[1] https://reason.com/2022/12/23/why-is-sesame-suddenly-in-ever...
The reason why Louis Rossmann is - or, at least, was able to fix your MacBook is because Apple's vendors were breaching their supplier agreements. Apple worked around that by putting Apple logos on all their components and getting Customs to seize any parts shipments coming out of China.
It's actually an even BETTER candidate for board-level repair as they have easier to hand-solder, off-the-shelf through-hole components, and yet they still don't do it.
!=
Design For Durability + Design For Repair + Design For Low TCO
Recall how the GDR's unbreakable beer mugs failed to sell in the West and became lost to time because restaurant vendors insisted on selling "cheap", inferior, fragile products breaking regularly to ensure profits.
I prefer thinner, lighter glassware. Even if it breaks more often. The fact that these products didn’t do well in households should be Exhibit A for why restaurants’ profit concerns weren’t to blame.
Households weren't offered that choice because they never entered the supply-chain.
And it had nothing to do with restaurants' profits, and everything to do with distributors' and resellers' profits.
The goal is usually something like: ensure we meet durability requirements X, while minimizing costs.
Now in practice that might very much amount to the same practical impact, such as the product will break after the designed lifetime, but maybe not if it happens to be cheaper to use a simpler, cheaper component that actually is more durable. But probably there is some component that is the weak link that only meets the minimum design specs. And this yet one more reason why Repair is important, because many of the components are perfectly fine!
https://youtu.be/vEvBpjCOBu0?t=12m15s
Video reference links: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l8mKisckj6gcJXX2f0P01BrB...
People don't notice early enough that it will cause problems, and they don't have equivalent options available that are more repairable but only marginally different in price and capability.
Brand reputation reigns in "the worst", but pretty bad things still happen, and being unrepairable and non-upgradable isn't "the worst" so it keeps happening.
Because it isn't collectively valued relative to other things, like have the most performant device. The bundle of things people value includes repairability ... but not that much. As I said, you can buy repairable and upgradable system, they just tend to be last-generation tech and cost more. Buyers just don't value it more. But clearly they value it some, which reaches that equilibrium of reigning in the "worst" as you say.
If it was there at a fair price, lots of buyers would pick it.
But because the actual cost is quite low, we can have a good outcome by forcing it on companies, to also fight their perverse incentive to make disposable hardware.
I don't think this is true. Lot's of folks on a forum like this would pick it. But the social norms around repair have degraded significantly (in large part no doubt, to it not being a cost-effective option). But my main point is that it will take more than just availability. And thus there is no market pressure, so it doesn't appear to me that this is indeed a market failure, instead it looks like the market responding to the demand.
Let me illustrate further, if a top provider of electronics and appliances, but not fully market dominate in many niches, say LG, pledged and followed through on their pledge to ensure the repairability of their products, and remained price-competitive, would they gain significant market share over their competitors? In phones? In appliances sold at a big box store? Or would people choosing an Apple device, or GE Fridge still choose those options because of features and market clout and ignore the repairability? I predict they'd gain some marginal sales, but really wouldn't incentivize change amongst their competition.
Now there are markets where the dynamic is different. Farming equipment, where there are some strong challengers to Deere and one of the things they sometimes use to different is repairability. There the market failure I'd be concerned with is the vertical alignment of dealers with service.
This is a systematic effect, whose size must be quantified, so we can deploy appropriate regulation to counteract it.
One is when the market is too concentrated. So e.g. when substantially all of the SoCs in smartphones are made by just three companies, none of them have to provide adequate drivers or documentation unless the others do, and then their devices become e-waste as soon as they themselves stop updating the binary blob drivers for newer kernel versions, because the kernels the old blobs are compatible with have published security vulnerabilities. A better solution to this would be to break them up / stop letting them buy each other, but state-level governments have little ability to break up multi-national corporations and national governments have failed to do it, so here we are.
The other is when the rule is to protect customers other than the original purchaser. In many of these markets one customer buys the product new, with a warranty, and then sells it to someone else when the warranty expires. The original customer doesn't care about repairability because all their repairs will be under warranty, and may not even care much about resale value because they're affluent, so the OEM can sell them a device that isn't repairable. But that screws the customers in the second-hand market who need to make out-of-warranty repairs, and it's those who the law is trying to protect.