I do a lot of amateur repair of various things around the house, washing machines, TV, etc. I remember being really struck by the commentary of this repair book I read:How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Geier. He has some insight into this arena in terms of labor costs, and growing complexity of components...
"When I was a kid, there were radio and TV servicers in many neighborhoods. If something broke, you dropped it off at your local electronics repair shop, which was as much a part of ordinary life as the corner automotive service garage. These days, those shops have all but disappeared as rising labor costs and device complexity have driven consumer electronics into the age of the disposable machine. When it stops working, you toss it out and get a new one."
He makes some other points too from a deep technician perspective citing how companies began to view and deal with complexity and liability of having their products be user servicable...
"..."No user-serviceable parts inside. Refer service to qualified personnel," replaced the [repair/service] diagrams. Is it any wonder they call today's gadgetry "consumer electronics"?
Service manuals were cheap and plentiful, and shops kept huge rows of filing cabinets bursting with them. In addition to manuals generated by the products' makers, the Howard W Sams company produced its own comprehensive line of Photofact schematics for just about everything out there. If you couldn't get a schematic from Zenith, you could get a Sams easily enough for a buck or two.
As products got still more complex, manuals grew from a few pages to a few hundred, with large, fold-out schematics and very detailed, color pictorials. Producing these big books became quite expensive, so their prices skyrocketed. Shops continue to buy them--they had little choice--but no consumer would spend more for a manual than the product cost in the first place! Companies gradually reduced and finally abandoned the infrastructure for selling manuals to the public, and today's age of "use it, wear it out and toss it" was in full swing. Many manufacturers will no longer sell schematics or service manuals to consumers, thanks in part to fear of potential lawsuits by injured tinkerers. Some companies won't even sell manuals to service shops unless they're factory-authorized warranty service providers. And, believe it or not, some even refuse to provide diagrams to those facilities! Secretive computer makers, in particular, only let authorized servicers swap boards; the techs work on their machines for years without ever seeing a schematic of one."
Give it a read, you'll come to realize that for any failure something has to break, some component, otherwise for a failure to occur every single component has to go at once simultaneously. I realized this concretely when I had repaired our garage door opener. I could see the designer using substandard material on the teeth of this horizontal slider cog that allowed it to fail first, and it happened to be an easy part to replace, rather than say having the corkscrew fail, which would be much more complicated to replace. I remember reading about the part in amazon reviews where people criticized it, but I felt it was a good choice and had a reasonable lifetime to it. If something has to break, let it be the more serviceable part!
Comments
I do a lot of amateur repair of various things around the house, washing machines, TV, etc. I remember being really struck by the commentary of this repair book I read:How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic by Michael Geier. He has some insight into this arena in terms of labor costs, and growing complexity of components...
"When I was a kid, there were radio and TV servicers in many neighborhoods. If something broke, you dropped it off at your local electronics repair shop, which was as much a part of ordinary life as the corner automotive service garage. These days, those shops have all but disappeared as rising labor costs and device complexity have driven consumer electronics into the age of the disposable machine. When it stops working, you toss it out and get a new one."
He makes some other points too from a deep technician perspective citing how companies began to view and deal with complexity and liability of having their products be user servicable...
"..."No user-serviceable parts inside. Refer service to qualified personnel," replaced the [repair/service] diagrams. Is it any wonder they call today's gadgetry "consumer electronics"? Service manuals were cheap and plentiful, and shops kept huge rows of filing cabinets bursting with them. In addition to manuals generated by the products' makers, the Howard W Sams company produced its own comprehensive line of Photofact schematics for just about everything out there. If you couldn't get a schematic from Zenith, you could get a Sams easily enough for a buck or two. As products got still more complex, manuals grew from a few pages to a few hundred, with large, fold-out schematics and very detailed, color pictorials. Producing these big books became quite expensive, so their prices skyrocketed. Shops continue to buy them--they had little choice--but no consumer would spend more for a manual than the product cost in the first place! Companies gradually reduced and finally abandoned the infrastructure for selling manuals to the public, and today's age of "use it, wear it out and toss it" was in full swing. Many manufacturers will no longer sell schematics or service manuals to consumers, thanks in part to fear of potential lawsuits by injured tinkerers. Some companies won't even sell manuals to service shops unless they're factory-authorized warranty service providers. And, believe it or not, some even refuse to provide diagrams to those facilities! Secretive computer makers, in particular, only let authorized servicers swap boards; the techs work on their machines for years without ever seeing a schematic of one."
His books is solidly amazing, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071744223/ref=rdr_ext_tmb, definitely valuable reading if you're into that sort of thing. Another thing to keep in mind with what may be confused as planned obsolescence can be tied to the well done story about the One Horse Shay..https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Deacon%27s_Masterpiece
Give it a read, you'll come to realize that for any failure something has to break, some component, otherwise for a failure to occur every single component has to go at once simultaneously. I realized this concretely when I had repaired our garage door opener. I could see the designer using substandard material on the teeth of this horizontal slider cog that allowed it to fail first, and it happened to be an easy part to replace, rather than say having the corkscrew fail, which would be much more complicated to replace. I remember reading about the part in amazon reviews where people criticized it, but I felt it was a good choice and had a reasonable lifetime to it. If something has to break, let it be the more serviceable part!