I think there’s two parts to modern electronics that make them hard to repair.
One is indeed planned obsolescence, companies like apple deliberately making things harder to repair. This is easy to solve, but what’s in it for businesses that only exist to make money when the average consumer is happy to suck this crap up?
But there is a non deliberate side. So many things that used to be modules built with discrete components have been moved to a single chip. Radio parts is an example, they used to requir a lot more external discrete parts and you can now get a single chip doing Bluetooth, WiFi etc with minimal external components.
As more goes to a single chip, it’s single expensive parts that can fail rather than what might have been a single capacitor or resistor failing in a larger circuit.
Of course the planned obsolescence uses this by making custom chips that you literally cannot buy if you wanted to. But there is still a legitimate side to this.
Which is why i think we should explore MHz multi-chip computing more. GPUs like that could still run Quake in 3D back then, good enough to render some 2D interfaces anyway. While the move to monolithic chips is justified by GHz lanes can’t be too long, it also made them harder to create and repair, to the point that almost no competition exists, for peak performance most deskop use doesn’t need anyway.
I think there’s two parts to modern electronics that make them hard to repair.
One is indeed planned obsolescence, companies like apple deliberately making things harder to repair. This is easy to solve, but what’s in it for businesses that only exist to make money when the average consumer is happy to suck this crap up?
But there is a non deliberate side. So many things that used to be modules built with discrete components have been moved to a single chip. Radio parts is an example, they used to requir a lot more external discrete parts and you can now get a single chip doing Bluetooth, WiFi etc with minimal external components.
As more goes to a single chip, it’s single expensive parts that can fail rather than what might have been a single capacitor or resistor failing in a larger circuit.
Of course the planned obsolescence uses this by making custom chips that you literally cannot buy if you wanted to. But there is still a legitimate side to this.
For household appliances you could use some standard microcontroller. Pair that with open source software and you have long-term repairability.
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-universal-washing-machine-board.html
Which is why i think we should explore MHz multi-chip computing more. GPUs like that could still run Quake in 3D back then, good enough to render some 2D interfaces anyway. While the move to monolithic chips is justified by GHz lanes can’t be too long, it also made them harder to create and repair, to the point that almost no competition exists, for peak performance most deskop use doesn’t need anyway.