A few days ago, we had a thread about games that released in 2004, and I made a comment that ended with "old shit is better." And then I started thinking about it... old things are better.
Case in point: vehicles. I needed a truck for the family farm, and I went shopping. Quickly I realized that 1) newer 3/4 ton diesels are designed to fail as a revenue stream and 2) buying a $80,000 truck that will probably need at least one, maybe two $5,000 service visits before it hits six digit mileage wasn't in the cards. So I bought a 20 year old truck... that every mechanic who has seen it has tried to buy. Total cost was less than a Tabroma with the same mileage.
This continues on to just about everything. My house was built before I was born, and has the original air conditioner, stove and hot water heater. The original fridge died a few years ago, and the washer and dryer finally shuffled off this mortal coil last year. I doubt, seriously, that any of the replacement appliances lasts a decade, much less two or three.
Printers? Unless it's Japanese, don't buy a new one. HP will remote control your printer, if you opt in to the program (which they don't make clear what it is), and Xerox is a crapshoot if it works out of the box. Meanwhile, I have seen cheap Brother lasers go to half a million pages easily.
Tractors? Buy a new John Deere, and if it breaks, you either have Deere's mechanic fix it, or it stays broken. (Keep making your payments, please.) Meanwhile, you can buy an older Deere or Yanmar tractor and keep it going forever.
The modern world is starting to give me serious 40k vibes. Almost nobody knows how things work, new things are bad knockoffs, and there are mutants everywhere.
My old man has a John Deere that was getting old when I was born. It's gotta be at least 40 years old and still runs fine.
He's done all his own maintenance; hydraulics, engine, PTO, tires. No computers, no BS.
We've used it for everything from fieldwork, tree felling, building demolition, running a generator, residential construction, you name it.
So, obviously, we can build things that both work fine and last forever without dealer service. The fact that we can't buy them is nothing but a grift.
My grandfather still uses the Farmall tractor his father bought new sometime in the '50s. And it's seen some shit. My family is big on redneck engineering/DIY/nig-rigging. Honestly with some of the things I've come across it amazes me my great-grandfather lived as long as he did and my grandfather is still alive.
So, yeah. We used to build wonderful things. Now we either chose not to or just don't know how. I'm sad to say I think its the latter.
The old Deere 4000 series (4020/4030) are known for the fact that they can't be killed. The family used to own two of them, and then they got sold when all of the older generation decided "fuck it, let's pretend we were never farmers".