Brittle Toshiba Laptops

You can't sneeze near my laptop without some plastic bit or other falling off of it from the strain. One port cover is gone, another is loose, half of the chrome-looking plastic panel cover is gone, the cap between the network port and modem port is gone, making it impossible to plug in a network cable, the 'j' key is gone, from when I dropped a CD case on the keyboard, the battery died about a week after the warranty was up, the CD burner doesn't burn CDs reliably anymore.. And now I think the antenna on my wireless card is broken. My connection range is now on the order of 3 metres instead of 30, and I had to move my base station into my room just to get any network connection at all. Not pleased.

If I get another laptop after this one it will be 1) an apple, and 2) treated like a Janga tower, in its own protected force field, to keep crap from falling off of it. Though from all accounts the Mac laptops don't have nearly the amount of flimsy plastic crap hanging off of them as the Tishiba ones do.

It seems the quality of the workmanship in each computer I've owned (or family have owned) has gotten steadily worse since out first one, an Apple IIGS, which is still almost certainly in working order up in an attic somewhere. All of the parts were still on it, the disk drives worked solidly, they keyboard had the best feel of any I've used. If I could find a keyboard with the same feel with a USB port I'd be all over it (the new Apple keyboards don't even come close, and they're among the best ones around). I've also liked the original IBM PC keyboards with individual springs in each key instead of the stupid membrane modern keyboards have.

After that we had two laptops, a 286 and then a 486 from Toshiba. The 286 still boots up, though the 3.5" disk drive is now a remarkably efficient disk-chewing machine, and the blue CGA display is very easy on the eyes. Then I got a Pentium 200MHz desktop, entering the era of generic plastic and metal cases, a marked difference from the sheer beauty of the Apple IIGS's hardware design, where each part was made specifically for that computer, and everything fit together perfectly and had a purpose. The PC case, by contrast, was just a box with stuff thrown inside it, off-the-shelf parts from different companies for each component. An economic reality of a device so complex that one company couldn't efficiently design and make each part, but a step back in quality nonetheless.

After that PC I got an HP Pavilion for a very very good price. But it had fewer PCI slots, a crappy software modem, sound card made of tissue paper, there were plastic bits on the case like a cover over the front ports which eventually came loose.

And now we have our laptop, which is a great machine at its core, a 15" nice bright screen, great speakers that crush any other laptop speakers, lots of ram.. but the little things just aren't there anymore. It simply doesn't feel tough the way old computers do.

I think it's the same thing that's been happening to electronics and applicances across the marketplace in the last two decades. My parents got a VCR in 1985 or so that still works. Today people expect to have their electronic toys break or become useless within a couple of years, even outside of the media format obsolescence cycle which is also speeding up.

Even dishwashers and fridges are getting flimsier these days, and people are being slowly aclimated to the notion that it's normal to replace everything you own every few years. It's the natural solution to the market saturation problem that caused the Great Depression. The manufacturing revolution after World War I meant that everyone who could afford one bought one of everything, and then stopped. Factory production topped out, and it took another war before there was enough work for factories to do.

So the solution to the problem of what happens when everyone buys a DVD player is to make them fall apart after two years. I would wonder if this is a concerted effort by all makers of such products to engineer obsolescence into their products, or if it's more a product of cheaper parts going into third-world factories to compete with other companies' prices.

Either way, I'm going to stop buying stuff. This is just ridiculous. (this is in addition to my previous vow to stop doing anything that results in a recurring bill.) I should become independent of the consumer debt spiral if I can keep it up.