Planned Obselescence....A Good Thing?
Jeff Jonas wrote:
Companies are setting up the situation that you are forced to buy
new versus repair the used applicance ...
Only partly true. Do you want to keep your computer forever? Do
you think you'd be on line here if you still had that 286 processor?
That's opening up a can of worms:
some PCs were upgradeable, with socketed CPUs and even
daughterboards for the CPU, but with raised expectations of our
computers
and evolving motherboard chipsets and faster peripherals,
it's really hard to truly salvage much from a PC
other than disks and some peripherals.
BUT: some specialized applications require the "legacy" interfaces
that are being phased out, such as custom interface cards with the
ISA interface, or RS232 serial interfaced peripherals.
There are often items that have no equivalent in current production
so you can't just buy the PCI or USB version.
I still have some Z80 based single board computers
because they're now "old enough" to become embedded systems.
Many '486 systems /could be used again/ if anyone gave a damn
to find lightweight (NON-M$) operating systems to make them
dedicated devices, such as a digital answering machine, print server, etc.
And anyone with a clue just buys a dedicated hardware router etc.
|