It's interesting how, when you go just a little bit outside of the mass-market commercial product space and into any kind of niche, the transition from “disposable plastic pre-garbage that is a complete, self-contained product from birth to inevitable death and can never be repaired in between” to “works with other things and may even be repairable” is… abrupt.
I bought a couple of detail brushes for cleaning the inside of my car the other day. They're… just drill bits. You put one in the chuck of any off-the-shelf drill motor and run the motor to spin the brush. I went to Harbor Fright and bought a gooseneck bit to enable reaching some of the less reachable corners of my car's footwell—put the brush bit into one end of the gooseneck, the other end into the chuck, and then hold the motor in one hand and the far end (or at least the middle) of the gooseneck with the other.
I had readily expected there to be a self-contained product that takes a proprietary (or sealed-in) battery and will someday die and get thrown out. But no, this is a niche—and not even a small one! There are plenty of people who clean their own cars!—and so it's just a drill bit.
The other example I have is live sound equipment. So much of it is practically open-source hardware from before that was a term. Mixers, pedals, amps—a lot of times the schematic for the circuit is literally printed on the housing. If it isn't, it's probably in the manual. And the housing is beefy metal, with Philips screws. Need to replace a component? Unscrew it and bust out the soldering iron.
(To be fair, not all live sound equipment is like this—I suspect the dividing line is between the stage and backstage, as it's things like mixing boards that are more sealed, no-user-serviceable-parts products.)
It's possible this is a false correlation, but if it's real, I wonder what to make of it. If nothing else, it's that “all currently-sold products are pre-garbage” is by no means a fait accompli.
