If a manufacturer is confident that their product will last, they can convey this to the buyer by providing a really good warranty.

You can purchase an additional warranty for decent money. Handling repairs is still a huge mess and burden - even if you're not paying for them. I read a couple of "four weeks without refrigerator" horror stories. That they happend on the warranty time did not make them any better.

I don't want a good warranty, I want a well working equipment.

A good warranty from the manufacturer is different, since it incentivizes them to make a product they don't have to repair in the first place. Once you're paying for a warranty, that goes out the window.

Those are pretty much worthless. They usually exclude all the most common reasons the thing would break.

We cleaned up by buying the extended warranty on our dreadful dishwasher. For a modest charge upfront, Sears sent out technicians 5 or 6 times, replaced the electronic control panel, a valve, and the entire washer motor. It took months and months of angry phone calls, but the damned thing works now.

A really long warranty only helps if the company remains solvent.

I would be happier with something the manufacturer was confident was serviceable. Control boards that approach the cost of a high end smartphone are unreasonable, but also common.

I always had this dream of starting a company where my disruption to whatever industry, say home appliances, or cars, isn't that I'm doing something new, per say, its that I'm engineering everything the company would sell with DIY easy access fixes in mind, and actually publish (and ship with the product) the repair manual so people can just order the parts (with some margin, nothing crazy i'd think) and be on their way. Sell it to the self reliant, tinkers, and generally just people who hate to pay the high cost of repairs on things.

I wonder, truly, if this would be successful. I have no way of even wrapping my head around how to get something like that off the ground.

I think if someone designed and shipped a car, for instance, that was completely serviceable by the owner and designed with that in mind first and for most, you could easily disrupt the car market for a very broad amount of people today.

Many cars are largely DIY-friendly already. I do all of the work on our cars except tires, exhaust, bodywork/paint, and manufacturer recalls.

In the last 15 years, I can only recall one time a car went into a shop for a reason other than the above and that was an independent shop where I was too busy to deal with the job. That's across a Mercedes, a Jeep, a Honda CR-V, and Alfa Romeo, and some classic Mustangs.

There are a few marques that are DIY-unfriendly (hello, BMW), but most cars can be effectively DIY maintained. A DIY-friendly car would not be as disruptive as perhaps you think.

True, but even this trend is slowly changing sadly. Remember when fuel filters used to be inline? Sure, it's still DIY, but it's now no longer safe or easy to change them yourself without relatively expensive equipment, and a prayer you don't break a bolt or strap. Ever tried to change a battery on the reintroduced Beetle? As time goes on, drive by wire becomes more prevalent, etc...cars are slowly becoming harder to repair for the shadetree mechanic. Even the things that are still possible have become, in general, more cumbersome.

Perhaps. However I don't think they were built in mind for maximum owner repairability. I suspect they wouldn't be fighting the right to repair so hard otherwise

Most people never open up their cars though.

This is how a lot of Sears products worked. When I was a kid we had a little Craftsman tractor, and the entire repair manual and parts were available online. This was also true of their vacuums, and was how I got a $200 vacuum for $20 in college(a belt was broken). You could even buy parts in Sears.

I don't think you need to make it easy enough for an average person, but easy enough for a repair person to do repairs in about 30 minutes, so the service call is kind of reasonable.

Combine that with trying to keep parts compatible over years and you would develop a following.

I'm willing to bet manufacturers actually went and did market research, and found out the opposite. As if there was a market demand, they would have build and market such products.

Thats always the assumption isn't it? That they already did the research and found no demand for x.

I think if I have learned anything from Silicon Valley though its this: Never assume that these assumptions are categorically true, or that they were undertaken with due diligence.

Perhaps it is true, and there is not enough interest in this to justify it happening. What if, though, they didn't do the market research properly? Or steadfastly, it actually didn't happen at all?

I don't believe this. In Germany, "built-in" home apliances are standard for a modern kitchen. Replacing a built-in refrigerator if it failed would probably cost around 400-600€ (only replacement costs, not talking about the price of the refrigerator).