While this is true, for many customers who aren't technical (in a computer sense, since they may have significant highly technical expertise in another field, such as agriculture), "tech" (meaning computers) just means what we'd call anti-features since from their vantage point everything with a computer (or with "tech") isn't respecting their ownership rights. And, even among people who understand the distinction, there's a reasonable expectation that computers embedded in products that don't specifically market otherwise will have such anti-features.
So, even if computers in and of themselves are completely valid in such product categories saying "No Tech" (which means "no computers") is a great way to market to people who really just want to avoid anti-ownership anti-features.
Lastly, I find it mildly amusing that a tractor (which is very clearly a form of technology, in the traditional definition of the word where fire and printing presses are technology too) is now being marketed as having no technology.
The issue that breaks the camel's back isn't just the cost of the repair--it's that farmers can't find enough service people during harvest time.
The timeliness of the repair is more important than anything at harvest time. Farmers have to be able to repair their own equipment or risk suffering an egregiously expensive loss.
The problem is computer technology in its current state is fundamentally hard to trust. Without reading the source code and knowing the full source of all external services, and hoping the terms of service or external source code don’t change in the future, you really can’t trust anything. There is no authority that can guarantee “this will always work until it physically breaks, and even then be repairable”. Conventional parts and circuits can be more easily repaired and even reverse engineered if needed.
That's why you trust (or don't) the company behind the product, not the product itself. John Deere ruined their reputation for their business practices, not for using the automation.
Companies are fundamentally untrustworthy in the long term. You are always one management change away from the product being unusable or hostile to your use case. With old fashioned technology there is almost always a path to fixing it long after the company is dead.
How can you guarantee this patent-encumbered part that also requires specific (very rare) equipment and is purposefully made to be incompatible with anything is going to be produced after the company discards the product and/or becomes a patent troll? A company can be user-hostile in plenty of ways if it desires to.
It's just plain old vendor lock-in practiced forever and it's a market (or regulation) problem, not a technology one. I haven't yet seen a case where the lock-in was kept secret in the long run, you always have a clear signal that business practices of this particular company are user-hostile. There's nothing special about computers here either, you can always clearly tell that the company turns into shit. When a company starts doing something like this, stop trusting it. Or don't.
So, even if computers in and of themselves are completely valid in such product categories saying "No Tech" (which means "no computers") is a great way to market to people who really just want to avoid anti-ownership anti-features.
Lastly, I find it mildly amusing that a tractor (which is very clearly a form of technology, in the traditional definition of the word where fire and printing presses are technology too) is now being marketed as having no technology.