That may be true for a lot of folks, but that's not the only issue. From my experience, the biggest issue is that a lot of the appliances and other gadgets we

That may be true for a lot of folks, but that's not the only issue. From my experience, the biggest issue is that a lot of the appliances and other gadgets we have these days are very complex. You have to be an electrical engineers, software engineer and a mechanical engineer, or a big service company that employs all three, to be able to fix anything. Additionally it's sometimes really difficult to find service manuals for a lot of these things. If your doodat is flashing error code E-71-X1-C and the user manual you have just says "call for service", what are you going to do about it? You typically need pretty serious google-fu magic to find enough information to start figuring out what's wrong. When my dryer broke several years ago I think I found the proper service manual for it on a site that looked exactly like a SEO spam site and seriously sketchy. Downloading the PDF I was praying my anti-virus application was up-to-date.