Realization:

[mcity]

The reason my ten year old calculator still works perfectly is because calculators have to survive getting knocked around for years in backpacks by teenagers. That was obvious. What I just realized is that, unlike, say, an iPhone, there's no planned obsolescence; math doesn't change, and there are thousands of new customers, guaranteed, each year.. I don't need to update my firmware to do Trigonometry, and I still have no idea what "STATVAR" is for. I found a comparable calculator to my old TI-34 II, which cost around $30 back in 2001, for 15 bucks. It's mostly the high-end stuff that doesn't change.

I remember reading a magazine article back in 2000 about whether one's computer could handle browsing the internet while it burned a CD. It made me giggle, remembering it back in 2007.