Repairability doesn’t make products fragile or unreliable, poor design and quality control does. Source: spent the last 18 months building a highly repairable product and putting it through the same reliability tests less repairable products go through.
A lot of repairability just comes down to making replacement parts readily available too, which is orthogonal to the design.
I respectfully disagree. I’ve worked on products where field serviceability is a design goal. It absolutely can add complexity and cost - after all, it’s another design constraint. Rivets and glue are faster, cheaper, smaller, and often more reliable than screws. Soldered-on connectors are more vibration resistant and smaller than pluggable ones. Access panels can introduce structural weakness. Gluing or welding cases shut provides environmental protection that’s difficult to achieve with screws.
Even making parts available can be a pain. I might want to spin a new rev on a product where the old parts aren’t compatible with the new - but now I have to warehouse the old in case anybody wants them. I might not actually warehouse anything myself (contract manufacturer ships directly to retailers), but now I have to find a way of warehousing spares of everything. I might not have any good way of packing/shipping some of these loose parts.
That’s not to say R2R is a bad idea or anything (rather, I think it’s generally a good idea) - but it is not free, and we should be realistic about that.
You don't have to warehouse the old parts if you don't want to. When you deprecate them, you can simply license someone else to do so. They'd jump at the chance; parts are a profitable business.
Automakers have been warehousing parts for decades. Here's Toyota's catalog entry for a starter motor that fits a 1974 Corolla Coupe 1.6L A/T, which is available for under $200 via my local dealership: https://parts.toyota.com/p/Toyota_1974_Corolla-Coupe-16L-AT/...
The only reason to be anti-repair is if you want old devices to become useless so that more new devices get sold at retail. Automakers can't do this because if Toyota screws me on parts, I can buy a Honda next time. Apple is relatively peerless in many ways, and they also do their best to keep people locked in to the MacOS/iOS ecosystem.
Your point about packing and shipping is ludicrous, considering that all of the component manufacturers do that for all of their products. How do you think a device gets built? How does it get repaired under warranty? You just put the component in a bag, put the bag in a box with some foam, and voila. Electronic parts are fairly robust and there's a huge market for them (Newegg, Mouser, Digikey, etc).
When you say R2R "is not free," what you really mean is that repair is more economical for the user. The manufacturer isn't entitled to recurring revenue from replacement of potentially reparable devices, and shouldn't bake that revenue into their business model. That is an entirely anti-consumer practice whose existence is a very valid justification for regulators to open up a can of whoop-ass on device manufacturers.
A lot of repairability just comes down to making replacement parts readily available too, which is orthogonal to the design.