alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
> 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.
Sure, I would. Maybe a lot of people on this forum would. But we're 0.0001% of people that use light bulbs. Our personal persuasions are pretty irrelevant in context. And most of the time it doesn't make financial sense for us to do it, it is just personally satisfying.
The vast majority of people have no interest in repairing their own electronics, period. If it is cheap to replace, they will just get a new one. If it was a big investment, then it's important enough to call a professional to fix. In the middle ground you've got people who will ask their handy nephew to try to fix it before they run out to the store, and he'll open it up and look for a blown fuse or a loose wire before giving up. The type of people who can do board level repairs are so rare as to be completely irrelevant to the waste stream of electronics.
Even if we repaired 100% of broken electronics, we'd only make a tiny dent in the volume of waste electronics. Most electronics simply fall out use before they ever break.