[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.