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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That era is mostly over, due to the convergence of everything into smartphones. The 1990s were the peak period for minor electronic junk, powered by round connectors with no standard for voltage, current, polarity, or pin size. The 1990s brought the Furby, Tickle Me Elmo, and a flood of R/C controlled toys.

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You can still buy lots of these toys and minor electronic junk. But many of them nowadays at least standardise on USB for power or charging (otherwise, it's mostly AA or AAA batteries).

Honestly, the 'minor junk' has gotten so much better in quality, too. We got some kiddie light up shoes that we bought more than six months ago, and the LEDs and batteries in there are still going strong. The cheap RC car we got a year ago also still runs on the initial AA batteries.

Rechargeable batteries and ports becoming ubiquitous has been a boon for households. Case in point: we wanted lighting for our stairs like many people do. You can buy, in the single digit dollars, motion sensor lights that are rechargeable and come with magnetic and adhesive to mount the lights in the stairwell. Keep a usb fan out cable cluster nearby and recharging them once a week is a 10 second endeavor to pop the lights off the magnets in the walls and leave them plugged in for an hour. Amazing.

Such a setup would have been in the hundos of dollars even 25 years ago

I read somewhere that batteries get about 8% better per year. Meaning a doubling in performance about every 9 years.

Maybe car batteries.

The only dependency of the original Furby was AA batteries. If you find one in a drawer, you can clean out the battery compartment, pop in new cells, and you're probably good to go.

Meanwhile smartphones have enabled this trend writ large with devices now entirely dependent on surveillance-laden someone-else's-computer-connected throwaway apps that are only meant to work long enough to churn to the next product revision.

There is a lot of waste still. Pregnancy tests for example. And even the small array of devices - mouse keyboard phone watch charger headphones - still need to be replaced too often.

> Pregnancy tests for example.

Don't you just pee on a stick, no electronics involved?

Why sell a pee on a stick for $1 at 50c profit when you can sell one with a computer for $10 for $5 profit.

OK, you can get a computer to look at the chemicals for you. But that's unnecessary and doesn't add anything.

I've bought a few pregnancy tests in my life, and never an electronic one. Not sure they were even for sale. They were definitely not pushed prominently in the shops. I see talks about them online much more than I ever see them offline. Are electronic pregnancy tests one of those American obsessions?

I've never seen one. I've only ever seen the one line two line kind that certainly aren't electronic.

A quick Google tells me electronic versions of that are common though. Weird. I've never seen those.

A surprising number of people find the two line concept too complicated. A digital read out makes them feel better. At least it’s not yet connected to a smart phone.

There are (actually good) apps which help you read the two line tests. The apps are helpful for reading fertility window tests since the result is not binary. It will take a picture and use the control line to normalize the reading, showing you a history of the results.

Funny enough, letting your smartphone take a picture of the two lines and interpreting them for you would actually be better than having dedicated electronics in the pee stick.

Better in at least two ways:

(A) Your phone can run much more sophisticated software and has a great camera.

(B) Less waste.

> Better in at least two ways:

And a third way: now everybody knows you are pregnant. /s

> By removing most of the interior of the test, including the original CPU

Does that really count as "running Doom on X" ?

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