Comment by TeMPOraL

> Could it be because it's not financially feasible? If you present the idea of a repairable alternative to an iPad, are any investors going to take you up on it? (...) it's simply not economically worth it to sacrifice the resiliency and cost effectiveness of making it completely integrated (...) The cost to launch a new product and manufacturing line is also very high (...)

I believe all of that is true.

Which is why this needs to be corrected by regulation. If making a more user-respecting and environmentally-friendly products isn't economical enough for the market to do it on its own, the economical landscape needs to be altered so that it is.

> as a seller, you get to keep costs low when you have to spend less on dealing with people tinkering with it and then sending it in for warranty

This must be solvable, because somehow it isn't a problem on the PC market, or on the car market.

> Efficiency is frequently a trade off for a word that I can't think of, but maybe can be described as "security" or "local security".

"Distribution" and "decentralization" are the words you're thinking of. Despite the common propaganda to the contrary, centralization is usually increasing efficiency. That's why the market loves it so much (and why every country ends up with laws to limit it). The cost to that efficiency is usually resilience (failure of any single actor becomes a large-scale issue) and slower innovation (bigger actors take less risks, smaller actors tend to cover more of the possibility space, by virtue of numbers).

> It's similar to not needing a butcher, produce market, shoe store once a Walmart Supercenter rolls into town.

And it is a contentious issue. On the one hand, the food gets cheaper. On the other, the jobs get worse, the local community suffers, and money gets siphoned off the local economy. On an international scale, the same thing is called "globalization", which is both widely praised and criticized. In particular, the current pandemic has revealed the resilience problem of our globalized economy, which is why so many countries are now making moves towards reversing it a bit.