This is a great comment and extremely disappointing to see down voted. It's perfectly understandable that lots of people on HN in particular, being hackers, want to be able to mess with hardware as a goal/value in and of itself. However, even here and certainly for the general population "repairability" or "modularity" are merely two possible tools of many, not goals themselves. The goal for most people, rightly, is that any given product lasts for a "reasonable lifespan" in line with its relative price and market conditions. In a world with crappy warranty coverage, a product that is easier to repair means that people who get stuck with a manufacturing/QA/shipping fuckup might not get quite as big a bill.

But they still get a bill, and often that's a flat out externality. Everyone expects (and most get) their phones say to last a good 3-6 years, with a longer time for more expensive nicer devices. What should happen is that is simply explicitly mandated and gets represented in the price. Manufacturers should be the ones responsible for figuring out the right way to make it happen at a price that will still sell. They can try a vast number of different combinations of efforts to accomplish that, and easier repairability could be one. But instead, they're allowed to hide that cost and foist the 1%/2%/whatever problems off onto consumers.

That's what the government should fix, not tell them exactly how to do so since every various way to do it involves trade offs. Repairability, modularity, and upgradeability aren't free either. They involve compromises in physical design and other aspects that many of us directly value.

I wouldn’t mind having an SD slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The impenetrable sleekness of modern phones looks great in equally impenetrable television ads, but my real world would benefit from a bit more utility. Add replaceable battery to the list too, to swap out a dead one, or install a larger one.

And I would mind having an SD slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

This is the beauty of the market, yes? Both of us can shop at different brands, and the products that sell more get to continue to try new and better things.

I don't ask that every company stop using 3.5mm headphone jacks. Instead, I buy Apple. Why do you ask for Apple to re-add them? Instead, just buy some other brand.

If the goal of repairable/upgradable products is to reduce waste/resource depletion - how do warranties/long term support achieve the same objective?

Incentives to prevent planned obsolescence. I bet there's a lot of ewaste sitting at the bottom of the ocean because the market allowed software companies to obsolete working hardware, or hardware companies to make hardware where a small failure rendered the rest of the machine a writeoff.

My last iPhone worked perfectly, but stopped receiving updates. 8 months ago, I replaced it with a new iPhone for security reasons and some Apps did stop working too.

At first I was annoyed that I needed to replace it, but once I started using my new iPhone, my only regret was not upgrading sooner. I use my phone so much that my quality of life improved drastically.

The iPhone planned obsolescence after 6 years seems pretty reasonable to me (I did the math and liked the numbers). But regardless of the 6 years or not, next time I'll probably upgrade sooner to have another step function increase in my quality of life.

The market (like myself) seems to demand a 6 or less year life-cycle. At least this way Apple is planning for it, and is striving to remove all negative externalities of obsolescence. Wouldn't this be equally effective, while also being (given market dynamics) more practical?

I fear that this will just increase the price of the products. Apple will toss the broken iphone and hand you a new one because they don't want to pay the cost of labor to fix it. Repairing reduces e-waste, competition in repair reduces prices (with obviosu caveats). You can't really get around that.