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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
07/18/09
07/16/09
www.561iphonesolutions.com
=]
07/14/09
07/13/09
With just a touch of oiling and a new belt, it was ready to go to work. The motor in it was so powerful that it 'kicked' when you pulled back on the trigger, and it jerked out of our hands the first time we tried sanding something. We put at least 100 hours of sanding on that machine over the course of a year, and it showed not a single sign of wear. We contrasted it with the cheaper hardware tools you can buy today, which are all plastic pieces of junk with puny motors that burn out if you try to work them even moderately hard.
07/13/09
Hell ya, my dad has one of those amps from the 70's, it has the needles that go from left to right to measure the levels.
It's a beast the amount of power that thing pushes is ridiculous.
Something like this bad boy.
07/13/09
07/13/09
Not surprisingly, the FM receiver was the first to die.
07/13/09
07/13/09
If you look at old electronic equipment inside there is often schematics and diagrams listing part #s so they could be easily replaced.
Now, just about everything is engineered with the idea that if it breaks, the user will get a new one.
07/13/09
When you had a bad analog TV signal there might be some static, the screen didn't freeze or fill with artifacts. If I dropped a record I dusted it off and lived with a new *click* from a scratch, but when my iPod falls most of my music library disappears as the reader head snaps off and destroys the drive. If the VCR eats a tape you could often extract it and deal with a small glitch at that point from then on. If a DVD is scratched the movie freezes and you never see the rest of the movie.
Technology has done some great things but in terms of reality the world is about the same as it always has been.
07/13/09
How is a *click* equivalent to the loss of all data? Or some static equivalent to a frozen image? Those both seem like arguments in favor of the old - as in "Yes, things broke in the past too, but when they did it was in much smaller, more manageable ways. Now when things break, they completely break."
07/13/09
07/13/09
07/13/09
07/13/09
07/13/09
perfect excuse to shell out for the 3GS, no?
07/13/09
Also, I do not believe there is any such thing as rodents of unusual size
07/13/09
07/13/09
I have a Sony Quadrophonic LP/Stereo from the mid-70's that still works as well as it did when it was new. I've used it at every stage, as a record player to hooking my discman up to it, to hooking my iPod up to it now. The sound quality is still outstanding. Never been repaired never been fixed been used for over thirty years.
07/13/09
30 years ago if your car broke down or the arm on your record player broke or tube broke, etc. there was probably someone either in the house or at least the house next door that could put the pieces back together.
Once you had to start changing out tiny circuits or hooking things up to diagnostic machines or figuring out potential software bugs, the repairs got significantly more difficult, which made it cheaper/easier to replace. So even if it broke as often or more often, it seemed more reliable, because you could still use it for a much longer period of time.
07/13/09
Personally I feel that things are engineered to break at a certain point. They are designed with obsolescence in mind, and their overall manufacturing quality is reduced so that all parts wear out at approximately the same time.
It would do no good if the auto company kept building cars that had extremely sturdy frames, and you could just drop a more efficient/replacement engine in at will 4 years later.
It's one of the reasons GM didn't budge off of the 3800 V6 they had lying around forever. The damn thing was damn near bulletproof for them.
07/13/09
Build quality is rather good now, though. Have a first gen iPhone and it has survived some rather intense drops. Just a few corner dents on the rear metal casing, that's all. A great piece of industrial design.
07/13/09
07/13/09
The flip is that supposedly there is a built in failure rates with many items any more, making you essentially throw it away and start over.
07/13/09
Not to mention I don't have to wait weeks for special boards/chips to show up. It used to be they'd just Desolder transistor, replace, and go.
I've been experiencing a lot of this with my Wife's pinball machine. The amount of soldering, desoldering, testing, and tweaking takes me back to my college days of maintaining vacuum tensioned reel-to-reel units of old.
Pretty much all it needs is a new clock board (old boards have design flaw that new single board model fixes) and probably a re-build on the power board before it's 100%