[gibsonpil]

> I've never had "repairability" raised to me as an engineer.

What kinds of hardware do you engineer exactly? Tons of companies have repair technicians on staff. I'm sure every datacenter in the world has individuals frequently swapping faulty parts out of servers, and those servers are often designed to keep that kind of maintenance from being a chore.

It's one thing if you're talking about board level repair, but part swapping is something that end users do by themselves all the time. I've certainly swapped phone batteries before. I've helped friends replace their cracked screens.

In fairness however, for products that are being engineered for portability first there is certainly a case to be made for keeping things compact at the expense of reparability. That certainly doesn't explain away the behavior of companies that deliberately hinder repairs by blocking replacement parts, or making replacement parts impossible to obtain. That NEEDS to be illegal, and that is a big part of what right to repair is about.