I made a post a few weeks back about how electronics should be big, expensive, and repairable. A lot of people responded that they agreed with big and repairable, but it should be cheap too.
Here's the problem with that, cheap and well-constructed are mutually exclusive. They simply are. As long as you have an economy where people are paid for work, even with a robust safety net or even universal income, all costs eventually boil down to labor.
Yes, there's raw materials and such, but those are then converted into usable materials using, can anyone give me the answer? That's right, labor.
Simply put, money is a physical representation of labor. This isn't a controversial stance, this is extremely basic baby's first Marxism. Like, you say you go here, but you don't seem to understand this.
The reason things like LCD panels and disposable LED lights and hard disks are so cheap is because their production has been opitmized to produce the most of a specific item in the least amount of time. An electron tube for a radio takes a skilled technician an hour or so to make and costs you $30. Transistors can be made by the thousands on a fully automated production line in the same time and cost you less than a buck each.
If you want a laptop computer that you can service, repair, and upgrade, you have to engineer it to be serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable. That means someone has to be paid to do that. You have to use more materials in order to make it large enough that you can access the servicable parts, which means you have to pay for more materials. You have to provide quality control for all the various extra connections that make servicability possible, someone has to be paid for that. You have to be willing to reject products that make it to final assembly and do not check out for quality control, which is incredibly expensive.
So no, you can't just make things "Big, Cheap, and Repairable." Being cheap and well-made are completely orthogonal to each other.
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