[Fwirt]

I realize the purpose of the essay, and I agree with the author's sentiment that our possessions ask more of us than is necessary, and more than ever before. But I disagree that any object is finished. That Casio that the author mentions, yes it goes 7 years without a battery change, but the day the battery dies will be the day that you have to buy a new battery, figure out how to open it, and change it. Or (as many people will unfortunately do) throw it away and buy a new one because it's beat up now anyway.

Tools dull, and people neglect to sharpen them. Filters clog, and people neglect to clean them. Oil needs to be changed, guitar strings lose their brightness, lightbulbs flicker and die, rooftops gather moss. We live in a world where our possessions require maintenance, and the only solution to that is to have fewer possessions. Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)

The iPhone that the author mentions gives many tools to silence notifications from apps. The real problem is the social expectation that we are always paying attention, always ready to respond. I had a phone free week last year and now frequently will leave my phone in another room on silent for hours at a time unintentionally. It irritates my friends and my wife when I don't respond to their texts immediately. And it's frustrating that these features are being foisted on us more and more. But ultimately all things require maintenance, including relationships, and ultimately we set the standard of how much we have to give and are willing to put up with.

As far as the watch goes, personally I wear a Casio Tough Solar w/ Waveceptor because in theory they should go decades without needing a battery change or needing me to set the time, unless I travel. The WVA-M640 is reasonably stylish, and G-Shocks are virtually indestructible. As long as they keep changing the rules there's no escaping daylight saving time though.

[greedo]

My dad once told me that just because he had a phone (landline), that he was under no obligation to answer it. I thought it was funny at the time but I wish he was still around for me to tell him he was right.

When iPhones became common, my ex-wife would get upset when I wouldn't reply to a text message. Sometimes I was busy and missed the notification, or couldn't answer (like in a meeting, driving, etc). Or I knew that the message would be better answered in person.

The social expectations part is hard to overcome. Societal contracts, whether implicit or explicit are very hard to ignore.

[TacticalCoder]

Common... I've got tools I "inherited" from my grandpa that are still fine (brothers and I basically inherited the house and the tools where in the shed and whenever I go there on vacation, I use those tools to fix the house). I've got a screwdriver which I definitely remember using as a teenager, in the late 80s (and which I used for a variety of DIY jobs ever since) to assemble the trucks on my skateboards. And that screwdriver is a prized possession of mine: it's got a story. Hammers, saws, stainless steel scissors, hoses (to water the plants), multi-tool tools (don't know if they're stainless steel but they still look good), etc. Plenty of stuff still totally usable decades later.

You cannot compare tools that can outlast humans (like my grandpa and now myself) with an Apple watch that's going to be junk in a few years at most.

Even for oil that needs changing, things that needs lubricating once every blue moon (like, say, a mechanical watch): it's quite different to drop a tiny bit of lubricant inside a mechanical watch that's already 30 years old compared to having to update the firmware of whatever Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing gizmo that's going to be a thing of the past in a few years.

And if you really let a nice mechanical watch idle for decades, at least someone can do this:

"Restoring a Vintage Rolex Submariner with the Original Box, Paperwork... Even the Receipt!"

https://youtu.be/WsImSuG-dLY

While I'm really not sure there are going to be people out there keeping a connected wristwatch from 2026 going in the year 2066 (not sure about the value of that either).

[greedo]

When The Force Awakens, I spent $99 on a toy version of BB8 that you could control from your iPhone. It was a cool toy. Then after a while the app was no longer supported... Sad times.

I also owned every iPhone from the first through iPhone 7 and kept each as I replaced the old one. After a while, none were usable due to changes in cellphone tech. And I realized keeping LiO batteries around was a huge fire hazard...

[duggable]

If it’s the same BB8 I had, there was a repo on GitHub that allowed you to control it from your computer via Bluetooth. Might be worth looking around if you want to bring it back to life

[rendx]

> Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)

Is it? My understanding is that strictly return-wise, index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries, especially if you factor in all the maintenance cost and risks. Some countries have pretty good tenant protection, which is another big factor in practice.

Separately: Personally, I've really enjoyed and benefitted from not having to deal with the complexities of ownership, and it is well worth it in my own time/money/hassle/annoyance calculation. My own time is the single most valuable asset I have; one could say: it is ultimately the only real asset I have. Everything else merely translates to that.

[bombcar]

The rent vs own argument is a detailed and deep one, and anyone who comes down 100% on "one answer" (even things like "house hacking") is likely missing something.

Index funds are almost always better than house appreciation over long periods of time; if you discount leverage - because it's "normal" to be leveraged 80% on a house, but you can't margin your index funds that high, and the government doesn't protect you from gambler's ruin on margin.

Owning usually tends to win out the longer you want (or have) to remain in the same location and same house, renting tends to win if you move relatively often (location or changing home type/size, etc) or if you're in a rental inversion (which much of the coasts are in).

At the extremes nobody suggests you should buy a house instead of renting a hotel room or AirBNB in a city you're visiting.

And it's not strictly a financial decision; it's also a personal one and people may choose the "financially non-optimal" because of other reasons.

[pjc50]

This really depends 100% on how good your landlord is, over and above the tenancy protection you mention.

> index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries

It's much easier to borrow £200k to buy a house than to buy stocks, and then you don't have to pay CGT on it. Housing is the only asset the general public can leverage gains on.

[throwaway27448]

Land is not an investment (at least, not without explicitly improving the land). Buildings depreciate. If land (or the buildings on the land) are returning anything close to an index investment, an economy is seriously sick.

Edit: yes, you can rent the property out—but, societally, that's just shunting the problem down the road.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> As long as they keep changing the rules there's no escaping daylight saving time though.

I have a couple of Oceanus (fancy Casio) watches that adapt fine, to whatever DST is. Not sure how they would do in Arizona, though.

I also have a Junghans (more expensive), and it’s stuck in old DST.

I don’t wear any of them. My Apple Watch (cheaper than the others) does fine. It has a GPS-informed time setting. I don’t really use it for a lot of its fancier features, but I like that it allows me to keep my phone on silent.

I am “in the middle.” I don’t pine for “the good ol’ days,” but I also don’t get all hung up on futurism.

WFM. YMMV.

[mhandley]

Agree about the watch - I wear a Casio LCW-M100TSE, which is also very robust (titanium case, saphire glass), never needs the battery changing and never needs setting (except for travel). But most importantly, it does what it does really well and never bugs me about anything. Downtime is important.

[cam_l]

Agree, and funny also that the author shows the F91W.

It has a thriving hacker community built around it. You can get a new arm motherboard with a breakout for a sensor board. Sensorwatch have released a temperature sensor and an accelerometer.

Plus it is loud! But there is another mod I saw to make it quieter.

[mememememememo]

Oh come on. 7 years change a battery. That is low maintenance. There is no gotcha. It is damn near zero.

Infact if you hate it, buy a new casio every 4 weeks... it is cheaper than Apple Care.

[Fwirt]

My point was that when it does go, it will go with no warning, and there is a non-zero cost to replacing it. Cheap, easy, yes, but nothing lasts forever.

[pimlottc]

I agree, I think the idea of products being done is a temporary illusion. Older analog technology needed a lot more maintenance over time. I doubt someone in the 1970s would agree with this; most things then needed to be regularly mended, fixed, tuned, serviced, repaired, refilled, what have you.

It’s only in the last few decades that materials and manufacturing have gotten good enough that you can expect gadgets to “just work” without regular maintenance. And we’ve also had products cheap enough that people normally throw them out rather than maintaining them.

[greedo]

I don't agree. Older tech was simpler, and often more reliable. They didn't depend on being able to connect to a networked time clock for sync, didn't need networking period. Today's systems are inherently fragile.

I grew up in the 70's. About the only thing I would say is less fragile are cars. Today's cars are just better in so many ways but are unmaintainable by the average user.

And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how. But that's changing as self-repair movements have taught millions. For example, the Kitchen Aid mixer. The original, built by Hobart and acquired by KitchenAid was a tank. However it had a sacrificial gear and people said that was a flaw because they didn't understand the purpose of sheer pins or sacrificial gears. Now it's pretty well understood thanks to YouTubers like Mr. Mixer that repairing these is easy peezy.

[robinsonb5]

> And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how.

Part of it is the materials used now, though - many things get thrown out because the plastic bodyshell got old and brittle, and broke. (Plastic is particularly difficult to repair because the break usually presents very little surface area for glueing.)

[pimlottc]

I think I was unclear. I’m not saying now is better. What I meant is there was a short period, perhaps late 90s to early 2010s, when electronic devices became sophisticated and reliable enough to “just work” in perpetuity, but before everything was internet connected and subscription-based.

Cars are perhaps the best example. Before this that time, you’d expect to do much more maintenance and you’d be impressed to get 100k miles out of it. Now it’s not unusual to get to 200k miles or more, but increasingly you have to deal with firmware upgrades and pay a monthly fee for advanced features.

Aside from this brief period, devices either required more maintenance and replacement (pre-90s) or updates and subscriptions (now).

[greedo]

Can you provide some examples from this time period? I'm having trouble squaring your statement with things like the Red Ring of Death with the X-Box etc.

[bombcar]

Cars are actually surprisingly maintainable by an "average" user - if you maintain them the same way the repair shops do - replacing parts.

What old cars had was the ability to fix things without replacing parts - but most of those kinds of repairs (think: adjusting points, etc) are no longer necessary at all.

A modern car tells you what is wrong (usually) and you can have an auto parts store read the codes, search YouTube for a video on it, and order parts and replace it yourself.

You need to go back pretty far to find vehicles that can be repaired by the side of the road in Outer Mongolia with nothing but a hammer and a bag of random pieces of metal (iirc, this was in the extended features of Planet Earth, maybe the Snow Leopard episode - sadly, not about macOS at all ;).

[Fwirt]

Yes and no - while it's still simple enough to replace parts in some cases, and said parts are usually easy enough to track down, manufacturers are starting to go the Apple route and lock the ECU to a given part, or require what boils down to a very expensive dongle to perform even simple maintenance procedures. Some of this is due to an actual need to recalibrate the vehicle due to minute differences in performance between parts, other cases are clearly laziness or malice.

For example, some modern Hyundai models require a very expensive ECU reprogramming tool to... release the electronic parking brake. So that you can change brake pads, a job that is normally well within the reach of anyone willing to get their hands dirty. I've seen suburban moms be shocked by how simple it is. And yet some vehicles now require a service at the dealership to change brake pads because they are the only ones who can command a parking brake unlock. What was wrong with the old pull handle or floor pedal parking brakes?

You can't tell me that all the features of an ECU reader couldn't be programmed into a modern head unit. The stereo is already on the CAN bus, why doesn't the stereo just pop up an alert that says e.g. "VSS Malfunction", "Oxygen Sensor Malfunction" instead of the cryptic check engine light requiring a special tool? Why don't our vehicles have a "maintenance mode" built into the head unit that can clear codes and recalibrate injector timings?

Even on early 2000s vehicles, there were usually procedures to do things like reprogramming key fobs by doing arcane things like cycling the key in the ignition 5 times while holding the brake pedal down. Old PCs had beep codes or blinkenlichten to tell you what the problem was when they couldn't POST, the only reason modern vehicles can't do the same is that automakers are looking for new revenue streams amid shrinking margins.

And this is aside from the fact that we have optimized for ease of construction rather than ease of repair, I saw a picture from a mechanic friend who works at a dealership recently, to replace a camshaft actuator on a modern Ford Bronco they had to lift the entire cab off the chassis. While I have seen home mechanics lift a cab a foot or two to access a part, it's well outside the ability of the average person to crane one of the heaviest parts of their vehicle several feet in the air.

[supliminal]

> That Casio that the author mentions

At the risk of sounding snide, thank you for mentioning this. I am going to skip this article, so you probably saved me a bunch of time.