[Laforet]

> everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.

That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center. My city runs a annual kerbside collection program for large appliances and furniture, and I distinctly remember metal scavengers cruising the street gutting old CRTs people have left out for the copper coils, leaving whatever remains to be collected as hazardous e-waste. Around the same time, my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".

In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.

[to11mtm]

> That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center.That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center.

Maybe I just grew up poorer than you but it took longer than that in my world.

> my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s

Yeah meanwhile some of us had to deal with a Zenith TV that would 'jump' with a PS1 and other consoles on the RF/AV output because 'lord knows why'.

> and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".

Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.

Resourceful not-well-off people used to really appreciate repairable things, and the worst thing C4C did was get rid of a lot of not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.

The video of that TV and the pair further underscores it. Everything on decently laid out boards. Nowadays an LCD tv, sometimes a part can go bad and it's so integrated that even 15 years ago it could be a 30 min solder job, nowadays it's cuck the whole shebang.

> In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.

Corporate maybe but I'd guess any smart corporation would try to load the 'disposal' costs of a 440 pound object onto the taker somehow. Similar for any rich household that wanted to keep wealth for more than a generation or two.

[Laforet]

> Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.

Let me assure you that none of what I said was meant to diminish your point of view which I agree with mostly.

What I was trying to convey was that people’s mindsets were rather different during the last decade of CRT. CRT had been around since the end of WWII, it may have gotten bigger over the years but the form it took on largely remained the same so there was a sense of continuity as people handed down old TVs when they got something nicer.

When cheap LCD TVs came to the market it represented something more akin to a paradigm shift as people with limited space at home could now easily own screens 30 inches and up. My parents are actually rather frugal with my dad borders on being a tech hoarder who insist on keeping every single cell phone and laptop he ever owned somewhere in his garage. However even he was unable to justify the sheer bulk and running cost of CRT TVs back in that period. Even if he were to give it away there would have been very few takers of any.

Therefore it’s not inconceivable that this model could have been sold in the US or even few more places outside Japan. Most of them simply disappeared without a trace because at some point they were probably worth less than the space it occupies, and people were overly eager to embrace the flat panels without realising that they are not getting some of the utilities back.

[c22]

I keep all my old cell phones too, but I had to get rid of a run of them from around 1998 - 2008 because the plastic started turning sticky a while back.

[Retric]

> not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.

You don’t need to drive that much for fuel inefficiency to get really expensive. Even 10k miles/year which is well below average at 10MPH vs 30MPH @ 3$ / gallon is an extra 2,000$ / year, and adjusted for inflation gas is currently fairly cheap. Inflation adjusted in 2011 and 2012 gas was over 5$/gallon.

We might see consistent low gas prices intended to delay the EV transition (or the could spike), but these cars were already old 15 years ago when the program happened.