Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

Reduce, re-used, recycle

The old adage is to reduce, re-use and recycle - in that order.

In terms of reduce - my desktop machine is an old Core i7-2700K (I think) in a big tower case which still manages just fine. Bought in 2010, and delivery was delayed due to the motherboard being affected by the Sandy Bridge southbridge chipset bug. (Remember that?)

It's a bit of a Trigger's Broom today, having had a new power supply, new graphics card, replacement RAM and an upgrade to an SSD. All except the SSD were replacements due to failures, but the big tower case means maintenance is quick and easy. It might need replacing soon - but it'll have served me for 10 years, which means ten years in which I haven't bought a new PC. Or even felt like I needed to.

For re-use, it's my laptop. It was more for budget reasons than anything else that I bought a second hand Thinkpad. They're reliable and durable, so are excellent candidates for that. Again, performance is just fine and it meets my needs amply. I put Ubuntu on it, all the hardware (except for the fingerprint reader - which I wasn't going to use anyway) was supported without issues.

I'm sure that the Windows 10 Refurb Edition installation that was on it would also have been OK. But I do have more reservations about running Windows as a sustainable OS on older hardware. Linux just works - no need for manufacturer's drivers. And that's where Windows falls down IMO. I remember installing Windows 7 onto my desktop tower 10 years ago. Windows failed to find almost all the hardware - it booted into a low res, had no sound, no network, nothing. Ubuntu found everything but one of the network adapters (the built in one on the motherboard). I didn't even realise that the motherboard had Bluetooth support until I saw the icon next to the clock in Ubuntu! Then I had to reboot into Windows and spend an hour or two installing drivers for the motherboard - most of the time spent rebooting after each driver install, of course.

It's no doubt better now. A decade has passed. But as the Sonos issue shows, companies want to sell you new hardware. So sunsetting driver support for newer versions of Windows is going to continue to be a thing. Ironically, hardware support in Linux is now becoming superior to hardware support for Windows, especially if you want to still use old hardware.

Until we can convince vendors to have longer support periods, anyone attempting to reduce/re-use is probably better off moving to Linux.

my AMD Phenom 4 core 3.2ghz machine I bought/built , ooh its gotta be 10 years ago now , is still more than fine for work and game.

What to do about the Leica M 35mm rangefinder camera body that uses film?

Cost north of £2500. They seem to be holding their value well because of collectors.

Early digital cameras that were cutting edges cost four figures but now only good for landfill.

One reason to replace and old desktop is power consumption

A laptop can often be just as powerful, is portable if you need it to be and has a built in UPS. Unless you want terabytes of disk.

The same arithmetic when choosing an automobile

Eh?

Cars need regular servicing that costs money, so there is an argument that buying new reduces your cost of ownership. But not a good one - the depreciation significantly exceeds the additional repair costs of an older model in most cases, not to mention the environmental costs of a new vehicle versus one that already exists.

Even if that argument were valid, you wouldn't apply it to a phone: mobile phones have an ongoing service cost of near zero. You might not continue to get updates for so long, but a lack of updates doesn't stop your phone working. If your phone has a fixed battery or a small amount of memory, you could perhaps argue that it has a fixed useful lifetime, but you're probably still economically and environmentally better off buying second hand or refurbished ones, though you might want to boil it first.

It's not really a question of durability - most of this surplus kit washing around us has not broken down - we've simply reached the "5 blade razor" mark in mobile technology: manufacturers are struggling to find new compelling features so we're hanging on to the stuff that's "good enough" rather than discarding it for something shinier.

Horses for courses.

Just updated two desktops. The thing is, unless I actually need a computer that moves with me, laptops are complete shit and tablets infinitely more so.

Decent size screen, proper, full size keyboard, non rsi-inducing mouse, loads of grunt, easily upgradeable (so no 4k-in-one-hit issues), etc ad nauseum.

The really big improvement recently has been cross device syncing so I don't have to use the shitty laptop when I don't actually need to.

It's not just Laptops and Smartphones

It's not just laptops and smartphones - outside of silicon melting and the whole battery lifetime debacle - most electronics can easily be repaired.

Usually it will be capacitors, smd-capacitors, or sometimes a fuse that will go bad and are easily repaired if your willing to grab a multi-meter & soldering iron.

Outfit's like Apple will generally tell you that your equipment is FUBAR because they are trained to expect that you will easily pay up for convenience and rather than have the problem diagnosed properly they will just tell you that "the mainboard is bad we need to replace it", when it's probably only one or two bad capacitors which could be easily replaced.

I had a 5 year old 24" 1080p monitor go bad a month ago - I knew something was up with it prior to it turning non-responsive when occasionally it refused to power on without disconnecting and reconnecting it from the mains outlet.

I tested the power supply with a multi-meter and another monitor to rule that out - all good.

So I opened the monitor up, inspected and tested the capacitors on the boards - one visually bad and another not gaining capacitance.

I opted to replace all of the capacitors as if one went bad knowing my luck the others would be near EOL too (fyi capacitor lifetime is rated by hours).

I paid less than £2 for 5 different capacitors rated at 9000h (as high a rating as I could get), a couple of days waiting on the post, an hour replacing caps and I had a fully working monitor, it's been a few weeks and no issues so I'd say it's all good, at least until the next time the caps go.

The largest issue I found while repairing my monitor was the lack of any service manuals - manufacturers don't publish these anymore, probably to protect their service departments' revenue.

The underlying problem is a financial industry that assumes that sales of anything will grow forever. They won't. They can't. That's why we're seeing the likes of Microsoft trying to switch customers to some form of subscription, cloud, anything that keeps the money rolling in irrespective of whether it's of benefit to those customers. If they fail to do that their share price, built on the assumption of growth, will tank. Markets need to price shares on the basis of short term growth, medium term peak, long term ticking over.

Used cars vs. new ones

"They'd use the same arithmetic when choosing an automobile"

I always thought that the instant depreciation of brand new cars meant that the most economic strategy was to buy used, but nearly-new.

"something more durable – with upgrade paths"

Yeah, like we used to have. Once upon a time a fridge was repairable, a dishwasher was serviceable, the TV repairman was a household guest.

Today ? Nothing electronic is repairable any more, it's all made to just be thrown out and replaced. That's a bloody foolish waste of resources, and it's the companies that have forced this upon us because, up to now, hardware was always progressing at a rapid pace.

But that pace has slowed to a crawl. Today, a 5-year-old laptop works just fine and almost as well as a brand new one. This year's new phone model has literally nothing over last year's, and may even have something less (headphone jack, anyone ?). But companies still chuck out a new version every year, even if the hardware is practically on a 2-year cycle now, because marketing has to have something new.

Never mind. We are on the path to a world when a new model only comes out when it genuinely has something new over the previous model. We will, soonish, begin to live in a world where a new phone model will be about as common as a new model of fridge, and we'll be replacing them about as often.

I'm looking forward to that.

Hand-me-downs

I've just refreshed my old Dell N5110 laptop to give it a new lease of life as a general email tool/portable entertainment machine for my little boys when we go camping. It was already refurbished when I bought it some years for the wife to do a bit of home-secretary-ing when the boys were babies, and we deliberately went down the refurbished route because it was the only way to get a Windows 7 machine instead of 8.0. Plus it's got front firing speakers, a full size HDMI output and I had already added a Blu-ray optical drive for movies.

Last month I installed a free upgrade to Windows 10, running on a £15 SSD (120GB is plenty), and even picked up a funky purple replacement shell for a few quid on eBay. Considering that until recently we were still using XP laptops in work for odd-jobs (lots of our gear still only talks via serial ports), I can see us getting a few more good years out of the old girl.

Certainly I bet a lot of 2015 MacBook Pro owners are hanging on for dear life because the device has USB-A ports and HDMI ports, without needing a dock. The lack of USB-C is an issue going forward however.

Still, for those who have to upgrade, USB-C docks are getting down to the £25 price range (when on offer at least) so maybe this is becoming less of an issue for some (and at least they have an advantage of only needing one plug in/out action). And some monitors are getting USB-C DisplayPort input now, although monitors have an even longer replacement cycle in the home.

Soon we might return to where we used to be in the 80s, where a piece of equipment would last 10 years in the living room (TV, stereo) and then another 10 years in a secondary room.

Regarding computers however, surely a huge factor in the lack of upgrades is because Intel have made negligible improvements in 5 years because of their 10nm debacle? Additionally DRAM stalled in capacity over the past few years as well. The only thing that improved was SSD capacity, which

AMD have caught up (and with Renoir this month they will exceed Intel in performance, power consumption and cost in laptops for the first time) and look to have a path to 3nm over the next 3 or 4 years, hence performance will increase greatly over the next few years. And DDR5/LPDDR5 is coming online this year.

Is it any coincidence...

Is it any coincidence that the slowdown of the upgrade treadmill happened to coincide with the decline of the Microsoft monopoly?

As for me and my house...

After about a decade of living exclusively with laptops and bricks (think Intel NUC, or Apple Mini) ... this year I did something I haven't done in many years: I built a desktop.

So yes, I expect this machine to sit on my desk for the next 10, 15, maybe 20 years, receiving component upgrades as it needs them. Just like in the old days of the upgrade treadmill, except at a much slower pace.

The ragged edge

I consistently run on the ragged edge of technology - the far end from the cutting edge. My phone is a 2016 Samsung J3V, but it works fine. My laptop is a hand-me-up from my nephew, a 2014 model that wouldn't play nice with Windows (but runs Ubuntu 18.04 fine). My wife's laptop is an old Macbook Pro, not sure what year but at least 5 years. Best one is my desktop - not top-of-the-line when built, and then when XP went end-of-life, I bought a new hard drive and upgraded the memory to 8GB. No other upgrades - running Ubuntu 18.04 fine ever since.

The biggest difference is the software. I thought Linux was pretty cool before I started running it every day - now it's a necessity. Why pay $200+ for an inferior OS, with constantly changing interface and constantly increasing hardware requirements, when I can have one that's more stable, more secure, and runs on cheaper hardware for free?

I hate computers

I really hate computers.

$1000? I have three words for you....

Rossman Repair Group. They do component-level repair. Saving Mac owners from being screwed by Apple is their speciality. (Said in Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice) The owner is a rabid advocate of right-to-repair, traveling across the country spreading the good word to legislative bodies. He also has some cool videos on YouTube.

https://rossmanngroup.com/

Trailing Edge

A few years ago my office systems were run on a Sun V20Z with ESXi and a handful of Linux and Windows VMs. Over the years, I dropped that idea and replaced the VMs with J1900 NUCs one box per function. It's quieter, doesn't guzzle electricity and works without fuss. The use of separate boxes improves availability since I'm not dependent on one expensive box. I adopted a similar approach with laptops, getting rid of my old MacBook and HP Pavilion and using a single, cheap, Chuwi Lapbook Air with 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. That works fine for the limited uses I have for a laptop on the move and it's light and sturdy. Back at the office it's mostly used to SSH into the headless boxes so if anything, way over-powered for its tasks.

If I need processing grunt, which I do from time to time, I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre i7 which is still fast enough for my work needs. All of this stuff cost a fraction of the amount I once spent on systems, the NUCs are £130-150 each, the laptop was £240, the ThinkCentre was about £250, bought as unused stock from an eBay supplier. The most expensive item in the office network is the 24TB NAS. I'm also finding that I need to do much less maintenance than I used to. Despite being an IT professional, I don't want to spend all my time doing work in my own office. It's better to do that stuff for the paying customers who simply have to have the latest and best of everything.

I'm very happy to not be on the leading edge, and certainly not the bleeding edge.

My undead laptop and me

My very very old (It came with Windows XP!) Media Center HP laptop has a faulty video card, the bios battery and the laptop battery is dead. And the hard drive really needs replacing. Yet I installed Linux Mint 19.3 Xfce (32-bit) on it, FINALLY erasing the malfunctioning Windows XP on it, and it works! (But I have Virtual XP on my Windows 7 machine so yes I still use XP stuff).

I save everything in two sd cards, since the hard disk really is about to go to silicon heaven at any moment, and I am wondering when the thing will just either refuse to boot or the hard disk damage will get so bad that will be it.

Oh and it also overheats if I leave the screen on for more than a hour.

Mostly I use it to watch videos and listen to online radios.

Yes I could actually fix it. The bios battery would be easy, a bit hard to get a compatible hard disk, the battery is a lost cause since they don't make the ones for that model anymore. And of course replacing the faulty video card would be almost impossible.

Funny enough the DVD Player/DVD Recorder still works well. That's usually one of the most breakable thing on a laptop.

Maybe because is a Media Center laptop it actually has a non crappy DVD player thingie.

No cutting edge for me....

At this point, I am running one laptop and one "tower". Both are on "stick" disk drives (either NVME or SATA) , none have built in DVD (have an external device). Due to not needing huge drives or external cards (other than graphics), and due to the CPU only requiring 65watts (Ryzen 5 3600), no huge cooler is needed and the tower/box is mostly EMPTY.

The laptop gets changed every 8 years now.

The tower gets incremental upgrades. In a few years, when the current round of GPUs sitting at $500 falls to $150, I'll upgrade my RX580. This current system cost less than $450 (yes... R5 3600 + RX580 + 1TB NVME drive + 16 gb memory), and I have it in a Q500 case which is just about the smallest "tower case" that takes a full sized ATX power supply.

If I am playing games, I prefer the 3600/RX580 combo to my laptop's I5-7000/1060gtx combo.

This has always been my expectation

> We'll still consume lots of kit, but expect it to last out the decade

I have always expected the kit I buy to last at least 10 years (with periodic minor repairs). I've rarely been disappointed, and the few times that I was meant that I didn't buy more gear from that manufacturer.

My current smartphone is 6 years old, and my primary laptop is well over 10 years old. Both are still going strong, just as they should be.

Circular Economy

The Circular Economy movement is all about building stuff that can be repaired

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/concept

Main reason why I have buying AMD since the 386DX40

I'm remember a day not that long ago (Pre-Ryzen) where I was regularly insulted because I chose AMD over Intel. I swear I would have been fired if I even suggested to use Opterons (again pre-Ryzen).

Also why is it even still allowed to have new phone models (and even laptops these days) that don't have replaceable batteries. I've long been an environmentalist but this idea of anthropogenic climate change if true and everyone believes in it then why are those whom complain the most about them tend to be ones that have less than 3 years usage on any if not all electronic devices.

Look Fairephone, Librem 5 and a few others (potentially Pine Phone) are what we should be shooting for regarding mobiles. AMD's approach to using a single socket for every class of computing for 5 years should be the minimum.

Heck Microsoft recently mentions that it will go carbon negative, sure but they are definitely not counting the carbon footprint of forced upgrades over the last 30 to 40 years.

Simply put not only should hardware be maintained but software as well... in other words if the new version of the OS is just too demanding for the hardware then proprietary vendors should be allowing 3rd party maintainers to keep that OS going. This isn't the early days of IT where stuff could be tossed, code never rots so if Microsoft "cares" so much about its carbon footprint then they should do as what is currently being suggested with Windows 7 ... Open source it, if not then have an agreement with a 3rd party maintainer to keep it going. Microsoft has had diminishing returns on the OS side of things for a long time now, cloud is where it is at for them so this should be a no-brainer if they truly willing to put money where their mouth is.

Tell that to Panasonic

Bought a vacuum not 9 years ago, now cannot get the filters for it, so its essentially junk. Local member of Scottish parliament told me last year "the EU are putting through a law on supply of spares, a great reason to be part of the EU and build a circular economy" (Eco bullshit buzzword bingo)

the law - 9 years of spares, so I'll be no better off even if Scotland goes indy and signs up to the EU. I expect to be able to buy stuff like filters for decades, heck I can still buy bits for a Hoover Junior and those are knocking 40 years old or more...

Next one might be a Dyson as they seem to have decent filter availability, you can still buy bits for a DC01 released in 1993, which bodes well...

Out of warranty? See YouTube and eBay

If the unit is borked, what harm can my tinkering do?

Saved a few old devices over the years from Dysons to iPods to PCs, and I learned a few things along the way.

I've been using the "Put LInux on it and eke out another 5 years" approach to home Desktops & Laptops for year now...

I manage to still get by on a 12 year old Dell desktop that's on it's 3rd HDD and has even had RAM fail. I had to slot in a cheap used NVIDIA GPU last year because the monitor failed and the VGA/HDMI converter I bought meant that you couldn't ever see the BIOS screens and even 1080p video slowed the refresh rate to a crawl.

Rendering YouTube videos can be time consuming, but you gets what you pays for.

Sonos

The Sonos story was apalling. It is instructive to compare their repair and service policy with that of Naim, whom they consider to be a rival in the wireless speaker market.

Sonos: brick your perfectly functional device and we will give you a discount on a new one.

Naim: we will repair any item of kit, and upgrade the parts if upgrades are available, that we have produced in the past 40 years for a fixed fee of £330.

Another one bites the dust?

Its not just laptops - how about the tens of thousands of HP Inkjets that have gone to recycling / landfill all for the sake of a .001 cent sprocket that splits and breaks the paper load mechanism. I bought an A3 HP inkjet off eBay, yeah caveat emptor, absolutely, it was dusty, but worked. The web page said it had only done 4000 pages. It stopped loading paper. Following a grainy YouTube video I dismantled almost the entire printer, reassembling cause no end of random 0x6000**** errors, but you still can't get to the paper load mechanism from above... Bit more googling - aha, take the cartridges out, invert, examine. Some HP printers have a window in the bottom of the paper tray and you can see the drive sprocket, alternatively take a guess and enlarge a hole that's already there.. If you can see knurling, the gear has moved on the shaft..

The fault?, rubbish engineering - there's a knurl on the drive shaft that the sprocket is force fitted over and over time, the lack of material at the root of the gear tooth results in the gear splitting, then merrily rotating on the shaft - so no paper loading mechanism any more.

The fix?, slide the gear back over the knurling, making sure it aligns with the next gear in the chain, see if you can find the split in the gear and then apply a good drop of superglue, not so much it goes over everything else but just on the sprocket. Leave to dry. Put everything back. Mine's done over a 1000 pages since.

The precise location of the gear varies by model so YMMV but its worth a try. I'm on a mission to fix the next common fault, broken touchscreens.

N.B. HP's website has hundreds of 'customers' aka victims, with the same problem, solution?, buy a new printer... OK I can get one on end of line sale for a tenner occasionally at the local supermarket, but that's not the point is it? And neither is HP's extortionate ink pricing, in the race to the cheapest devices, everyone loses, because we are all inhabiting a precious place.

P.S. I use the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Pixel x86 on ten year old laptops for STEM / Code club - works a treat, and its no biggie if it breaks, I can just reinstall in half an hour.

It's "irreparable".

It's "irreparable", actually!

Hard to know what to do!

My laptop is a three year old Acer Cloudbook -- no maintainable parts in the box. It's a nice, useful machine, but it's down at the pathetic end of the hardware spectrum -- 2GB memory, 32GB eMMC hard drive, Intel N3060 -- passive cooling, no fan. It cost £200. It runs Fedora 31 like a champ -- LibreOffice, database, GIMP, browser of choice.

Here's my problem. The Acer looks like it will last for maybe five years before the software bloat drags it down towards unusable. So....should I have spent twice as much (£400) for a (barely) maintainable laptop which might (or might not) last ten years?????? Right now, my answer is an emphatic "No".

Any thoughts out there to help me with this?

My current desktop, bought 2015, has an i7-4790 , 16GB DDR3-1600 , 2TB SSD & 2TB spinning rust, and a GTX960 with 4GB VRam. For gaming it's perfectly adequate. Runs Outer Worlds with everything at max and although there are no doubt games out there it can't run at optimum, I don't play them, so don't care. I'll replace this PC when I feel the need to do so.

In terms of reuse, the PC it replaced some 5 years ago is a 2009 bought Q9550 with 16GB RAM, a 120GB SSD & 1TB spinning rust, and a GTX750 ti. That is in the garage where it plays internet radio, displays service manuals and gives me internet access when working on my motorcycles. It runs Win10 just fine but I'm not sure it would run games very well on Win 10 any more.

In recent years, there has been too much emphasis on replacement rather than repair, re-purpose and recycle but that is now starting to change,.... thank god. Now I just need to persuade the Mrs that she doesn't "need" more shoes or handbags. <LOL>

Won't somebody think of the landfill?

About 3 years ago I bought a Neato Botvac to do the housekeping I hate. It's a mid-range £350 model, just about smart enough to manage a 2-bedroom flat and the pre-vacuum floor clearing is a good way to tidy up.

After about 2 years it ground to a halt and the usual maintenance didn't help, so I got onto the support line and they lead me to a lot of stiffness in the brush rotation. Their solution was to replace this large lump of plastic. My solution: remove the spindle (an easy part of the regular maintenance routine), gently unclip the cap and - hey presto! - remove the lump of dust clogging it up. A spritz of WD40 and it worked like new. Now it's part of my regular maintenance and has been running smoothly for another year.

I wasn't really bothered about the £25 cost of a new brush, but the thought of chucking the whole thing in landfill when it was so easy to repair. Consumer tech companies have to move beyond this mindset if we're going to escape the disposable society that has us drowning in mountains of plastic waste. At the very least, make it possible to return the parts and buy refurbished units instead of churning out disposable crap.

Obsolescence

For me the reason in the past to upgrade was incompatibility; back in the day, you'd have an 8088 or 286, but the 386 was such a big step in capabilities that rapidly that 8088 or 286 would not run a lot of new software. Or, once I had a 386 and Linux, finding you can't fit enough RAM. Believe it or not my first Linux box had 4MB of RAM, then 8MB, which was enough UNTIL Netscape came out. You'd have that 386, but one of those old video cards that only do 16-bit color at like 640x480, 8-bit otherwise, and need better graphics for something. Something newer would need a 486, which also had quite a few instructions; or later still, MMX or SSE (Pentium or new enough AMD chip.) Of course eventually Linux went to a 486 minimum (I did not have any 386s by then...)

Now, for me it's really the same reason -- but anything made about the last 15 years, you'll have USB ports to plug stuff into; 2-4GB of RAM with the possibility to expand to more (usually); full color at whatever resolution you'd like; if you're looking to expand, plenty is available for PCI and PCIe, and for SATA and still for IDE. The main issue still is CPU compatiblity; but you can have a 32-bit CPU with no VT-X (virtualization) and still run Ubuntu 18.04 on it (install server version then the "ubuntu-desktop" package and reboot), the only notable missing package is Google Chrome (no 32-bit linux build, but it does have chromium available.) The cutoffs to me now are 1) 32-bit -- it's fine now but there are packages no longer available 32-bit, and distro makers etc. are in the process of cutting most 32-bit builds for x86. 2) VT-X (virtualization), in Linux this means no 64-bit VirtualBox VMs, and of course no vmware or kvm, which isn't a big deal depending on what you're doing but is the other BIG example of "CPU too old, can't do it."

Shark vacuum cleaner fail

We've had a Shark vacuum cleaner for a couple of years (since the previous Dyson let out a lot of magic smoke). Generally happy with the Shark, it does a great job of cleaning our midden (children and cat influence), to the extent that loss of efficiency was obvious. Took a look at it, and found a split in the flexi hose at the base of the upright. Stuck a bit of tape on it and contacted customer services, who were very helpful and arranged to send out the relevant spare part with no questions asked. However, when the spare part arrived, it was the entire brush assembly complete with motor, LEDs, etc! All for a bit of spring-reinforced plastic tube. I haven't got round to repairing the old assembly yet, but I will!

Re. Shark vacuum cleaner fail

Incidentally duct tape works!

Have you gutted the old assembly? Sounds like you lucked out if the motor ever does fail.

In my experience its usually the simplest thing like (on my DC04) bad switch.

I am in the market for a good casing as mine suffered an unfortunate accident but unit still runs otherwise.

Just the thing for my man-cave as no-one else wants to use it with all the repairs and bodged components.

I am also still using my antique Sony phone circa the early broadband era, alas won't Tweet but still useful.

Might one day replace it but the battery is still fine and holding a fair amount.

Still rolling on MBP 2011

Rolling on a 17inch MacBook Pro 2011 I did feel twinge of sadness when the machine could not upgrade to the latest OS. After replacing the CD-ROM with an SSD on day two of ownership and recently doubling the RAM to 16GB the system still copes well with research and development tasks. Replacing two motherboards ( one free under recall, one paid for) and putting in a new battery I expect to be using this one for a few years more. I waited for ages before looking at the latest shiny mac toy but would miss the big screen, traditional 3 * USB, external display port and wired ethernet but the firewire not so much.

Upgrading would also obsolete the Adobe CS5 and office that I regularly use but don't want to buy again from scratch. Despite it's high initial price and spendy repairs to get 9 years (and counting) service out of a laptop proves the benefits of repairability and upgradeability. Retail machine power exceeded most consumer needs in about 2010 and Intel have plateaued since. For my other desktops upgrading the GPU has and storage has kept them from needing a refresh.

Buying a new mouse/keyboard every few years make a desktop machine feel fresh again and is certainly cheaper / greener then swapping out the whole device.

you could...

....of taken that mac to an independent repair shop and they wouldn't of charged you anywhere near $1k

This is a cool trend, and totally normal. During periods of innovation (and IT has experienced some of the wildest periods of innovation in history) we should expect churn, as in 100 years' time we may well be considered the "early adopters" of consumer computing. As primary innovation (computing power, storage, network, form factor, battery life) lessens, innovation around secondary issues such as durability and sustainability will take hold.

For years I've complained about how you can still get parts for a 1961 Falcon yet you can't get anything for a pc that's two years old. I built my desktop almost 11 years ago and it's doing everything just fine. How much longer I'll be able to find PCIE x16 video card remains to be seen. As to continuing to be able to be able to get HDDs or DDR2 1333 RAM is open to question. Yes, I know DDR 4 and SSD are the latest & greatest but increasing access speed by a few nanoseconds seems like a waste. Plus the fact that when a SSD craps out you're screwed because the data is lost & gone forever. I had a HDD die and I downloaded a freebie that successfully retrieved ALL of the data. Had the drive mote gone, I could have sent it to a shop that would have gotten the data back. SSDs? Ain't gonna happen and I tried.

Maybe if you're into simulating nuclear explosions you need the latest and greatest, but for common, everyday tasks at home and for business, my trusty Gigabyte GA-MA 770-UD3 based unit does just fine. Now if the software companies will quit making their product such memory hogs, all would be well in the valley.

Flibbertygibbets the lot of you

I'm still using my only "new" computer - a trusty ZX81. Perfectly good enough for anyone, even that whippersnapper Gates - yeaah, him and his "640k is enough fo ranyone" - the cheek of the man.

I also use both sides of the toilet paper for maximum economy

The other power

A significant driving force for me to upgrade has been electric power consumption. Power consumption in a upper-mid level desktop system has fallen from around 600W to about 60W in the past 20 years. That's of no concern if you live someplace cold, but screw that in a hot climate. I'm hoping the year 2020 is the last year I need to buy a spinning rust array too. That's about 8W/disk that's always on, with one extra for RAID5 reliability, and then double it because I need a backup.