[hiisukun]

I did a ctrl+f for 'environment' and didn't see anything.

So, this is me replying to say that government regulation might be seen as good or evil depending on your point of view and the context, but I hope members from both sides would agree that the health of the environment is rarely a consideration in businesses.

Not being able to repair something sucks for the environment, because people will throw the whole thing away (like a phone), when just a small part is broken (for example, the microphone!). Sometimes an external (not-naturally-market-occuring) stimulus is required to incentivize things like repair.

[gambiting]

At the same time, making things repairable definitely hurts the environment in some way too.

I'm looking around my office - there's about 300 workstations, all of them have a gigantic metal case, the motherboard has several PCIEx slots that will never be used, several SATA connectors, metal clips for the CPU mounts, tons of power cabling just hanging around doing nothing because it has no devices connected to it. All of those PCs will be fully replaced for newer models in about 3 years, and all of this effort to make them repairable and modifiable will be for naught. If we could buy a small system that had everything integrated on the motherboard and required one cable for power, would that not be better for the environment? All the plastic to make superfluous connectors in my machine is literally a giant waste of resources and we could have done without it.

[kerbalspacepro]

The environmental impacts of repairability definitely have edge cases, but for any machine with a low rate of depreciation (any machine that isn't driven directly by Moore's Law) repairability makes it more environmentally friendly.

[paulryanrogers]

Buying new ones every 3 years seems the more wasteful choice, especially when they can be upgraded.