I know what it means. I'm an engineer though and a practical person so I -will- choose to repair something myself where practical, that wasn't the point I was t

I know what it means. I'm an engineer though and a practical person so I -will- choose to repair something myself where practical, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. Unfortunately, although the parts to repair the washing machine are inexpensive, the design means a sizeable labor effort (and thus cost) to get at the problem part, so repairing it isn't practical, even for a repair shop, because it's hours of work. The fact that several of my neighbors had the same machine fail at the same time suggest it's designed to fail early. Between that and being designed to make a simple bearing change several hours of work, is was designed to be thrown away, not repaired, by anyone.