I think if you are in china you probably can buy all the parts you want for cheap. It is just that these parts aren't in Europe/US. But I think the main point isn't manufacturers making repairing expensive, it is them making buying new stuff so cheap. It's just not worth the time and hassle to repair most devices. Buy the cheapest device you can find, if it breaks, replace it. Still cheaper than buying the high end, expensive one.
Not convinced. The components simply aren't designed for replacement in most cases any more even in China when you have the necessary part. Though sure there's a lot of creative repairs and spares in Shenzen, especially for phones. That's repairs despite the best efforts of manufacturers. :)
Even the cheapest tat domestic appliance brands used to let you replace an element etc for a fraction the cost of new. When it was designed in and a screwdriver-free sub 3 minute job I'm not sure time or hassle really entered into it. A new model often used the same filters or elements. Now the time and hassle is designed in as almost nothing is intended to be replaced, opened or disassembled so it becomes an afternoon's work (eg phone battery replacement).
One example of many. Frost free fridge freezers need a small heating element to defrost the coils. That was a simple plug in component for a few pounds, and lowest callout fee from your local repairer. Now they're mostly being combined indivisibly with the coil and that becomes a replacement of a major, mostly working, module and a re-gas that costs half the cost of the damn fridge. Even on the fancy £1k Samsung fridge freezers. Actually I think Samsung were one of the first to do this. Heating elements, of course, still fail with roughly the same regularity. That's an awful lot of metal, plastic, refrigerant and climate CO2 deliberately turned into a disposable.
If we can't go back to the old view, at least partially, resolving climate change is going to remain challenging.
