Repair shops in India are fighting planned obsolescence by creating $100 laptops

Why it matters: The past couple of decades have seen a trend where devices have become harder to repair, thanks to components becoming increasingly complex and companies pulling questionable moves that make fixes difficult. But out in the gritty tech markets of New Delhi, there's a crew of rebel repair shops fighting back by breathing new life into laptops that would've ended up in the scrapyard. Some of these shops in India's capital go as far as creating entirely new machines by stitching together parts from dead machines. Delhi's Nehru Place is one of the largest commercial centres in the city, and though its significance as a financial centre has declined in recent years, it's still the place to go for "jugadu kaam" – the Hindi equivalent of a "duct tape solution." Here, in crammed workshops, technicians are piecing together functioning machines from the guts of various dead and obsolete laptops. They harvest still-viable components from multiple donors and stitch them together. ... Read full article.