@novenary @wolf480pl @mikoto > after all artificial market segmentation for electronics is a scam to charge you more for hardware that barely costs more to produce, there is no reason to sell crippled CPUs and machines with less than the maximum supported amount of memory

Agreed.

> for repair, I don't really see anything wrong with leaving that up to specialists

Those specialists cost a fortune (often enough to make buying a new machine more palatable) when they're available at all (which they aren't here, I'd need to commute for a long time or ship the machine at considerable expense). It is also concerning that so much stateful hardware (but hard to reflash by users) remains on a machine, such that if the repair specialist is malicious, they can get up to shenanigans nearly undetectably.

> the sad reality is that capitalism will not do the right thing here anyway, and in most cases perfectly repairable machines end up in the landfill/junkyard regardless of user serviceability for a whole host of reasons, including user miseducation and obsolescence, or insurance writing off vehicles way too liberally

That is unfortunately true.