> But as a society, we could value reparability That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes wit

> But as a society, we could value reparability That is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Yes, free repairability would be fun, but as everything comes with a cost, values are encoded as trade offs between desirable outcomes, rather than the desirable outcomes themselves. When some desirable outcome is not obtained in society, almost always the reason is that there are other tradeoffs being made. So society values affordability, competition, performance, longevity, quality, repairability, customizability -- and that's just on the product side. Then these product trade offs compete against things like labor market protections, use of resources for competing products, etc. When Apple decides to solder RAM into the motherboard, it is making a trade off between performance and repairability. When Tesla chooses megacasting that might result in a fender bender totaling your car, they are choosing reliability and lower production costs over repairability. Just bemoaning that some product is less repairable and that society values repairability so therefore some dark force must be working to subvert society's values is not a useful or insightful analytical approach. Everything boils down to tradeoffs.