I live just south of Indianapolis.. I remember when one of their relatives ran an "everything electronics" store. Was packed to the gills with anything and everything you could imagine. In fact, it reminded me of what Shenzhen is shown now by Bunnie. You could buy new stuff retail, or buy returns and broken or unknown by the pound.

Now, we have wealth upon wealth with technology of all sorts. But those things are sealed with alu lids over the board. Or this talks to the cloud. Or that is glued together with ultrasonic sealing so opening = destroying. Or batteries are buried with ultrasonic and glue and spot-welding. They're made intentionally user-unservicable.

All of it means that you have a snowball's chance in hell in fixing it. And yes, SMT is servicable. So is through-hole. And if these companies provided their pinouts for flying probe or provided probe posts, we could check what part or system is acting up. If we knew their voltages, then following that as a test would be easy. Or someone could re-solder that Atmel 328p DIP (or Arm, or PIC) after using a programmer to reprogram and then use it.

Instead, we see flat screens hauled down to the dumpster. DVD and blurays are dumped. Computers of all sorts and types, that likely have a single miniscule flaw "destroy" the whole device. It makes the game great for consumer culture: consume consume CONSUME! Companies can make shoddy stuff that has a MBTF "warranty + 1 day", and whoops that cap or vreg blows.

Seeing that e-waste makes me cry. I know how much resources are put into that via how much I paid, and I also know how much of that is externalized to our environment.. and Mother Earth's account is going lower and lower. I don't need that new thing. I just want to fix that thing that broke that necessitated me to get the new.

Of course, that old, often expensive, often tube-based equipment needed repair far more often than modern electronics.

Most everything I own lasts longer than I care to use it. (For context on that, I just replaced my iPhone 5S this month with a used 8, so I’m willing to run equipment quite a while.)

What does break before I care to get rid of is >50% electrolytic capacitor failures, which are generally easily repaired without a schematic. Beyond that, most anything is BER (beyond economic repair), even for someone who is capable of and interested in component level repair. I’m just not going to tear into a $500 TV beyond a caps issue. If I had to take it to a service center, it’s going to be $200 to take a look at it past the power supply.