[nerdponx]

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power.

This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.

[pbhjpbhj]

>people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete

People throw out computers (including screens and everything) because the mouse stopped working, or the power supply needs replacing or the computer got a virus. A washing machine needs a new door-seal, a cooker needs a new light, people actually throw out that sort of stuff. Ebay has helped to make a market for junk, but oftentimes it seems people over-estimate the financial value of their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.

[tajen]

« A door seal’s gonna cost as much as a new machine sir. » Every repairman.

It’s a difficult economic issue. Suitably skilled repairmen only exist medium economies, where we produce enough income to teach youngsters soldering, but when the economy is not developed as much as to have marketers take the power over the makers (think Juicero). In the Western economy today, repairmen are more salesmen on the field than actual people capable of repairing anything. I’ve never seen one actually repairing an appliance.

I have my doubt whether it’s really the machines getting built in such a way that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search could have found the defective wire, but let’s be honest, if they want to survive in a big city, soldering won’t pay enough. And that’s where the economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.

[Retra]

That's really just economy of scale at work, right? Shipping one repair man to a single location is less efficient than shipping ten thousand units from a factory to a distribution center. Servicing all of your customers (new and old) with the same mechanism is more efficient than having different mechanisms for new (sales & delivery) and old (repair).

[aplc0r]

I don't know about appliances, but the last few times I tried to repair a failed electronic device I found them to be un-repairable by design.

It is so frustrating to know that all something likely needs is a small surface component, but you can't repair it. Usually this is due to components being epoxied or dipped for seemingly no reason. At least thanks to ebay, you can sometimes find a duplicate broken device that can be harvested for whole PCBs.

[ChristianGeek]

People don’t throw out technology until it’s obsolete for THEM. There are tiers of consumers across the world for whom obsolete is defined at different stages of functionality/performance/affordability/etc.

[tortarga]

Does "Obsolete" only apply to consumer grade applications though? Can there be a market for refurbishing old phones, laptops etc for IoT controllers that don't need massive processing power?

[nintendo1889]

hmmm, I worked at google when they were doing a drive upgrade. They couldn't erase 100,000 hard drives (it would take years of time in the eraser machines) so they had to destroy them, which I assume meant melting them and eventually extracting the gold.