Are electronics more durable than they were 10 years ago?

[yoda313]

So with all the new generation of electronics are they more reliable than their counterparts from a decade ago? Or are they so cheap and flimsy that you end up upgrading due to product failure than feature requirements?

I'd say its on par with recent technology. I mean sure you get the occasional dud that you kick yourself for buying and end up having to replace right away. But overall my electronics are holding up nicely. How about you?

[TBoneit]

The answer is yes and no to me....

A $1000 electronics from the past vs the same function in a $1000 unit now....

I could still use my 10 or 20 year old electronics but the feature set is lacking....

My first VCR was very expensive and had a 1 event 1 day timer and 2 speeds for recording.

The electronics never died.. The moving parts did. I wore out the video heads. I could still use it now as a analog tuner, well until it all goes digital of course. I still have my original computer upgraded to 64K memory from 16K, Lowercase kit, alternative floppy controller with support for single or double sided drives.

IOWs I've found over the years that it is the moving parts that go bad. Remotes with bad switches etc.

The older stuff is easier to fix, no surface mount components.

[ZAPPER]

On the bubble, but leaning towards crap.


Been through a couple of cheap ($100 and less DVD players and VCRs) that were bought as disposable for the kids.

Got two TV/VCR combos with the VCRs crapped out (Kid damage, mechanical parts) I would like to get them fixed just for the sake of having them work, but I would have to put a real low repair budget on them, maybe $50 each max and I am only talking $100 to $200 units to start with.

I havent bought any what you would call "High end" stuff in a long time for a couple of reasons. First, the old high end stuff is still going strong, second, who can afford anything new? The console TVs are still working, the Stereos are still working and the PC is still working (Way out dated and under powered, but working)

Now when it comes to cell phones it is kind of split agan. I think that they are slightly tougher when it comes to surviving the ocassional fumble and drop (I think that the lighter, less mass qualities has something to do with that) But I have been having troubles with the buttons crapping out. It seems that the little tits on the back of the key pad wear out pretty quick and dont reach the little touch pads anymore.

[FulciLives]

It seems that the little tits on the back of the key pad wear out pretty quick and dont reach the little touch pads anymore.

I'll never look at a remote control unit the same way again. Man this makes me wanna play with my remote control now ...



Anways ... I picked the "No - it's all crap these days that we have to continually replace due to breakdowns" option.

Just look at the current state of the VHS VCR. Even DVD players ... my first Pioneer DVD player (3rd gen unit) was built like a tank ... now they are all as light as a feather.

And remote controls now-a-days seem to be so crappy. I have a Philips DVP-5140 and someone in a thread about this player said the remote was so light they thought it would float away if they weren't holding it LOL

Oh well ... I gotta go play with my remotes now ...

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[ZAPPER]

I think that they are little silicone tits, not much fun to play with, but I wore them out anyways

[FulciLives]

I think that they are little silicone tits, not much fun to play with, but I wore them out anyways

heh ... you said it again ... my favorite word ... ahhhhhh

Although I do prefer natural to silicone but why be picky? As the saying goes, "love the one you're with"

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Cole]

I vote a draw but there is one major difference towards our and the market's attitude towards technology between now and years ago; If an item, such as a television or VCR, broke down in the early 90s I would be inclined to get it repaired. Nowadays, if an item breaks down, for many, it is a good excuse to get a newer model.

[GilbyGood]

The price of Items are going down and the quailty is going with it. It is cheeper to send out the electronics without testing and risk the wrath of the user than to do testing and insure that the product is 100%. Just my opinion seeing as how our jobs are all going overseas and they still want to sell the product here.

[Nitemare]

The products are obsolete before they break.

[redwudz]

The newer stuff seems better designed, but cheaper built. To me it's a toss up whether it's better. I am amazed that high tech seems to be much cheaper than it was ten years ago, even allowing for inflation.

When you can buy a DVD burner for $30 or a DVD player for not much more, that's nice. To go along with it, though, the quality suffers. But I would rather be stuck with a cheap player that is obsolete in a couple of years and disposable, rather than a expensive one that I can't afford to repair.

[oldandinthe way]

The global economy has brought us a strong emphasis on reduced product cost and weight without loss of features.

Result - inadequate cooling, and quality control - shorter product lifespan. Component reliability is excellent.

However, commodity products at low cost offer almost all of the features of premium products and often greater compatibility.

Unless you are religiously "green" accept the fact that your product will be in the trash heap in a couple of years and look forward to the great new features your next purchase will have.

In many cases you control the product life by your placement of the product and the adequacy of air flow around the product. Put it on a stack of electronics 2" from a wall and you will be making frequent trips to the store.

[Duchess]

Electronics have got to be less reliable than they were as a result of moves towards making the products less toxic. Remove the lead from solder and you have to use higher temperatures to use the replacement, which will shorten the life of the components. Add to that the fact that the tin/lead solder replacement has a tendancy to crystalise after a few years which makes joints go bad, then you are looking at an even more reduced life span.

[ZAPPER]

The goal of product design is to make a product attractive enough to get the consumer to purchase it and produce and package it just durable enough and cheap enough to make it past the cash register!



Products are designed to be handled by high speed mechanized production machinery. Packaged by high speed machinery, josteled and moved by high school drop outs on fork lifts, crammed into shipping containers, battered by the waves of the ocean, vibrated in rail cars and over the road semi trucks, rolled down roller conveyors, slam stacked by stock boys and handled by a dozen consumers before one decides to buy it. But push the damn DVD tray just a bit too fast and it's crap! Snug the coax connection and you are looking at a repair bill. Drag your feet across the carpet and give the unit a static shock and it is fried! That is not counting the kids (Over 18 included) playing ball, Frisbe, tag, 'rasslin' Koolaid spilling, beer spilling and general mischeif in the same room as any electronic toy.



No, maybe they are not as durable, but it sure is fun shopping for new ones!

[oldfart13]

10 years ago my new (at the time) hard drive was warrantied for 5 years. Today my brand new Maxtor 250 Gig drive is warrantied for 1 year....bah!

[DRP]

I just voted. As I did my Sony amp lies disassembled in a mate's workshop having dry joints and a relay replaced. It's been in and out of his workshop for the last 2 years chasing the same intermittant fault and my 42" plasma screen which is 15 months old lies in an authorised repair workshop on a digitally altered purchase receipt for the warranty replacement of a high voltage power supply board for the screen.

That's how pissed I am at how often I have to get stuff repaired. I've taken to forging documents to claim warranty outside the warranty period. I only got a 1 year warranty with it when I bought it. Now however, if you buy the very same screen, you get a voucher to fill in and they give you for free a 3 year warranty instead! Nice.

I have a new policy now. I sell everything electrical on eBay when the warranty expires. Sadly, that only encourages the companies that make the rubbish because that's exactly what they want me to do. The trouble is that I don't see another option.

[oldandinthe way]

10 years ago my new (at the time) hard drive was warrantied for 5 years. Today my brand new Maxtor 250 Gig drive is warrantied for 1 year....bah!

This is a great example of how cost reduction affects reliability.

The electronics on your drive are probably more reliable than your old drive - fewer components, less heat.

The mechanics of disks drives have been on a steady decline.

Way back in the early days of PCs, the full height hard drives used voice coils to control head movement. These were precise and reliable. I sold thousands of these drives in systems to control paper mills, chemical plants, factories and even nuclear power plants.

They were replaced by half-height 5.25" drives which used stepper motors to control head movement - reliability of the mechanics decreased. We inventoried large numbers of voice coil drives and continued to sell them long after the stepper motors dominated the market. At a substantial price premium.

These were replaced by half height 3.5" drives, with significant cost reduction. These drives included virtual geometries, automatic bad sector remapping and other features to improve manufacturing yields and the mechanics were reduced in size and cost. Reliability decreased further.

Of course we have seen low profile 3.5" drives, 2.5" drives and 1" drives with greater miniaturization of the mechanics and greater potential for mechanical failure.

Just a P.S. We sold 71mb voice coil drives for $750. each. How many of you would have a system which is video capable if the price of storage was that high today?

[ZAPPER]

Yep, you get what you pay for, if you are lucky.

[RabidDog]

Yep the weight of electronics gives the game away. I just got a 10 year old VHS recorder and it weighs quite a bit, compared to the featherweights available in the showrooms. It's all about integrated chips, lower price production and reduced cost of raw materials. Of course this tends to fit neatly into a green scenario. But the recent analysis that a jeep cherokee is greener than a Prius also says a lot. the greenest car of all is the one that runs for 25-30 years, not the one thats scrapped every 10 years. Trouble is, capitalism works by constant renewal, not by conserving and hoarding.
They certainly dont make them like they used to!

[DRP]

When my $300 Sony DVD player finally dies (can't wait) I'm replacing it with the cheapest no-name generic brand slimline piece of crap I can find for $29.95 in the Father's Day sales at K-Mart. It will support more (non-standard) disc formats and read more brands and types of discs than the more expensive Sony but it will be a miracle if it will last more than a year tops. That said though, at $29.95 each time, it doesn't really matter.

I feel bad for the environment though. All that disposal and wastage for absolutely no good reason.

[kush]

10 years ago my new (at the time) hard drive was warrantied for 5 years. Today my brand new Maxtor 250 Gig drive is warrantied for 1 year....bah!

Many drive makers have better than 1 year policies.

ALL Seagates (whether OEM or retail, which is now owns Maxtor btw) are 5 year. Maxtor retail drives are 3 year, OEM 1 (or vice versa I forget), and I'm almost 100% certain they have enterprise class drives (likely rebadged Seagates now I guess) with 5 year. Same w/ Western Digital - retail warranty 1 year, OEM 3 year -- with the exception of enterprise/raid class drives and the Raptor's - they all have 5 year coverage. For the rest (ie: Hitachi, Samsung, etc), I'm not sure, but it's unlikely any have solely 1 year coverage across all drives and model lines.

[edit] oh and on topic, quality/longevity has definitely gone down over the years. Liike was said before, it's now size (smaller is better) and style (+ low price of course), over substance and durability. On the flip-side though, there tends to be far more features crammed into the average electronics units these days than, say a 1st get VCR. More stuff=more breakdowns. Not that the inadequate cooling & undersizing of the enclosures is helping any of course.

[TBoneit]

On the Western Digitals they used to be 3 years retail, Now it is one year and for a fee it can be extended. My guess is the drives are being sold so close to cost they are looking for warranty revenue.

On the Sony players: IMHO they adhere colsely to DVD specification and not much else. My two changers, 5 and 400 disc, both play only region 1 and NTSC. They play VCD but not SVCD....
OTOH if I take 544 by 480 mpeg2 files or SVCD 480 by 480 and patch the header to DVD specs, Author with TDA 1.5 by patching the file,adding the file into TDA 1.5, then unpatching and authoring they play fine despite long GOPS in the 544 by 480. However 640 by 480 doesn't play properly they don't fill the screen.

However they are Sony durable. I have a Phillips 5960 for Divx, region free and PAL playback and the Sony the NTSC DVDs are available at a touch of the remote.

[rayden54]

I think the crap is comparable to the crap and the durable is comparable than the durable. The only difference is there's a lot more of the the crap.

[oldfart13]

I'm looking at the Maxtor One-Year Limited Warranty United States and Canada right now...this is not an OEM product as it came with the Maxblast 4 software disc and it was in a sealed Maxtor 250 Gig drive box.

[ozymango]

I think the crap is comparable to the crap and the durable is comparable than the durable. The only difference is there's a lot more of the the crap.

I really like that one!

[oldandinthe way]

If only what rayden said was true.

Everything electronic suffers from certain areas of deficiency which were not present in the past, the only questions are whether other improvements offset the deficiencies.

As previously posted in this thread, the elimination of lead in solder has made manufacturing more difficult. This is especially true on production lines which have not been replaced as part of the changeover.

The elimination of acid baths for printed circuit manufacturing have also contributed to quality loss, not only are the water-based solvents now used are less effective, but they create their own contamination risks.

Greater levels of integration on chips have eliminated many potential failures since their are fewer points of interconnect.

Greater levels of integration on chips have also lead to greater heat generation. This coupled with the smaller cost reduced packaging have lead to higher levels of failure due to overheating.

And there is also the problem of contamination in chip manufacturing and board manufacturing. The most modern board manufacturing facilities have shifted to "clean room" manufacturing comparable to chip fabs.

On the enviornement impact, it appears that the elimination of lead and acid baths is a plus which is offset by the increased numbers of failed machines in the dumps. I leave it to others to judge the wisdom of this tradeoff.

[ozymango]

Everything electronic suffers from certain areas of deficiency which were not present in the past, the only questions are whether other improvements offset the deficiencies.

True. But I'm guessing that for the majority of users, the improvements do offset the deficiencies.

More simply: How many electronic items do you own that are not technically obsolete before they actually cease functioning?

I'm sure a lot of electronics parts fail, but I've got several CD drives that still function that, for technical reasons, I don't use anymore because my needs have changed. The technology has changed. You can buy a world-class HD or Blu-Ray Disc player that will last -- how long? How long, mechanically, and how long, in terms of people not wanting the next version?

I've got a perfectly good 10-year-old portable CD player. Guess how often I actually use it.

So it's a complex topic. And of course nobody should be throwing any of this stuff in the dumps, regardless of how good it was built and whether or not it's still working, electronics devices need to be properly recycled. And yes of course I realize that a great number of people aren't going to recycle, they'll just throw things in the trash despite pleas otherwise ... in which case, I'm definitely happier that they've gotten away from lead solder and acid baths!

[oldandinthe way]

I've had a TV set fail during warranty.

My Lite-on DVDrecorder has an intermittantly functioning drive tray started at 14 months.

One of my LG DVDwriters is in the process of giving up the ghost at 18mos and thousands of burns.

I have piles of functioning CD-ROMs removed from service because they are obsolete.

I have 10 and 12 year old PCs still running.

The only failures i see are in currently useful items,(and I'm not unduly upset due to their low cost), all of my functionally obsolete equipment keeps on truckin'.

A comment on the SONY players, in my opinion they were implemented in an anal retentive manner, checking compliance with the DVD spec in areas where no one else saw a requirement for compliance. As with many standards the wording of the standard allows for a certain degree of freedom in implementation, the SONY culture supports greater rigidity. Ideally they refer a standard that they control - such as Beta.

[cyflyer]

Maybe the technology has improved, but cheap and tacky build nowadays compared to years ago. Whereas stuff was Made in Japan, England, USA, its all made in China now. Pressures to make more profit, cut corners, cheap labour tacky tacky quality.

[DRP]

On the SONY DVD player bizzo, maybe this is the case in USA models. Mine is Australian and it plays quite a lot of non-standard stuff without a drama. Overburnt CDs/DVDs = no problem. DVD-SVCD = no problem. VBR VCD up to 2500kbps = no prob. 16:9 DAR on SVCD/DVD below 720 pixel resolution = no prob.

The only thing it won't play correctly for me is a VCD spec disc I have with a 16:9 DAR on it. It doesn't accept the 16:9 flag on a VCD spec MPEG, but apart from that, it plays everything else just fine. 2500kbps+224(audio) is the absolute limit for CD though. Higher than that and you get drop outs in the audio as it tries to keep up with the required read speed

[EddyH]

Hard to say at the moment, but I think if you can keep a sense of perspective, it's probably about the same. Some things break down quickly whilst others soldier on, but you only really pay attention to the status quo. So you'll notice today's early breakdowns more than you remember those of 10 years ago, but you do notice the 10-year-old model that's still going strong. I don't think 1997 was a particularly strong year for electronics, was it? Because that's the era we mean... not really a classic age or anything.

It may pay to make a note to be opened in 2017 and see how a lot of today's stuff has lasted. Will it still operate as well as the Acer P-120 laptop that I used for more than a year (I was skint, it was cheap, functional, and had a "never used" NiMH battery that genuinely ran for hours) before getting this current one? Or the potentially-scrap Pentium desktops i'm jazzing up to pass on to anyone who needs any old PC to do some work with, and their seemingly unburstable CPUs, memory and hard discs (which is rubbish - there were plenty of failures then, otherwise data recovery firms would have all gone to the wall). The portable music players of today vs yesteryear's CD, MD and tape players... digital cameras... stereos... TVs... etc, etc.

Personally I'm going to be quite put out if this laptop isn't still nicely functional (barring the battery, which i abuse quite a bit ) in another 9 years - because by then it will still have cost me twice as much year-on-year as it's forebear