alt Hacker NewsI'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.
If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it. But because it is glued together to not be taken apart, and there are no diagrams for how anything in it works or is put together, it isn't worth the time even if you have a station and equipment all ready setup and replacement component on hand. 95% of the time fixing electronics is just figuring out how they were put together in the first place so you can diagnostically trace along the circuit.
Not that I think lightbulbs are probably worth saving, but expand it to any other device which gets exponentially more complex and it is easy to see why they don't get diagnosed, not to mention repaired. With a board diagram I can point at a spot on the board and say "I should see 15 volts here", without a board diagram i gotta draw out and figure out how the power supply even works so I know what it is suppose to be outputting and then trace that all the way to the test point to make sure there isn't other crap inline before then that might change what I see.