It’s a simple fact that in our new technological age, products become obsolete and/or die after a few years. As a child of the 1960s this is a hard concept for me to grasp. I used to fix the television set in the frat house by extracting all of the vacuum tubes, marking their locations, and heading to the hardware store. I would test each tube on the “tube-tester” machine to find the bad one; then I would buy a new one and replace the tube, bringing the TV back to life. The boys of Beta Theta Pi at Emory U thought I was a genius.
But we can’t do that anymore. Products simply die or become so difficult to function that users must replace the device. How many PCs/laptops have you burned through in the last 10 years? I probably have discarded 20 or more computers in the last 25 years.