My appliance repair guy, who repairs appliances all day and has seen it all, told me to hold on to my (relatively old) appliances as long as possible because th

My appliance repair guy, who repairs appliances all day and has seen it all, told me to hold on to my (relatively old) appliances as long as possible because they are more easily repaired than the newer ones. Sure, it's his job to fix things so he has incentive to repair rather than recommend a replacement (in which he would make $0) but I trust him: when my 20-year-old microwave oven recently died, he said it would be several hundred dollars to fix and would not be worth the money (I agreed). So yes, many old appliances have broken and were likely not worth repairing, but on average all the evidence points to newer devices being more finicky, easily broken, and harder and more expensive to repair than older, simpler devices. Every engineer worth their salt knows that simpler is usually more reliable.