But let's ask the list: is there anybody else out
there or that you
know who buys a product only if it has repair documentation
available?
I don't carry it to quite the absolute pitch this statement does, but
certainly decent repair potential is a positive factor when I buy
something. (For electronics, this typically means docs.)
And as a corollary, do you only buy products you want
to run 20
years?
Again, I don't take it to this absolute a pitch, but I do prefer things
which I expect to last. As a non-computer example, I will cheerfully
spend $50 for a kitchen knife I expect to outlive me instead of $5 for
one I expect to need to replace after one (frustrating) year. As a
computer example, I use Suns instead of peecees for most of my house
computers, even though they're significantly slower, simply because my
peecees have accounted for a fraction of my failures out of all
proportion to their fraction of my uptime hours.
Or can you accept a product as being expendable?
Depends on the part. Some things I think of as consumables - mostly
things even Tony thinks of as consumables, I suspect (I'm talking
things like toner cartridges), but not entirely (eg, peecee keyboards).
How long should a computer part last?
Should? Ideally, until it suffers catastrohpic physical damage (like a
chip getting its die cracked across by something heavy falling on it)
or gross electrical excess (like feeding mains voltage to a TTL input).
I don't really expect that from most hardware. But there sure are some
that seem to come close. I've got a Sun-3/60 that's being a real
Timex, for example.
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