Yeah. I guess my background makes me a little naive when it comes to these things. A few decades working as a systems engineer and having to do systems reliability calculations, including a spot of mathematical model development in the area, gives a guy some strange notions.
You probably need to get out more. There used to be a time when 1 TV, 1 (landline) phone, and 1 car was the norm (for the relatively affluent). Now? Even the dog has probably got its own TV and beer fridge. "Can I borrow your phone? Mine's out of battery".
.
Redundancy occurs where it's
needed. Eg, domestic mobile phone, GPS, and wifi networks usually have signal redundancy built into them (
whether it be multiple nodes and/or frequency-band switching).
Which should please MrBane immensely as, all things being equal, it removes failure points
"Part" is such an inclusive word. It covers everything from that bulky 10 ohm, kiloamp resistor (
used as a voltage dropper on greatgrandad's thermionic valve power amp for his turntable) to the 3 GHz, 16 GiB RAM, octa-core, microcontroller unit with 32 programmable, interruptable, multipurpose, tristate (digital/ADC/DAC/PWM/I2C/SPI/CANBUS/UNAMEIT) I/O pins, Improved reliability was
one of the major drivers for moving from analogue to digital circuitry.
I have to confess that I've got quite a few bits of Chinese and Malay kit hanging around that are probably a couple of decades old. I've also been cheerfully surprised at how good some of the dirt-cheap Banggod/Alibaba electronics stuff is.
Reliability and high integrity cost less with time as economy of scale kicks in and consumers get more screechy.
People make the same kind of cost-benefit analyses they've probably always done, and will certainly vote with their wallets where reliability is concerned. Anybody here remember a thing called the British domestic consumer electronic industry?
There was a time when it behoved a man to learn to fix a car and wield a soldering iron. Neither are deemed generally-useful skills today. Sure, there are a fair number of even young people who have decent mechanical and electrical/electronic knowledge, but they have these skills for either jobs or hobbies.
The *average* car owner doesn't remember the days when you'd hear folk saying "I've had this car from new and it hasn't let me down once since I drove out of the showroom last week.". My wife's Fiat hasn't needed anything beyond the trivial and consumables doing to it in over 11 years. Modern engines easily run up mileage that was almost the sole preserve of Volvos when I was a kid. What percentage of people get the new, swizzy SamGoogApple phone because their old one broke, rather than because "Ooh! Shiny! Look at the specs, street cred and conspicuous consumption on that!"? (
Having said that, I generally don't get new a new phone/PC until the old one runs out of capability)
That isn't to say that you don't get what you pay for, but you get a lot more for your money than you used to.
OTOH, I am well aware that, particularly at the low end of the price scale, the final stage of product test and inspection is consumer purchase - it's cheaper overall to give the few who moan a new one. Many examples of cheap (
for values of cheap) binoculars and monoculars are damn near useless, even if you get one that is correctly assembled, aligned, collimated, etc.
And, oddly, I seem to recall John Glenn surviving into ripe old age. Of course, not all his colleagues were that lucky but now we're largely into a different discussion about human behavioural failures.
[I joke with my children about the days of 1200 kps modems, 16KB RAM packs, and 75 baud teletypes. However, often forgotten is that our PCs couldn't easily handle kilobytes or megabytes, let alone, gigabytes, of data, and many used text interfaces with character-based block graphics - VGA was cutting edge.
Sure I cringe now, but I didn't then coz we didn't have anything better. I also cringe at what people used to think constituted "fast" or "good handling" in cars]
[Security was almost non-existent and far too easily compromised back in the day. Almost the first thing I did on any new system was hack myself into administrator/root/superuser/whatever status. And it was usually very difficult to boot me off a system without a fresh system reload. Fortunately, I outgrew such childish amusements at about the same time people started to penalize such things rather than just rolling their eyes (
if they even noticed, which they usually didn't unless I telegraphed it)]
