I think there's some truth to this. It's not just miniaturization, but sometimes components are now so tightly integrated and specialized that failure of one part causes a lot of collateral damage.
At least for "major" appliances, I tend to choose based on my best guess of serviceability. I avoid models that have too much electronics, not because I expect those parts to break, but because the complexity might frustrate diagnosis in the future.
There's a lot of repair information online. People enjoy blogging about their successful repairs. But judging from comments on web forums, I'm guessing that a lot of people doing these repairs are landlords. If you buy 15 dryers, and they all break on the same day for the same reason, you'll have a pretty strong incentive to figure out how to fix them.
There's some debate of this exact issue among musicians who play amplified instruments, as I do. There are now tiny little amplifiers, but if you open them up, it's apparent that diagnosis of the circuits (switch mode power supplies and amplifiers) would be daunting, even for a pretty serious electronics enthusiast. There are players who will avoid these products for this reason. I've decided in that case that I will take the risk of having to replace a module or an entire unit in the future, because the portability is actually a benefit.
Indeed there is, and one of the sad things is that this proliferation of easy access to information has seemingly not had much effect on the throwaway consumerism of today's culture, nor in getting people to understand more about the machines they use. A service manual is often literally a Google away (even for older models, there are a lot of neighbourly people who digitise them), and although I've not needed to do any major repairs on my white goods, I've collected from the Internet all the information I need to for most if not all of them.
At least for "major" appliances, I tend to choose based on my best guess of serviceability. I avoid models that have too much electronics, not because I expect those parts to break, but because the complexity might frustrate diagnosis in the future.
There's a lot of repair information online. People enjoy blogging about their successful repairs. But judging from comments on web forums, I'm guessing that a lot of people doing these repairs are landlords. If you buy 15 dryers, and they all break on the same day for the same reason, you'll have a pretty strong incentive to figure out how to fix them.
There's some debate of this exact issue among musicians who play amplified instruments, as I do. There are now tiny little amplifiers, but if you open them up, it's apparent that diagnosis of the circuits (switch mode power supplies and amplifiers) would be daunting, even for a pretty serious electronics enthusiast. There are players who will avoid these products for this reason. I've decided in that case that I will take the risk of having to replace a module or an entire unit in the future, because the portability is actually a benefit.