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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you're too young to remember, but people used to keep TVs for much longer periods before HDTV and flat panels came out.

Also, these TVs are apparently fire hazards. It doesn't matter that they're 20 years old (at the point of the "recall" in 2010).

I doubt the parts necessary to fix them were out of production; you can get parts for truly ancient electronics still. Things like capacitors don't become obsolete. The recall doesn't specify exactly which component is problematic, but says it's age-related, which usually points to capacitors.

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This. I’ve known a TV that was in more or less daily use for over 30 years. Not sure why we stopped expecting that from electronics.

Because electronics got so much better so much faster, that the vast majority of customers did not want to use old hardware.

Especially if customers allowing shorter lifetimes allowed companies to lower the prices.

There are many use cases for which a decade-old computer is still perfectly serviceable and even where they aren't, those computers can be repurposed for the ones that are.

Moreover, we're talking about televisions and old Macs. TVs with higher resolutions might come out, but lower resolution ones continue to be sold new (implying demand exists at some price), and then why should anybody want to replace a functioning old TV with a newer one of the same resolution?

Much older computers continue to be used because they run software that newer computers can't without emulation (which often introduces bugs) or have older physical interfaces compatible with other and often extremely expensive older hardware.

If people actually wanted to replace their hardware instead of fixing it then they'd not be complaining about the inability to fix it.

>There are many use cases for which a decade-old computer is still perfectly serviceable and even where they aren't, those computers can be repurposed for the ones that are.

It depends. Older computers usually guzzle power, especially if you look at the absolutely awful Pentium4 systems. You're probably better off getting a RasPi or something, depending on what exactly you're trying to do. Newer systems have gotten much better with energy efficiency, so they'll pay for themselves quickly through lower electricity bills.

>TVs with higher resolutions might come out, but lower resolution ones continue to be sold new (implying demand exists at some price)

We're already seeing a limit here. 8k TVs are here now, but not very popular. There's almost no media in that resolution, and people can't tell the difference from 4k.

For a while, this wasn't the case: people were upgrading from 480 to 720 to 1080 and now to 4k.

>and then why should anybody want to replace a functioning old TV with a newer one of the same resolution?

They probably don't; if they're upgrading, they're getting a higher resolution (lots of 1080 screens still out there), or they're getting a bigger screen. It's possible they might want newer smart TV features too: older sets probably have support dropped and don't support the latest streaming services, though usually you can just get an add-on device that plugs into the HDMI port so this is probably less of a factor.

A decade old CPU would be a Haswell, not a Pentium 4.

> Older computers usually guzzle power, especially if you look at the absolutely awful Pentium4 systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_proces...

The Northwood chips were 50 to 70 W. HT chips and later Prescott chips were more 80 to 90 W. Even the highest chips I see on the page are only 115 W.

But modern chips can use way more power than Pentium 4 chips:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake

The i5-14600K has a base TDP of 125 W and turbo TDP of 181 W, and the high-end i9-14900KS is 150 W base/253 W turbo. For example, when encoding video, the mid-range 14600K pulls 146 W: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-14900k-cpu-r...

More recent processors can do more with the same power than older processors, but I think for the most part that doesn't matter. Most people don't keep their processor at 100% usage a lot anyway.

As I said in a sister comment here, you can't compare CPUs by TDP. No one runs their CPU flat-out all the time on a PC. Idle power is the important metric.

> Older computers usually guzzle power, especially if you look at the absolutely awful Pentium4 systems.

Even many Pentium 4-based systems would idle around 30 watts and peak at a little over 100, which is on par with a lot of modern desktops, and there were lower and higher power systems both then and now. The top end Pentium 4 had a TDP of 115W vs. 170W for the current top end Ryzen 9000 and even worse for current Intel. Midrange then and now was ~65W. Also, the Pentium 4 is twenty two years old.

And the Pentium 4 in particular was an atypically inefficient CPU. The contemporaneous Pentium M was so much better that Intel soon after dumped the P4 in favor of a desktop CPU based on that (Core 2 Duo).

Moreover, you're not going to be worried about electric bills for older phones or tablets with <5W CPUs, so why do those go out of support so fast? Plenty of people whose most demanding mobile workload is GPS navigation, which has been available since before the turn of the century and widely available for nearly two decades.

> For a while, this wasn't the case: people were upgrading from 480 to 720 to 1080 and now to 4k.

Some people. Plenty of others who don't even care about 4k, and then why would they want to needlessly replace their existing TV?

> They probably don't; if they're upgrading, they're getting a higher resolution (lots of 1080 screens still out there), or they're getting a bigger screen.

That's the point. 1080p TVs and even some 720p TVs are still sold new, so anyone buying one isn't upgrading and has no real reason to want to replace their existing device unless it e.g. has a design flaw that causes it to catch fire. In which case they should do a proper recall.

>The top end Pentium 4 had a TDP of 115W vs. 170W for the current top end Ryzen 9000 and even worse for current Intel.

You can't compare CPUs based on TDP; it's an almost entirely useless measurement. The only thing it's good for is making sure you have a sufficient heatsink and cooling system, because it tells you only the peak power consumption of the chip. No one runs their CPUs flat-out all the time unless it's some kind of data center or something; we're talking about PCs here.

What's important is idle CPU power consumption, and that's significantly better these days.

>older phones or tablets with <5W CPUs, so why do those go out of support so fast?

That's an entirely different situation because of the closed and vendor-controlled nature of those systems. They're not PCs; they're basically appliances. It's a shitty situation, but there's not much people can do about it, though many have tried (CyanogenMod, GrapheneOS, etc.).

>Plenty of others who don't even care about 4k

Not everyone cares about 4k, it's true (personally I like it but it's not that much better than 1080p). But if you can't tell the difference between 1080p and an NTSC TV, you're blind.

>1080p TVs and even some 720p TVs are still sold new

Yes, as I said before, we're seeing diminishing returns. (Or should I say "diminishing discernable improvements"?)

Also, the 720p stuff is only in very small (relatively) screens. You're not going to find a 75" TV with 720p or even 1080p; those are all 4k. The low-res stuff is relegated to very small budget models where it's really pointless to have such high resolution.

For most videos, the difference between 1080p and 4k ain't that large.

But for certain video games on a large screen, I can definitely tell the different between 1080p and 4k. Especially strategy games that present a lot of information.

Btw, as far as I can tell modern screens use significantly less power, especially per unit of area, than the CRTs of old; even if that CRT is still perfectly functional.

> What's important is idle CPU power consumption, and that's significantly better these days.

It isn't. You can find both ancient and modern PCs that idle anywhere in the range from 10 to 30 watts, and pathological cases for both where the idle is >100W. Some of the newer ones can even get pretty close to zero, but the difference between zero and 30 watts for something you're leaving on eight hours a day at $0.25/kWh is ~$22/year. Which is less than the interest you'd get from sticking the $600 cost of a new PC in a 5% CD.

And many of the new ones are still 30 watts or more at idle.

> That's an entirely different situation because of the closed and vendor-controlled nature of those systems.

It's a worse situation, but if the complaint is that they abandon their customers long before the customer wants to stop using the device, they certainly match the criteria.

> But if you can't tell the difference between 1080p and an NTSC TV, you're blind.

Being able to discern a difference and caring about it are two different things. If your use for a TV is to watch the news and play 90s video games then the resolution of the talking heads doesn't matter and the classic games aren't in 1080p anyway.

> The low-res stuff is relegated to very small budget models where it's really pointless to have such high resolution.

Which is the point. If you have an old 30" TV and no space for a 72" TV, you do not need a new 30" TV.

>Not sure why we stopped expecting that from electronics.

For TVs specifically, the technology changed a lot. For a long time, everyone was stuck on the NTSC standard, which didn't change much. At first, everyone had B&W TVs, so once you had one, there was no reason to change. Then color TV came out, so suddenly people wanted those. After that, again no reason to change for a long time. Later, they got remote controls, so sometimes people would want one of those, or maybe a bigger screen, but generally a working color TV was good enough. Because TVs were glass CRTs, bigger screens cost a lot more than smaller ones, and there wasn't much change in cost here for a long time.

Then HDTV came out and now people wanted those, first in 720p, and later in 1080i/p. And flat screens came too, so people wanted those too. So in a relatively short amount of time, people went from old-style NTSC CRTs to seeing rapid improvements in resolution (480p->720p->1080->4k), screen size (going from ~20" to 3x", 4x", 5x", 6x", now up to 85"), and also display/color quality (LCD, plasma, QLED, OLED), so there were valid reasons to upgrade. The media quality (I hate the word "content") changed too, with programs being shot in HD, and lately 4k/HDR, so the difference was quite noticeable to viewers.

Before long, the improvements are going to slow or stop. They already have 8k screens, but no one buys them because there's no media for them and they can't really see the difference from 4k. Even 1080p media looks great on a 4k screen with upscaling, and not that much different from 4k. The human eye is only capable of so much, so we're seeing diminishing returns.

So I predict that this rapid upgrade cycle might be slowing, and probably stopping before long with the coming economic crash and Great Depression of 2025. The main driver of new TV sales will be people's old TVs dying from component failure.

> The human eye is only capable of so much, so we're seeing diminishing returns.

Or not seeing diminishing returns. Which is the point.

> At first, everyone had B&W TVs, so once you had one, there was no reason to change

Televisions improved over time:

- screens got flatter

- screens got larger

- image quality improved

- image contrast increased (people used to close their curtains to watch tv)

- televisions got preset channels

Great points. The TV I have today is approaching my platonic ideal screen. It’s as big as it can get without having to continually look around to see the whole screen. Sit in the first row of a movie theater to understand how that can be a bad thing. The pixels are smaller than I can see, it has great dynamic range, and the colors can be as saturated as I’d ever want. There’s not much that can be improved on it as a traditional flatscreen video monitor.

> Not sure why we stopped expecting that from electronics.

Last years model only does 4k, my eyes need 8k

32K ought to be enough for anybody.

32K is going to look so lifeless and dull after you try 64k.

When will the pixels start to approach erythrocyte-level density like on the Vision Pro?

edit: Anywhere between 208K to 277K.

My experience of ancient CRT devices is that the display gets gradually dimmer. I once had a TV that was only really usable after dark -- but that's the only time I wanted to use it anyway -- and a huge Sun monitor that was only just about readable in total darkness, but we kept it because we also had a Sun server that we didn't know how to connect to any other monitor and we were worried that one day we wouldn't be able to SSH to it, but in fact the server never once failed.

> daily use for over 30 years

However that doesn't imply TVs were that reliable.

Before the 90s TV repairman was a regular job, and TVs often needed occasional expensive servicing. I remember a local TV repair place in the 90s which serviced "old" TVs.

Suppose they would recall all the old tv's with known faults, can those be fixed to become conform to (today's) quality and safety standards, while being full of old components with characteristics beyond original tolerances?

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