They Don’t Make Things Like They Used To...

            They don’t make things like they used to; or least I don’t think they do. We have all heard the stories of how our parents and grandparents didn’t go buy new electronics every two years or so; they were built to last and they had them for what they described as decades. When something broke, they fixed it. That does not always seem to be the case nowadays.

            I have an old cassette player that I found in the trash that works perfectly, and yet my audio interface that is barely two years old has a broken input. When my grandparents moved into my parent’s house when I was younger, they brought a record player that my mom used when she was little that just kept spinning and spinning. Then tell me why my Korg synthesizer that is 3 years old has problems with the 5-pin MIDI connections (No, really, tell me, because I tried updating the firmware and it’s still driving me crazy).

           

            The only answer I have is that they don’t make things like they used to. Electronics today are built to be cheap, and are built to quickly replace its predecessor that came out only a year prior. On top of that, most of the electronic components that are used today are so small that machines have to do the soldering, and people are only used for quality control.

           

            There was a certain ruggedness to old electronics. They were big, solid, and they could take a spill; good luck dropping your phone or computer today, chances are you will be buying a new one. Robert Moog, to prove the ruggedness of his early synthesizers, used to plug the synthesizers in, play a few notes, and then push them off the table onto the ground. Moog would go pick the synthesizer up, plug everything back in, and then continue to play like nothing ever happened. Customers loved that demonstration; not only was he demoing the products features, but the durability of it as well.

            Today, we don’t expect our electronics to survive the fall, we don’t expect them to survive longer then a few years, and even if they do survive we buy the new version because the old one is out of date and holds us back. Electronics failing is the nature of the beast, but it seems like the beast has a shorter lifespan and quicker temper these days. I guess that’s just the way it is. But does it need to be that way?

If we dust it off maybe it'll still work.

...My mistake in "Player Piano" was my failure as a futurist. I did not foresee transistors, and so imagined that super computers would have to be huge, with bulky vacuum tubes taking up a lot of space. -Kurt Vonnegut in "Letters"