The 'plague' - the one that feels utterly needless, is deplorably bad quality crap. The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I thin

The 'plague' - the one that feels utterly needless, is deplorably bad quality crap. The key is that there are 2 completely different things going on and I think it's very bad that we keep conflating the 2: * Bad quality crap, which took shortcuts which impair repairability for no reason other than to save a cent, make it impossible to find replacement parts because it's a fly by night operation that didn't think about it in the slightest, and which in general is going to break down on you within the year. * Devices which are hard to repair. That second category contains a lot of reasons ('save half a cent on a screw' is one of them, as is 'planned obsolescence' / 'make sure our pricey resellers get plenty of work'), but some of those reason are GOOD - such as 'it is a heck of a lot easier to make a robust product if we don't make the battery swappable (e.g., iPhone, which got plenty of flak for this)'. For the first, the only 'good' reason to do that, is to ensure some product is available even to those who have _very_ little to spend, but, [A] environmentally this isn't a good idea, and [B] how 'available' is it when the only category you can buy is dinky crap that doesn't work well and breaks down within 6 months? So how do we get rid of _that_? Right-to-repair laws are barking up an entirely different tree, e.g. fighting the kind of bullshit where a farm tractor manufacturer intentionally makes it impossible to work on computer-guided stuff basically just to be dicks and get more money from their official repair/reseller program. And to a lesser extent, acts where a manufacturer makes a device significantly harder to repair with as only goal to save a cent or two on an errant screw, or cheaper glue or whatever.