Especially since Lenovo had full disassembly and replacement instructions for quite a few (all?) ThinkPads for years now. There maybe others but Lenovo is the one I know about.

Just last week I upgraded the memory in mine, no repair kit required, just a simple screwdriver.

I've been fixing ThinkPads since the IBM days (my first laptop was a 770x), and I seem to recall reasonable documentation having been available then, too. Or it's possible that it was just so easy to do the most common things (eg separate labeled RAM covers set into the bigger bottom cover) that I never even bothered looking for repair docs and I'm conflating their availability with their lack of necessity.

There are some Lenovo models with RAM soldered into the logic board. I have one. It's a brick now because the memory started failing.

All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer.

I've used a (presumably leaked) 2008 MacBook Pro 15" service guide to disassemble, mend the bent case (due to a bad fall), change the hard drive with a SSD, and put my machine together.

> All products from HP, IBM/Lenovo, Apple and others have these instructions. The matter is not presence but availability to consumer.

I think this is unfair, because precisely what the OP is saying is that in e.g. Lenovo products these instructions have been readily available for customers, sometimes even in the very product manual itself. I have an HP tablet from around 5 years ago where the disassembly instructions came with the printed manual. Also, it requires about 3 tools only, all of which are so standard that except for a suction cap I think they are almost in every household. Compare to this teardown of a much thicker laptop... even for replacing just the battery, I wouldn't have the tools, much less the balls to do it. It's not a surprise that iFixit still gives them a rather low "5" score.

I don't think I'm being unfair to OP, because I'm not putting a counterargument on the table.

I just say that these guides are always produced, but not generally made available to consumers, and that's bad.

I wish every electronic equipment is shipped with a User's Guide and Service Manual out of the factory.

However, both to protect service businesses and due to more integrated nature of newer devices, self-service is becoming more impractical every day. Hope right to repair changes that for the better.

Also, there was an Ask HN about "Declination of Everything", and people objected vehemently. Why we are having this debate now, if nothing is declining?

I also find it interesting that these gestures start to happen when user hardware upgrades have become all but impossible anyway, and the difference between the 8GiB and 32GiB models can be upwards of $1000.

Do motives matter? I’m hard pressed to think of a company doing the right thing for noble reasons rather than profit motive.

Yeah, let's not lose sight of how the right-to-repair movement made this possible. And we still have long way to go as even iFixit notes:

> There is of course the elephant in the room: parts pairing. As it stands, despite the increasingly repairable designs, the software locks that Apple maintains will result in waste as otherwise-useful components end up in landfills instead of being repurposed. The useful life of our devices will also be limited to Apple’s hardware support—whatever they decide that may be. Once support is dropped for a device, those software locks will remain in place which means even if a third-party manufacturer is willing to step in with replacement parts, those parts may be restricted in functionality.

> It took us 20 years to get these manuals ...

This is being mentioned in the end of the video. They also only get a 5 out of 10 in their repairability score.