Hacker News Reader

As often as they break or want and can afford a bigger one.

I'd need a pretty compelling reason to buy a new TV even every five years.

How many Walkman's or Discman's did you buy before the iPod came out? The market for portable music devices went up exponentially from the 90's to the mid-2000's when the iPod achieved mainstream status. I bought two iPods in three years before the iPhone made 'em useless.

Consumer behavior isn't set in stone.

Source: http://www.in-stat.com/press.asp?ID=1366&sku=IN0502148ID

Off topic, but the iPhone has done anything but make my iPod Classic useless. It's shown me what a brilliant and useful device my Classic is, that I can hold 120gigs of music in my pocket at all times. You have to be a music fan to really appreciate this, but for me I like that I have a smart phone and an iPod and, if my classic broke, I would certainly buy another one.

Re-read my comment. It's set-top box not TV.

Oops, my bad. The rest of us were discussion televisions, not set-top boxes!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com