You might want to repair something yourself but you are in a minority and the market wants to buy products for cheap and throw them away at end of life.

This isn't unique to technology either. Making a simple repair to most modern cars is an exercise in frustration even if you have all the necessary documentation.

I just recently replaced the headlight assemblies on my Toyota Tacoma. I had to disassemble the entire front of the truck to get them out. The grill, bumper cover, and wheel well liners all had to come off just to get the headlight assembly out. I had a bucket full of screws - many of them those garbage plastic ones - a garage full of parts, and a bloody hand by the time I even got to the meat of the project. It literally took me about four hours and 14 pages of directions start to finish.

Twenty years ago I did this same thing on a Dodge Spirit. Three easily reachable bolts and the headlights came right out. New one popped right in, and tighten three easily reachable bolts. Took like 15 minutes.

It seems like everything is becoming more complex and difficult to repair.

This is quite sad to consider. For a device like a telephone or laptop it’s quite understandable: adding the affordance for many (though not all) repairs would add cost and decrease reliability.

But there’s a kind of learned helplessness in not being able to dismantle and consider something manufactured. I’m a backpacker and the lines between make/modify/improvise/repair are often hard to find. And I think it’s also a kind of stance: the same self confidence and debugging perspective are required to fix a tent and figure out who should be president.

The problems mentioned come partly from having too many part numbers. That is, how much inventory do you need to be able to fix something? It's not the level of technology. It's the lack of standardization.

Companies hate standardization. It allows customers to switch too easily. It makes repair too easy.

All of those reasons are the main critisms of gen Z and millenials! I'm not a boomer, but:

1) Emotions are preventing repairs?? A bit of stoicism is needed. If you have the habit of repairing things, there is no anxiety. In the old hacker culture you'd think it would be a fun opportunity to disassemble and see how it works and repair it.

2) Takes some reponsibility and risks instead of putting the liability on someone else. The end result is people who are less reliant on others, less finger pointing.

3) The article is trying to promote repairing skills instead of consumer culture. Repairing and better built products instead of filling landfills.

You also mention "i'd need to invest into the repair kit"... it's cheaper to repair than buy new! As you collect tools and experience, there's more and more opportunity to repair, which adds more tools and experiences... a great positive feedback loop.

  > For most typewriters, restoration is only a matter of taking the time to do it. There’s no complex skills or tools involved. Even the most difficult operations could be learned alone, by simple trial and error.

  > By contrast, we have to change our laptops every three or four years. Our phones every couple of years. And all other pieces of equipment (charger,router, modem,printers,…) need to be changed regularly.

As a side note, a quick search through the article revealed no mention of why you'd want to do this. For fun, sure, but something like this is going to need a business case and lots of cash to be done properly.

That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon.

Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace.

"Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved.

Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.

The company built the thing. There are tools, parts, and instructions that tell someone how to put it together. There are also tools, parts, and instructions that tell someone how to take it apart.

It may require special tools and parts, but for any mass-market item it won't be difficult with the right tools and the knowledge of how to do it.

The reason for this is that the company will lose more money by making it difficult to repair for themselves than they will ever lose to a DIY repairman.

My solution for DIY repairs:

- Official, real service manual made available. If you allow the company to provide a "monkey" version they certainly will.

- All neccesary parts and tools available at cost, or the cost of their generic equivalent in case of things like proprietary screwdrivers etc.

Repair is more efficient than replace! You're replacing something in either case. But in a repair, you replace less: only the part(s) that failed.

Reasons we don't (in many cases) are 3-fold:

1) Products are designed for 'easy'/efficient/cheap manufacturing, not to be easily repairable. "Repair-friendly" is often near the bottom on consumers' wishlist.

2) Manufacturers have become laser-focussed on that (successfully!), such that some devices literally cost pennies. Combined with

3) We value human time above machine/production time. So in most cases, the cost of [human time spent on repair] exceeds cost of [just buy replacement device].

Maybe "repair robots" will change that equation some day? Only if those are cheap & skillful enough.

I get that things have gotten smaller. I can't do transistor level repairs when the transistors are 7 nanometers across.

I've fixed nearly every appliance in my house, some twice or more.

What I've learned is that a remarkable number of repairs involve something that is basically mechanical, and big enough to work on, if you can get at it. I resoldered the headphone jack on my son's cell phone.

But design measures that frustrate repair and don't really add much value, such as tamper proof screws, prevent what might otherwise be a perfectly legitimate and easy repair. That bothers me. Design features that seem to gratuitously frustrate repairs. IP built into components to prevent aftermarket replacement parts from working.

>That is not repairable.

Why not? What if something requires a screwdriver? I'd say that's not repairable either, by your definition, because it requires special tools.

If something can't be repaired realistically without destroying it (like a Microsoft Surface laptop), that's "not repairable". Needing a soldering iron is not a big deal.

Depends. I found my various Tektronix pieces quite easily repaired, with insights gained. But then again their documentation is quite good.

I think the fact that you have to manually add a component for connection by soldering, even if you can remove it later, makes that point somewhat moot.

Let's look at it from another point of view. The combination of needed skills is rare, and if you had to pay someone to do this, it would likely cost to fix it is more than the cost of a new device (since they would have to research how to fix and apply that knowledge. If there was an existing market you could easily tap it may be cheaper). If the cost to fix is more than the cost to replace, it's a brick.

Total bullshit. It takes more than 20 minutes just to disassemble and reassemble a laptop to get the motherboard out without damaging anything. Diagnosing the failed component can be quicker in some cases (eg. scorch marks), but checking the extent of collateral damage isn't that quick. A more realistic estimate would be about two or three repairs per day, unless you want to complicate things by stipulating that all the less skilled parts of the process (disassembly, fetching replacement parts reassembly, verifying repair worked) are to be done by a less skilled technician and only the actual board inspection, probing, and rework are done by the skilled technician. And then you have to consider that such repairs will never have a perfect success rate, so you need to be able to regularly eat the cost of wasted time on failed repairs while still keeping the cost of labor and maintaining an extensive parts inventory cheaper than the cost of a new motherboard.

Define easy? (Modern electronics, for instance, is highly integrated, full of miniature surface-mounted components etc., and so the "repair process" might as well be simply selling you a replacement for the whole thing.)

It does sound fun. But, it'd be a project. Now imagine you had no manuals, voltmeter, or replacement chips. What's a 555? Not so fun now.

Or imagine this another way. You have all the docs, and a fully stocked electronics lab. And in the other corner is someone with a screwdriver and a broken mechanical metronome. Who's faster?