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Finally cracked open that old Palm Pilot I had in a drawer for 6 years
I dug out my Palm Pilot V from 2001 last weekend and charged it up, totally expecting the screen to be dead or the battery to explode. Turns out it still synced with my laptop after I found a serial-to-USB adapter, and all my old contacts from college are still on there. Anyone else have an old gadget that just refused to die no matter how long it sat?
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the_joel17d ago
Honestly, my old iPod classic from 2005 is sitting in a box in my garage right now. I haven't plugged it in since like 2013, but I bet if I did, it would still have all my 128 kbps rips of Green Day and Linkin Park albums from high school. What gets me is that these older gadgets had actual replaceable batteries and hard drives, not glued-together proprietary garbage. If a modern iPhone sat for 6 years, the battery would puff up like a balloon and the logic board would probably corrode from humidity. So yeah, your Palm Pilot is a survivor but it's also from a time when companies didn't actively plan for your stuff to break.
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hernandez.jordan17d ago
Oh man, that's such a good point. I mean, it's wild to think about how much the whole "planned obsolescence" thing has taken over since then. My old iPod nano from like 2007 is still kicking around somewhere and I bet it works fine, but I've had two iPhone batteries swell up on me after just a couple years. It's like they're not even trying to make stuff that lasts anymore. Maybe it's just me but I'd take a chunky, plastic gadget I could actually swap a battery in over a thin glass sandwich any day.
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