Man discovers 30 year old Apple computer still in working order

Yeah, pretty sure you can grab a working unit on eBay for under a hundred. It's cool... but absolutely not notable or newsworthy.

It's also on the front page of CNN... Which editor decided that this was big enough news that it deserved to be on the front page of their site?

In this case, it's about the contents of the machine, title probably should have made that clear.

There are many potentially interesting discussions around this story. Just off the top of my head: the resilience of old hardware, the joy of rediscovering something previously forgotten, old computer games. Let's not make this about CNN's editorial choices (human interest stories have been a thing for a long time) or whether or not this is news. After all, you submitted it.

Or cars. I think it's even more amazing that a 30 year old (or much older) car could still work well. Lots going on there.

+1. Just have a look at the retrocomputing community.

I'm sure Apple paid them well for the advertisement.

Even original Gameboys still work fine. To the extent that they're barely worth anything. The only things that seem to fail on Gameboys is the batteries inside many of the cartridges, but it's trivial to replace those (you do lose your saves, though).

Nintendo Switch isn't the most durable device. I attribute this to the sheer complexity of the device - they did what they could to while cutting some corners here and there to make the device affordable. And it's a massive success.

The Game Boy Advance SP does not take batteries. It has its own, rechargable li-on battery inside. You're probably thinking of the regular Advance.

Funny; this is my one annoyance with the Switch. If I leave it for a few days I know that it will be dead and I'll need to recharge it.

Yep. I have a 37yo working Commodore 64 here and I didn't get any CNN story for it.

Based on personal experience, the older the hardware, the more resilient it is.

A lot of that is probably down to simplicity, but the fact that it's from a time when electronics were expected to be repairable and maintained is probably a big part of it as well. My Apple II Plus from grade school still works perfectly, and I've done nothing more than simply keep using it.

I recently acquired an IMSAI 8080 that had been sitting in someone's storage unit for the past decade. I used a variac at first to make sure I wouldn't fry any circuits, but it turned out to be in perfect condition, and went right back into action as if it were still 1975.

Meanwhile, my 2009 MacBook has long since given up the ghost—and of course, Apple has no interest whatsoever in supporting me to repair it myself. I wish our technology was still built to last, rather than built to replace every two years when the payment plan ends.

Apart from the main battery and any backup batteries that laptop would probably work if it were left in storage for a few decades. The power supply is another story, that probably would need to have its electrolytic capacitors replaced before it would work reliably (or at all). Laptops don't contain that much hardware which deteriorates in time, especially not when left un-powered to avoid electromigration becoming an issue. Switch-mode power supplies don't hold up well and their failure mode is often catastrophic, this in contrast to linear power supplies which start suffering from ever-larger ripple current as the buffer capacitors lose electrolyte over time. The main reason for this is that switch-mode power supplies have large electrolytic buffer capacitors on the high-voltage side while linear power supplies only have them on the low-voltage end. I've repaired many a 'boat-anchor' (large transformer-equipped linear) power supply by simply swapping out the buffer capacitors. Blown switch-mode power supplies usually don't come back to life by swapping capacitors, these often need to have some active components replaced before anything interesting (other than the rapid release of magic smoke) happens.

Bigger and more crudely build components probably play a large part. A Microprocessor from the 70s and 80s is made on much larger nodes than today's chips, traces and soldering points are bigger, PCB's thicker, almost all components sans resistors and wires were either bigger or build differently.

They have more material to play with while they decay compared to modern devices.

> do my laptop will continue working in 30 years without maintenance?

Probably not, but same is often true for old computers.

Old hardware is easier to maintain. You can recap them, replace the failed memory chips and even fix cracks in the PCB by just running some extra wires.

You can do same to current modern computers as well, but it's nowhere near as easy.

Since it has an ssd I could see mine working in 24 years when it is 30 years old.

Was it your parents' computer that you used as a child?

Me too!

5.25" were always more durable than the 1.44mb 3.5" ones. I used an '87-vintage PC XT clone till I got a Pentium in '95 & kept the old computer in a closet.

When I booted it up a few years later all my 5.25" still worked where as brand new 3.5" ones would be a good bet to not be readable even after a single rewrite.

I recently found a stack of 3.5" floppies from the 90's, about 1/3 of them had errors. I was able to read most of the data from those -- I think I only ran into one that was completely dead.