CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:15 am Post subject:

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

Sure, Analog - but my guess is that you'd never in a million years have bought that '87 car new if it had been priced so the average model would last 25 years. Do you think it would be great if we all had cell phones that had 35 minutes of talk time, weighed two pounds, and cost three bucks a minute to use? Would the world be a better place if my wife couldn't call me from the side of the road if she ran out of gas bringing our son to the doctor? Hell, if you wanted to access this forum with 25-year-old Internet pricing, you'd need to be a wealthy, wealthy man to get your post count.

It's pretty hypocritical to bemoan rapid turnover in consumer devices while you enjoy the results of it every minute of every day. Hell, the fact that the keyboard you're typing on didn't set you back $300 is a direct result of that rapid turnover.

Why use a busted-ass, ancient laptop with a dim, horrible LCD screen (I'd have thought if you were going to go vintage you'd at least get a GRID with a gas-plasma... Smile

) when you can get something far more usable for basically nothing? Hell, I'm using a 15" IBM P3/1000 laptop with a 1600x1200 display as a music player in my living room! You're kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Utilizing older tech when it makes sense is all well and good, but clinging to a 486 laptop is bordering on obsession. It's not even like they "built 'em better" in 1997. God knows they didn't build CARS better in 19*8*7.

Using old stuff just because it's old - particularly when newer stuff is demonstrably better in EVERY way - makes no sense at all.

If every manufacturer actually hewed to your cries, we'd still have computers with tubes (well - scratch that - we wouldn't have computers at all, because we'd be twenty generations of hardware behind). We wouldn't have CRT projectors, we wouldn't have DVDs, and god knows we wouldn't have HD. It's easy to wax nostalgic about the 'good old days' when you don't have to live in the world your own ideas would have created.

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:54 am Post subject:

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

Oh, come on... don't tell me they weren't doing the same thing in 1985. And like I said - CARS? Jeez, cars were absolutely horrible - particularly american cars - before the early '90s. Totally godawful!

Anyway, yeah, I have a lot of used stuff, too. My RPTV was resurrected, and I got it because they did a crappy job on the engineering and I got to fix it. But I'm certainly not going to advocate that they do anything differently - if they had, I wouldn't have my CRT PJ (if new digitals were built to last, they wouldn't be as cheap, and they wouldn't be adopted, and the people would still HAVE my barco instead of me getting it for next to nothing), I wouldn't have that laptop as my media player, and I wouldn't have an HDTV.

What I would have, if everyone built stuff to last, is a 27" TV, a couple of speakers with the surrounds taped so they didn't fall apart, and that's about it.

Building stuff to last? Great, if you have money. But if it was actually a policy, the irony is that guys like you and me would be stuck with next to nothing, because wealthy people could buy stuff once and be done with it, and there wouldn't BE one-generation-old-but-almost-as-good stuff for nearly free.

As it is, I get my CRT PJ in my HT, and my next-to-free cell phone and computer equipment too. I'm not complaining.

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:15 am Post subject:

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:23 am Post subject:

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2008 4:33 am Post subject:

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10273

Peri, you need to acknowledge what exactly is considered a non-durable good. Imagine every single tangible article out there. Remove the house you are in. Everything else is deemed not worth manufacturing to last more than 90-days. And a handful not more than 2.5 years.

And there are a lot of articles out there should last a lot longer, but 'business' is based on early failure and not because they couldn't make it durable. Electronics are not the only tangible articles out there.

The comment about all of us using CRT projectors that have lasted 10-20 years is not an acceptable example. These CRT projectors are NOT consumer products, but commercial/industrial products.

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

WanMan, let me put it this way: I almost never run into a situation where I'm out of luck because something I want to use, or bought new, fails early. The only ready example I can think of is hard drives - price pressure has indeed driven them to lower MTBFs, and I've had a few drives fail. But... that's a few drives out of dozens; maybe 3 dead drives in 50 over the last 7 years. My laptop is getting kind of iffy, but it's from 2005, has been through an absolutely horrible pounding, and is nearly obsolete anyway.

Two DV cams I got have croaked, but that's not because they were designed with obsolescence; it's because they were pieces of sh*t. Smile

I can't think of many times when I've been truly inconvenienced by a 'durable good' failing prematurely. Maybe I'm just lucky.

And this isn't because I replace stuff all the time. I'm not a rich person, and I don't buy a lot of new stuff.

And on the other side of the coin, there are a LOT of things around that have lasted well - a digital camera from 2001 is still going strong (though, again, it's nearly useless now and equivalents are almost free), I've got computers around from 1998 that I still use for various things, and quite a few more bits of odd electronics that are still totally fine, but are so obsolete they're useless - a P120 laptop, a bunch of Pentium-class computers, nearly a dozen CRT monitors, and even LCD screens which are obsolete now, and four or five years old but working fine. I've got consumer FFB steering wheels that we pounded the hell out of on motion platforms for a year, and they're fine.

I just don't see this "built like crap" phenomenon. Newer stuff (those consumer FFB steering wheels, for instance) is built incredibly well - the engineering and use of plastic is just wonderful. The new audio systems from Logitech are absolutely marvelous for the price.

Early failure? Not sure where it is; for me, stuff is lasting, on average, far past the time I'll have switched to something new, and I'm hardly an early adopter.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10273

I see it all the time. Stuff that shouldn't fail simply does. At ~31-month/38K miles the steering rack on my truck failed. Naturally, it was out of warranty. And I'm not driving on pot-holed roads. Then the O2 sensors failed at 14 and 22 months of ownership. I'm not even driving a so-called American truck. Before that non-American truck, I had a non-American car which I had to bring into the dealership twice for recall conditions ahead of the actual recall (congealing insulation that was running down the body/chassis in liquid black form. Both times well within the warranty period, but both times I had to find alternate transportation. Just simple examples of non-durable goods accurately classified as such.