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A recent story on the BBC posed a question to its readers. If it ain't broke: You share your oldest working gadgets. Folks wrote in with their favorite, longest-lasting devices.
Besides being curious about the latest tech devices and advancements, I've noticed our community also seems to have a number of thrifty folk who thrive on getting the most out of their gadgets.
I'll count myself among those in that category. I'll start with a Sharp EL-510S solar-powered, scientific calculator from the early 1980s. I also have a JVC stereo receiver from the mid 1980s that is still going strong. The computer I am currently using is a Dell Latitude Core 2 Duo from about 2009.
So how well has your stuff held up? What was been your best acquisition for long-term durability?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hartree on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:37AM (5 children)
There was a lot of real crap put out in those magical nostalgic days. In fact, during the late 60s and 70s there was even more crap as there was a major quality control problem in many US industries.
The thing is: By now, all the crap already broke! It's only the stuff that stood the test of time, so most people are judging from a highly biased sample.
When I was a kid, I liked mechanical toys and at that time the QC on them was quite poor. So, I had these immediately broke toys. Dad said it was fun watching me get working toys by learning how to fix and modify them so they'd work. (Well... to be honest, there were a lot of sad casualties of phonographs, gas powered model airplanes, electrical games and toys that got taken apart and somehow didn't quite make it back together on the way to me learning how to actually put them together right. I salute those items that made the supreme sacrifice at my, as yet unskilled, little hands. :) )
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:55AM (4 children)
You are correct that only the hardy stuff is left now,
but you cannot deny that modern equipment is, on the whole, flimsier. After opening up to China with their unbelievably cheap (at first) but shoddy goods, there was no way for quality goods to survive. They were simply not price competitive. The buying public was trained to think of everything as disposable trash that you'd be lucky to get a couple of years out of. Modern manufacturing with CAD/FEA tools also let you design paper thin plastic parts with a little strategic ribbing for support that is guaranteed to break just outside warranty. Everything is made using the same design and manufacturing as a disposable fork. Compare an old piece of gear to today's of anything when lifting it. The old thing weighs a lot more while the new one has all the strength of a dead horsehoe crab shell. You have to keep making the product crummier in order to keep the company profits going up. And let's not forget anything that relies on complicated software or an external internet service. Those are obsolete within a year, unsupported.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday June 10 2020, @04:15AM (1 child)
"but you cannot deny that modern equipment is, on the whole, flimsier"
In many areas, yes I can. It's not across the board, but few things are. But, when I was a kid in the 60s, it was doing very well to get 100,000 miles out of a new car. On average the amount of miles/lifetime of cars has increased greatly. The ability to withstand accidents and not kill the passengers is utterly amazing compared to those old "heavy Chevies". I know. I had friends die in high school (Names: Brett K., Kenny W., Tom M. for example just off the top of my head) in them from impacts that would be walked away from or minor hospitalization today.
Another area where things are massively more reliable is electronics. Not only did the move away from tubes to transistors greatly increase reliability, but the improvements in the manufacture and processing made transistors themselves have orders of magnitude lower MTBF. It had to be so in order for our modern systems with component counts in the billions to not fail instantly out of the box.
Even rotational systems. The better tolerances in many bearings mean they last longer and run cooler. And though I dislike many of the needless applications brushless DC motors are sometimes put to, I can't deny the greater reliability due to not having carbon brushes, nor the massively improved efficiency of them. Again, that's an area I work on daily.
Yes, there is often less mass in gadgets. At least partly, that is due to consumer demand for thin small electronic devices. The thing you miss is that you couldn't have made the items that small and light without those same CAD systems and not have them fail very quickly from the repeated stresses.
Batteries: Oh, heavens. The improvements in rechargeable batteries is night and day. Bulky memory laden NiCads would have meant your gadgets would have had to have major league more structural strength just to deal with the size and weight of them. And the lifetime of them? Again, night and day.
It's not just reliability, there are many things you just could not have made. Ear buds. Without superstrong magnets, you can't get the small size and efficiency needed for battery powered music usage in ear. Forget flimsiness, you'd have had to make it large and bulky just to accommodate the components.
Is it all good news? No. Of course not. Yes if you have the ability to reduce the cost by reducing the amount of material used until it just barely doesn't fail there are a lot of companies that will push that too far and you'll end up with flimsy crap. But, we had lots of flimsy crap then too. Believe me, I had to work with it and repair it.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 10 2020, @10:14AM
They demand it now, but I think that's mainly because Apple's marketing teams trained them to like it. If they started training people to prefer robustness, ergonomics and a sense of build quality, to see a bit of weight to a device as a positive thing, the demand would change. There are few corporations that would do that now though, because thinner and lighter means fewer materials means higher profit margins.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday June 10 2020, @07:41AM (1 child)
Really?
I'd be hard pushed to name something flimsier now than before. Though my phones have had LCD etc. screens for 20 years, they've taken any number of tumbles and never cracked or broken. I don't have any kind of protection on them except maybe a thin rubber casing on the corners, I hate all those bulky boxes and screen layer junk. Electronics and plastics always used to be incredibly flimsy, now with toy-safety laws and more rugged-use devices, things that are far more vulnerable (e.g. large flat glass sheets) are far more durable.
Furniture. Cars (all expected to hit 100,000 miles or more now). I remember the days of anything plastic just being something like a toy out of a Christmas cracker, everything now appears to be quite substantial. I'm looking at a bunch of PSUs, a room of computers, a bank of office chairs, air con units, etc.
Sure, if you paid through the nose back then and bought something high-quality, of course it was better than the cheap Ikea junk that people buy just to have a bookshelf, but that's not a fair comparison. A dining table is now something you pick up in your lunch hour and pay less than a day's wages for. It can't compare to an oak table that took three months to make and cost a small fortune back in its day, and was so valuable that it was passed down from generation to generation rather than just binned.
And it also matters what you're buying: My ex spent £1000 on designer chairs made of plastic that looked nice but also highly impractical. I spend £50 on a set of cheap wooden chairs and have carried them through four relationships and 20 years.
The things that last, last. Sure there are lots of cheap/shoddy shite out there, but if you're buying for it to last, it will last. I have literally given away every smartphone I've had since about 2005 to someone else (and that's only 3 or 4) because I finished using them, upgraded, and handed off the previous one in perfect working order to someone else for them to use.
My laptop is coming up on a decade old, and I'm replacing it mainly because I want a faster model. I have IBM Thinkpads with floppy drives that are still in perfect working order (and I used them again only a few years ago because if you just need to type up a document and aren't demanding the latest OS, wifi, etc., they work just fine). I've literally never replaced a kitchen appliance (washing machine, tumble dryer, fridge, freezer, etc.). I've moved out, leaving mine behind, and bought new ones for my new place but never actually thrown one away in 20+ years.
The fact is that most people aren't buying for longevity at all. They're buying for cheapness and/or uniqueness. I don't really care if my £20 set of shelves falls apart after a decade. I'll buy another, it's cheap enough to do so every year. When it's more of a hassle, though, I'll pay to get a decent (but not stupendous) one.
If anything, I've been living on my own for the last few years and I've realised that most things are just... there and working. I buy cheap. If it keeps dying on me, I'll buy better, but it's not been worth it for anything I can think of.
It's a conscious choice. And there aren't millions of antique oak tables running around the country, or toolsets from the 20's still in working order. You're just cherry picking the good stuff that was taken care of and happened to survive.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday June 10 2020, @10:28AM
It can't compare, yet somehow most people today seem to prefer the fiberboard junk to the handcrafted oak--even quite a few Soylentils when this came up before.
Yes. I guess that's why they're dumping their grandparents' handcrafted oak table in favor of the fiberboard (and no, it's not even always cheap).
That's just because the sheeple threw them out because they were brainwashed into thinking old is bad, new and shiny good, if you keep the old you're called a hoarder.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?