Funny. I studied EE in 2012, and by that time, according to professors, there weren't many hardware tinkerers in the group compared to the 1990's. Many more people saw it was a good field that's comparable to CS. At this time, EE was on the way down and CS was on the rise in popularity. The classes were absolutely brutal for most people because they came in with less of an understanding of it.
I think the drop in tinkering is due to the high skill/cost barrier to entry particularly SMT, and lab equipment. If you want to do anything interesting beyond a breadboard and arduino/rpi you are going to need to invest in a custom pcb and lab equipment. With SMT, I got into EE/HW by taking things apart and studying them, back then (late 90's) most consumer stuff still had a good mix of thru-hole and SMT so tinkering was easy. Now almost nothing is thru-hole so if you want to fix or modify anything you are going to need more than a cheap harbor freight soldering iron.
I disagree. It has never been cheaper to get decent equipment.
Custom PCBs have been $5/square inch for a set of 3 from OSHPark for many years.
You can buy a usable hot air station on Amazon for the price of a DoorDash meal.
Do you have a recommended hot air station for tinkerer use? I am trying to move up from breadboarding into something more field-deployable proof of concept.
Look up '959D' as a model. They're serviceable hot air stations made by a bunch of different white label vendors that are usually $40-60 on the likes of Amazon, cheaper elsewhere.
You can work with SMT at home no problem. A decent hot air station like Quick 861dw will cost you just about $300 and you don’t need much more to tinker.
I duuno, a custom pcb costs a dollar and you solder it with a cheap hot plate instead of an iron
repair is definitely not the gateway it used to be, though