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Comment by roxolotl | Hacker News Reader

So taking this as the thought experiment it is what I’m struck by is that seemingly most things will completely deteriorate in the first 10-15 years. Is that accurate? Would switches mostly fail by the 10 year mark if not replaced? I’ve been looking at buying a switch for my house should I expect it to not last more than 10 years? I have a 10 year old tv should I expect it starts to fail soon?

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My experience with retro computers is that things start to fail from around the 10-15 year mark, yes. Some things are still good after 30 years, maybe more, but .. capacitors leak, resistors go out of spec, etc, and that means voltages drift, and soon enough you burn something out.

You can replace known likely culprits preemptively, assuming you can get parts. But dendritic growths aren’t yet a problem for most old stuff because the feature sizes are still large enough. No one really knows what the lifetime of modern 5/4/3nm chips is going to be.

Theres a hardware law that hardware past its half life often lives for an excessively long time.

Really depends on brand and purpose but consumer hardware switches do die pretty frequently.

But if you bought something like a C2960 fanless switch I would expect it to outlive me.

I have a 10+ year old Cisco 2960G and a pair of 10+ year old Dell R620's in my homelab, still humming happily along.

So, no.

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