The first one I played was Zelda, on a gold cartridge, on the original NES.

The oldest system I played on was an Atari.

The oldest system I played games on was an Appie IIe, and it was Sticky Bear Basket Bounce. That game is like, my youth.

I’ll pile on with a “Yup!”

While I fell into a pattern where I intend to upgrade every 2 years maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I’ve noticed in that same time frame that both the cost of new devices has gone up significantly and the durability of those devices has dropped.

I’m very easy on my phones. They spend a vast majority of their time on my desk, or plugged into my car. I’m old and boring enough that “going out” involves sitting down at a table at a nice dinner with friends and then going home. That said, the battery life on my phones starts to degrade after about a year. Various flaws start to creep up in the device. I’ve already had to replace the screen on my Pixel 7 Pro once – though, to be fair, it took a tumble from the couch onto a hardwood floor, but even that, really, shouldn’t turn the screen non-functional.

It’s disappointing to see that planned obsolescence rearing its head.

In the short term, a series of collapses as we reach ever closer toward that singularity. There’s a great many constraints on our ability to grow while on Earth, and it’s proving difficult to get off the planet in any reasonable method with our current technology. I suspect we’ll need to fall down and rebuild a couple times before we can reliably spread to other planets, or even simply exist in orbit.

Once we get up there, though, and we’re no longer constrained by Earth’s resource limits, we’ll grow signficantly. I suspect we’ll move toward a machine-based society, both in automation and robotics, but also integrating technology into our bodies.

At some point, someone is going to figure out how to do that mind to machine transfer, and we’ll diverge as a species. The organic humans and the composite AI / machine-based humanity.

Knowing how stupid we are, though, we’ll probably end up becoming the Borg.