Although full time job, sometimes been asked to repair (like everyone else on this site) electrical /mechanical equipment big or small up to the not so easy washing machines and mig welders. Down to a few items nowadays due to the throw-away attitudes that people have, as items do not cost as much as the older items once did.
The skip sites were valuable to me to hunt for parts as I repaired items for no cost whenever I could. Due to H&S you are not allowed now this past few years to remove anything from a skip site.
The big winner of this new law. "The right to repair " will be of course that big rich company where you can get anything even a small £1 switch in a big cardboard box (and I use them for parts), the loser will be the with hundreds of big vans travelling all over the country for small items.
This is only a small courteous take on this from me, others may have a more generous view.
You don't sell more lamps by making ones that last longer. You sell more by making ones that are designed to fail after a defined time.
Depends totally on your marketing strategy! Some companies base their strategy on reliability, some on cost, both strategies work.
That one feels like a slightly academic argument anyway, by coincidence I was passing the light bulb section as I was shopping yesterday and it made me realise that I couldn't remember the last time I bought a bulb because it failed! (Other than the filament bulb in the oven.)
What I find more irritating is the "dreadful" news that Samsung may be delayed in releasing its latest phone. That's not about about engineering in obsolescence, that's about marketing in obsolescence - it really isn't the end of the world that people may need to use a two year old design for another year. Ok, it is slightly about engineering in obsolescence by allowing software bloat so that perfectly functional older technology becomes unusably slow (I've just bought a new tablet for that reason, fortunately I was able to think of a use for the old one). Rantette over...
everything nowadays has a built in failure rate as an example, when I worked for Ford Motor Company as an Electrical/Electronic Engineer that percentage was 12% and when new cars were rolled out to the public and have multiple issues 'Teething problems' these percentages are to high, no different to White goods, I used to repair them at home when they failed, but now you are down to false economy at your expense, it wouldn't make manufacturing sense for any company to build an item that lasts for ever, they would soon go out of business ,a prime example was the old milkfloats, they never went wrong and the company that built them went out of business, you could put this down to greed at our expense, however a Manufacturing company has to survive, I for one would always have wanted to repair something electrically but I feel those days have gone and so to are our skills, probably easier for the new generations.
There is a bigger question about how you run society. As it stands I agree, for a company to stay busy, it needs to keep making stuff, and steady replacement of an unreliable product model is one very inefficient way . It may be the only way if the company is only geared to one sort of product which is easy to do, but that makes it vulnerable to competition developing something better or market saturation (let us call this the model for Landrover or Kodak.)
Now, consider the following extreme alternative approach.
You could have a company that made enough light bulbs or whatever for everyone in the world to have sufficient, but pretty much designed to last forever, and then it stops, re-tools and makes something else instead for a bit.
When or of it is all finished, and everyone has everything, we can all retire, no-one will ever need to work again, as it will all be free, and there will be no need to do any repair work ever either.
Now that is not going to happen either, but the idea of keeping moving on , and retooling for new areas of business his is closer to the 3M (Minissota Mining and Manufacture) approach, which nowadays does almost everything but the original business of mining and metals - had they stuck to which it would probably have gone under years ago. (floppy disks, laser goggles, post-it glue..... literally thousands of lines of business, and a lot of R and D reinvestement in new stuff.)
It is not clear to me that the one product factory is a good idea.
" it wouldn't make manufacturing sense for any company to build an item that lasts for ever, they would soon go out of business ,a prime example was the old milkfloats, they never went wrong and the company that built them went out of business, you could put this down to greed at our expense, "
Probably would have done well long term if they'd developed their business into maufacturing Rickshaws.
