This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour.
We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something.
As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't.
People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).
This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour.
We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something.
As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't.
People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).