> you are the first person I know of talking about about repairing your blender, and I've never seen a blender repair shop

In my town, there are several repair shops that fix small appliances such as blenders. I've never used them, because I fix my small appliances myself.

I can't stand throwing away machines that can be fixed and put back into service. It seems so utterly wasteful.

Small appliance repair is/used to be a thing, remember TV repair shops? Vacuum repair shops I still see around occasionally.

Problem is people buy a $25 hamilton beach blender that doesn't make any financial sense to repair but makes huge amounts of sense as an initial purchase. If you buy a $500 vitamix, you can keep it running forever with new parts, but that's the same price as 20 of the cheap blender. And blender technology isn't really advancing at a huge rate compared to, say, cell phones.

> And blender technology isn't really advancing at a huge rate

That's part of it, but also the vitamix and hamilton beach really have quite different capabilities. For most peoples usage, it doesn't matter much, but the vitamix (at least the core one) show their commercial kitchen background.

The real problem is that there isn't anything much between the $25 one and the $350 one. From a technical point of view, there isn't any reason someone couldn't produce a $90 one that was robust and repairable but less powerful etc. than the vitamix. I dont' think i've ever seen one - if you do find a $90 one it's essentially the $25 one in a fancier looking shell.

The market, as they say, has spoken. In most cases you are better off going for commercial suppliers if you want longer life, repairability, etc., but often the only things on offer there are way overkill for e.g. a home kitchen.

Small appliance repair is alive and well in parts of the world where it is easy to access parts supply close to the source (i.e. you are paying roughly small batch wholesale prices).

> I dont' think i've ever seen one - if you do find a $90 one it's essentially the $25 one in a fancier looking shell.

I think this is a huge problem. If you don't know a good brand (or can't trust the brand), why risk the $350 one when you can buy 14x $25 ones for the same cost and maybe get lucky?

Take the humble toaster for example. Are there some nice, well built, repairable ones that can (possibly) make the toast of angels? Sure, I've heard good things about Dualit[1]. But I bought a generic Black and Decker toaster for $15 over 20 years ago and it continues to work just fine. I would have had to replace that toaster roughly every 3.5 years in order to get over the cost of the cheapest Dualit toaster. It's not fancy and not consistent, but it is functional, and I can more or less guarantee that walmart will be selling it or a similar item for decades. Buying a more expensive "repairable" toaster from a small brand is just a risk that doesn't make a lot of sense, even before you factor in that repair shop labor is going to be in the $40-50/hr range.

[1]: https://www.dualit.com/collections/toasters

Phone screens are pretty easy to repair though. You just drop it off at the Apple Store and they do it for you. Yes it’s expensive, but the screen is the biggest and probably the hardest to manufacture part on the phone so it’s going to be expensive.

Yeah it would be nice if Apple provided in depth repair guides and sold individual chips for cheaper repairs, but realistically I don’t think it’s going to change all that much vs other product categories.

> Yes it’s expensive, but the screen is the biggest and probably the hardest to manufacture part on the phone so it’s going to be expensive.

If it weren't glued in place and if they wouldn't tie Face ID components to the goddamn screen, it would be far less expensive. I managed to break my iPhone 12 Mini's screen in a freak incident - the protection glass is intact, but it shattered below it, right over the left Face ID illuminator.

A new display + glass would clock in at 60-100€ plus maybe half an hour of time to do the replacement - but that would break FaceID as the components are paired for whatever reason. Apple's quote is 279€. What a fucking joke!

The mainboard and FaceID sensor are paired so you can’t ‘trick’ the phone into letting you in with a dummy FaceID sensor.

The complaint is that it's tied to the screen, not the mainboard.

Pairing sensor and mainboard is fine as long as I can reset it when I reset the phone.

That makes sense but why is this shit glued to the screen? Every other phone has the camera, proximity sensor and whatever installed in the main body or at least makes it trivial to take off from the old screen and replace in a new one.

Also... why is there any need for the FaceID sensor to be paired? It's two LEDs illuminating the face from different angles in infrared so the camera can create a depth map. None of that needs a secure connection.

It makes the phone parts next to worthless on the secondhand market, making it not worthwhile to steal the phone and sell it for parts.

Hector Martin has some nice rants about right-to-repair zealots and their lack of understanding as to why Apple made the decisions they did.

I can assure you that stolen iPhones absolutely aren't worthless. They are sent to various places where extremely technically sophisticated groups are still able to make at least 200$, sometimes much more, from a stolen iPhone, which isn't much less than what it used to be worth. In fact, phone thieves in many places only ever made about 50-100$ from a stolen high end phone.

Phone theft is a billion dollar industry, and as Apple tries to lock down parts, thieves adapted by forming far more efficient logistics and by centralizing value extraction from stolen phones. Apple's tactics haven't so far made a big impact to a phone thief's incentives, and I don't see it happening in the near future either.

I agree with the zealots but there could be better ways - for one, make the replacement screens "unpaired" by default, maybe using a WORM to store keys, so people (or repair shops) could still repair their phones with legit replacement screens while "second hand" aka parted-out displays would still be impeded.

>right-to-repair zealots

You will own nothing, and you will be happy. :^)

Not sure what costs but you can get a 12 mini done for £79 in the UK (non Apple https://www.ismash.com/collections/iphone-12-mini-repairs)