alt Hacker News> 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.
If they had board diagrams or schematics that nephew could do a lot more than simply look for a blown fuse or wire. Nobody looks deeper than that because they know it is a waste of time without any reference materials.
No it doesn't solve all the problems, but how many TVs now sit in the dump because of the failure of some 1 cent part that nobody could diagnose even if they wanted because they would have to reverse engineer half the board, rather than probe a few different points on the board?
Appliance repair use to be big business. Did it stop being so because washers and TVs and vacuums became too complicated to understand, or the parts went up in cost, or because $1000 is considered cheap enough of a device to be considered disposable? No. They stopped existing because appliances stopped coming with the reference materials to repair them in a reasonable time and parts are obfuscated from their source so people don't even know what their broken part is half the time. Is that a thermistor, a capacitor, a diode that blew up? Have fun spending the next 2 hours tracing the obfuscated part number down through 5 different suppliers to figure it out because you obviously can't test a broken part and there is no schematic to look at and identify it from.