> Our "obsession" with sleek, thin devices running quad core processors and battery life out the wazoo has the unfortunately required side effect of making things much much harder to self-repair.
I think it's more than just a side-effect. For example, consider the iPhone's non-user-replaceable battery; one of the most commonly heard reasons for it is that it makes for a thinner device and a bigger battery. But an interesting device I saw recently made me question that; the Jiayu G5. It's an Android phone that looks almost exactly like the iPhone (only very slightly larger), with a metal casing and a removable battery plus dual SIM and expandable storage. It's only 0.25mm thicker but its battery has 33% more capacity. If a relatively small Chinese company can come up with something that has iPhone aesthetics but also retains a lot of the repairability, why can't Apple?