To join the usual choir, I have a pretty early machine and mine is still trouble-free coming up on 6 years. In that time, I have barely even cleaned it.
That said, as one of the folks who has apparently spent over 2,000 days on this forum, I do wonder why we haven’t seen a more dramatic redesign of the hardware. I’ve never worked in product design, but I imagined that after a couple of years you’d take a look at the spreadsheet where you’re tracking all of the issues that customers have encountered, sort by most frequent, and start making some changes. Maybe there are more things than are visible externally, but I can only think of the slightly longer ribbon cable and the exhaust fan grill change, apart from minor cosmetics.
I ponder what it would be like to have a machine that is designed from the ground up for ease of troubleshooting and repair. I would think that’d be a win all around, considering what it must cost in warranty replacements for minor problems, and even for those where the customer has to pay, logistics is not free. I know there’s a tradeoff and making things modular increases expense and in some ways decreases reliability, but for example in a device where the primary thing it does is a tube that will eventually wear out, it is a crying shame that there’s literally no way to replace that part in the field. I dread that day, because I probably can’t justify the cost of a replacement. I know the past few years have been rough on the economics of consumer electronics, but I expected the cost to come down over time. I’m easily sold on “the all new 2.0”, but it’s hard to re-buy the same machine 6 years later for twice the price.
.
