Which can increase the original cost of the good.
... to better reflect it's real cost by including all the otherwise externalized costs.
I'm not saying that it's a net loss, nor that even if a net loss that it isn't worth it. But there is a cost there, and you are shoving it away on your quest to regulation instead of looking at it and deciding its worth.
Yeah, incorporating some product standards is going to raise the cost of all units sold, which represents a loss to the buyer who hoped to get the product at the cheapest possible price and was either willing to take perfect care of it or tolerate it not being fully repairable if it were broken. But that's OK, because when regulating something the most important person to consider is the median user, noth the clumsiest/unluckiest nor the most skilled/luckiest.
If the median user buys a car expecting to drive it for 5 years, and there's a >50% chance that it will suffer some damage to some major functional component during that time, it would be pretty inefficient for said damage to cost more to fix than the cost of replacing the whole car, unless cars were to become so cheap that it was actually cheaper and better to scrap them - perhaps thanks to some breakthrough in large-scale 3d printing technology or so.
That's what happened with computer keyboards; it used to be that they were fairly expensive and if someone spilled coffee into one it was worth dismantling, cleaning, and re-assembling, but then cheap membrane keyboards assembled with increasing levels of automation brought the price down faster and faster, and today you can get a PC keyboard for something ridiculous like $10. A few fetishists still pay out for old-style IBM Model M, but most people will just replace a damaged keyboard.
But while cars remain relatively expensive and hard to dispose of, it makes sense to minimize the economic losses stemming for a lack of modularity and repairability across the market as a whole, rather than seeking to minimize the costs for the stingiest buyer.
Competition from non-Cherry keyswitches have forced Cherry to drop prices, such that nearly identical keyboards from 2008 now cost a quarter as much. Cherry was valuable for proving the technology in the premium market, and Cherry's competitors were valuable in bringing the prices down and driving economies of scale to make mechanical keyboards basically a "no brainer" purchase now.
What if the chance is actually 1%? What if the cost of repairing it is bigger than a new car? What if, as you said, cars got cheaper, but not so cheap to be disposable? What if making if repairable has the side effect of making it less durable?
Just nobody upthread is asking any of those questions. It's not circular, it's a plain old and boring cost vs. benefit assessment to be done over government intervention.
What is the externality here? Trash left over when the product is discarded?
Regulating the manufacturer is a classic progressive roundabout way of not regulating the externality directly. Instead, perhaps a better solution would be regulating the amount of wasted resources / complexity to recycling, such that the consumer is made very aware of the environmental impact of a product that is no longer in use.
And if the consumer was truly bearing a non-environmental burden for cheap stuff that is hard to fix and breaks easily, they would keep name-brand businesses with durable products in business (and indeed, they do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2]
Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain.
1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si...
>Which is done because solder is thinner/lighter than sockets, and therefore you can get a thinner/lighter laptop.
So let them figure out another way to make it thinner/lighter. I don't want them to do it at the expense of upgrading common parts. We're not asking for every single chip to be replaceable. Just the obvious parts that have an established 10+ year history of being serviceable. I bet welding every single part on a car makes it lighter too, but I don't think people want to replace the entire car if their fuel pump breaks.
>There are real engineering tradeoffs all over the place here that are being elided
Huh? You switched from purely cosmetic factors - thinner/lighter, to engineering. You will have to explain that one to me...
User-serviceable parts are better, all things being equal. But all things aren't equal. You're trying to mandate tradeoffs for everyone else, and I don't think you understand everyone else's tradeoffs well enough to do that.
And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who? Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM. And it's not acceptable to those who buy other laptops that don't have soldered RAM. The compromise has been accepted by the market. "Well, the market got it wrong and should do it better," you might think. Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better, and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.
>And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who?
To me, and anyone else who shares my values.
>Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM.
Seems like you can layer-on any argument you want simply by citing sales. I suppose people think Windows security is the best since they overwhelmingly choose to buy Windows machines over Apple or Linux desktops. But that is a false statement, because not everyone is aware of the intricacies of operating system design or that different options exist, or how they differ etc etc. Extrapolating _just_ from commercial success to use as data in an argument is a fools errand because of the thousands of variables involved in a large diverse group making a purchasing decision.
>Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better,
Hmm I'm curious.. can you provide a sampling of those incidents that apply to our discussion here?
>and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.
They almost never do. Systems typically evolve to coalesce around a local maxima. All around the world (in democracies anyway), citizens have always installed regulations to make the market serve us, rather than the other way around. For e.g. in the US - child labor, minimum wage, consumer product safety, etc, antitrust laws, etc etc. Before each of those laws got passed, I'm sure people made arguments against it with "well the market has accepted it". (You seem like a decent bloke, so I'm not suggesting that you personally would be against those regulations, just making a general point)