don't fix, throw away - Re: Computing the old way - Is it a thing of the past?

On Apr 16, 2013, at 1:27 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: We have them in Philadelphia, too. It can get hard to justify when it costs more to repair/resole a shoe than to buy a new pair, but my wife is an opera performer, so sometimes it's important enough to repair a pair that looks good. Appliances are my big beef. I have a coffee maker with the grinder built in that I REALLY like. Somehow, the bottom part got colonized by roaches (which, fortunately, don't seem to have taken root anywhere else in the house), so I thoroughly flushed it out with soap and water and let it dry for about a month. Everything works EXCEPT the transistor that switches the relay that turns on the heater, which makes it pretty useless as a coffee maker. Taking the thing apart was totally impossible without marring the appearance, and some parts are nearly impossible to put back together; the low-voltage PSU for the microcontroller and the relay were all sealed in a caulked-up box at the bottom that was impossible to remove. I still think I can fix it, since I've identified the bad transistor, but if it weren't a $200 coffee maker, I don't think I'd have considered it worth the effort. Things just aren't made to be fixed anymore; you can't buy replacement PSU or controller boards, so if the microcontroller had died, there'd be basically no hope. As a side note, we've been getting along fine with a separate grinder and a Farberware percolator whose design hasn't been changed since at least the '60s with the exception of using an IEC receptacle for the power cord. So there's that. My in-laws still use theirs from the '60s, so I'm reasonably confident that it should last.

- Dave