In Many Cases and in Many Different Ways, Technology Became Less Durable and Less Reliable Over Time
The average "new" (modern, "smart") car is an expensive ordeal to keep servicing for over a decade and almost impossible to keep on the road for 2-3 decades
How old is that microwave oven or stereo system in your parents' or grandparents' home? How long have those 'dumb' oximeters or mechanical (and manual) blood pressure monitors lasted? 50 years? Possibly.
The "modern" things are more complex. And complexity is a foe or reliability and repair-ability.
In software design, we've long had the same problem. More layers are more things that can go wrong (break down, became unsupported and so on).
How well and how long will tape storage last? Depending on the need for accuracy (e.g. with music some distortions here and there are OK, it's not compressed or encrypted), they can work alright for a lot longer than the "modern" things.
Magnetic tape storage, for instance, is proven to have a lifespan of over thirty years in most cases (depending on the conditions of storage or wear and tear due to excessive use). SSDs and HDDs typically have lifespans of 5-10 years. What's more, due to various complications with "moving parts" (which in the case of tapes are in the player, not the storage medium), there's risk of complete failure, set aside CRCs and all sorts of "clever" ways of storing more on less. Recovering data from "raw plates" in "spinning rust" would be an expensive nightmare that only state actors would ever bother with. It's forensics.
Why can't things remain simple where simple makes perfect sense? Why is the media shaming us into buying things far more complicated than they need to be? And then buying them again a few years later because repair is either impossible or a lot more expensive than "buying another one"?
Not everything that is new (or "modern") is better. We wrote about this two months ago. Dr. Andy Farnell wrote a few weeks later: "Mechanical tills, which evolved into electronic tills, offer a receptacle for storing and ordering cash money, a ledger, receipt printer, typewriter keyboard of sorts with shortcuts for common items or operations. Sometimes there are peripherals like scanners, scales, staff keys, card readers, PIN keypads, security-tag deactivation… all part of over-complicating a simple timeless act of buying and selling and contriving functions incidental to core tasks that a human can do in less time. [...] But something has gone badly, horribly wrong with POS tech. Today it is common to see a huge queue of frustrated customers and a group of confused teen or 20-something staff standing around the POS, excitedly arguing about its video-game-like functions."
Such a POS is basically a POS (not the same acronym) and would only last a few years. It'll constantly need to be "updated" too, so full running costs by far exceed that of acquisition. █
