I've spent 30+ years designing and engineering consumer and medical products, mostly for high volume production. While I detest working on projects I consider "instant landfill", the reality is that so much of our built society whether it be a toy car, a mobile phone, or a house, is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible. Prioritizing things like that means that a lot is invested in specialized equipment, fixtures, and training for the labor force which manufactures their new shiny object. Duplicating that equipment and expertise is next to impossible on the scale of maintenance. Maintenance is more of a craft. Think about your local car mechanic vs the factory which produced the car in the first place.
Even in the factories where your new shiny consumer electronics products are produced, when Chinese News Year is over, and a bunch of the staff turns over, getting the production line up and running again with the same quality is challenging. Despite there being documented standard operating procedures, incoming and outgoing quality checks, etc... there's a lot which is tribal knowledge and muscle memory of the operators. Even if things are highly automated (and you'd be shocked how much is done by hand despite all those magical How It's Made videos), those machines need to be adjusted and tuned to keep from producing junk. This is all to say that so many things are on the hairy edge of working well. They're not always so easy to disassemble and reassemble without destroying seals, alignment, calibration etc.
To a degree, some of this can be blamed on products becoming more and more electronic and miniaturized, but the reality is that so many things involve inseparable assemblies (whether it's an heirloom chair glued out of wood, a PCBA, the drywall in your house, or a welded and painted autobody). While there are rework techniques for these, they're never the same as following the normal process in the factory.
> so much of our built society [..] is designed to appeal to consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light, waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they bought, and at the lowest price possible.
Nope, i beg to differ. The appeal is built too, it's no secret that our global retail economy is largely driven by marketing and communication, since ww2. Hence it's driven by producers and not by consumers: these criteria are what producers want consumers to want. Which they largely managed to assert. Mass media, mass consumption, all this is guided from the top, not the bottom. Surely there is nuance, the top-down control strives to test if it's not too far from something that would actually be appealing to the bottom. But the main driving force here is to pump up the volume, and to do so by creating markets, by forcefully pushing goods onto consumers habits and by making things short-lived (using forced obsolescence, but more commonly and insidiously by producing pointless new versions all the time). Actually once you go down that path, you see that the whole underpinnings of "consumer"/"producer" duality is biased towards this state of affairs. It's no wonder Marx babbled about taking over the means of productions (and ipso facto destroying passive consumption as a practice). Even Knuth says that the only proper way to make any tool is to design it for your own use (can't remember out the source for this one, probably something about TeX). This is a major reason for grassroots software domination against corporate products, despite the ridiculous imbalance.
Even in the factories where your new shiny consumer electronics products are produced, when Chinese News Year is over, and a bunch of the staff turns over, getting the production line up and running again with the same quality is challenging. Despite there being documented standard operating procedures, incoming and outgoing quality checks, etc... there's a lot which is tribal knowledge and muscle memory of the operators. Even if things are highly automated (and you'd be shocked how much is done by hand despite all those magical How It's Made videos), those machines need to be adjusted and tuned to keep from producing junk. This is all to say that so many things are on the hairy edge of working well. They're not always so easy to disassemble and reassemble without destroying seals, alignment, calibration etc.
To a degree, some of this can be blamed on products becoming more and more electronic and miniaturized, but the reality is that so many things involve inseparable assemblies (whether it's an heirloom chair glued out of wood, a PCBA, the drywall in your house, or a welded and painted autobody). While there are rework techniques for these, they're never the same as following the normal process in the factory.