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Tallgeese wrote:

Cars are more reliable than ever but they're also much more expensive to repair when something does go wrong. So that's a trade-off.

Yeah, for example, it is much less expensive to fix a carburetor than a fuel injection system. I remember when cars went exclusively to feul injection. Many people (friends who worked on cars as hobbyists) complained due to the high cost of repairing a fuel injection unit.

zoees wrote:

I have a Sony receiver that pops whenever I try for the surround sound from the television.

I called a repair place and they said it would be 50 bucks to look at it. Then who knows how much to actually fix it. Probably could buy another for the same for just a little more.

Planned obsolescence. Right?

Pay a little extra for a Denon or something similarly as good. You will be happy you did.

However I have an old Zenith from 1980 that (until the digital switchover) got better aerial reception and has lasted a lot longer than any LCD or plasma will.

If I had kids who treated my Mac with anything less than reverence, I'd have some kids that never got to use a computer!

I stripped a gear on my paper shredder. The company still sells that model, but they wouldn't sell me the part.

Somebody else made my new paper shredder.

My sewing machine is about 40 years old. I can easily see the mechanism from the underside, and imagine it would be pretty easy to fix if necessary. (never had to)

The new ones, you can't even open 'em up.

That said, I've thrown out plenty of old stuff too. I don't think things were made particularly better in the "old days" - at least overall. A plastic toy is a plastic toy, and there are SO many sharp metal edges...

But the mechanical stuff was damn sure easier to fix.

Yeah I remember pushing my brothers, who were sitting on the back of the big Tonka dump truck everyone had, around the yard.

We went down many a dirt hill riding that thing. Wheels held up just fine as did the metal body.

Last edited by Random User (2009-08-15 2:46 am)

I partially disagree with the notion that toys are better today.

For example, when I was a child, I had the glorious Corgi Batmobile:



That thing fired tiny little rockets that could easily choke a toddler to death, and it had a sharp circular saw that came out of the front to cut through road-blocks! Corgi Batmobiles are such treasures that there is now a cottage industry of artisans who restore them to better-than-stock condition, and even the most ragged, incomplete example will fetch a pretty penny on eBay.

It wasn't until quite recently that Mattel managed to come up with something to rival Corgi's jewel-like Batmobile:



That's the 1/18 scale edition, which is really the one to have. I've got the smaller one in the traditional Hot Wheels  scale of 1/64:



It seems the only toys that are any good these days are the ones targeted at adult collectors, and a lot of those are reproductions of older toys or harken back to them without being actual copies.

Last edited by Bren (2009-08-15 4:43 am)

Where did you get the idea that I had a Mac Pro?

I have no Mac Pro.

Bren wrote:

Where did you get the idea that I had a Mac Pro?

Bren wrote:

I said "my Mac," not "iMac!"

dv wrote:

Hell, I have a flower power.

You... you... liberal hippie Minnesotan, you! :shakefist:

I bet you're a secret St. Paul sympathiser.

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Bren wrote:

Here's one:

Comic books. There are treasures from every decade, but if you look at any mainstream title from the mid 1980s or earlier, you'll see a lot of inane crap. Now the art and writing is more mature, and four-color printing on pulp stock has given way to better printing on heavy, acid-free paper.

Most of that is the changing market: 40 years ago it, it was almost all kids. Now it's adults, with an eye towards durability and collectability.

So, if it's not really the same market, and it's got a different function... is it even really the same product anymore?

Here's another:

American space ships.

They worked pretty nicely during most of Apollo, other than the Apollo 1 disaster.

Then, along comes the Space Shuttle, which was supposed to be a big bus, but wound up being a big, expensive, unsafe cargo truck with a tragic death toll. American astronauts probably breath a sigh of relief when they think about hitching a ride on a Soyuz instead.

The Shuttle is essentially late 1970s and 1980s era technology. Sure, there have been upgrades, but putting a new stereo with iPod port in your '84 Renault Fuego doesn't change the fact that it's a Fuego.

Now, in the modern era, for about what it would cost to give the Space Shuttle a lube, oil, and filter, Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are giving us a proper space bus that won't explode on the way up like Challenger did, and don't burn to cinders on the way down like Columbia.