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@idiot @Zergling_man @lanodan @mangeurdenuage @sun Cross our fingers on the FTC non to non-competes, but its prospects aren't generically good since its head is an activist who doesn't care if what she orders is legal, and is being regularly slapped down by the courts.

Would also severely screw over California for what that's worth....

Speaking as someone who's worked for a few hardware companies back in the days, and did some fiddling around with electronics before college (OK, got some mad soldering skills out of that) and my family was also in the business, I think much of the rest of what you say is wrong including on salaries, but I don't have real knowledge of the latter today.

So I see "sharing schematics, drawings, and BOMs, and assembling the computer/printer/whatever together your own bad self...."

And I also see "and then a miracle occurs" where a bunch of surface mount parts get placed on a (multilayer??!?!!!???) PCB and soldered into place.

See also connectors, cables, and all the fun that comes with them and how they too can fail. I see people tearing their hair out trying to debug all the things which can go wrong.

You're also going to either go crazy trying to buy the parts in tiny or normal quantities which will be insanely expensive, or now you're back to a company buying them in normalish quantities and parceling them out into kits, along with PCBs that I hope they test.

And not entirely cheaply because they'll have to do something about customer support for those debugging issues, which can also include replacing damaged stuff.

Software is massively more tractable.