I have a digital calculator with the little solar screen. It fell on the floor, on the back I noticed the sticker Texas Instruments 1991. 24 year old calculator, it has lasted me forever and I have crunched an unknown amount of bad numbers through it. Still works just fine.
Why have I gone through about 50-60 PC's of various forms since then? And my old cheap calculator still works just fine? PC's and calculators have basically the same kind of parts. Copper, silicon, tin, aluminum, maybe little bits of gold and silver, green wafer board, plastic body.
I mean heck, a desktop never even moves around on the desk. My calculator can travel everywhere and sometimes it does.

Planned obsolescence seems acceptable in the computer universe, but we are at the point where it should not be acceptable. I think its time to create a Fixed Point Standard for things like basic office pc's. There is none for a calculator but we all know what it looks like.

That calculator is obviously defective too, because 2025 - 1991 = 34.

I didnt use it!

That’s probably why it has lasted so long.

Nope cant say that all, its my right hand fast shooter. When you crunch as many weird numbers as I sometimes have to, I have to keep an old school tool to keep up with the benchmarks in the data. i.e. the value for that anchor spot the data is dependent on.

I’ve got an HP11c I keep in the garage and it was old when I got it around 1990 or so. My HP 28S from college still works great too. It’s about 36 or 37 years old.

Its damndest thing. We built a computer thats meant to last and it did. The Calculator. If you think about that is the definition of a Tradition building Artifact. In archaeology those are artifacts that were meant to last forever but did not. Stone Knives really are forever, because we will always know how to figure out how to make them. But other stuff is just by chance or one really smart dude who was able to spread his idea. Think about it a little bit.

Heat and usage percentage.

I think the designers took all that and more into account and used materials meant to make them durable as opposed to the bean counter/marketeer driven designs and material choices of today.

Folks liked to make thing strong cause could back then. I guess thats part of why some of us still do things the way we do. I put in some corner posts in on my new lot. I want them real strong cause corners take a beating over many years. So I used Bridge Foundation piling Poles. Big ones, 18 inchers.They were 18 feet long but cut down for me. I got them 6 foot tall corner on two ends and The other two are shorter to fit the slope right, But I cut those at the fat end of the bridge pole, those are 20 inches. Concrete set 24" deep in red clay. They are better than Walmart Bollards.
I might have them over built a little bit but a bastion has to be strong.

“Something worth doing, is worth doing right.”

Heat is the enemy of a computer. Computes generate far more heat than a calculator. Calculator is far less complicated. They simply don't overheat.

Computers have far more components and heat is the enemy. Far more to break.

Software gets outdated and that, more than physical failure, ends the life of more computers than anything else. My dad has a laptop still running windows 95. Works fine. .But can't do much more with it than play solitaire.

My 1970s Yamaha amps, Pioneer turntable, and JBL speakers all work and sound fine. They are at or pushing 50 years old and the amp generates plenty of heat.

Agree 100% regarding the heat, but nobody is trying to install adware or spyware, hack into or cause viruses in your calculator, amplifier, speakers, or toaster oven.

I still have my Casio graphing calculator somewhere. It was my sister's before I used it, so it is from the mid to late 80's. It worked last time I used it.