Comment Re:If anyone actually cared... (Score 1) 710
There is only one solution to the problem of how to get devices that last longer: you make them have longer warranties, so manufacturers have an incentive to make cost/longevity trade-offs on the lifetime side. That will drive up prices on everything. People would need to think of cost in terms of $/year assuming the lifetime is at least the warranty, to get a price metric that drops when quality improves.
Your run at finding easier answers has two major issues. First you're assuming that manufacturers know, in advance, which parts will wear out fast and which won't. The way things will fail in the field is unpredictable. The last thing I bothered to repair was a TV that filed due to the Capacitor plague. Quoth Wikpedia: "these capacitors should have a life expectancy of about 18 years of continuous operation; a failure after 1.5 to 2 years is very premature".
The idea that this could have been prevented by buying higher quality parts is not well founded. They already bought capacitors that were overbuilt by at least a 6X factor over their warranty period. But shit happens. You cannot overbuild to where shit doesn't happen. That's the road to the crazy town that's given us things like super-expensive "mil-spec" parts. And assemblies of things made from that quality level of part still fail early anyway; see "shit happens", again. Also, device failures are dictated by the first failing component. There's no sense overbuilding plastic parts into metal if the lifetime is normally dictated by a motor.
Second major flaw: designing for maintenance and repair is way more expensive than you give it credit for, and it's not clear it's even productive. Splitting a design into usefully modular components makes things more expensive, and while repairs are easier the failure rate goes up in the process. The way you've connected the modules becomes a whole new failure mode. Take a washing machine that was reliable as a single mechanism, split it into easy to repair modules, and the new type of failure you'll see in the field are modules that vibrate out of their module interface over time. There's a reason we've moved toward giant monolithic designs: they're simply more reliable than modular ones, on top of being cheaper to build and design too. People don't really like less reliable but easier to repair, and in a high labor cost world that's a correct preference.