Thursday, September 9, 2010

Planned Obsolesence?

Another Pet Peeve Thursday

The last two days have not been kind to Casa De Barrett.

Last week I told you how my laptop is giving me commercials to buy a new version of itself.  Well, this week my husband's iMac up and died.  The thing is barely three years old, and two days ago it started coughing up blood.  He took it into the Mac store this morning and -- yes, it's dead, Jim.  Oh, they could fix it.  And fix it.  And fix it.  Because they really don't know what's wrong with it. It might be this or it might be that, and each this or that costs at least $200.  Hubby figures it's better to cut our losses and toss the thing and get the next best Mac. (I have to add this is the is briefest Mac-lifespan either of us have had with a Mac product.  We are NOT pleased.)

Then last night, we thought we'd sit down and watch an hour of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which we just got.  (Love that show!)  Hello!  The DVD was working fine on Monday night.  We watched the last three episodes of A Fine Romance (with Judi Dench and the wonderful Michael Williams), although I will admit I was suspicious when I turned the machine off and the little digital screen actually said OFF, which it had never done before. 

When I went to turn it on last night I thought maybe the remote's batteries were dead.  So I changed them with the remote for the old VHS/DVD machine (the DVD player died in that machine, too--and honest, we aren't all that hard on our DVD players).

I am very annoyed.  I hate that these things died without warning.  And I hate that I have to now replace the machine that replaced the last machine.  (Maybe I should go back to watching VHS tapes--that thing will probably go on forever.)

Which one of your machines has recently snuffed it?