| HN Mirror

This is the bit that people keep skirting around. No one is intentionally making items hard to repair (at least I have never seen any evidence to suggest it); they're making them easy and cheap to manufacture. And cheap to manufacture often means hard to repair as a side effect.

To anyone working with complex industrial devices this isn't a surprise. A good manufacturer will involve their Service people in Manufacturability reviews because what makes things easy for the Manufacturing guys and what makes the device cheap and so makes Sales & Marketing's jobs easier, often makes the Service people's job harder. For a product that costs $5,000 and that is expected to have a few repair cycles, getting input from Service is important. In that case, adding $1,000 to the selling price can be worth it to the customer if it means it can be repaired easily.

But when the product costs $500 and and has a predicted lifetime of less than 5 years and it isn't expected to be repaired by any but a tiny fraction of customers, it makes sense to ignore the repairability issues in favor of lower cost. Making that $500 device more repairable might add $100 to the selling cost, and that can be the difference between a hit that flies off the shelves and a total dud.