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by lotrjohn 212 days ago
Completely anecdotal, and mostly unrelated, but my NES from 1990 is still going strong. Two PS3’s that I have owned simply broke.

CRTs from 1994 and 2002 still going strong. LCD tvs from 2012 and 2022 just went kaput for no reason.

Old hardware rocks.

4 comments

LCD tvs from 2012 and 2022 just went kaput for no reason.

Most likely bad capacitors. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague may have passed, but electrolytic capacitors are still the major life-limiting component in electronics.

MLCC's look ready to take over nearly all uses of electrolytics.

They still degrade with time, but in a very predictable way.

That makes it possible to build a version of your design with all capacitors '50 year aged' and check it still works.

Sadly no engineering firm I know does this, despite it being very cheap and easy to do.

Looks like that plague stopped in 2007? I have a 8 year old LCD that died out of nowhere as well, So I'm guessing wouldn't be affected by this. Could still be a capacitor issue though
Specifically old Japanese hardware from the 80s and 90s - this stuff is bulletproof
I still have a Marantz amp from the 80's that works like new, it hasn't even been recapped.
For what it's worth my LCD monitor from 2010 is doing well. I think the power supplied died at one point but I already had a laptop supply to replace it with.
I had an LCD that worked from around 2005 to 2022. It became very yellow closer to 2022 for some reason. It was Samsung PVA, I think it was model 910T.
Its old enough to use a CFL backlight and those turn yellow with age.
Thanks ;)