Their website is gone and has been gone for days. Emails are unanswered.
www.nteinc.com
www.ntepartsdirect.com
The end of an era.
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Arrow’s page is gone too… But Google still returns it.
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Mommy, make it stop…
Hard to keep “right to repair” when parts are very difficult to come by. 
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The modern era of right to repair is mostly replacing modules rather than individual components. For example people replacing an alternator instead of brushes, diodes, bearings, etc. Or replacing a power supply instead of replacing capacitors, fans, etc. Right to repair is still important to me but what it is changes constantly if left up to the manufacturer and the market.
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Part of that is the lack of clear standards in marking SMT components. There’s some… but not much in that. Is it a Schottky rectifier diode? TVS diode? Bidirectional TVS diode? I’ve found all three with the same markings and in the same packaging.
Makes it a bitch when you can’t get schematics and a D# marking on the PCB doesn’t help clarify it either.
The market was already challenged to repair big thru-hole components at ≥0.10" pin spacing.
The falloff with SMT pushes things into the professional realm. Yes, not impossible or even unreasonably inaccessible, but the willingness has long been exceptionally low.
For sure manufacturers making schematics available would go a long way.
I’ve been working on the manufacturer side of the business throughout the transition. It almost universally had very little to do with the underlying package technology. The driving forces were generally:
- perceived intellectual property exposure
- lack of effective customer demand for service data - many demanded, but few were big enough to matter.
- The cost of developing and maintaining service data and tools for use outside the company.
Consumer electronics manufacturers rarely supplied this data. The dominant supplier of TV and stereo documentation was Howard Sams who reverse engineered everything they supplied, even in the rare cases where the manufacturer offered it. They were good enough that the manufacturer often relied on Sams manuals internally.
The US Government used to have strict requirements for service data. The transition to so-called “Commercial off the shelf” products (generally anything but that) and contractor maintenance has effectively eliminated this. This is why you can no longer get any useful service data on high-dollar test equipment.
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I’m speaking more to the consumer/hobbyist attempting to repair their Radiation Master 5000 tube TV at the component level. Discrete resistors/caps/coils/transistors with big distinct packages you could remove and replace almost with a plumber’s soldering iron are a far simpler affair than even SOT for the hobbyist. There’s little that a board repair shop does that a dedicated hobbyist can’t do, but that dedication requires more than just additional elbow grease and a steadier hand.
To the extent it happens nowadays for hobbyists, it seems to be replacements: board swaps, lingering thru-hole components, rarely the largest of SMDs.
I can see that - the lawyers see nothing but liability for putting that info out there.
I also gather there’s a strong desire not to be comparing schematics between big name OEMs with competing patents / IP, as the contract design firms are allegedly copypasta’ing chunks of protected designs between OEMs. Refusing to publish schematics sweeps that potential avalanche of litigation under the rug.
Suspect there’s the perception that the revenue from repair servicers - generally small independent outfits - just isn’t worth it. As they need to buy components (generally from 3rd-party suppliers) and perform labor for considerably less than the price of new, it’s a hard dollar.
Spite pricing and punitive agreements with suppliers forbidding sales to 3rd parties and DRM’ing/“pairing” higher-value components for repairs the OEM refuses to do does distort the market so it’s hard to say if electronics OEMs are thwarting a more vibrant repair shop market than the present cell phone repair shop genre that seems to be a touch threadbare.
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Modern electronics are designed for a robot to assemble them like a pick and place. Human readability isn’t a factor in that scenario. I get what you’re saying and it makes sense. 