When somethings stops working, needs repair, or just some attention, it boggles my mind when my suggestions of repair and improvise are completely ignored in favor of "order a new one with overnight shipping".

I personally derive great satisfaction from fixing the stuff I rely on, and it's working out really well for me now I'm traveling through West Africa.

It could be super stressful, but I appreciate knowing those things now that I could afford to ignore them if I wanted to.

I actually ended up getting a side job working for a stage magician because I worked for the moving company that moved his stuff. I overheard them talking about a motorcycle they used in a trick, and how it wasn't working. I told them how they could fix it and they asked if I wanted to make some extra cash fixing other tricks, which by their nature were all cobbled together one-offs.

ahhh, the things we do to our stuff when things can't be shipped and already cost a fortune (AU) :).

It probably varies depending upon your social circles. Plenty of North Americans repair and improvise, especially those not in dense urban areas. Americans may love their disposable consumer goods but I wouldn't write of their ability to adapt and improvise just yet!

I guess the necessity is still there but often you can't do anything because most products contain way to much electronics.

The only thing you needed to fix an old farm tractor was a hammer, a piece of pipe and a screwdriver. But nowadays you need to study computer science before you can get such a thing running again... Or look at old TVs or audio equipment. Back in the day you could repair them yourself but nowadays it's full of non-servicable SMD parts.

It's just a matter of having the right tools, and in most cases you don't need anything expensive. A cheap Chinese hot-air rework station, some flux, and tweezers will let you service a lot of those "non-servicable" parts. People tend to overestimate the difficulty of surface mount soldering simply because the parts are small. In many cases it's actually easier than through hole because surface tension does so much of the work for you. You don't need perfect alignment. BGAs are admittedly more difficult but even those can be replaced with cheap/improvised tools if you're sufficiently dedicated. In the old days tools were more expensive and we didn't have easily accessible video tutorials for most common repairs. I think a bigger reason for the decline of repair is the lower costs of replacement products.

The problem is that it's nearly impossible to get schematics for most devices, and I'm not even talking about legally since you'll have to do it illegally for virtually any device any how.

Many SMD components are not marked at all, which means that if some tiny SMD component gets fried you can't even know what it was for sure not to mention it's value without having another board to measure.

Not to mention that with 402 and 603 sized packages becoming more and more common goodluck soldering those at home even with professional kits, these are 0.4MM packages, sure 1608 and even 1005 are doable by a steady hand but anything smaller and you likely won't even be able to see the damage on the board.

And without schematics you can't really debug anything, you might be able to reverse some of the boards but anything beyond 2-3 layers is impossible to RE by hand without an x-ray scattering machine.

And then we get into active components and custom chips which are either impossible to get hold off without cannibalization or would cost you more to buy even in bulk on digikey or any other store than the devices you attempt to fix.

Sure a 2000$ Macbook is worth a 400$ fix, but a 50$ controller board doesn't.

0603s are easily solderable with an iron and an Optivisor. There's a knack to 0402s, but they're entirely manageable. Hot tweezers make the job far easier, but it's perfectly manageable with a decent iron and a steady hand. Smartphone repairers are now often dealing with 01005 parts, which are barely visible to the naked eye. As mrob suggests, working with SMDs is often easier than PTH if you know the proper techniques.

A lack of schematics is a problem, but that problem has existed for decades. The most common repairs are broken connectors and failed electrolytics, for which no schematics are required. Schematics for popular smartphones, tablets and laptops are readily available; ZXW make a superb interactive schematic package that massively simplifies the fault finding process.

I think it's very much swings and roundabouts. Some things are more difficult than they used to be, but the tools and information are far more accessible. There are thousands of excellent tutorials on YouTube demonstrating practically every aspect of electronics repair. Test equipment has become dirt cheap. Most components are readily available; for those that aren't, eBay's "spares or repair" listings are a treasure trove.

In my opinion, repair is less common simply because consumer electronics have become so cheap relative to the labor needed to repair them. The number of repairs that are economically viable has dwindled as prices have fallen. By the time something has failed, the odds are fairly good that it has been rendered obsolete.

And they included the schematics!

This was useful in the case of the dryer -- I was trying to disable the buzzer that unhelpfully wakes me up to tell me that my clothes are dry, and the schematic pointed the way to the right circuit to clip.

It was less useful in the case of the dishwasher, as the root cause was user error. But, the schematics were there, nonetheless.

But there are still no schematics for the logic boards which is what tends to die more often than the solenoid that controls the water intake valve for example, and those logic boards are either impossible to get or cost as much as a new dishwasher or a washing machine.

My parents have a washing machine with busted power transistors and MCU which drives them. The MCU could be replaced but without FW it's a brick.

Another great example of Aussie ingenuity! One farmer's way of dealing with the 2010 locust plague.