India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
202 comments
·April 8, 2025saidinesh5
gloxkiqcza
All tech is becoming more and more integrated and purposefully locked down. Everything from operating systems to cars. It’s truly a shame. I think many of us tinkerers/hackers have a similar story to yours - something grabs your attention when you’re a child and develops into an engineering knack later on.
vladms
All tech or all physical tech? For now software managed to somehow go in the opposite direction. In the '90s many / lots of operating systems / tools / libraries were paid / hard to access, today we have lots of (open-source) stuff for people to tinker with.
Tinkering with physical stuff is also good and should be encouraged / supported, but let's also be careful not to loose the software tinkering (for example by not permitting in any shape rooting mobile devices).
coretx
No, most people are stuffing everything into the application layer, or worse, a web/mobile app these days and don't know how to fix anything below it. I know many "programmers" who can neither configure a SME/Enterprise firewall or switch nor build their own PC or server from parts. Also, during the 90's everything was easy to find and access. Piracy was the norm and FOSS was booming.
Nextgrid
Even proprietary software in those times was accessible via piracy, and was generally tolerated/accepted as long as it wasn't for profit (in fact it benefited the software authors by allowing users to learn the usage of their software, for which they'd then push their future employers to buy).
const_cast
[dead]
yason
Question is what domain/field is the next virgin frontier for hackers, unspoiled of commercial greed and integrated and locked down solutions, where you can still not only buy things but also own them, and rebuild from parts what you bought when it breaks down?
dghlsakjg
There are all sorts of things like this, but one that springs to mind is drones, specifically FPV drones. You can build a very good drone from basically parts that runs on open firmware. The videos that you see coming out of Ukraine is clearly using flight control software that is basically the standard for non commercial drones. Nothing more cyberpunk than fighting fascists using open source software and commodity hardware.
saidinesh5
Embedded systems for sure.
Eg. Home Automation with custom LED strips + an ESP32 (via. tasmota, esphome etc...), Wireless sensors using the same, FPV Drones and RC toys/cars in general, 3D printers, Custom keyboards are the usual gateway hobbies in my experience. I haven't seen anyone who is into one of these and hasn't explored the others.
einpoklum
> Everything from operating systems ...
The subtle reference to systemd has not escaped our notice; and it is truly a shame.
HPsquared
We (in the West, at least) live in an age of vendor lock-in. In the East, it's state lock-in but vendor freedom.
intrasight
There are plenty of places where both are locked in
Cthulhu_
My dad has set up a repair cafe near where he lives, and they're popping up in loads of places now. While some electronics are hard / impossible to repair, sure, there's still a lot that can be done with the rest. Household appliances, for example.
The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run, but to make a living out of anything you need to charge an X amount per hour, and if the repair is more expensive than a replacement it's simply not worth it.
All the e-waste going to e.g. India like in the article is stuff where repairing it where it comes from is not worth it.
pjc50
> The main issue of course is cost;
This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour.
We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something.
As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't.
People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).
saidinesh5
> The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run
There is cost, and there's also the companies/devices themselves. We are losing modularity. With almost no benefit to the user.
I mean companies have the audacity to solder an SSD to the motherboards of laptops. And make the batteries - one of the biggest points of failure - non user replaceable. We had all that. It was cheap. It was user friendly. When one failed, you were able to replace it yourself.
Once there is enough momentum on letting users fix these failing parts themselves, the ecosystems would automatically fix themselves imo. That's one of the things that companies like Framework, Valve etc.. seem to do really well with their hardware endeavors.
iszomer
Framework and Valve are brands for their end products but the meat of the argument really should be what occurs in the background, eg: formal contractual and agreement say, the integration of a Sony co-designed and manufactured camera component and its integration into an Apple iPhone for example, as well as all the intermediaries involved up and down the chain.
sandeep1998
reminded me of my own childhood.
blackoil
It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.
ryandrake
Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world. If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke, Lenovo should pay the cost of disposing (or repairing) it and bringing the environment back to the condition it was in before the product existed. When my car dies, Toyota should have to tow it away, part it out and reuse what it can. We've somehow normalized the idea that companies can just externalize these real disposal costs onto the public and environment.
pjc50
> Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world
Boy have I got a WEEE for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...
More broadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
(however, both of those schemes don't put everything back directly - which would be inefficient. They allow delegation by paying recyclers. This can result in "carbon offset" like shenanigans.)
nottorp
> If I have to throw away my laptop because it broke
Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.
Incidentally you should also be able to modify the laptop as you want, or if you lack the skills, pay said 3rd party repair shops to do it for you.
jdietrich
>Actually you should be able to bring it to one of the multiple 3rd party repair shops of your choice, get it fixed and not have Lenovo involved at all, except maybe by selling you parts at a reasonable price.
You already can, it's just often not economically viable in high-income countries. Lenovo have a very comprehensive parts service and provide useful service manuals.
Ironically, Apple devices are the most widely repaired by third-party specialists despite Apple's strenuous efforts to make that difficult, because they're expensive and depreciate slowly.
forgotoldacc
Making the company responsible for the entire lifetime of a product also makes them effectively own the product. Your idea sounds a lot like renting from the producer.
HappMacDonald
Said responsibility can remain the choice of the consumer: producer must accept repair/replacement if consumer brings it back to them, but consumer is not forced to bring it back to them if anything goes wrong. Consumer may also choose to self-repair, sell, etc. Perhaps consumer must bring it back to dispose of it though, as nobody benefits from hucking it directly into a landfill.
The other difference between "renting" from the producer is that the producer isn't collecting any rent, only initial purchase.. and that producer cannot claim the item back whenever they please.
dghlsakjg
Most places in North America people will pay you to take your old dead car away. They strip the useful parts, and send the rest for metal recycling.
Why does Toyota need to get involved if there is already a multi-billion dollar salvage industry doing what you already propose with no obligation?
My last car I was paid ~$200 and that was low because I had them tow it from my home.
sidkshatriya
This is a fair and valid view of looking at things. Though the trick is to not get too heavy handed. At what point does regulation become too stifling ?
The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation.
One way to approach this would be to put more responsibilities on large established companies and less on smaller companies. But then the problem is that larger companies will want to arbitrage this somehow by indirectly "owning" these smaller companies with less environmental responsibilities.
This area is far more complex than we think it is.
Also what do we do about totally new materials that are thought to be benign when introduced but then are proved to have harmful effects many years later. Does the company that introduced them now have huge open ended costs and now go bankrupt ?
The solution is as always in the middle ground. Society as a whole bears some cost of cleanup (a kind of insurance policy for all companies) and companies bear some of costs.
magicalhippo
Here in Norway, electrical and electronic (EE) goods are taxed extra and that money goes to recycling and cleanup[1].
Importers and producers are required to be a member of a approved company handling returns, like RENAS[2].
Shops selling EE goods are required to accept returned EE goods from individuals of the type they sell. So if you sell fridges you have to take my old fridge and handle it in accordance with the rules.
Seems to work better than nothing, though how well I don't know. As with all such regulations there's money to be made by skipping steps, and some do[3].
[1]: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/ansvarsomrader/avfall/Retur...
[2]: https://renas.no/
[3]: https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/2022/februar/...
more-nitor
but ryandrake's comment might be the solution to what trump/republicans/rust-belt wants:
1. employment-rate for Americans. 2. bringing back industrial capacity in US.
If large companies are forced to recycle/repair INSIDE USA, that ultimately means employment for Americans, and bringing back industrial capacity back to US.
(which could mean forcing Chinese manufacturers settings up whole industrial complexes in US...)
btw, this would be a much easier/lesser-side-effect measure than "tariff on everyone" situation
Cthulhu_
> Companies should have to bear the full cost of cleaning up, repairing, or disposing the products they unleash upon the world.
Where I live, you pay a "removal fee" when buying electronics or appliances for just that. If you're buying a new washing machine for example, the party delivering your device is obligated to take the old one with them.
Of course, that's only part of it, your country also needs to have good waste processing and ideally not export it.
iszomer
I'd opt for an unconditional bootloader unlock on subsidized devices long EOL to save my electronics from obsolescence.
rishav_sharan
That's an interesting law. which country is that? I would love to know more about it.
meta_ai_x
what about people who don't care for the products they own. Why should it be Toyota's responsibility for lazy people who don't even do basic maintenance?
lompad
Pretty much every product becomes trash at some point, maintenance only changes the timescale.
Something somewhat similar is already law in germany and works rather well. There is no reason society should have to pay for expected costs for disposing a company's products - as this would only incentivize companies to care even less about the difficulty of recycling/disposal.
catmanjan
Companies never bear any costs, their customers do
goku12
Please don't define everything in India in terms of poverty. It gives the impression that anything good in India happens only because of economic concerns. But that isn't entirely true. Let's not undermine the recognition of those who do it as a social responsibility. I'm personally acquainted with a rather successful engineer and businessman who does it because he believes in sustainability. His reworked Thinkpads are very popular among the tech community here - not because they're cheap, but because of his workmanship and configurability (it even comes with coreboot). And none of those customers are incapable of affording high-end laptops either - many are FOSS contributors when they're not at their full-time jobs.
throw844849
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midnightclubbed
I know you are making a flippant and pointless comment, but I’m compelled to respond.
Of all the laptops I’ve owned my 2020 MacBook Air is still my personal daily driver, my 2010 Mac mini still works fine for running my 3d printer, my 2014 Mac mini works great for crafting and my 2020 iPhone SE2 is still getting OS updates and is sending this message. Are they repairable? Not easily. Do they still work, absolutely. Having used a bunch of non apple laptops and devices at home and work I would say the Apple products last at least 2x as long before breaking or hitting enforced obsolescence.
vel0city
My 2020 Walmart-brand Motile M141 is still my main personal laptop. I have another Thinkpad T460s (2016) that still works fine. My wife still uses her 2019 Surface Pro. I have an ASRock Vision 3D (2010) in my closet running some SDRs. I've got a Supermicro X11SBA-LN4F (2016) in an old Shuttle SFF chassis (2009). And that's just the old stuff that still gets regular use.
Aside from the Surface tablet they're all very repairable.
I disagree that Mac things tend to last longer. There might be trash out there, but there's tons of stuff that's just fine and lasts a long time. You don't even need to always spend a lot on it; that Motile was like $300 for a 14" 1080p laptop.
octopoc
Yeah I'm in the same boat. I have a MacBook Pro 2009 that still works fine. That is 16 years old! I use it for web browsing occasionally, although I do have to update the certs manually.
Only downsides are it has only 2GB of RAM and about 0.1 seconds of battery life.
When I bought a new one, I made sure to get 32GB of RAM. That way I'll still be able to browse the web in twenty years, although I'm sure it'll be very slow because of the CPU.
randunel
I'm pretty sure you'll find individual Tesla owners who haven't yet had any issues, but their poor track record in terms of reliability and repairability remain.
Stop encouraging companies who lock you out, stop renting products you should fully own!
Locking things down is simply a hidden subscription in the shape of repairs and replacements. When you stop paying the subscription (stop repairing, stop upgrading), that's also approximately when the rental stops working (car, iphone, etc).
I'm sure the percentage of broken to working devices is a carefully monitored R&D output, to maximise profit and retain customer trust from renters such as yourself.
throw828288
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goku12
I agree with the basic premise of your argument. The reason why I dislike certain products like Apple's is because of my professional background in electronics. But the way you presented it is definitely not the way to do it - flipping people off most certainly won't convince people to reconsider their ways. Instead, if people could see the economic and environmental damage cause by such consumerism in person, I'm sure that many would have a change of heart. It just doesn't hit you until you see for yourself what you're contributing to.
spaceman_2020
A few years ago, I wanted to add more RAM to a Lenovo laptop. I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot.
The laptop refused to start.
I took it to the Lenovo center and they said about 7-10 days and a minimum of Rs 10,000 (about $150 in those days).
Since this was too much for an old laptop, I looked for alternatives. Someone suggested a repair shop in Nehru Place, New Delhi
This was tucked into the back of the basement of a big tower. A tiny 10x10 room filled with laptop parts
The guy at the counter looked at the laptop, opened it up, twisted some wires around, added another few wires, and the thing was working again
Total time: under 10 minutes.
Total cost: Rs 200 - just about $2.5 today
gruez
>I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot.
>The laptop refused to start.
>I took it to the Lenovo center [...]
This makes no sense. Why didn't you just replace the RAM? I seriously doubt starting the laptop without RAM bricks the laptop.
spaceman_2020
I forgot I had no RAM in the slot and switched the laptop back on
Why it refused to start after that is something that's beyond my expertise
einpoklum
Wait, you mean the laptop refused to start after replacing the RAM? And - was the price quote you got for adding RAM, or for fixing the laptop so that it starts again (with the old RAM SODIMM)? I couldn't quite follow the example.
spaceman_2020
I never replaced the RAM. Switched off the laptop, opened it, removed the RAM, and then accidentally switched it on again without any RAM in the slot
glouwbug
It was the secret button: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932247
pjmlp
I remember up to the early 1990's we had repair shops all over Portugal, we would buy devices for life, and any kind of malfunction would be rescued at one of those repair shops, unless it was really a death sentence for the device.
Now in a throw away society with planned obsolence devices, most of those shops are gone and the repair knowledge gone with them.
Unless goverments fix the planned obsolence culture it is almost impossible to have the repair culture back.
Gigachad
Stuff still is repairable these days, it’s just most of us live in countries where labor is so expensive locally it makes more sense to just buy a new one than to pay someone to replace components on a circuit board.
vjk800
This is the reason.
I've fixed old electronics myself sometimes and quite often it's doable and the spare parts usually cost approximately nothing. However, paying someone 50 euros for half an hour worth of work to fix a thirty euro Christmas decoration doesn't feel like a good deal. Maybe for 10 or even 15 euros it would be.
vel0city
Right? If the replacement is $500, and the repair guy is going to charge $100/hr in labor to diagnose the issue and repair it plus an unknown cost of replacement components, the risk of spending more on the repair is quite high.
zoobab
"The throw-away society is a human society strongly influenced by consumerism. The term describes a critical view of overconsumption and excessive production of short-lived or disposable items over durable goods that can be repaired."
djrj477dhsnv
Isn't it also a natural consequence of rapidly improving technology.
Even if a laptop were built to last 20 years, who would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better?
consp
20 years is a bit much but a 10 year old laptop can still browse normal websites. Just not the javascript loaden addfactories.
Doesn't mean you dump it after 2-3 years because a new fancy models comes along or the battery is not repairable because it's welded shut.
pjmlp
My Asus 1215B netbook from 2009 has served me well, until it died last year.
There was nothing in 2025 laptops that I would have replaced it for, the use cases haven't changed from my 2009 requirements in computing on the go with a cheap laptop like device.
Its replacement is now Samsung tablet with DEX capabilities, which I will likewise use until it dies.
srean
New laptops, phones also last a lot less (borked storage, borked motherboard), forcing us to buy another - which I think is the point.
We have one refrigerator that's still going strong after 50 years whereas one of our 'newer' air-conditioners had to be replaced after 6 years.
eviks
> would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better
It's not, you're just ignoring two obvious points:
1. a person with no laptop would prefer it
2. a repairable laptop can also have its parts upgraded, so a 20 year laptop could have 1-year old parts
griffzhowl
If it's two orders of magnitude cheaper then plenty of people could want one. It's handy to have a spare laptop or two around and with a lightweight linux on there old ones can be perfectly functional
fitsumbelay
> Even if a laptop were built to last 20 years, who would want one when a new one is an order of magnitude better?
Someone living in poverty whose life may be markedly improved by having one?
soco
We still have here in Switzerland "repair cafes" run by volunteers, where mostly elderly bring their usually outdated devices to be repaired, while having a coffee and socializing. It works, as long it works...
BenjiWiebe
I think it would be fun to volunteer at a repair clinic, but there's none nearby and it probably wouldn't work well with a low population density rural area.
pjmlp
Starting to exist a bit around here in Germany as well.
jdietrich
In the early 1990s, Portugal had a GDP per capita of less than $10,000 per year. Portuguese people today just have much better things to do with their time than fix old toasters.
I repair my own stuff for fun, but there's absolutely no way I could make a living from fixing other people's stuff. The phone repair business in my area is dominated by illegal immigrants, because fixing iPhones is only marginally more lucrative than delivering pizzas.
pjmlp
Go tell that to the folks earning minimum wage, splitting 800 euros for everything a family needs.
Yeah Portugal is a great experience when visiting with tier 1 country salary.
carlosjobim
Your lord and savior the government cannot do anything about the fact that it's cheaper to manufacture new than to repair. Unless you want to de-industrialize, which of course is a popular ideology among Europeans.
pjmlp
We only need to throw into the arena the mighty power of executive orders, and great wall of Europe.
const_cast
[dead]
rockyj
I spent many a weekends at Nehru Place, even though it was a 90 mins drive and the parking ... oh the parking, well if you want to test your patience this is this is the place to go.
But for a hardware / gaming junkie this was the place to be. Not to mention (pirated / photocopied) books. Almost any book / media you could dream of. The lanes are buzzing with scamsters / pirates and geniuses who can build / repair anything - phones, TVs, PCs, laptops, watches etc. At one time Nehru Place was the "IT" hub of New Delhi. The street food was not half bad as well. I was just happy watching the men at work in dinky shops fixing anything, built a few PCs there (a tradition which continues to this day).
Some happy memories (but you have to be careful or you will need to walk back home without your wallet and your shirt).
Edit: 2 movies to understand this culture (a bit more) -
- Rocket Singh (salesman of the year)
- Mickey Virus
farhanhubble
Nehru place was almost 100% scammers than real geniuses but definitely the place if you wanted a custom computing rig. The food was good enough, like you said but the prospect of having a 2GB RAM module made you salivate even more!
The neighboring areas also had electronics importers that proved super helpful. You could find some of the most "lethal" tech with their help. I got myself some powerful FPGA kits that are normally not accessible outside defense, academia, and select licensed labs. I have great admiration for those folks who let me lay my hands over the most powerful technology of that time.
ravirajx7
This reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine not long ago. He’d just been laid off from a pretty good Salesforce Admin job and was already in a tight spot financially when his laptop’s motherboard fried after a voltage spike.
Local shops were quoting ₹25,000–₹30,000 (roughly $300–$360), which he just couldn’t afford. Then a friend told him about Nehru Place. He sent the laptop there through someone he knew, and the repair only cost him around ₹5,000–₹10,000 ($60–$120). Way more reasonable.
He was glad to get it fixed without spending a lot but it does make you wonder how reliable those reused parts are. Like, how long is it gonna hold up before something else goes wrong?
sokz
Delhi NCR in general looks like a pretty nice place to source tech in India. The Bangalore counterpart of Nehru Place, SP Road felt expensive and a bit less competent than I expected.
gyomu
I could also see unscrupulous businesses swapping out original parts in machines sent for repair for cheaper ones as a way to drive their costs down. The vast majority of customers wouldn’t be able to tell/prove what happened.
sokz
Spare parts are expensive in general in India. Add to the fact that there are unscrupulous repair centers, I am certain that the theft of genuine parts happen regularly.
LordGrignard
this is all the more important since 60$ in india is enough for a meal for four in an expensive restaurant in one of the better malls ( for e.g. in Mumbai ) ... and 25k to 30k is just ludicrous for a laptop. Even 5-10k will easily hurt his pockets but it depends on what the laptop's specs were and what it was worth
InfinityByTen
Heh, my brother got his Xbox original controller fixed for ₹200 which was just misbehaving due to old battery gunk. He could have afforded a new one, sure, but the charm of having the thing get another life, is a separate kick altogether :)
robin_reala
Not the same thing as this article, but I was impressed with the Chinese trend of “fixing” 2015-era MacBook Pros with broken screens by deleting the screen and installing a blanking plate, leaving the machine as a sort of C64/Amiga/ST/Acorn style keyboard-and-CPU single unit that could be plugged into an HDMI screen. https://ioshacker.com/news/people-in-china-are-using-macbook...
datadrivenangel
I did this with an old ASUS laptop. Just removed the whole screen after the hinges and LCD died. Worked fine!
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
There was this famous guy, which sold custom old Thinkpads, but with newer mainboards and Intel 10th gen chips in it, with custom USB-C adapters and all.
At some point he kind of disappeared and rumors appeared that he is now in mandatory military service, but will come back afterwards. Well, that was pre-COVID.
He also knows a friend that backports coreboot to the new mainboards. No idea how they manage to do that in a 2 person project like this. So yeah, all of the laptops they sell run coreboot in it (including the Thunderbolt EC, which is insane amount of work to implement).
Nonetheless the build quality was insanely good, and lots of folks were amazed by what they essentially bet blindly on when they ordered it. The X2100 would be my dream laptop, but I didn't manage to get one in time.
accurrent
His last post was in 2022. Singapore's national service is 2 years, he'd be out by now. Seems like he probably ran into issues. Also he mentions his university: you can't start university till you've finished your military service.
lproven
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
Holy shit. X210 with an Intel 7 Ultra 165H in it? Damn. I'm sold.
Anyone got one of these already or are they still in pre-production?
lproven
Right? I am extremely tempted to take some cash from my savings account.
I spoke with a chap called Franck Deng and he seems to be taking orders right now.
msephton
I'm guessing they still look like a normal laptop, which is why there's no photo of such a "Frankenstein" laptop?
DeathArrow
I grew up in a poor Eastern European country which is not as poor anymore.
We repaired anything: worn out shoes, distressed socks and clothes. Even cooking pots were patched when they developed holes. Everything had very long lifetimes and those lifetimes were extended with periodic repairs.
Cars were rare and using parts of low quality made the break often. People repaired their cars in front of their houses or apartment buildings. Or on the side of the road if it broke there. Everyone carried big toolkits in their trunks and and almost any car owner or driver knew how to fix the car. If a tire ran flat, they had the tools to fix it on spot.
There were electronic repair shops everywhere. There were also other kind of repair shops.
If someone looked in the trash cans at the time, most of it was vegetable waste resulting from people cooking their meals.
It wasn't unusual to own a 30 years old car, a 20 years washing machine, a 30 year radio or a 15 year black and white TV, all being repaired lots of times.
Some mass market goods, or most of them, were handed down to the next generation as priced possessions.
Now, we repair next to nothing. We still repair cars, although many people sell their old car if it breaks and buy a new one.
PC, TV, washing machines, fridges, furniture get replaced in a few years even if it's in perfectly good condition.
Good got cheaper, although of uncertain quality and the wages got high so it's expensive to repair something even if you find a place to do it. If you buy a new bicycle and go to the repair shop two or three times it will cost you the price of a new one.
I am not nostalgic about it, and I don't think people should stick with old junk. But I do believe we need an equilibrium, goods should be of higher quality, easier and cheaper to repair. I dislike being forced to throw something away because it can't be repaired, even if such a repair should be simple and cheap in theory.
We pay less for good and we don't spend for the wages of repair technicians (almost none left) but since the goods are of low quality, have planned obsolescence built in and can't be repaired, we end up buying the same good two or three times so we spend more. While that might create jobs in China or other remote country, I as a consumer, care more about my budget and my quality of life.
evgandr
I'm living in Russia. Can't say that we lived wealthy any time, maybe near 10 years at the beginning of XXI century. So the culture of repairs and repair shops is widely adopted here.
It is so widespread that even a special sort of frauds have been invented. First, a fake "repair shop" where you can lose money on paid "diagnosis" of broken parts or on extremely high cost of "repair". Which is just an installation of less broken parts or non-original and cheap parts ordered in China.
Second is a fake repairman, who comes to fix someone's PC and charges unreasonably high price for simple things, like cleaning the case from the dust or changing the thermal paste. Or even installs viruses to convince the user of the "real problems" and takes the computer to the "repair shop" where the obviously working parts will be stolen (swapped to smth cheap chinese parts) and the user ofc gets the unreasonably large paycheck for these operations.
Usually the technically illiterate people are the main target of such scammers.
---
I'm still using the PC from 2013 year and the heavily modified Thinkpad X220. Yes, maybe some operations (mostly the modern Web-related operations) take more time than on the modern computer (mostly because of JavaScript). But editing text, programming, watching videos and listening to audio still works pretty well.
Maybe, some day some time, the battery will be a problem. But it is detachable, so the main problem is the BMS (Battery Management System), which prevents me from just swapping the old battery cells for the new ones.
But for now it has 2K screen (installed it because photo editing with 1366x768 isn't easy), new WiFi card with new WiFi revisions support and so on. Can say what this laptop have enormous repairability compared to the new laptops. One flaw — the CPU is soldered to the board, so I can't change it to something newer, like I can do with much older laptops.
Sateeshm
I used to do at-home computer troubleshooting as a part time job when was in college. Most of time it was just opening up the casing, dusting it and reattaching all the parts/reinstalling Windows that did the trick. 90% of time it was just RAM popping out a bit. But in rare cases, it was the components themselves. I used to rely of these shops in the city (Hyderabad, India) that fixed motherboards etc. really cheap and relatively quickly (less than a week most of the time). People that worked there weren't engineers or anything, more like tradesmen. It was amazing to see them work.
During my middle school days, we lived in a small town for a little while (read: A place where i was allowed to take my bicycle out onto the main road).
After school, I used to spend a lot of time just hanging out around some TV and radio repair shops and just watched them work. They used to be friendly and gave me parts like spare motors, lights that were lying around from broken Walkmans they wouldn't repair. I took those motors and added to my bicycle as a "dynamo light" , built "wired RC car" etc ...
Fast forward to a few years ago when i got into building racing drones, soldering certain tiny wires was difficult for me. I went to a nearby mobile repair shop to get that done and he was happy to help me out.
I owe a lot of my curiosity and my knowledge today to these repair shops.
It's not a good thing that our electronics are becoming less and less repairable these days. No wonder these repair shops are vanishing as the time progresses.
The closest thing to that we have these days are makerspaces. At our local makerspace we encourage people try to fix their broken electronics instead of throwing them away. But I feel like there should be more.