"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in message
...

It is the consumer's fault that so much throw-away crap is built,
because they are too stupid and too cheap to buy quality,
repairable equipment.

I agree that the average consumer doesn't understand much about what he's
buying, and too often chooses price over quality. But I'm not sure his
ignorance and "cheapness" explains why modern products are designed the way
they are.

If you compared a hand-held CB transceiver of 45 years ago with a modern
amateur handy-talky, you'd note a roughly thousand-fold increase in circuit
complexity. The amateur transceiver is impossible to build with discrete
components. It requires complex ICs and hundreds of tiny SMDs crammed onto a
tiny board. Such products, regardless of their quality, are inherently
difficult to service.

It's not possible to return to easily serviced products, because we'd have
to go back to simple, unsophisticated devices.

One other point... There's nothing wrong -- other than wasting natural
resources (!!!) -- with really cheap products that can't be serviced. As
long as they last a reasonable amount of time, you can toss them and buy a
new one without feeling you've wasted your money. And let's not forget that
technology changes so rapidly that products are sometimes subjectively
obsolete before they have time to fail.

What bothers me is _expensive_ items (such my Palm PDA and iRiver jukebox)
that I expect to last at least a decade, and be repairable at a
not-too-unreasonable price (eg, half the price of an equivalent new
product). I consider these to be long-term investments, and expect the
manufacturer to support them.

PS: I am, in general, pro-union. Unions will disappear when businesses start
treating their employees as business partners, rather than as a disposable
"resource".