"Marc Wielage" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 24 Apr 2004 19:18:39 -0700, William Sommerwerck wrote
(in message ):

If so, this is a break with Sony's policy. I had been told by the head
of
their parts division that they never threw out parts.
--------------------------------snip----------------------------------

Oh, I never said they were going to THROW the parts AWAY. Just that
they're
not going to go out of their way to maintain a large stock of parts
anymore.

The theory is that they're going to start replacing more boards (if not
entire products) rather than do a lot of board-level repair anymore.
Again,
this is all hearsay, and I haven't gotten confirmation about it. But it's
in
keeping with Sony closing more and more of their factory-owned service
centers. For example, there's no more Sony consumer factory service in
LA --
a city of 10 million people. Pretty startling.

--MFW

For many years Sony and most other manufacturers have had independent
authorized service centers for warranty and non-warranty repairs run by
independent electronics service companies. Check your yellow pages for
details.

In the past, these independent survive companies existed in almost every
medium size or larger city, but there is a trend (on the part of consumers)
toward not repairing mid-level consumer equipment because of large scale
integrated assemblies, the high labor cost involved, the rapid rate of
technological obsolescence, and the declining cost of new replacement
products.

I don't think Sony is any worse than other manufacturers, and in most
respects they are better than most.