I too suffer from upgrade obsolescence anxiety. As soon as you plant your flag on the escalator you are headed back down to the bottom. If you try and stay at the top you suffer from the pain of early adoption and all the issues that go with that, the sweet spot is sprinting full speed while somehow staying about 90% of the way up, ugggh. give me quality solid durable long lasting well designed functional goods anyday.
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Which smartphone pricepoint? The latest $1000 iPhone or a perfectly usable $200 Moto? Or even a gen behind Moto for ~$125? Combine that with a $10/mo MVNO phone plan for some serious savings. Too many people take the phone kool-aid.
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Much of that is road-salt related - especially the AC, radiators, and likely even the heater-core if the dealer was a bit naughty in how they dealt with the initial radiator problem.
My experience with a few Honda dealers was that their criteria for 4-wheel alignment being “within spec” on our Pilot was nowhere close to what an alignment shop considered “in spec”, and that made a tremendous difference in tire life once we stopped using the dealer for maintenance.
I’ve eaten 3 wipers this winter by forgetting that I’d left the wipers switched “on” when starting the car with the windscreen covered with ice – tore the working edge right off, as it was frozen to the glass.
I blamed myself rather than the car/wipers, but still replaced them with a Duralast Winter Blade each time and I’ve found those to be more durable much better at clearing the smeary brine also.
One of our cars came to us secondhand with admitted battery problems, but watching them remove their stuff it seemed like every cubby had a hidden power port with some sort of charger or lighter-socket accessory doodad plugged in. And then for the next few weeks every time I parked it in our dark garage I found one more convenience light glowing with the car shut off – I think I counted 17 lights with individual switches that could be left “on”, not ideal for a family with children. We never had a problem after that.
I’ve never seen cars deteriorate faster than in our current place of residence, and most of it is stuff not really visible from up top. Even a car I didn’t use for a whole winter got rusty just from being in the same garage with snowmelt from the other cars. The 2 most frequently used cars are 11 and 15, but spent most of their lives in different regions, and local mechanics comment on their “fantastic condition for being that old” every time they are serviced.
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Not a specific one, the price of having the latest smartphone apple or android and the expected lifecycle before they intend you to buy a new one. brutal.
yes, the moto are much more reasonable and decent little phones for the price, i highly recommend them to budget conscious android phone users.
(well besides the shitty internal sd card slot hardware that is flakey.)
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While I don’t have a mortgage, I do have a lower than average income and all the usual bills to pay. I too start with either keeping my older tech alive or picking up and refurbishing the stuff others have let go.
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Sometimes people get sucked into trying to find deals that they focus more on price than quality, and as far as electronics goes i am willing to spend a little bit extra to ensure it’ll last me a long time. It’s not a hard fast rule but you do get what you pay for, and price is not my primary goal… of course i want something reasonably priced but not cheap.
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I pulled out my Nexus 7 tablets (2012 and 2013) just to charge and check that they still work.Both turn on and can be used. I don’t think that the 2012 Nexus 7 has gotten super slow (I recal hearing about the slow down issues for the 2012 model) but I wouldn’t really want to regular use a tablet running just Jelly Bean these days as a main device.
I don’t use tablets much these days, but if I would want to get a new tablet with similar size/shap[e to the Nexus 7 (2013) then I’d be struggling to find one that would get as good as support for Android updates… I’d probably have to go ipad mini.
Agree, repairs have to be within reason and if they start happening too frequently, time for replacement. Same reasoning with a car. Had a 2001 Honda accord, only repaired the usual (battery, tires wipers, etc.) Put 120K on it, gave it to my son who has put another 120K on it. The list of repairs I did, never came close to what VirgilStar has experienced.
That one of those cabinet TVs with the casters? My granddad had one, pretty impressive piece of furniture.
For the HTPC:
Will it transcode video? Will it play back H.265?
For the office pc:
do you drink coffee? When you choose to partake, who’s making the decision? You, or the PC?
(I’m using one old gadget-- my bluray player. Currently, I don’t have my high bandwdith connection. so my amazon prime video subscription-- which had largely supplanted my bluray setup, has proven “useful.” Unfortunately, I don’t have access to my calibrated tv, so everything looks disappointing)
My ipad 3 (2012 vintage) is frustrating to use. Wish I could downgrade a few iterations of IOS. Oh well. I remember the days when it was much more pleasurable to use than my desktop.
Were it not for SPECTRE/Meltdown and the fucking miners, this would be as good a time as any to think about 4K-- the computers are capable, the hardware (with one important exception) is less than expensive, the publishers are on board.
Same here, I’m a retired IT tech and I mostly carry a twelve year old (or more, I forgot when I got it) Razor flip phone because ti fits in any pocket I have, makes great phone calls, the battery lasts for days when on and weeks if off
I have a basic Nexus for when I want access to the 'net when away from home so I can email the wife or check bus schedules, menus, Yelp, grab an interesting picture etc.
I’ve had people act surprised and ask if I don’t like tech. My response is and always has been “Appropriate tech doesn’t have to be the latest and “best” if it does what you need it to do.”
I’d love to get one of the “gosh wow” phones but damn they are expensive for little increase and I too dislike not having bezels you can grip.
When I do replace the Nexus I’ll probably put battery life near the top of the spec requirements as I hate seeing how fast these things run down when I am at a convention or such.
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I get the same reaction from people when they learn I’ve never owned a smartphone. I tell them that after years of working in IT, I only want my phone to be a phone.
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Yeah, it’s almost like the very idea of infinite growth is flawed or something.
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Assuming, of course, that you can find someone who will repair it. When the compressor blew on our refrigerator four years ago, none of the appliance repair services in the area would work on it, because none of them considered that repair (replacing the compressor) to be worth doing. (I can do simple repairs myself, but fiddling around with that is out of my comfort zone.)
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I’m using an iPhone 5, too. I wish I could go back to my iPhone 3, which I truly loved.
I wish my carrier would let me use my old Motorola flip phone. It fit pockets, it had great battery life, and it would be a great text-and-talk only phone. Alas, there is no sim card available, they say.
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It’s a GSM phone, or at least mine is,. Mine is on T-Mobile and has a standard size SIM card (I think, silly thing just works so I never have to muck with it). There were other models for other carriers and one that used CDMA might not have a SIM slot at all.
If they (your cell co) use a micro or nano SIM card, adapters are available.
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Was this the Subaru? I’ve had 3 of them during my lifetime, all second-hand, and all what is now called “Legacy Outback” or something but will always in my mind be called “station wagons.” Two lasted more than 250K miles, and the third made it to within 400 miles of 300K.
I’ve found that if the first owner treated it according to the owner’s manual, you were golden. Miss a couple of 20K checkups, and things fell apart mechanically in the car’s later life.
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It plays anything fine, I don’t consider transcoding a htpc function, they are just for playback, but I did used to record 1080p on it when I used PVR software. If the coffee break you’re talking about is because the PC is choking on something, no that doesn’t happen. Sure video rendering, High frame rate games, or very large data sets require more power, but in reality very few people really need that, they’re mostly web-surfing, email and word processing.
That’s why the newest tech in the house is the cameras and computers. Our personal tech is old, but the A/V tech is pretty new and heavy-duty.
The battery only lasts a few weeks when off? This weekend my son found an old flip phone in my drawer that I finally stopped using when the screen got cracked. It still turned on after not having been charged in several years.
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