Are we talking phones or laptops?
It’s not hard to get into a macbook…
Comparing miniaturized electronics to IKEA furniture…come on.
Yes I would love to live in a world where everyone was empowered to work on their own stuff, be it electronics or anything else. But being someone who people constantly turn to in order to do the repair on their behalf…people are scared of what they don’t know. That’s why repairing things is a learned skill. I absolutely believe almost everyone (barring physical reasons) is capable, but the vast majority of people seem to have no interest or courage to DIY especially when it comes to tech.
My learned skills mostly happened in junior high school woodshop class, high school photography classes, and learning the printing trade during my college years. My dad showed me how to change the oil, rotate my tires, and change my transmission fluid and filter. Back then, we also had to grease our steering linkage fittings. I learned how to change front disc brakes as well as rear drum (and later disc) brakes.
Those things didn’t make me capable of doing just anything, no. But they did teach me how to apply myself and got me in the practice of always learning new skills, no matter what they might be. So when I learned how to write code in college, that was more “learned skills”.
Today, I never change my oil or do my won brake jobs. It’s not because I don’t know how, it’s because the body doesn’t like laying supine under a rusty, drippy engine block. But I know what’s needed for that type of work, because I learned it so long ago.
My entire point is that we should be making it easier to learn that skill. And while not everyone has a laptop, virtually everyone has a phone. Why not make that a great place to start?
Yes we should. If I had a kid today, I would teach him or her how to swap out an SSD or motherboard. I probably wouldn’t bother teaching him how to do oil or transmission service on his car. But I WOULD make sure he could always change a tire and put a spare on his car during rush hour on I-75. Or jumpstart his own car with the jumper cables he would naturally be carrying all the time in his trunk.
And he would understand just how confiscatory the US tax code is.
It’s a different world than the one my dad grew up in. But learning is forever, and I would still honor his memory by teaching TODAY’s skills to my kid.
www.ifixit.com
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