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Comment by emteycz | Hacker News Reader

But it exists - it's not that stuff is worse now than it was before, you just have to spend the value (not amount) of money you spent back in the 60's. Our family houses are full of stuff that lasts a lifetime and/or can be easily fixed - you just can't buy the first thing the ad in TV suggests.

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Disagree. I'm willing to throw heaps of hard earned money to recover my time spent being bothered by such problems. I researched and tried many "premium" brands, with minor exceptions they proved to be planned for obsolence too. I had good experience with small companies/kickstarters. Once they grow to the point of being "popular", economies of scale and CFOs show up to the table and eat your cake.

In all of the following I got a new thing looking for some new feature or because I could I guess, and had the older device outlasted the newer one: Bose headphones, any mobile phone really, Thinkpad laptops, Audi cars, Brother printers, any and all household appliances.

Well... My headphones are 10 years old, my phone is 3 years old and all my previous ones including my Galaxy S2 (my first smartphone) are still in use by family, my kitchen doesn't have anything younger that 15 years - most stuff is 25+ years old - except the fridge, I replaced it because of power efficiency and the old one is at the cottage, nearly 35 years old. None of it was bought from a kickstarter as most of that stuff predates internet.

I really don't see the problem. Like you're saying people are buying new stuff because they want the new stuff, not because old is broken. There are tons of extremely cheap second hand things that could do the job and yet people keep buying new things.

How will this right to repair change anything? How much money was spent making it reality that could've been spent productively?

That manufacturers are actually hostile towards end users says a lot about our current state of helplessness.

I had multiple manufacturers of kitchen appliances send me schematics so I could fix it myself instead of paying for a service visit. Many vendors have service guides online, including lists of parts. That's not hostile at all. You have to choose what you're buying, but it's not hard to buy from a solid company.

I had to fix my circa 2005 Kenmore dryer and it had a folded up paper schematic behind the panel!!!

Note: whenever throwing those things out, save the knobs. They’re like $10+ each.

Indeed, a lot of appliances have the schematics embedded. My ETA oven does too.

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