What Became of Build Quality?

I love technology, new and old.  However I love the old and the new for decidedly different reasons.  Once upon a time, almost everything was very well built.  Old VCRs and home audio equipment had metal cases -often quite thick, and the controls were built to take a lifetime of use.  Now most video disc players (and VCRs if you can find them) are made of flimsy plastic.  If you are lucky and find a unit with a decent housing, the controls will probably be cheap microswitches, and the internals will certainly be nothing compared to those of just twenty-five years ago. 

Certainly there is some advantage to the modern viewpoint that every corner should be cut; you can buy DVD players for less than the price of a nice meal for two, but the unit itself may not last very long.  Good luck getting it serviced, too.  Sure, you can pick up another cheap unit, probably for not much more (Or even less) than the cost of that service, but what if you liked that particular unit's feature set, or look (some modern electronics are incomparably ugly).  You've no choice but to bin it and start over, since such cheap units aren't made to be serviced in the traditional sense.  The case isn't much better even for brand name merchandise, for which the service literature is often unavailable, and when it is, the parts the technician needs to set it to rights are either unavailable, or represent such a large fraction of the price of a new unit that it's not likely to be worth your time or his.

Take for instance my old Sony Betamax VCR.  It's got all the signs of good quality -it's metal, heavy, and name-brand.  There are some compromises for cost, but they work out well, since the particular model was lauded by Consumer Reports as the best consumer VCR they ever tested.  If you want to service it, the individual circuit boards tilt out on hinges, and everything that is adjustable has a label.  If an individual component has failed, it can be replaced as a module, whereas the last modern VCR I tried to service had everything, including the head drum, on the same PCB, and there were no internal adjustments to tweak if the mechanism got out of alignment or wore down with age. 

Now I have a VCR even older than that, from the first generation of consumer VCRs from the early 1970s, and it represents the other end of the spectrum.  It's mind-numbingly complex and unfathomably heavy, but it's so easy to work on, partly because everything is so large and can be observed in operation.  It's circuit cards are edged with metal for strength, and tilt out on wire hinges that have hold-opens like trunk lids, so they don't swing around while you work on them.  It was, however, also so expensive that few people bought them for home use, and they were relegated to industry and to people with specific need (The main character in the TV show "Coach" has such a VCR; very useful in his profession).  The Betamax and its kin, however, found their way into thousands of homes and supported a thriving industry of cassette sales, rental, duplicating, and stimulated other industries, such as amateur movie-making, pornography and other niche markets, as well as boosting Hollywood itself with a new source of revenue. 

What I'm driving at here is that somewhere between the throwaway merchandise of today, and that 70-pound bulletproof U-Matic deck that cost more than a used car is a compromise.  A piece of merchandise that can be serviced properly and economically, can withstand years of use, and yet is cheap enough that anyone who wants one can reasonably expect to buy one.  Unfortunately the mass market that drives technological innovation doesn't want to attain this balance right now, even though with modern design techniques and assembly it would be even easier than when Sony took a decent stab at it with their Betamax decks. 

There is something telling in the fact that I've seen three modern air conditioners come and go in the past five or so years, but the two I have that I bought secondhand, one from the 50s and the other the 70s, continue to operate flawlessly and deliver more satisfying results than the modern units did, and none of them, not even the ridiculous Kenmore with its sold-state thermostatic control, are anywhere near as complex as a video recorder. 

Let's Talk Tech

In case you haven't guessed from the title, this post is about technology and my opinions on it.  Some of these are pretty subjective, but such is the nature of opinion. 

We've come a long way in a short time.  My grandmother was born just seven years after the Wright brothers flew their clumsy, underpowered aeroplane on the dunes of Kitty Hawk, and she died having seen men use what was learned on those dunes to circumnavigate the Earth, fight several wars, unleash the fiery power of the atom, travel into space and to the moon, and launch satellites that allow us to communicate as we do here now, and to perform a myriad of other useful tasks.  I'm not particularly old but I'm already seeing what was the science fiction of my childhood become the reality I live in. 

A man can lose an arm and have it put back on again, or, should it be lost or damaged beyond repair, he can be fitted with a replacement that can take signals from his nerves and even give him feedback like his natural limb did, all while being insensitive to discomfort and untiring.  My nation's Navy recently deployed laser weapons to defend against missiles -laser weapons!  This does the heart of the Sci-Fi fan good.  While these are minority cases, they show just how far we have come, and let us wonder wide-eyed how far we will go. 

Will the latest "Flying Car", newly approved, finally give us what so many of us, numb to the tiny portable phones that let us call anyone on the planet and the massive, Gibsonian computer network we use right now, what has always seemed the symbol of "The Future"?  Or perhaps will they simply prove an amusing novelty for the few who can truly use them, and peter out after a few hundred are made, just like all the previous attempts at blending the automobile and the aeroplane?  We shall see.