Late electronics
The scroll wheel on my mouse stopped working. I've had a lot of mice, going back to ball mice that had to have the heavy ball taken out and cleaned, along with the little wheels inside that detected when the ball moved. I've never had the scroll wheel quit before.
We've had lots of electronics. Some phases of my adult life have been remembered by which desktop computer we had in the living room, or by which operating system we were using. Windows XP had a long run over several years; Vista's reign was short, maybe as short as one year.
I'm a late adopter; I tend to get the latest electronics once they go on sale half price. The exceptions are my phone and one or two of my laptops. We got a Win 98 when my husband brought home the floor model Walmart was getting rid of. We got a sweet Nascar racing game with it, because the salesman had left the CD-ROM in the drive.
We kept our Win 7 E-machine desktop for probably 12 years; that's an eternity in computer years. I had an old Celeron laptop that predated Minecraft (2011) and kept it until it literally couldn't play java Minecraft at all anymore, even with Optifine helping reduce lag. My original browser-only save file of Minecraft I kept through many updates; I'd just wander out in the map until I got to an area that had the new trees and terrain generating. I still have that file saved in my Google drive.
Phones have been an exception for two reasons: they break sooner, and the phone company stops supporting the older models. I had to switch when they went from 3G to 4G, and now 5G is the thing. My in-home router has two channels, one 5G and the other not. The 5G channel doesn't reach the further reaches of my house. The company that set it up insisted we upgrade to a new router that would be faster and smaller and all the things--but shorter range and only one hard-wired port. So I talked to the installing tech; at my request he plugged the less-than-a-year-old previous router into the hard-wired port of the new router, and we kept everything else connecting to the old router. Now I get frequent emails from my ISP advertising extenders that will increase the short range of my new router. Joke's on them; the old router does just fine, thank you, even with six people on computers at once playing multiplayer computer games together, or three people streaming video in separate rooms.
Tech advances faster than I need it. There's no call to get the latest or brightest, when older works just as well. Granted, I got a top-of-the-line graphics card in desktop to play an intense new game a while back. But now I've beat that game and there's no need to stress over new chips until the sequel game comes out. With shake-ups in the games industry, it might be quite a while before that game arrives, and then I'll wait a few months or maybe a year, while the initial buggy release gets patched up. That will be soon enough for a new, more powerful graphics card. It can already do fast and realistic; what more do we need?
