As I stated in this post I sometimes measure time in laptops. Actually, to be even more general about it, it could be any durable good, iPads, TVs, cars, etc.

Some examples:

That one MacBook Pro I had, the first model that was laser cut out of a solid block of aluminum, that was 3 laptops ago.

My daughter’s first iPad, the one where she broke the screen and cried about it for 2 days straight, that was 2 iPads ago

The maroon Monte Carlo I drove, my first brand new car, that was 4 cars ago.

I’m not sure if I am the only one who thinks in these terms, but I like to think that there are indeed others who do.

But what got me thinking about this topic the other day was how, at least anecdotally, the “number of things ago”, whatever that thing is, seems to be accelerating.

It used to be I would be able to squeeze 7 or 8 years out of a laptop, but these days I’m lucky to get 6. I will admit the last years of a laptop’s life are difficult to deal with, kind of like an incontinent elderly friend or relative with dementia.

Cars are the same way. I like to stick with a car for at least 10 years. This is because after that the reliability and maintenance costs, in my experience, outweigh the hassle which is car shopping. But recently, things start going south with my family’s automobiles much sooner.

I do have one exception to the car turnover, which was a Ford Explorer. It was originally my wife’s, and I took it over after the obligatory 10 years. That car lasted another 7 years. I will admit that I should have put it to pasture long before I actually did, but I kinda liked having a beater car that I really didn’t care if it got dinged or scratched, or what kind of mess my kids made in it. It actually reminded me of my very first car, a used Mitsubishi that I bought for $800. I beat the crap out of that poor thing.

But back to laptops and other electronic durable goods. Aside from the occasional accidental damage that renders one of these modern marvels of technology useless, the time delta between them seems to be shrinking.

For example:

  • A Pentium class Gateway 2000 1 desktop computer, 9 years
  • An IBM ThinkPad 2, 9 years
  • A late 2008 MacBook Pro, 8 years
  • A late 2016 MacBook Pro 3, 6 years
  • Two 21.5” iMac desktops 4 years (each)

The Gateway, the ThinkPad, and the first MacBook Pro (2008) were still operational at the time of their replacement, but well past their useful life. The rest (the 2016 MacBook Pro, and the two iMacs all had some hardware failure or another, and the cost to repair them was not worth the expense.

To be perfectly clear, I am not an advocate of the “planned obsolesce” theory. Rather, it just occurred to me that the lifespan of my laptops has been shrinking when I had to replace the 2016 MacBook Pro recently.

Have you noticed this phenomenon as well?

Thanks for visiting.

  1. Do you remember those cow boxes they shipped in? ↩

  2. This was before Lenovo bought the brand. This was running Linux of course. ↩

  3. This was the one I had to recently replace, prompting this article. ↩