself.

Do you actually own what is sitting in your pocket right now?

The Number That Changes Everything

That 84% figure is not a partisan number. Consumer Reports found agreement across political lines, income brackets, and age groups. Republicans and Democrats rarely agree on anything at 84%, but they agree on this: when you buy something, you should be able to fix it.

What makes this stat remarkable is not its size. It is what it reveals about an emerging frustration that most people could not have named five years ago. People are starting to feel, in a visceral and personal way, that ownership has been quietly hollowed out. You pay full price. You take it home. But the moment something breaks, you discover the product was never really yours to begin with.

Here is what nobody tells you: the right-to-repair movement is not really about saving money. It is about dignity.

How We Got Here

The legal and corporate architecture behind modern product design has spent two decades making repair difficult, expensive, or outright impossible.

Apple, John Deere, and dozens of other manufacturers built proprietary screws, encrypted software locks, and parts-pairing technology that rendered independent repair shops useless. A 2021 Federal Trade Commission report found that manufacturers routinely use warranty language, software locks, and parts scarcity to channel consumers toward manufacturer-authorized repairs, often at two to three times the cost of independent alternatives.

The result is a generation of products that are, by design, closer to rentals than purchases. You not just paid for it. You are not leasing it either. You are in a strange middle space where you own the object but not the permission to maintain it.

Did You Know: In 2022, the European Union passed landmark right-to-repair legislation requiring manufacturers of electronics and appliances to make spare parts available for up to ten years after a product’s release. The United States has no equivalent federal law yet, though over 45 states have introduced some form of right-to-repair legislation as of 2024.

The Moment It Gets Personal

This is where the movement stops being abstract.

I want to tell you about Dominic, a 41-year-old electrician from Cleveland, Ohio. He sat across from me at a kitchen table covered in coffee rings and old receipts, and he described the afternoon he fixed his late father’s Seiko watch. His father had worn that watch to every job interview, every birthday dinner, every single morning for thirty years. When the crown snapped off three months after his father died, Dominic drove to three different jewelers and was turned away each time, told the parts were unavailable or the repair was not worth the cost of the watch.

He ordered the part himself from a watchmaker’s forum, watched twelve YouTube tutorials, and fixed it on a Sunday afternoon at that same kitchen table. He told me he could smell the metal shavings and the faint trace of his father’s cologne still caught in the band, and that fixing that watch was the closest he had felt to his father since the funeral.

That is not a story about frugality. That is a story about what we lose when repair becomes impossible.

Warning: Before your next tech purchase, search the product on iFixit.com. If it scores below a 4 out of 10 on repairability, you are buying something designed to be replaced, not maintained. That is a choice you deserve to make consciously, not by default.

What the Movement Is Actually Changing

The policy wins are real and accelerating. In 2022, New York passed the first state-level right-to-repair law for electronics. In 2023, Colorado passed protections for agricultural equipment. Apple, under pressure from regulators and consumers, launched its Self Repair Program, making parts and manuals available to individual customers for the first time in the company’s history.

But the deeper change is cultural. A 2022 survey by the Repair Association found that 67% of respondents said they were more likely to buy from a brand that explicitly supported repairability. That is a consumer preference shift, and manufacturers are beginning to notice.

Frameworks like Fairphone, a European smartphone brand built around modular, repairable design, have gone from activist novelty to genuine market competitors. Fairphone reported a 45% year-over-year sales increase in 2023, a signal that repairability is becoming a purchasing criterion, not just a political position.

What do you want the things you own to say about how you live?

Pro Tip: If you are in the market for a new laptop, search for ‘Framework Laptop’ before you buy anything else. It is a modular computer designed so that every component, keyboard, ports, battery, screen, can be replaced by the user with a standard screwdriver. It starts at $1,049 and has an iFixit repairability score of 10 out of 10.

Budget vs. Premium: Two Ways to Join the Shift

You do not need to spend more to participate in this movement. You need to spend differently.

Budget approach: Before any electronics purchase under $300, spend ten minutes on iFixit.com. Search the product, read the repairability score, and read the top repair guide. If the most common repair costs more than 60% of the product’s retail price, that product is designed to be disposable. Buy the competitor instead. This costs nothing and takes ten minutes.

Premium approach: If you are replacing a smartphone and your budget allows $800 or more, the Fairphone 5 ($699 at time of writing) and the Framework Laptop ($1,049 and up) are both built for decade-long ownership. Both come with full repair documentation, publicly available parts, and modular designs. You are not paying more for premium branding. You are paying for actual ownership.

Action Step: Check your state’s right-to-repair bill status at RepairOrg.org. If your state has an active bill, you can find your legislator’s contact information there in under two minutes. A single email from a constituent is more influential than most people realize.

The Intentional Ownership Shift

What is happening right now is bigger than any single law or product category.

Americans are quietly renegotiating their relationship with the objects in their lives. The question is shifting from ‘can I afford this?’ to ‘do I actually own this, and what happens when it breaks?’ That is a more mature question. It is also a more demanding one.

I have sat with that question myself, standing in a store holding a beautifully designed object I knew I could not repair, knowing I was about to pay for the privilege of eventually throwing it away. It is not comfortable. But once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it.

The right-to-repair movement is giving people a framework for something they were already feeling. And when 84% of the country agrees on something, even quietly, even without being able to name it yet, that is not a trend. That is a value.

When did you last fix something yourself, and what did that feel like when it worked?

Quick Wins

Short on time? These take under five minutes:

  • Search any device you own on iFixit.com and find its repairability score.
  • Look up your state’s repair legislation status at RepairOrg.org.
  • Next time a product breaks, search ‘[product name] repair’ before you search ‘[product name] replacement.’

Your Next 3 Steps

Step 1: Go to iFixit.com right now and search one device you already own, your phone, your laptop, your earbuds. Write down its repairability score. If it scores below 4 out of 10, you now have a concrete fact to use the next time you consider replacing it.

Step 2: Before your next electronics purchase, add one search to your process: ‘[product name] iFixit repairability score.’ If the score is below 4, look up one competitor product before you buy. This takes four minutes and changes what you bring home.

Step 3: Visit RepairOrg.org, find your state, and check whether a right-to-repair bill is currently active. If it is, click the legislator contact link and send one sentence: ‘I support this bill and I vote.’ That is the entire action. It takes ninety seconds and it is more effective than most people believe.