Someone arguing in favor of allowing market forces to solve the problem truly do think it's fine for Apple and John Deere to do those things. The solution for lack of repairability isn't to enact legislation to force them to make their products more repairable, it's to stop buying Apple and John Deere.

To a point, they're right, but relying on market solutions assumes rational consumers, which we have anything but. I think back about 7 years when I bought a Motorola Droid Turbo. Back then, consumers were asking for phones with longer-lasting batteries and screens that wouldn't shatter because you sneezed. This phone was exactly what consumers were asking for, with it's monstrous 3950 mAh battery, and a screen that could survive a 100-foot drop onto pavement (Saw a video of it!), but most people had never even heard of it, and still bought their iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones which couldn't even survive a waist-high drop onto the sidewalk without cracking the screen.

Consumers are not rational, and so the market will never be rational, and relying on market solutions does not always work.

Yes, we on HN are far more likely to demand repairabiliy, but most consumers don't care about the ability to repair their devices. Or at the very least, don't care so much that they'll choose not to buy the latest phone because the battery is not easily replaced.

And it boils down to what are consumers actually buying? If consumers are demanding something and the corporations are not providing it, but they buy the products anyways, the corporation has no incentive to provide it.

There was a lot of uproar when Apple removed the headphone jack when they made the iPhone 7, but that didn't stop consumers from making it the best selling smartphone in the world at the time, with ~40 million units sold. And now guess what? Other phone manufacturers followed suit. I guess headphone jacks aren't that important after all.

The market can demand whatever the hell it wants, but rarely follows through.