MMMiii!

Ten years ago, hard drives were sold with a warranty of 10 years or something like that. And they came in smaller capacities. Now they come in bigger capacities and with shorter warranties.

I bought a hard drive last October because I was worried about the somewhat clicking sound my other hard drive was making, and it housed my music. So I bought a new hard drive (because I can) and moved all my music there with the intention of organizing them and THEN burning them to DVDs. It had 1 month Advanced Warranty Replacement which meant that if it breaks in one month, I could get a replacement immediately, and the standard warranty of 1 year, which meant that if it breaks after the first month, I’ll have to wait another month to get a new one.

That clicking hard drive still works. The one I bought crashed. It took with it more than 200 Gb of files, of music. Stuff I’ve collected over the years. Stuff that I scoured the web for, little discoveries made here and there that I liked and treasured.

I know I’m at fault for deleting the ones from the old drive.

It made me realize that nothing REALLY lasts forever. Even files. Even things that are supposed to last forever or work as good as seen on tv. Probably in 2 or 3 months, or maybe less than that, you’d be throwing what you bought on TV away…

You can get a lot of disposable stuff now. There are disposable cups and plates and spoons and forks and knives. There are disposable microwavable containers (that we keep anyway). There are disposable kitchen towels. Disposable underwear. Disposable email addresses! These are things that are supposed to last for a lifetime (maybe except the kitchen towels. And the underwear?). Well, even if not a lifetime, but really long. In other words, they’re supposed to last.

I have a friend who has an extra cellphone, the non-colored one, so that if ever she gets robbed or something, she would just give that one. That’s her disposable cellphone.

With the rate of new cellphones being put to the market, if you buy a new cellphone today, in three to four month’s time, the value would have gone down by at least 20%. It could be more. Soon cellphones are going to be fully disposable too. Or so cheap that you could mix and match for the day, even for a commoner.

Soon hard drives, computers, nothing will last. Buy a laptop today, in a year’s time it’s obsolete. Half a year? The price of my current mp3 player when I bought it would now buy a better player that has a bigger disk space, plays more formats of videos and music as well, and waaayy cooler.

As for files, like I said, they won’t last either. Our high school class pictures got deleted for some reason off the face of the internet.

Maybe, soon, houses are going to be disposable as well. Don’t like it anymore? Boom, get a new one. Soon we’re going to have disposable lives too.

It’s pretty sad. I’m still griping about how I lost all those music. I can still get back more than half of them, but the other half might be a little hard now. *sigh*

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