> The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.
This seems like a pretty weird example, right? WiFi routers don’t connect to the internet. If your modem can’t connect to the internet, something has probably broken outside your house. That’s the sort of locally-unsolvable problem that everybody last century was familiar with; the crappy copper telephone wire that was never designed to let the Internet blast through it and it will eventually rebel and start giving you noise.
If your router doesn’t work, I don’t know. Cheap routers are not a new invention or sign of the times, I think.
VHS players, if I remember correctly, often died in mysterious ways (they have all sorts of little motors and finicky sensors in them).
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