True, in my perfect world I would settle for a trade in program, you would get some value for the failed unit so that you can upgrade and the OEM could recycle the raw materials. If we will ever live in a sustainable society we are going to need repairability and recycling programs for all consumer products.
using up the flash doesn't hurt the controller, though. the controller still knows how much writing it's done even if the flash itself is toast, it's a totally different part of the drive.
And even still, you could construct the controller so that it was burning e-fuses to indicate lifespan and the fuses could be readable through JTAG, short of complete controller death or lightning-strike level surges (which you can legitimately argue as being abuse and not warrantyable) you could make it offline-readable from an external device.
The problems here are primarily economic/social, not technical. Companies don't want to hold warranty liability on their books for 10+ years, but they also don't really want to accept returns for defective products or other things either, and we make them do it anyway.
The EU is already pushing warranties to a minimum of two years for exactly this reason. Could it be 5 years, or 10 years? Sure, why not.
Companies will scream in the short term, of course. It's cheaper for them to push out crap that'll die and be in the trash in 3 years. Engineering products for longer lifespans would be a shift in engineering/design mindset. It probably would also push minimum device costs upwards at least a little bit, but, that's not a bad thing either - the slogan is "reduce, reuse, recycle", in that order, and "reduce" there means simply buy less or buy things that last longer. A shift away from planned obsolescence isn't the worst thing culturally, we don't want to encourage design-for-disposability.
Especially as Moore's Law slows, hardware is relevant for longer and longer periods of time. For example, a lot of people are finding that their GPUs are dying before they're actually irrelevant as hardware. It's not just NVIDIA who had bumpgate, a ton of hardware from that era failed over time due to faulty solder and probably could have been fixed with an hour of a tech's work.
Even worse, they're often dropped from support. There's really nothing wrong with a R9 290X as a GPU, but AMD won't support it with software anymore, despite the fact that it basically works anyway and it's pretty much purely a software lockout (which third parties have hacked and bypassed), because they want you to buy the new one. Wouldn't it be nice if GPUs were just expected to work for 10 years from purchase and that was covered by warranty and software support?
There are an increasing number of people who do hang onto hardware for 5-10 years because the relevant lifespan is getting longer and longer, and we should encourage that and require companies to support those consumption patterns. Just like not gluing together phones to make the battery irreplaceable, we really should be making sure electronics bumpouts don't fail in 3-5 years and that companies don't dump-and-run on the software.
Routers are another one where the software support is just egregious, too. How many rando Linksys or TP-Link or whatever actually get an update when a bunch of new vulnerabilities in WPA or whatever are discovered? Not that many, and "just install OpenWRT" is not a society-level answer especially when companies are locking down hardware.
Growing up poor, I was always a few generations behind, rocking a 486 DX2 when the PII & PIII where the latest and greatest. 33kbps modem when others had 56k. When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
> When I was 10ish Me and my older brother would go to the thrift store and dig through the computer parts, it was an adventure.
I miss that too. Thrift stores suck now, they're pulling all the good clothes out and selling them to upcyclers and pulling all the cool electronics and cameras and other stuff and selling them on ShopGoodwill and ebay.
And ShopGoodwill is pretty absurd, almost everything is sold as-is and uninspected, and prices are just as high as ebay if not sometimes higher.
The days of wandering through a goodwill and finding some neat stuff at a bargain price are gone now, unfortunately.
