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Cherry-picking wearable consumer electronics as a class that intrinsically suffers from diminishing returns with respect to repairability doesn't negate the fac
by metaphor 5y ago
Cherry-picking wearable consumer electronics as a class that intrinsically suffers from diminishing returns with respect to repairability doesn't negate the fact that there's a crapton of other classes in a common household whose design space isn't fundamentally constrained in the same ways but nevertheless artificially suffer from unsustainable lifecycle trade-offs that could have easily been designed around or avoided altogether if objectively targeted from the onset.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y agoThe "problem" is that people get what they pay for. The majority of consumers prioritize cost, so they get price-optimized devices that are difficult or impossible to repair. When you prioritize, e.g., reliability or ease of service, that problem goes away, but now stuff costs more. Worth it for commercial/industrial products, but it tanks the consumer market. My Kitchen-Aid mixer has had its sacrificial plastic gear replaced a few times because I keep overloading it with bread dough. It was designed to be repairable. My cheap Walmart TV, OTOH, is in the garage awaiting the annual electronics scrap pickup because although I know what the problem is, for $200 (about what I paid for the mixer 20 years ago) it simply isn't worth my time fixing it when I can buy a better one for the same price.