21st Century Consumer Electronics Are Rubbish

Post Reply New Topic

Thd book See No Evil is a stellar read if you track it down DeepHour.

Someone resents the criticism of unrestrained capitalism!

I'm trying to remember how I was introduced to the concept and can't remember. Possibly college? It's something that I learned about years ago, anyway. I just noticed growing up that the sort of appliances designed in my parents time were made better (usually with metal instead of mostly cheap plastics that wear and stress and break more easily) and lasted much longer. My mother's old vacuum is one example. It was heavy but it worked well for a couple decades. I still have the old Brentwood toaster my parents bought for our household when I was a child. It still works and is sitting on my kitchen counter-top as we speak. Try to imagine a cheap modern mostly plastic toaster lasting for going on 4 decades!

It's not criticism, it's vitriolic attack. Psychs bore me.

Planned obsolesence really doesn't go on. I can have a computer go ten years easy. A tablet five years (less than 10 cents a day). As for VHS - the last country to have a VHS scene stopped releasing videos ten years ago.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamsarhan ... f295e53cf2

https://www.popularmechanics.com/techno ... ce-460210/

https://www.economist.com/news/2009/03/ ... solescence

Yup, it's all arrant nonsense.

And what am I vitriolically attacking? And what is a "Psych"?

It's the writing style.

As a vintage computers collector, I have loads of CRT monitors and TV sets. They are already showing their ages, but compared to my flat screen, they can be perceived as much more robust. Hands down.

Now, consumer products from the 1980s may also be rubbish compared to the 1970s. I have taken apart tape decks, receivers, amplifiers from the 1980s that needed important components to be replaced while the 1970s counterparts needed a bit of TLC and nothing else.

Plus, I have this 1973 Phillips mono radio recorder that sounds warm, lovely, beautiful. I decided to leave its innards untouched as they are, because I could even spoil its magic. Its mechanical parts need all sort of fixes but it still works. Meanwhile, I have two high-end Technics decks from 1986 that don't even work anymore.

Your mileage may vary, it all depends on the devices in question, models and manufacturers, but from where I stand even cookers and fridges these days are rubbish compared to what we had way back when. My own cooker weighs as much as the cardboard in which it was shipped!

My writing style makes me a "Psych"? What are you trying to say?

You sound like you might be mad because you don't have much of an argument against the existence of planned obsolescence other than "that doesn't happen", which is a pretty weak argument. Are you making fun of me because your argument is weak?

Even though I wear my foil hat when I say this I am of the the same opinion of KTAHSP

I have a 1998 puter whose last OS was w98SE, the hard drives in there still work. but on my most recent laptop I went through 3 hard drives about a month apart, each failed, before I said to hell with it and replaced with something with no moving parts to fail, an SSD. lord knows if the electrons and silicon themselves will fail.

^ I've seen quite a few reports of increasing rates of hard drive failure recently. Those with very high capacity (eg 3 or 4 TB) seem to be more at risk.

Seagate HDDs appear to have acquired a particularly poor reputation over the last few years. That said, I've got a lot of drives by other manufacturers up to 15 years old, which still perform fine. Western Digital seems to be a particularly reliable brand.

Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that solid state drives might have similar failure rates to their mechanical equivalents. After all, the flash memory technology used in usb thumb drives hardly has a spotless reliability record.

my SSD is 6 years old so far. crossed fingers.

Why are you using such outdated technology? Of course it's unreliable, there's little incentive for manufacturers to make decent quality hardware for such an uncompetitive, niche market.

^ You might be missing the point here.

Recordable dvd technology was the 'state of the art' in the early 21st century, yet it was unreliable and shoddily executed from the start, and never really improved.

It was a pretty bad sign that there were at least five different disc formats, with huge degrees of incompatibility. You couldn't use a +R disc in a recorder designed for -R, but also a -R recorder might work with -R discs made by Verbatim, but not by Maxell or TDK.

+RW discs could be erased and reused and were supposedly good for 1000 recordings, but in practice you'd be lucky to get more than 10 uses out of them before they failed. I lost quite a few valuable recordings which I entrusted to this half-baked, half-digested technology.

As for -RW, they used a system so complicated that I haven't yet worked it out, 12 years after first encountering them.

I liked DVD-RAM while it lasted.

RIP Intel Wireless Display