Most is economics of scale and mass production; repair is device & damage specific, which does not scale at all. Add exploitation of workers, just in time deliveries eliminating storage costs, the fact that transporting parts for 100 devices takes much more transport volume than 100 devices themselves...

a standout product is the steam deck: every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap. I don't know how valve did it, but that should be the standard the industry should be aiming at.

The level of technical knowledge needed to repair things has increased, while general technical knowledge has decreased. People aren't reading Popular Mechanics from the 1950's where "build a hovercraft from an old lawnmower" the building one.

Parts are also a huge problem. Where previously a car alternator, for example, was three discrete parts, alternator-rectifier–voltage regulator, that is now a single assembly. If one of those parts goes bad you need to replace the whole thing, unless you have used parts you can pull from. For some things the assembly is NLA, no longer available.

As for why it's cheaper that comes down to manufacturers wanting to sell you a new one, not wanting to have to spend money on repair stock sitting somewhere, and possibly not having access to it themselves since very few manufacturers actually produce a complete product on their own.

For something simple like a Bluetooth speaker, the power supply comes from one company, the Bluetooth module and amplifier from another, the driver, a display board, the housing, someone designs it and puts that all together. If any one of those chains fails you may not be able to source the part to fix something.

There are usually workarounds to this but unless you are doing it yourself it will be cost prohibitive

Example: friend rented a house with a new stove, gas top, electric oven. Two months later the oven stopped working, motherboard was NFG (no fucking good), it was also NLA. So the landlord bought a new stove. The old one could have been made to work, but the complete functionally would not have been there. If my friend owned this I would have said 'I can make it work, but you will be missing these features'.

I once repaired my dishwasher. It cost me about £50 for a new pump, and many hours working out how to take the dishwasher apart and put it back together again. If I treated this as work, I would have been better off buying a new dishwasher, because I would have been paid more for those hours than the cost of a new dishwasher minus a pump.

Appliances are cheap relative to wages now, and repair still takes a lot of time. That's the simple answer.

We have to consider why we want to encourage repair: it's not simply true that we should always prefer to repair for its own sake. We should true to minimise greenhouse gas emissions or the use of resources that can't be reclaimed, but not to the exclusion of all else.

If we had a carbon tax for example, it would somewhat increase the price of new goods and promote repair. But such a tax would not cause people to repair everything reparable - there would still be reparable items that are not economical to repair. This is a good thing though - if the carbon tax correctly embodies the externalities of producing emissions, then the choice to not repair it is a choice to do something else with people's time. That time could be used on other productive things - maybe working to replace dirty fossil fuel infrastructure, or working to feed or entertain people, which are all things we want.

I can't speak for everything, but I can speak for e-waste. Especially printers. Those things are made cheap as hell, but constructed so you can't just get off the shelf parts. Being able to take the machine apart, find a replacement for whatever party is broken, install, and reassemble, you might have just bought a new printer for the same cost as the part. It's almost the same with laptops, phones/tablets, televisions, etc. Brand doesn't matter, it's all the same. Right to repair doesn't mean shit if you can't even make the repairs.

Where I work any problems with a company laptop or phone it just gets replaced and the original is disposed of. Cheaper that way when you factor in the cost of having components on hand, space to store them, the time to replace them and the premium you'd have to pay for either employing staff with those skills or giving them that level of training.

Let's take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer's description of what is wrong, and you're prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you're confident in your diagnosis.

Your typical job looks like this:

• Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
• Drive out to the person's home (30 minutes).
• Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
• Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
• Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
• Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
• Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
• Drive back to your office (30 minutes).

There, that's 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn't need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn't have had to remove an old one.

Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn't have to waste too much time driving from place to place.

Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you're also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.

The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn't until you're up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.

For $500 devices, it's gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.

I'd guess the repair option would look better if you had the same economic status as the person who initially put it together.

It only became cheaper to buy new over repairing the old because companies stopped producing replacement parts, and making things repairable.

If they never enshittified things to be unrepariable, repairing things would still be cheaper than buying a new one.

Encouraging people to repair things isn't going to help much when a fuckton of things simply are not made in a way that they can even be repaired at home or even by the people who made the thing.

Making new

• Making something new requires simpler processes that are easy to automate.

• Making something new may involve the same series of steps done many times, so one can take advantage of economies of scale. You obtain raw materials or parts, and they're all handled in the same way, many times over.

• You only need to deal with assembly, not disassembly.

Repair

• Devices don't fail in the same way, so repairs tend to be unique and not amenable to taking advantage of economies of scale.

• Unless you repair a device in the same way multiple times, the scale is necessarily going to be less than manufacturing new, since if you manufacture N devices, you can't be repairing more than N devices; again, not friendly to economies of scale. Even with things like automobiles that are designed with the intention of being easy to repair, older cars become increasingly less-practical to repair as the pool of cars of a particular year and model shrink over time as some become unrepairable and head to junkyards.

• If repair requires components, those components may need to be manufactured and then warehoused until repair is required, so the storage cost also adds to the cost of repair.

• Repairing is a complex process that likely differs from device to device that is hard to automate.

• Repair involves not just reassembly, but also disassembly.

• Especially if a device was not specifically designed to be simple to repair and especially if scale is not high, repair may involve (expensive) skilled labor from someone who has to be able to craft a specific repair process for this particular device being repaired.

• Repair involves diagnosis of the problem. Diagnosis may be an extraordinarily difficult process

e.g. trying to diagnose a failure inside of a chip without destroying it is something that we may not be able to do today, and the skillset or automated system required to do it may be very complex. Intel spent ages just trying to understand why there were failures in the last two generations of their chips, a situation where they didn't care at all about destroying chips that they'd use for diagnosis, and they weren't trying to repair a single chip, but to fix a process that involved huge numbers of chips. Maybe an electrical engineer could diagnose a problem on a device, but his work will repair only a single device. The time of that same electrical engineer could be used to improve a manufacturing process that could produce many more new devices.

Other

• When you repair a device, you get a device which may have other worn components. At some point, something else will fail. If you manufacture a new device, you get all new parts; you "reset the clock" on everything.

• When you repair a device, you get an older device. In many cases, due to the advance of technology, a newer device is preferable. That may not always be true

consider, say, an antique made by a specific artist centuries ago, where the value is in part that that particular person made the thing. But for most functional purposes, something made using present-day technology beats stuff made in the past. And that's a more-important factor the greater the rate of advance in the field of whatever good it is that you're trying to repair.

• Repair may compete with recycling.

We live in a world that, due to global trade and large population and probably access to interchange languages, has far more potential for scale than ever before in the past, so economies of scale can be pretty important

design a device once, make a very efficient process for making it, and you can sell to many, many people. Billions of people, even. You couldn't do that a few hundred years ago, because the world was simply too disconnected. That's a lot of potential for economy of scale. And economies of scale are, I think, generally more-friendly to manufacturing new.

I can't think of many factors that would cause repair to become more-efficient versus manufacturing new relative to where they are today. I think that when we get AGI, we may be able to reduce the cost of skilled labor and complex automation, both used in repair, so far that repairing could see a bit of a renaissance. Maybe if we become a multiplanetary species in the future, travel into space and live elsewhere, then we'll have small populations that are mostly cut off from the rest of the population, and economies of scale will greatly decrease, and repair will become more worthwhile

you fix something on Mars because there aren't enough people on Mars for building new to make sense, and sending a new item from Earth costs too much. Maybe we'll crash into fundamental physical limits and the rate of technological advance in many fields will slow way down, so a newer device won't have many more benefits over an older device. Maybe some sort of new types of goods that are fantastically-expensive and only required in small scale will become increasingly important, and for them repair will be more important than for goods that are produced at large scale. But outside of that, I think that most of the factors will favor manufacturing new, and if anything, probably continue to do so even more than they do today.

It takes a huge shift in the US. There's a stigma that if you don't get new youre "a poor". The funniest part is, the poorest people i know have a hatred for the poor. Like dude, you are 1 paycheck from being homeless but yes the homeless person is your issue not the tech billionaires.

Anyway, my mindset is the opposite in that im more disgusted by new and feel much happier with repair and reuse. But thats very rare. Not to mention late stage capitalism has made a lot of new stuff shit compared to old (cars, appliances, houses, consoles that don't require Spyware and accounts to even play a single player offline game etc)

Part of the answer here is also integrated design. To be able to be repaired a thing has to be designed for that, and to have identifiable parts that can be adjusted or replaced in isolation, and non-destructive disassembly.

If you have to destroy one part to adjust another, it's not really repairable. If several functions/components are all one thing then you can't really replace just the one.

To use a bike as an example, you can exchange wires, brake pads, seats and most other things in isolation, especially the things that are expected to wear out and need replacement. But you're not going to replace part of your bar tape or frame, because they're essentially one whole thing.

(Ok, you could probably weld a steel frame if you really wanted to, but I think the intent is readable.)

Some of the reason is indeed due to fuckery such as companies intentionally making things difficult or illegal to repair, however part of it is also due to economic reasons. If you're trying to assemble something in the most economical way possible, you're probably not going to go out of your way to also make it more repairable. You're going to use single-use fasteners like rivets, glue, tack-welds, etc. - all things that are cheap to assemble the first time, but at the expense of more difficult disassembly later on.

In addition, diagnosing problems may be expensive depending on the appliance or machine. Would you spend four hours of your time repairing a dishwasher that could be replaced for $300? For some people it may be worth it; for some, not. I personally will spend quite a bit of time trying to repair something rather than replace it, however that's more of an ideological choice rather than an economic one.

Does your assessment assume that you cannot fix it yourself?

Fixing things is nearly always cheaper than buying new unless the base assumption is you cannot perform it yourself and have to rely on a third party.

Repair services are often not even available because the margins would be so low. So, to answer your question of how we got here is because of Capitalism.

https://degrowth.info/en

Not in the least bit true with phones, cars and computers. TVs have gotten extremely cheap compared to what they were when I was coming up, but I'd still take a healthy 1080p panel from 2015 over a born-to-fail $300 4k piece of trash made yesterday.

Basically, quality. We dipped quality into the gutter for quicker turnarounds and cheaper sales. Everything made today is basically shit.

A few reasons.

First, ease of repair isn't a major reason for people to buy certain products. Because consumers don't purchase on ease of repair for a lot of products, it doesn't get prioritized in design. The cost of screws over glue may not be worth it if only a small part of the customer base wants screws.

Second, an OEM supply chain is a cost that a lot of people don't want to pay. It may be cheaper to replace or refund a product than create a supply chain to fix items.

Exploitation.

People in rich countries have stuff manufactured in countries with a lower living standard, less regulation, nor work safety, no unions, lower wages etc. Same goes for the raw materials all stuff is built out of. If you don't have to care about anything, you can make everything so much cheaper. As long as this exploitative relationship between rich and poor countries exists, the rich will have access to cheap stuff that doesn't need to be fixed.

Repairing broken appliances and electronics has different dynamic though. You're paying a trained professional in a rich country to work for you. That doesn't come cheap. Even though the parts may be cheap, labor costs a lot. That's the exact reason why everything is manufactured in poor countries where labor is cheap. See also: planned obsolescence

We've been doing this for centuries already. It's a tradition by now. Global inequality fueled the Dutch East India company, Made England rich etc. Oh, and American cotton plantations too. We're just getting started with this can of worms.

Tax the fuck out of products that aren't repairable but should be.

cries in Brexit

Well, clearly as others said, it's the economy of scale: making large quantities of the same thing is cheaper than making small runs or one offs, and spare parts don't sell as much, if an item is designed well (i.e. doesn't break immediately).

But, I want to add something important IMHO: buying new because is cheaper isn't really the problem, the problem is the waste it generates, and when we throw away (or hoard...) something, neither we nor the company that made the item pays for the cost of disposal. In fact, in many cases, the cost will be paid by society as a whole, sometimes by future generations. This is why it appears cheaper to buy new, but really, there's a hidden cost that individuals and companies don't directly pay.

If we could, somehow, make a company pay for the disposal of all the waste their products create, I tell you, repairing would be a lot more common.

Old products were made so that each product lasted as long as possible.

So when one part failed, it was worth repairing because the rest was probably fine.

Modern products are designed to last X amount of time, so when one part fails, the rest of it is likely to fail soon.

Making repair not worth it.

You're trying to treat this as one problem, but it's specific depending on what you need. Like, you can 100% buy a fountain pen instead of using cheap disposables. But I doubt that's what you're talked no about.

As long as we live in a capitalist society industries will trend twoards monopolies and monopolies will implement planned obsolescence to make more money.

Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old

This may be true in single instances, but long-term it is often cheaper to repair a single device than repeatedly buy new replacements.

China fixed this. Or maybe America fixed it for China. Idk. It’s all way above my paygrade. All I know is, you go to any mall, there will be a kid there aged 12-18 willing to fix anything you got for the price of the cab you took to get there.