With Apple's Self Service Repair, you can keep your Mac alive for years to come, all by yourself, but with some expensive caveats.

Apple’s self-repair program started earlier this year with the iPhone. Now the Mac has joined the party, albeit only a specific subset of Macs: M1 MacBooks Air and Pro. As with the iPhone, you can buy replacement parts, rent the tools needed to make the repair, and use Apple’s extensive repair manuals. And while your iPhone is more likely to get damaged, we tend to keep our laptops for much longer, so in some ways, repairs are even more important to keeping things up and running. But, oddly enough, Apple hasn’t made it easy for users or the independent repair shops that rely on its parts and manuals.

"Of course, there are many ways to fix Macs," wrote Jason Snell, an Apple watcher and journalist, on his Six Colors blog, "There's the Apple Store, Apple's mail-in repair program, a network of 5,000 Apple Authorized Repair Centers, and more than 3,500 independent repair shops. But for some people, whether by geography or preference, fixing a broken Mac is something they'd rather do themselves."

Being able to repair your computer is essential. Even if you never break anything or drink liquids near your desk, at some point the battery will give up the ghost and need to be replaced. It used to be possible to upgrade the RAM and SSD/hard drive storage in a laptop, but those days are long gone now that everything is simply soldered onto the logic board or even built in as an integral part of it.