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Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

The root cause of the "throwaway culture" seems to be the assembly line: Stuff becomes cheap when it can be produced in a series of simple, non-varying steps.

Stuff just doesn't break in a consist way. If every repair were identical, we could fix stuff on an assembly line, and we would no longer constantly run into ridiculous situations where it costs less to buy a whole new widgit than to repair your old one.

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Yes and on top of that a lot of products are "designed for assembly" which often means using parts that 'click' together, instead of using screws. This means they're fast to assemble, but almost impossible to take apart again, making repairs overly difficult and costly.

Indeed. There was even a "Design for Manufacturability" elective in my ME undergrad. I don't recall seeing a countervailing "Design for Serviceability".

I think another factor is the inordinate price sensitivity of the aggregate consumer.

It's also important that assembly lines can be offshored, whereas a lot of repairs really need to be done locally by someone who can interact with the consumer to understand the problem. Countries where labor is cheap relative to imports don't have the same throwaway culture, because in those circumstances it's economically viable to repair things rather than replacing them.

I don't think it's the assembly line at all.

I think the cause is the move to doing stuff on PCBs, doing logic in proprietary controllers rather than electro-mechanically with relays, limit switches, etc, and consumer demand for lower prices, which generally leads to lots of molded plastic and other similar cost-cutting methods, rather than use stamped metal or other more expensive processes.

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