Hardware quality in a dive

Life Technology
1

Caution, ranting follows.

I’m really horrified at the appalling quality of electronic hardware these days. I look around the house and beyond some very specific industrial type equipment, nothing I own is more than about two years old. Or should I say, it’s either two years old, or ten. Why is that the TV set I bought ten years ago still works, but I have never owned a DVD player that lasted more than two?
It used to be that I’d buy a new HDD for my home computer every two or three years because it either too slow, or too small. Now they are broken long before they’re full up. :s
Same with graphics cards. I used to upgrade them because some new game would demand it. Now they are dead before a new card with significantly better performance even hits the market. My last one just started to fail at two years, and the new replacement I bought today was a dud. Installed it just to see a blank screen… :fume:
When you consider that PCBs are one of the most poisonous products on the planet and the most difficult to dispose of, you have to wonder why we are deliberately making them as short-lived as possible!

What is the world coming to? :grandpa:

2

I agree. This was an interesting story the other week:
theregister.co.uk/2006/09/20 … l_rip_off/

Now while it’s shocking that the woman ended up paying $14,000 renting a phone for 40 years, it also a fact that the phone was still working after 40 years.

They sure don’t make things like they used to :grandpa:

3

As long as customers continue to buy based on price and features rather than reliability, manufacturers will continue to cut corners to save money, OEMers will continue to press manufacturers to bring their price down a few more cents and stores will continue to play OEMers off one another to get the lowest selling price. This makes for more work for the customer though. One will have to check reviews, check warranty policies, check how responsive service support is, and evaluate the brand’s reputation for reliability. In other words, don’t buy the cheapest crap you can find.

Even then, one will sometimes get stuck with a piece of crap from a usually reliable company. (Like my D-Link DGS-1008D of which I’ve gone through three in the last month and still having problems!)