alt Hacker NewsRepairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.
It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.
The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.
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I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.
e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.
And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.
Try buying an LED flashlight.. when the LED circuitry/bulb goes out, the whole thing's a brick, battery, assembly, everything. You have to throw it all out. The bulb assembly is usually fused to the frame so that it's hard just to recycle that frame.
Human-scale engineering is underrated. It is very satisfying when you can repair something yourself using your hands, without having to need specialist equipment.
For example when you have a circuit board that can be serviced with a soldering iron, without having to use a microscope or reflow-oven.
Exactly! That's what motivated us to design a repairable e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com
Seeing LED bulb reliability rapidly degrade as the technology matured was like seeing the Phoebus Cartel[1] play out in real time.
Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work.
Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board.
It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.