WTF is this nonsense, Discman was a specific Sony product ala Walkman.

Canyon is one of the best, but weirdly the Whole Foods store brand is really decent for their bread, waffles, and bagels and super cheap. Like matching normal bread cheap. I go to Whole Foods twice a month and buy pretty much only these items because my wife has Celiacs.

That is an absolutely wild fail rate.

Mine was a new TI 9/4A. Did yours have the voice synthesizer or hard drive? The voice synthesizer was awesome to kid me, even if most of the games were not so great.

I just recently replaced a bunch of 1TB and 2TB drives with an 4TB SSD and 8TB HDD pretty cheaply back in December. I was trying to get those in before tariff shenanigans. Technically, those old drives are still in use, just for redundancy now. Even the scary old Seagate drives!

To be fair, I believe the increased pricing then was mostly due to sales, and thus production, tanking post COVID along with the big inflation for a couple of years. There was almost certainly greed from the most prominent memory makers tackedo n though.

I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.

The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it’s all anecdotal, and I’ve had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I’ve owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven’t had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can’t recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the “bad” gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM’s derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi’s HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.

I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the “deathstars” (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I’d personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.

The only thing on my phone that could do anything like that would be the SIM itself, and luckily that’d a single call I’d do right away.

Nano’s a knockoff, use pico.

It’s nearly lossess if you can connect and maintain a 990kbps connection, but it still doesn’t have enough bandwidth to do it truly lossless. I think it would require 1411kpbs to be actually lossless. It is still better than any codec I know of for bluetooth as far as that does, but bluetooth just kinda sucks for that sort of application.