DeWalt Lied 

It's a trade-off. Their unification of parts leads to higher reliability lower cost of the overall unit (fewer connectors reduces cost and reliability, etc).This lowers their cost of manufacture and assembly because they avoid further connectors and mechanical interaction, etc. The trade-off is that it isn't as serviceable - but we're talking about consumer/prosumer goods, not fleet tools like Hilti. Their goal is to get the edge on price and reliability for low-to-moderate duty cycle use. While the last thing I want to be called is an apologist for these huge companies, I do think Hanlon's razor or similar applies -- there are alternate explanations here about their bottom line, before you get to malice ("engineered to fail") as the default conclusion. Spare parts are such a tiny component of Dewalt et al's cashflow that I have a hard time believing that "making more money on spare parts" is the motivator, compared to the rest of the cost of assembly and the fact that they compete on the retail shelves with other brands. Corollary to Hanlon's razor as well, the epoxy potting isn't "to keep people out" but to keep dust/grime/water/conductive dust out. I'd rather have the epoxy potting and 10x the reliability than the ability to replace exploded components in the controls (and that is something I do like to do when it makes sense) To look at an alternative situation, look at Hilti or Caterpillar or other non-consumer durable goods. For those you tend to get commercial service contracts -- at that point *yes* there is a component about making money on service instead of just sales. For that matter it's the same in the IT industry when you look at professionally-maintained fleets of computers by Dell, HP, etc; or Cisco/Juniper/Dell/HP networking. In all these cases, you're buying the device *and* you are going to pay for the service contract or parts on it, and that is a non-trivial component of the cashflow for these vendors.