[lips]

Tapers (live music recorders) used to do something like this on the old Sony TCD-D8 DAT recorder. The ten-cent 1/8" jack on your $600 device wasn't exactly readily accessible for DIY repair, so people would put the D8 inside a box with panel mount jacks, and run a jumper from the internal to external jacks. I've used the same principle multiple times since then, in other ways - on headphones, computer audio jacks, etc.

[darkmighty]

That touches a very interesting problem imo: there are some really cheap components in most products that completely compromise their usage, but are prone to failure. Most times, throwing more money at them won't improve the situation significantly, because they are material-constrained (i.e. the material has to be plastic, and it's not viable to make a plastic that wears out 100x slower than the average plastic). The only solution then is to modularize the problem for easy replacement: you can either put it in "maintenance" perspective, or you can spawn a new product out of it.

Yet I feel many major manufacturers fail to see this.

For example, there's the fans in desktop computers -- a $5 fan is about as good as a $50 fan (slight improvements in noise etc), but they're instrumental in keeping your valuable components from overheating, and they fail from time to time, so if one stops working you just get another one and after a few screws you're done.

My Sony phone has a plastic exterior that just snaps out and you can replace it without any tools -- I can get find this part for like $5 -- and it makes so much sense. If they used some much more resistant not-easily-replaceable material the difference in the end will still be breaking from dropping from 1m in concrete to something like 1.5m.

[dsr_]

If you're going to insert/remove a USB device several times a day, a 6" extender cable will keep your motherboard jack from going defective. Less than a dollar apiece, too.

There are cheap extender cables for PS/2, audio, VGA, DVI, HDMI; I don't usually recommend them for RJ45 because you can compromise signal quality on gigabit connections, but unmanaged 5 port switches are cheap enough.

One rule of thumb: if the cost of the labor in replacing a component is half or more the cost of the component, see if you can insulate yourself from replacing that component. When pulling cables through buildings, the labor cost far outweighs the cable cost, so pull many spares at the same time.