Do We Rely Too Much On Electronic Parts?

Just an innocent question and one that I don’t have any for sure answers to but one that deserves at least some thought. I am thinking them number one because my lovely brother-in-law has me writing these joyous articles for him as his employee and also because electronic parts are one of the most frustrating parts for me of the technology boom that has happened in the last 100 (but way more quickly in the last 30) years.

What frustrates me so much about electronic parts? Well for one thing I don’t understand them and don’t have the power therefore to fix them or to at least know what needs to be fixed, what kind of effort it will be, and maybe most importantly how much it should cost to fix it. It is this way with any system that you don’t understand and it frustrates me to no end because people who do understand can’t be trusted oftentimes and we end up paying for being ignorant.

Electronic parts also have a habit of breaking at the worst times, and the more we rely on them the worse it is when they unreliably quit working properly. They are so unexpected because often they go from working fine to not working at all. There is no way to do preventative maintenance as a result and so you are always blindsided and left stranded especially if it doesn’t happen during convenient business hours.

Another aspect of these frustrating little tools we call electronic parts is that they make the products that we buy that contain them very unreliable from one product to the next. What I am referring to I will try to explain by example. You see right now I am trying to make a wise purchase of a PDA phone and am having trouble as I am getting mixed messages over all on the reviews of the different phones. The problem is that people have such different experiences from one phone to the next in the exact same line and model. This I attribute mainly to the unreliability of the electronic components.

So what are we to do? Well maybe technology should be developed that does give us warning before a part actually fails. Some sort of easy to read meter that gives you a chance to get your car in for a change of the electronic parts are failing. This would make all the difference I believe. The other part of it would be to have more regulation over the parts makers so that they would be forced to produce parts more reliably so that you could be more confident when you buy.