I was renting a place that had a washer and dryer set from the early 60s. It worked wonderfully, until one day the washer wouldn't cycle properly. I tore it apart and there was a stack of plastic gears that ran the state machine for the various cycles, one them was worn.
I didn't have the means in 2000 to disassemble the gear pack and a replacement couldn't be found and god I tried. The land lords endedup scrapping both machines and replacing it with shoddy new stuff that didn't work as well. A total shame.
Or having Google Tango or a sufficiently smart computational camera that can take a picture of the defective part have it repaired by some mechanism either automatic or the fiver of mechanical fixups, have it printed and shipped (drone, carrier pigeon, USPS, etc).
One of my hopes is that public good corp will rise of the consumerist ashes and start to produce items that can not only be repaired but that can be collectively refined just like a codebase. Imagine if there was an open source, end user repairable washing machine, that when a flaw is discovered it is fixed and tracked in a public ledger?
I didn't have the means in 2000 to disassemble the gear pack and a replacement couldn't be found and god I tried. The land lords endedup scrapping both machines and replacing it with shoddy new stuff that didn't work as well. A total shame.