Killing the manuals kills these businesses. Many manufacturers don’t publish manuals online, so they’re only available from third-party sites with suspicious names like “” and “.” These sites create networks of ad-riddled pages for each file in an elaborate dance to boost their Google juice above their competitors’. But the cost to society is significant: The e-waste problem is growing we’re losing thousands of domestic jobs as independent repair shops shut down and consumers are being forced to replace their hardware much frequently than they should have to.
Toshiba has discovered a new way to enforce such planned obsolescence by cutting the repair market off from critical service information. By making it so expensive and inconvenient to repair broken electronics, this policy amounts to planned obsolescence: many people simply throw the devices away.
Keeping manuals off the internet ensures the only path for beleaguered customers is sending broken devices back to high-priced, only-manufacturer-authorized service centers.
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