Vint Cerf Talks Repairability

Below an intro, some good points.  

Repairability Redux  By Vinton G. Cerf

Communications of the ACM, December 2020, Vol. 63 No. 12, Page 5   10.1145/3429267

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

I wrote about repairability in the February 2020 issue of Communications (p. 7) and here I am at year's end harping on the same topic. My excuse is COVID-19. I have been at home for the past six months while my normal schedule would have had me on the road three weeks out of four. Of course, like many of you, I have been all over the world—virtually—since mid-March. There are days when I can visit Australia and Austria and be home in time for dinner. So, what does that have to do with stuff that breaks? Mostly, I am actually here when it does. Under more normal conditions, my wife would have to call a repair person to fix or replace a broken item. Now that I am home, I am sometimes the one who discovers the problem, or I am told about it before a repair service gets the call. I am an engineer of sorts, so broken things attract my attention. Engineers love problems to solve. "Fix me! Fix me! You can do it!" Of course, if you are like me, you go to the hardware store three times: first to get the stuff you need, second to get the stuff you forgot, and third to get the stuff you need to fix what you broke. My basic rant is that manufactured goods today do not seem to take into account the possibility of repair.   ... "