Broken luxury goods
A hose on Chris Coyier's fridge split recently, so he bought a whole new fridge. Coyier's by all appearances an eminently sensible person, so I don't understand how he's come to such a neglect of waste and money.
And it's not just fridges: why is it that the most expensive, high-end, feature-rich products are prone to catastrophic failure when a single component goes out of spec? Why was Coyier's fridge bolted into place? Why did it require specialist knowledge and equipment to move? It's a big box with a heat exchanger on the back.
Similarly: why can't you operate the doors on your Tesla if the battery is dead? Why does the failure of a single MacBook Pro flex cable necessitate the replacement of the entire screen assembly? Is it because people who buy expensive things are more than happy to replace at the first inconvenience, rather than repair what they've got?
How is a brand new, wifi-enabled, 400-pound, $4,800 fridge the solution to a single split hose?