You're right that YouTube has a lot of helpful videos for repair / disassembly that make it a lot easier than it used to be. I don't know why "being helpless without the internet" would be "the real problem" though, given that we ... have the internet..?
The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be. Also manufacturers don't expect things to be repaired (because it isn't cost effective unless you do it yourself) so they don't make things easy to disassemble.
>The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be.
I broadly disagree - the proportion of people who can fix a TV is probably no lower now than it was in the 1970s; a modern TV might be more complex, but the accessibility of information, tools and parts is far better.
The wider issue is the broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour. The range of products and failure modes that are economically repairable is much narrower, because repair is relatively more expensive and replacement is relatively cheaper. Generally speaking, the most expensive part of repairing a TV is simply the labour cost of dismantling and reassembling it. As mentioned in the article, paying a seamstress to patch a jacket or darn a sweater is often more expensive than just buying a new one. There are worse problems in the world than "we've got so good at making stuff cheaply that it isn't worth the effort to fix it".
Exactly. Had part of the bottom LED backlighting strip go bad on a monitor recently. I'm no stranger to electronics work, but repairing it proved impossible due to the way the monitor was manufactured, even if I had been able to source proper replacements. Compare that to old CRTs I used to repair in high school by swapping out parts you could often find at radio shack and get to with just a screwdriver.
True, but not too much higher if you're careful to ground out the HV circuitry before you touch anything. It's also not nearly as high a risk as people tend to think [1].
The primary failure mode of a TV in the 70s was a tube that went bad. Easy fix: open TV, pop out old tube, pop in old tube, done.
If a TV breaks now, it's some component that's either glued in or soldered in, so good luck replacing that. Modern TVs are not designed to have replaceable parts.
It's both. Things are so much cheaper to buy because the marginal cost of a factory assembling parts (on hundreds of widgets a minute) is ridiculously cheap.
But also, a set of tools was once a necessity, because things were built to be repaired. Now it's a luxury item for most people. Simple things like changing oil are, in most cars, way more complicated and difficult than they used to be, because the market has spoken. Easy DIY maintenance is not the priority.
>broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour
Only because the huge negative external costs of a new appliance aren't priced in - pollution created in manufacture, environment disposal of the old one, long-term exhaustion of raw materials.
The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be. Also manufacturers don't expect things to be repaired (because it isn't cost effective unless you do it yourself) so they don't make things easy to disassemble.