terry wrote
Ecnerwal wrote:

The new ones are, for the most part, designed NOT to be repairable,
and/or parts prices/availability are manipulated to render them
effectively non-economic to repair. "This part will (by design) break
about 1 year after the warranty runs out - let's put in in a monolithic
module containing all the most expensive parts of the machine."

Maybe that's stating it rather strongly?

Although recent discussion/discovery that IPods will
exhaust their batteries in approximately one to two
years do clearly raise the question? "Designed to fail?".

Doesnt explain stuff like cordless phones that use standard batterys.

But it's the same reason that I continue to accept
and use old appliances that I can repair myself.

That can mean that you have to do without
some of the most elegantly usable appliances tho.

For example I refuse to buy a stove that incorporates
a digital timer/clock; they are virtually unrepairable!

Mindlessly silly. My microwave is still going fine 30 years later.

Eventually can see myself, however, ending up with one of those and
deliberately disconnecting the digital timer clock or modifying the stove to use
one my older (saved) clock/timers or just dong away with the timer altogether.

Or get a clue and only bother with that if it actually does fail.
And get the benefit of a decent modern design when it doesnt.

I've never actually had a single digital clock in any system
ever fail and I've got heaps of them, plenty 30+ years old.