There are lots of reasons they aren't repairable. Lack of documentation and debug access is probably the biggest one. My washing machine died, and it looked like some components on the PCB blew. I bought a replacement for around £50 (already a crazy move) but sadly it didn't work. Not really anywhere you can go from there unless you're a professional washing machine repair man.

My fridge also had some kind of fault with the drainage tube (kept freezing up) but there's simply no way to access it. The back panel is not removable.

> PCBs that have been manufactured for decades ... same designs.

Absolutely not the case. Go and look up any washing machine control board. They're different for almost every model.

Washing machines & fridges may be better; I've never had to take one apart.

The only good solution to this problem I've come up with is requiring manufacturers to dispose of unwanted appliances for free. That way they have at least some incentive to make them last for a long time and be easily recyclable / repairable.

I'm not an expert on washing machine-ology, so sorry if I sound like a smartass, but a quick google search confirmed my suspicions - lower end washing machines tend to use the same PCBs, a telltale sign being that the controls/displays tend to be in the same place.

To be honest, even if you can't find a PCB replacement, a faulty PCB can be fixed by inspecting the components and/or replacing them. Usually it costs only a couple of dollars and an hour of soldering time, less if you are good at it.

Microcontrollers obviously are not as easy, but as luck would have it, my old (early 2000s) machine doesn't even have one - it is driven by those rotary encoder dial thingies that move in a circle and open/close various traces to begin/end program steps.

> even if you can't find a PCB replacement, a faulty PCB can be fixed by inspecting the components and/or replacing them

Yeah right. Maybe if you're lucky or it's all low power stuff but circuits aren't generally designed to isolate failures. If one thing fails it will often cause other components to fail invisibly.

And yes I have tried it. The main transistor on an amplifier I had blew. Replaced it. Still doesn't work.

> a faulty PCB can be fixed by inspecting the components and/or replacing them. Usually it costs only a couple of dollars and an hour of soldering time, less if you are good at it.

That's a pretty steep DIY requirement. Wonder how robust the market is for these kinds of repair skills. Hard to know when you have a problem like this, who to call about it, and how much it'll cost to fix.

I mean yeah. But hunting down a skilled repairman as you said, or browsing for a new machine that fits in the exact same place as the old one, and then wrestling with that hulking beast is no easy task either.

Yes, I was looking at replacing the bathroom air vents that were likely installed when my house was built 50 years ago, and the manufacturer still makes the replacement motor and fan assembly for the one I got. Replacing these two parts costs about 50% more than buying a brand new one at home depot, but the fact that these lasted 50 years before needing replacement has convinced me to spend the extra money.

Well, repairable is a spectrum and for someone inexperienced it sounds quite daunting to repair their fridge's power supply. However the repairability that e.g. a Framework laptop has (swapping out new parts) is much simpler and requires little expertise.

I feel like the Framework doesn't rate very highly on that spectrum. It seems like it's motherboard is replaceable as a single unit, just like every other laptop.

For example, if you watch Louis Rossmann's videos, you'll see that a typical repair he does is replacing the power driver IC for the display on MacBooks, which would be a motherboard replacement if done by Apple themselves.

On the framework, I don't see why it would be less effort.