The modern automobile is safer, cleaner, more efficient, and more technologically advanced than anything that came before it. Yet those improvements have come at a cost. For many owners, mechanics, and independent repair shops, that cost is repairability.
I do too, I think general-purpose compute has become a too-cheap way to solve problems that have more durable (and repairable) mechanical solutions. It makes the sticker price lower even if the total cost over the lifetime of the vehicle (or laptop, or washing machine, etc.).
I think it would be nice to have a law that certain hardware needs to have user-autitable and user-replaceable control software. If you want to ship your hardware product with some preinstalled software, the source code must be publicly available. I don’t know how it would get passed in America because it would make consumer electronics more expensive to manufacture, but I think it would be helpful in the long term to legally decouple hardware from closed-source software.
I would go further than software. I think too much stuff is cheap. I’m not rich, I’m barely surviving. That said if things were more expensive but better I think that’s a net positive. Like you can buy a 50 vacuum, won’t do a good job won’t last long no hope to fix anything. If minimum was a 300 vacuum but it had a 15 year warrenty, mandatory suction and cleaning ability and user fixable wouldn’t that be better?
It’s similar to the old boot thing. A poor man buys a pair of boots for 10 dollars and lasts 2 months. A rich man buys a pair of boots for 200 and they last 4 years.
Being poor is very expensive!