[PoachedSausage]

>The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.

If only. In the past it was common to provide schematics of your hardware in order that people could repair it. This was common for consumer products, industrial, instrumentation, test gear, almost everything. For example, the manual for the Amiga 500 had the schematics in it.

[diggan]

Also "hardware companies are still stuck way in the past" is only true for some hardware companies. Recently got into music production and lots of hardware comes with schematics of the inner workings with descriptions on how it all works and is connected, together with implementation guides for MIDI and more. Night and day if you compare to how computer hardware gets sold today.

[zwog]

I don't know if this is only with music hardware or with 'professional' hardware in general, but yeah you get a lot of schematics and such.

While I was at University I made some money by repairing DJ-hardware. Controllers, CD-Players and Turntables. There things are often expensive, but they are quite easy to repair because there are detailed service manuals available. Not on the official sites, though.