Personally I disagree that the reason is economics. I think the reason is cultural, and it is not just software, the disease infects almost everything. In the

Personally I disagree that the reason is economics. I think the reason is cultural, and it is not just software, the disease infects almost everything. In the old days you had cheap junk products just like now, but if you spent more you could purchase high-quality products. High-quality products used decent materials and were designed to fit their purpose and built to last. You could reasonably expect that if you had any problem and you shipped it to tech support you would get a repaired product back, no questions asked, for free if you have a warranty. Hence the saying: "I'm too poor to buy cheap shoes". Nowadays it's different. The Sale(TM) is everything, and the product is the minimum viable piece of garbage that is able to facilitate that. Cheap junk is still junk, of course, but more expensive products are simply the same junk but more expensive and rebranded, with a "high quality" sticker on it. Some industries are more affected than others of course, but for all of them, if there is thought put in the design, you can basically guarantee that nowadays some of it will go towards intentionally making the product break itself over time so that you have to buy another one. Go and find a hand blender for less than $1000 which gearing and mating parts can take the load of its motor and not break over time (i.e. it's not plastic). I will wait. You have a problem with your product? Well the answer is go away and buy another one. There is no support. Whatever semblance of it may exist is there because the company is forced to have it and it's basically low-paid flowchart executors that are too busy surviving to care about you. The flowcharts, of course, are designed to make you go away and drain as little of the company money as possible. If you send your product back to get repaired you may get it back the same way you sent it. Or you may get another customer's product which is maybe more scuffed than yours. Or you may get charged and have to pay to get it back even if you have a warranty because they say your product breaking 3 days from purchase is "normal wear and tear". IF you have no warranty expect to simply get rejected or to pay more or less what a new product would cost you, making the whole thing pointless. It's more likely though that you won't ever find how to send it back because the instructions to do so are as hidden as humanly possible and there is no phone to call where a human will listen and not hang up on you. Now, it was always more economical to sell junk as expensive as possible. It was always more economical to not give support, to not sell repair parts, and to not give out repair schematics. That didn't change. But it didn't happen in the old days (at the very least it was not as widespread as it is now). Because in the old days people Gave A Shit. (/rant)