Re: Extend to cars
I think we digress here. Is it so much about the time or about the incidental cost applied to minor repairs?
The issue is that on a £1,000 laptop if you want more ram, or your ram fails, or one other tiny piece of your logic board fails then you are either paying about £800 to replace the entire logic board and discard the remaining working components, or you are paying £1,000 for a shiny new [insert current year] macbook.
If my suspension fails and in order to replace only the suspension I have to have a mechanic spend 12 hours disassembling to get to it and replace it, in this case only the suspension is discarded. It might take longer, I definitely won't have to buy a new car and my old car will carry on just as it was before.
I thought the goal was to get to the latter position with consumber electronics. Specifically those consumer electronics which could and have been made modular but are now being made as single units, glued or that do not have parts made available for the purposes of the upgrade cycle.