Longevity of tech equipment
This post is inspired by my NAS HDD that has just spun its last spin. After 9.5y of 24/7 Service, the WD Red 4TB is off to the graveyard. It was clicking and whirring, the temperature 21c higher than the other three it shared a chassis with. It's done well, now rest in peace.
Then I looked at the 11yr old MacBook sitting underneath my 6yr old Lenovo laptop. Hmm, also aged but still working. A little bit of OpenCore Legacy Patcher and it's still grinding for test work, albeit a little slow even with a SSD. Then my home built PC running Debian. It is a 2018 built with a MSI motherboard and AM4 socket. The CPU was upgraded 6 months ago for the last time. No other changes though and it's still wicked fast. This box also runs a VM with all my sea sailing, Jellyfin, encodes all my media to AV1, and is also my daily driver. It's a wonderful box.
Hardware lasts a long time now in our world. There's no need for a 2 year bin off of phones, or a 3 year PC cycle that Dell would have believe. In heavy business, I understand the need for faster machines for business software, but for the average Joe, it's really not.
Anyway, what are your tech aged devices you still use, and why haven't you updated them?
I used to work in electronics recycling. I did a variety of things, but my last job in the industry was stress testing PC components for resale. I was neck deep in CPUs and DIMMs and laptop and desktop motherboards all day long, and I came away from it with a healthy respect for the hardiness of components from the last decade when compared to those that came before.
For a time you could get excellent hardware for dirt cheap if you knew how to pick parts and throw it all together, but lately it seems like resellers have twigged that a lot of older hardware is still perfectly serviceable, and many components aren't depreciating as quickly as they once did.
Anyway, my oldest working machine now is a Dell Optiplex 790 with an i7-2700 and 16GB DDR3. I think the memory clocks at 1333MHz, but it's been a while since I've given a thought to it, so I might be misremembering. It's running an out-of-date but still supported version of Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop. I got the computer gratis for volunteering with a recycler, and I've only put maybe $150 into it in upgrades, not counting hand-me-down GPUs I've pulled from other machines when upgrading them.
It does everything I ask it to, which is admittedly not much. Mostly I use that machine for media storage and playback because I prefer multimedia to be sandboxed away from gaming, which i do on another machine.
Mostly I haven't done bothered to upgrade it because it still does everything I want it to. I may decide to figure another solution out for its role in the future, but money's tight right now, and there's nothing pressing me to take action. It just keeps chugging away.
You're speaking directly to me, in a time when I'm looking at all these devices worrying that they're doomed to fail.
My QNAP TS4-12 has been spinning away it's 4x1TB WD Reds for more than 11 years. I've been seriously considering its replacement these last few months, but what I'll probably do is setup a solution in parallel, and see how long it can go. Maybe in 10 more years the parallelized solution will fail, and it'll turn out that this one is in fact immotal.
My gaming/hobby PC is getting pretty long in the tooth these days. Originally built in 2011 using an Intel 2600k, two GTX 580s, a custom test-bench case (DangerDen if anyone remembers them) and massive custom watercooling loop. Over the years I've upgraded the SSD/HDD's many times and in 2018 I swapped the GTX 580 SLi setup for an 8GB RTX 2070 when 1.5GB of VRAM was no longer viable.
Thanks to an aggressive overclock, gaming at 1080p and not playing the latest AAA titles I've not really had a huge reason to upgrade. Remembering how quickly computers were considered obsolete in the 90's and early 00's I wanted to see if I could make this machine last a decade. Now that we're a few years beyond that there are some sentimental reasons partially responsible for holding me back from an upgrade. This machine and I have done so much work together, crunched countless numbers, made lots of art and it has been the main game server hub for my friends that I am finding it difficult to power it down and say goodbye.
Also with the cost of building a new, fancy computer right now replacing it is not feasible, unfortunately.
I have a Synology DS213 that's 12 years old and still getting OS and software updates. I did replace WD Red drives with HGST since I got part of a bad WD batch. But for spinning disks, the Synology NAS unit has been a monster of reliability. No bad updates, never a problem. Actually, it did throw fan warnings last year, but a gentle tap and it was fine again. It's gone through four moves, so the fact that it's still working is just bonus time.
I have a DS215 that I bought second hand a few years ago and it's still trucking. It's a little too underpowered to run more than a few apps, and it mostly serves as a dumping ground for important docs, backups, etc. But the thing is damn reliable.
My gaming/workstation PC's hardware slowly gets "retired" into my home server. In some cases that ends up being a little silly, like I had what would have counted as a high end gaming GPU a decade ago being used to render a text login console twice a year. I did eventually replace that with a new lower-midrange GPU, partly because of codec support and partly because the difference in power usage (especially idle power usage) meant breaking even in about 18 months.
Other than that, I replaced a bunch of old seagate hard drives after failure (avg lifespan a not very impressive 6 years), a bunch of fans (I'd guess a 20% failure rate over 5 years) and a corsair power supply that failed after 10 years, but the rest is still in operation.
Hardware is usually fine, problem is software long term support.
I still have a TiVo Premiere XL that has been running non-stop since 2010 (14 years now) recording TV shows. The original 1TB HDD in the TiVo was still going strong 2 years ago when I upgraded it to a new 8TB one which brings it up to almost 1300 hour HD recording capacity. The original fan is even still working, basically having been running 24/7 for 14 years now - I am quite impressed how well this thing has been designed and built. Spectrum is still letting me use a CableCARD, although they have long stopped issuing them to new customers - so now it's a race between either the TiVo kicking the bucket, or Spectrum finally shutting off the few remaining CableCARD customers they have at this point, it will be kind of a sad day for me either way.
I also have a collection of various 8-bit Atari home computers (earliest is from 1979, latest around 1990) most of which still work (I do have a lot of spares and spare parts which I accumulated back in the day to keep them going) - but those are mostly for nostalgia, I don't really use them as much anymore.