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This is what I wanted to say. Going more off-topic, I think nearly all "modern" home customer hardware is designed to have a short life, just think about DVD drives. Just to scare you, I still have a HP Laserjet 4 that works perfectly (!) - I'm using it more than 10 years now, and I don't know how the previous owner treated the printer, at least I wasn't a very kind printer owner. In opposite, I hear lots of firends and family aound me begging to fix their "new" printers for free - they usually bought cheap or expensive inkjet printers (sometimes even multifunctional printers with scanner unit and other stuff) - because the "new" thing did strange things (printing without having something on the paper, refusing to work in general, requesting to press keys that do not exist etc.). It's hard to explain that this behaviour is completely intended. Well, that's what we call "Lehrgeld" (tr.: apprentice's premium / to learn it the hard way) im Germany, but they don't learn. :-)

Going even mor off-topic, life costs are increasing in Germany. Simple food (milk, bread, meat, vegetables etc.) are getting more and more expensive, but especially inkjet printers and flatscreen monitors are getting more cheap. Just too sad that I can't eat them. :-)

To follow this off-topic post: feel free to eat a flatscreen if you want (I heard LG are the tastiest). Take car enot to drink gasoline with it

I still have my first computer screen: 14" 800x600, which is 13 years old and still working. Since this one, i never kept one more than 2 years. On the other hand my Samsung P35 laptop is still up n' running with 3h30 of battery after 4 years of daily use.

This is what I wanted to say. Going more off-topic, I think nearly all "modern" home customer hardware is designed to have a short life, just think about DVD drives. Just to scare you, I still have a HP Laserjet 4 that works perfectly (!) - I'm using it more than 10 years now, and I don't know how the previous owner treated the printer, at least I wasn't a very kind printer owner. In opposite, I hear lots of firends and family aound me begging to fix their "new" printers for free - they usually bought cheap or expensive inkjet printers (sometimes even multifunctional printers with scanner unit and other stuff) - because the "new" thing did strange things (printing without having something on the paper, refusing to work in general, requesting to press keys that do not exist etc.). It's hard to explain that this behaviour is completely intended. Well, that's what we call "Lehrgeld" (tr.: apprentice's premium / to learn it the hard way) im Germany, but they don't learn. :-)

Going even mor off-topic, life costs are increasing in Germany. Simple food (milk, bread, meat, vegetables etc.) are getting more and more expensive, but especially inkjet printers and flatscreen monitors are getting more cheap. Just too sad that I can't eat them. :-) "
I could not agree more. I have a Laserjet 4, that I have no idea now how old it is (it has been that long).

A better example of quality is this. I have a Cisco PIX 506 firewall running 8+ years non stop...24/7...for 8 years! Yet in that time I went through countless Linksys and D-link home routers, before eventually taking an old computer and ran Linux for a firewall. In this time I have still gone through numerous wireless routers (used as access points). At the moment I have 3 wireless devices sitting in a closet waiting to be recycled.

It is not just that consumer devices are designed to have a short life, but rather the cost construction dictates this. The fault is not on the business, but rather the consumers who demand cheap products. Consumers are simply not going to pay $400 for a firewall, but they will spend $60 for one. It is simply not just the features that determine the cost difference, but the quality of materials and design.

Ever wonder why HP can have in their home line a quad-core CPU with the latest Nvidia card, where as most of the business models run much lower CPUs. Because companies like HP know that the product development cycle requirement for business demands a much longer design and testing phase, with the result that whatever the latest fastest CPU is now won't reach the workstations until months later.