> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everyt

> Part of the problem with electronics is often a brand new unit costs less than replacing a faulty part on an old unit due to miniaturization and having everything on chip combined with economics of scale. That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon. Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace. "Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved. Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.