Modern cars very reliable and, yes more economical - but the engineering and "serviceability" is badly designed. There is nothing that says that if you can make it economical - or more efficient - you can't make it simple to fix. Today you are at the mercy of a guy in a white coat that explains that the light bulb illuminating the speedometer to some other instrument is $0.70 - but the "module" that controls it is a mere $400 + labor to replace! Bad design - particularly as said module is a $20 item.
Digital cameras are profitable simply because they are not worth fixing. Something goes wrong - throw it away and buy another one - and yet another piece of junk in a landfill - together with the millions of cell phones that are chucked out. Yes, recycling is good - but I would like to see the statistics of how many of these items are actually recycled and how many gets thrown in the garbage .
I am not advocating going back to Model T's (though that would be more interesting) or Speed Graphic's - but it the manufacturers can spend the money on designing all the bells and whistles into the latest gizmo - they can also design the same object to be serviceable by someone reasonably handy with tools!
I got a computer set up 7 years ago - using it for scanning, Flickr, RFf - it works fine and I fervently resists any so called "improvements" that are offered. I have it set up to do what I want it to do - and most of the improvements are at best incremental - and forces me to change how I do things. I am not particularly interested in how it works - just that it does work and continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
