[kzrdude]

> Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one !

I'd call the US, UK poor for lacking a system of recycling. And indeed in many ways they are poorer than the most well functioning societies.

[21]

Maybe OP wanted to say "reuse/refurbish" instead of "recycle". In less rich countries there are thriving second hand markets, online and offline. Many sell the obsolete hardware they no longer need instead of throwing it away.

[logfromblammo]

I still have some 9-year-old "capacitor plague" Dells. I got them gratis--due to the bad capacitors, naturally--and desoldered and re-capped them for about $15 each.

But desoldering and replacing non-SM PCB components is not the sort of repair that most people would feel comfortable doing, even if they can change the oil in their cars.

Based on the cost differential of something like an XBox mod chip versus the same mod chip plus no-hassle installation service, buying an all-new device assembled mostly by robots and low-wage Chinese people is simply more cost-effective in every country where knowing how to use a soldering iron is worth more than a few dollars per hour.

The only way around that is to teach kids how to build and repair custom electronics as part of the regular school curriculum. I don't know about you, but I learned to make sand-mold aluminum castings, silk-screened t-shirts, wooden bookends, and to spot-weld sheet metal in my 8th grade shop class. My classmates and I really would have been better off replacing the t-shirt module with custom-etched circuit boards and simple electronics soldering. That was close to the time when Heathkit stopped making hobbyist electronics kits, too.