There is a sweet spot at the end of a product production cycle when parts become very cheap.
I was thinking about my last posting, and much of it is based on experience. I have tried to fix up a lot of end-of-life vehicles and electronics with mixed results. Often a repair at that stage just forestalls the inevitable by a few months or a year. But it is the availability of cheap replacement parts that is the key to the deal.
With the golf cart, parts are still available after 30 years simply because golf cart technology hasn't changed much in that time. Our 1994 EZ-GO Marathon has an all-steel body. Yes, I already replaced the battery trays once (battery acid + mild steel = rust). Newer models such as the popular TXT have a steel frame and a fiberglass body that bolts on. That's why you see these "custom" golf carts with a '57 Chevy body, tooling around in The Villages. As one golf cart owner told me, it was cheaper to replace the entire body on his golf cart than it was to paint it.
But not much else has changed. The basic suspension and drivetrain is identical if not similar. The wheel bearings and brakes, for example, which were cheap online ($50 total) fit any EZ-GO from the 1980s to the present (with some exceptions). Even the solid-state Curtis controller (introduced in 1994) is basically the same as in later models. But there are some parts which are different, and over time, they are getting harder to find.
There reaches this "sweet spot" in a product cycle, after it has gone out of production, when parts are cheap. We had a 1981 Fiat Spider - one of the last years they made them (although they soldiered on as "Pinninfarina Spiders" for a couple more years). The thing stickered for $11,000 new in 1981, which was enough to buy a Cadillac. In the 1980's, you could get parts, as the dealers still stocked them, but they were expensive as it was an "expensive" car.
As they got older and worked their way down the food chain, people were less willing to spend money repairing them. Many got old and went to the junkyard. Others were in wrecks. The demand for parts declined - and dealers and distributors had inventory in stock. Prices fell.
As it often happens in the car business, there reaches a point there a distributor decides to get rid of all these old parts in inventory and sells off the lot in tractor-trailer loads, for pennies on the dollar. It is cheaper than paying someone to throw them in a dumpster. Some chap ends up with this inventory of parts and starts selling them - through ads in the back of car magazines, or today, online.
Since he paid nothing for the parts and since the number of cars is few (and they are cheap) the parts are sold off cheap. And the guy who owns one of these cars has found the "sweet spot" as he can keep the car on the road for a while, for not a lot of money.
But over time, the supply of parts winds down. Many parts are "NLA" (No Longer Available) and it becomes harder to find such parts and the prices skyrocket. Worse yet, the cars themselves are less seen as "old cars" worth fixing up to drive around than as "collector's items" to be carefully restored and kept in a garage. Well, maybe not with a Fiat, but with some cars, anyway.
There also reaches a point where you either have to take it to the next level - a ground-up restoration - or move on. Most of us cannot afford such a restoration, and even if we could, we would get back 50 cents for every dollar spent. It makes no sense unless you are a fanatic. And being a fanatic is never a cost-effective proposition.
So the prices start to go up and even used parts are hard to come by as scrapyards, seeing the junked versions languish without many customers, send them off to the shredder. Actually, many scrapyards don't keep cars for very long. They let customers strip off usable parts and then shred the rest. You can't waste the yard space hoping someone wants a vent window to a 1987 VW Golf or something. Shred it!
I have run into the same thing with my small fleet of Toshiba C655 laptops. I can (or could) buy them on eBay for under $50 in working order (sans hard drive). Using my collection of parts, I could make them work like new again. Things like a new keyboard are $10 or so, and other parts like used motherboards are not much more. Unlike a Chromebook, replacement part are - at the present time - cheap and readily available. I am in the sweet spot.
For the time being, that is. One reason these used laptops are so cheap is that no one wants them, and they made a lot of them. So the sell them off cheap to get rid of them. Eventually, they will run out and that will be the end of it - Toshiba doesn't sell replacement parts and I doubt anyone else has new parts for them for very long.
So I will enjoy my cheap old (and reliable) laptops for a few years more - and then move on. To what, I don't know. The Chromebook experience is mixed. While it works, sort of, it is not a laptop but just a glorified smart phone. We use it to stream video to our old Sanyo television. I am not sure it is ready for much else than that, although I suppose it could be used for blogging.
But the idea of everything in "the cloud" and renting software by the month simply doesn't appeal to me. Then again, I am still running 20+ year old programs. They work just fine, thank you.
There will come a time, even for those, however. Knowing when to quit is the key. You can bankrupt yourself trying to be cheap!
