Obviously a lot of design and engineering tasks these days don't have the goal of producing robust, repairable, long-lived hardware and software - where's the profit in that? If iphones lasted twice as long as they now do, wouldn't sales drop by 50% unless consumers decided they preferred the longer-lived phones? This would create pressure on all manufacturers to produce long-lived phones with easily replaceable batteries and publicly available repair kits. And what happens then? The entire market shrinks for all phone manufacturers, and the shareholders throw tantrums over lost profits.
In the late 19th and early 20th Gilded Age era, every industry was dominated by trusts, collusions of manufacturers who set up anti-compete systems to ensure such disruption of their industry by independent innovation wouldn't succeed. This is now being replayed in the tech industry for similar reasons.
There are two solutions to this problem that go together: anti-trust law and open-source hardware and software models - but for that to work, you need an educated population with and understanding of legal and scientific concepts, which is why the education system in the USA has been so deliberately degraded over the past few decades.
That's what happens when you let investment capitalists control everything, isn't it?
In the late 19th and early 20th Gilded Age era, every industry was dominated by trusts, collusions of manufacturers who set up anti-compete systems to ensure such disruption of their industry by independent innovation wouldn't succeed. This is now being replayed in the tech industry for similar reasons.
There are two solutions to this problem that go together: anti-trust law and open-source hardware and software models - but for that to work, you need an educated population with and understanding of legal and scientific concepts, which is why the education system in the USA has been so deliberately degraded over the past few decades.
That's what happens when you let investment capitalists control everything, isn't it?