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Comment by zuron7 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I do know a few (mid-size) companies who tend to replace the entire system, then send the faulty piece back to a centralized repair facility which repairs the boards, and then they're used to repair another faulty piece. Don't know whether the large companies do this though.

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The repairs at the central facility would be much more efficient if the repairable unit was a cable instead of half the machine.

Can't argue with that, but these repair houses have special tools which make the entire process almost as efficient as repairing a bulkier and modular device. At the end of the day, we can call it a user hostile measure and it needs to be tackled with government policies.

The repairs at central facility have fixed costs (shipping the device, tracking, paperwork), the not-repairs at customer center have fixed costs too. Carrying out simple repairs on site would be much more more efficient if they could be done on site. There is (albeit not trivially measurable) opportunity cost associated with customer inability to drop device for few hours and have it repaired.

Of course there is a delicate balance between various costs (design, manufacturing, repair, lost product upgrade sales, lost overall sales) and increased repairability may mean decreased profits, but I am arguing the main point.

Apple do this and call it "remanufacturing".

That's a pretty good gig for them, charge you $700 for a display replacement and then take your old display and remanufacture it for $10 to reuse somewhere else

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