Stuff that lasts vs disposable junk

Most modern electronics have been using lead-free solder for the past few years (to allow them to be sold in Europe and California). From my experience in manufacturing, I'd say that the long-term reliability of lead-free solders is still rather poor. I don't have much confidence that electronic devices made after about 2005 will last 25 years. Maybe in a few years time, the reliability of lead-free soldering will return to the levels of lead based solders just before RoHS came out. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substa...</a><p>When circuit boards heat up and cool down, they expand and contract. Ideally, a designer tries to match the coefficients (as much as is practical) so that all the components expand and contract at similar rates. Because they don't, the solder joints get stressed, and over time can become brittle and fracture. Then, they'll be intermittant connections that, depending on where they are located, may or may not cause intermittant operation, or a computer that shuts off/reboots when it is hot. A motherboard has on the order of 10^5 solder joints.<p>Because of the speed of changing products, and the ease of doing so, and the very thin margins for distribution, there is no money left in the system to make repairing computers affordable or profitable. It has been cheaper for more than the last decade to discard computers than to repair them. And to change that would mean severely restricting models of computers and the parts that go in them.<p>I used to work in the automotive industry, and keeping parts on the shelf to repair 10-15 year old products was rather common.

Disposable doesn't necessarily equal junk. In some situations it may be better to design things not to last. Perhaps not even to be physical-- to be a service. If you want a computer that's useful 25 years from now, your best bet is probably to sign up for AWS.

I still have the first computer I bought: an Apple ][+. I haven't booted it up in over fifteen years. If it still works it could be useful for some things, but without a TCP/IP stack, it can never connect to the Internet or even a LAN which severely limits its usefulness to me. Even if hardware lasts 25 years, who can say what the needs of the user will be in that time and whether the hardware will support the software needed to support those needs?<p>For simpler tools, such as knives, hammers and wrenches, I always buy top quality and have many hand tools that are more than a quarter century old and in perfect working condition. Some of the hand tools I have were my grandfather's first, then my father's before coming to me.

It depends on what you mean by "computer". A lot of the older calculators still work. I think many portable TRS-80's still work?<p>VIC-20, C64... the display is the weakest point. The above devices use VFDs or 7-segment LCDs.<p>RS-232-level 7&#38;8-bit ASCII serial communications are probably the lingua franca of computers and will continue to be, so if your devices can send text across the serial port you should be able to find devices far into the future to communicate with your old computer.

the 25-year-old computers that are still actively being used nowadays are the ruggedized ones that aren't affected by things like radiation and the more extreme temperatures.<p>the disposability of the modern computer tends to be a byproduct of how fast the industry and technology moves.

Surely there will be a distro of Linux or FreeBSD distributed 25 years from now that can be run on the hardware of today. So you'll still be able to browse Wikipedia, though perhaps not in full 4D VR. Obsolete is relative.