I have some doubts about them not breaking for 50 years.
Definitely.
Our repair shop back in the 80s had free minimalistic TVs you got during repairs.
I remember them standing at least once per year in our living room.
Also, despite all the repairing, my parents had to buy new sets thrice between late 70s and early nineties.
The "in the past stuff lasted forever" imho is a myth heavily fueled by survivorship bias.
The “in the past stuff lasted forever” imho is a myth heavily fueled by survivorship bias.
Forever might be a bit strong, but recent built in obsolescence and enshittification would like a word. There was a time when longevity was a selling point, this is not that time. If you find that exception, embrace and share.
There was a time when longevity was a selling point
At least to some degree that might be because the special longevity features from former days are often the expected default by now.
Take e.g. cars. While galvanized bodies still where a huge, specifically advertised selling point for premium cars (I remember Audi stressing it), they (or similar approaches) have become the common baseline by now.
The condition of my 15 year old, cheap-ass, 24/7 outside, 200.000 km+ eastern European car would have blown the mind of anyone in the 80s.
And coming back to OPs example: We e.g. only got new LCD monitors at work because the management walked through the office and decided that the yellowy-bleached, 15-year-old monitors were not representative enough any more. From a technical standpoint they were still working totally fine.
Whereas I remember my CRT computer screens during the 90s and early 00s each severely degrade after 5-6 years with smudgy, unevenly lid, progressively darker getting images, or just deciding to stop working with a bang (like my beloved 17'' did some day).
Or take e.g. the now standard LED lights compared to any lighting solution from just 20 years back.
built in obsolescence and enshittification
While this exists (especially when dealing with firmware-enabled devices), back in the days you just had real obsolescence instead.
Tech between roughly 1980 and 2010 was changing so rapidly, you were constantly upgrading or switching, especially for consumer electronics and IT, while we now have reached a plateau with much slower progression.
I am typing this on a 2015 entry level laptop, my E-Book-Reader was build in 2011 and my kids are totally happy playing 10 year old console games.
And regarding enshitification: If your product is shit from the start, you don't even need that, see e.g. the car example from above...
Yes, things are not perfect by far yet, and some certainly even have regressed, and we should definitely strive to improve those things.
But I don't see a point in trying and only looking at the gloomy side of things, downplaying everything that already has improved tremendously from 30 or 40 years ago.
Yeah, valid, enshittification as per Doctorow mostly applies to systems you can change on the fly ( e.g. firmware-enabled devices) and engineered obsolescence (and indeed the march of progress making things genuinely obsolete) is not new. It's just that so many physical products are worse than they were (not Toyotas, taps that used to last 50+ years and are lucky for a couple of years now, washing machines) that the term expanded. Some MBAs decided making 'good enough' cheap crap creates a 'revenue stream' when people have to replace it.
Technology does indeed progress, and many times that's a good thing (and not just a cheaper way to get a product sold. LED lights are great). 9 Billion people leads to a lot of good ideas, not a doomsayer, but I'd still like focus returned to longevity and quality in some way that advertisers can't fuck up. One can dream, I get sick of having to constantly research products to see if I'm going to need to do it again in a short time.
It's not that stuff lasted forever, it's that things were repairable. That CRT could be repaired, or you could repair your truck. It sucked for sure but it was generally cheaper to repair something than to replace it. Then it became cheaper and easier to replace it than repair it because that one part cost more than buying a new whatever. Now the skills needed to repair things hasn't been passed down and is becoming a lost skill like many others. For the better, perhaps. What's good for the scorpion isn't for the frog one may say.
It's not just skills not being passed down, but also that as technology has moved on, things have got more complicated, and then the skills needed to figure out why something isn't working, and what needs doing to fix it plus actually carry out the fix, have got more and more technical, to the point that anyone who could do a repair could also probably get a much better-paying career than repairing things.
That's not an inherent problem, as a good service manual from the manufacturer could bypass the need to understand all the details of how a device works to identify a root cause, but it's not in most companies' interests to provide one that good when regulation doesn't force them to, so for the most part, things need repairing without help from the manufacturer.
You are certainly right, but that is not what OP's meme was about...
Side note about survivorship bias (somewhat unrelated though):
People say "just because something is old doesn't mean it's good," usually in the context of criticizing traditions, conventions, or established norms. Also things like ancient beliefs and classical philosophy.
But the thing is, although it's true that being old or "ancient" doesn't make something better than things that are new, withstanding the tests of time for hundreds or thousands of years does indicate that something is at least effective or worth preserving. Obviously things that get disproven or replaced by new innovations don't fall into that category, so it's not the same thing as romanticizing the past (which is of course problematic).
It's not always the case of course, and I'm certainly not a traditionalist. But I find it an interesting example of how survivorship bias can actually be used to affirm a claim of worth or quality rather than negate it. It kinda flips the idea on its head.
The reason I thought of this is because I was reading dall'Agocchie's descriptions of single-sword guard positions, and he basically says "the names of these guards come to us from previous generations, and they work, so there's no need to change them."
I think it's kind of a long-winded way of saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
If anything, it's merely a counterpoint to avant-gard philosophy. Like, why deconstruct the principles and techniques of an art form if it works as a structured approach to producing good art, or to learning art forms?
It applies to crafts as well. Wood carving has evolved over time as technology develops, but if you strip it down to the very basics, the principles and techniques are the same as they've always been. Use this tool for flat surface, this on for round surfaces, this one for angled surfaces, etc.. Work with the grain. Sand from coarse grit to fine grit. These things don't change, and trying to deconstruct them would just result in a messy sculpture.
We always had a B&W TV in my house growing up because my parents were cheap hippies. My senior year in high school the TV broke and we had nothing at all for months until my grandfather died and we inherited his color TV. I had to read books and play outside! I still haven't fully recovered from this horror.
Okay but that’s still better than the 4 years I got out of my most recent LG before it got the blue death that is not repairable. Not to mention that I have only ever had one CRT die on me in my life and still have 2 in the garage.
Modern TVs are literally designed to fail faster so you have to replace it sooner.
I have a 10 year old TV which is in the sweet spot and still going strong. If it ever breaks I'll be upset because I don't really want a 2026 overpriced piece of trash.
My parents had a black and white set from the 1960s until the mid 80s. It did break quite often and was an absolute piece of crap. Nobody who lived with CRTs will be nostalgic for them.
Edit: nobody but these two guys below, I guess...
I guess I am nobody then.
That just means they were repairable, the new ones are electronic waste if you look at them the wrong way.
Speaking of loud smelly bangs, how's your mum been?
I can't say I miss CRTs. They're a really cool and clever technology, but LCDs and OLEDs are just way better. They're cheaper, take a fraction of the power, weigh almost nothing, and can be huge if you want.
These days CRTs do still have the niche of being better for retro gaming. Modern televisions process the image and that adds frames of visual lag between when a button is pressed and when the action is displayed. Since many games require precise inputs this can make a significant difference in how well a game plays. There are ways to compensate for this with scalers (RetroTINK, OSSC, Morph 4K), but they aren't cheap (like $400+) There's also the fact that many newer televisions just don't have compatible inputs for older consoles and cheap converters or adapters often add even more lag.
I do miss being able to change the resolution though…
CRT TVs broke ... especially if you were stuck buying the cheap brands. In my childhood, we had to replace several of them.
I've never had a modern HDTV that didn't work at all without internet connection. Not saying they don't exist, but as of now in 2026, they don't seem to be the norm for people in my part of the world.
But the memes!
Really though this is the truth. Those TVs broke all the time, and could break you picking them up. 32 inches and bigger is hernia territory. Now you could move a 100 inch TV by yourself. And they all work without Internet, unless you want to use the built in software, then they are used for media boxes and save even more space.
Well, have you tried to move an OLED? That shit weights a tonne.
My hisense tv broke the screen just existing, I'm sure because I was on a trip and the house was locked. There was a crack right across the screen and the warranty refused to fix or replace it because they don't cover broken screens.
Customer Service: “Sounds like your house is haunted. We’re sorry, this isn’t covered by the warranty. Would you like me to transfer you to our exorcism department?”
Have an old plasma. Had few CRT. Live near rail lines.
CRTs died most probably due to shaking I can't really notice. They just...stopped. Fixing them didn't take much, but it still was bothersome. In previous home, far away from major roads or rails, CRT's simply vibed.
New tech is more resistant to weird shit, but planned obsolescence paired with companies trying their best to keep control over the device is what breaks them.
Imagine building something to break. I know they're following corporate orders but I hope there is a special place in engineering hell for engineers willing to do this.
everything has a lifespan, the corps just want it artificially lowered
Sure, if you ignore the quality and size and ignore the fact that'll it'll run without the update 🙄
Some modern TVs, like Rokus, actually won’t run without the internet connection.
Right, the edge cases. I have yet to know a single person to have this happen but I'm sure it does.
Roku tvs are currently 37% of the American market according to numbers I found through a quick search. Last I heard LG, Amazon/Fire, and Samsung also required an internet connection/account for setup. Only Google TVs from my research (regardless of brand) have a dumb tv option at this time.
I wouldn’t call that an edge case.
Your research is garbage 🤣
Soon they'll require always-online connections to operate at all.
"I don't understand, why did the price go UP after our signing key was leaked?"
Maybe they shipped it unfinished and just added that in to cover their bases.
I bought a CRT tv in 1994 in Walmart. It stayed on probably 14 hours a day since my wife and I slept with it on. 24/7 sometimes as we later used it to keep the dogs company. We finally retired it in 2009 because the screen was a bit dark. It didn't last 50 years, but 15 years of continues, non-stop service is something I cannot deny. Obviously it had better sound than these flat panel TVs since it actually had speakers.
I wonder if repair shops were still a thing, if itbwas repairable.
I got an LG TV back in 2016 and realized immediately that when plugged in to my network, it was broadcasting an open wifi signal. Hard no from me, so I unplugged it and used an Xbox as my media center for years. I've never seen a forced update message or ads.
Yeah it is an extra step to stream things, but I was going to have it plugged in anyway as it doubles as a DVD player.
With an all in one remote with programmable activities if isn’t even an extra step
The thing I miss about those TVs (and old game consoles) is that you push the power button and it was on instantly. No booting up. No splash screen. No ten-second delay during which I'm forced to think about all my poor decisions. Just instant, somewhat blurry entertainment.
I miss analog cable TV from back then. You could change channels instantly. Now it seriously takes like 5 seconds.
It took some time for my TV in the 80s to warm up. Until then the picture would be very dim. It was a lot worse for TVs in the 60s.
Sure, there were plenty of other downsides but CRT monitors sure felt SO GOOD for PC gaming.
It is a bit weird to me that when I was a kid (in the '70s) great emphasis was placed on the inventors of the lightbulb and phonograph (Edison), the telephone (Graham Bell), and the television (Farnsworth).* And now those technologies have all been largely replaced by alternatives that work on very different physical principles. I'm not sure they even teach that inventor stuff in schools any more.
* Yes I know that nothing is ever really invented by one person.
I like to think of it this way:
Not exactly, but you get my point. Its not so different, just different standards using the same principles.
Analog to digital has been the biggest change I've noticed honestly - but still the same coax that brought me cartoons in the 90's (analog) carries my internet today (digital).
Mind you, white LEDs might be very different to incandescent light bulbs but they aren't conceptually a million miles away from fluorescent lights; they exploit the same concept of efficiently generating a narrowband emission and using it to stimulate a phosphor which creates a broad band of lights, it's just using a blue LED rather than a tube full of mercury plasma glowing in UV.
I'd go as far as saying a white LED is more or less a solid state fluorescent light, in a similar way to how some 1950s datasheets talk about transistors as 'solid state triodes'.
I agree that LEDs are a lot more similar to fluorescent lights than incandescent bulbs, but growing up nobody ever lauded "the inventor of fluorescent lights". I don't even know who that might be.
I have the best of both worlds right now. I have an old flatscreen from around 2010 that isn't in any way a smart TV. It has every plug you could ever want for consoles. Coaxial? Got it! AV? Check! HDMI? Yep! Good size as well!
It used to be my desktop monitor before getting my new desktop and I needed to upgrade to a new monitor.
I got a “big” TV for graduating HS, it was 25 or 27” CRT, and weighed a ton. My current main TV is a 65” OLED. Miss me with the fake nostalgia thx.
Games look juicy on crt
I know there's survivor bias out there for sure, but are bound to be tubes out there that are easily older than 50 doing just fine. Some of us might even witness 100-year-old sets in their lifetime.
@lemmy.world
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Considering that TV repair was a thing for the majority of the time during which CRT TVs were popular, I have some doubts about them not breaking for 50 years.
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