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by TacticalCoder 71 days ago
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).

1 comments

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...

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