try and get it fixed instead of buying a new one because TV's must have been expensive back then. I was watching a episode tonight and Jack asked the guy where is his TV and the guy said its out being repaired. Today and you can straight to Walmart and get another one and not have shit repaired lol
Each TV I had that died in 2006 and 2010 I got a new one the next day. Why would anyone try to get a TV repaired today
Where was Walmart and Target in 1977??? lol
Well.... things were very different back then. It wasn't that you couldn't go to the store and buy a new TV. Rather it was that doing so was horribly expensive, and fixing what you had was cheaper.
Yeah, today you can get a 60" Vizio for $400.
What if that 60" was $2,000, and you could fix it for $100? Would you just go to walmart and blow another $2,000, instead of fixing it?
Likely not.
In the 1970s, a high end TV of the time, would cost you $500. In today's money, that would be about $3,300.
Which by the way, shows you how things have changed. Anyone who says everything is so expensive today, is insane. A 21" color low res (Not 4K, or 2K or 1080p or 720p, or even 480... it was actually 440), was $3,300 in current dollars.
Things are so cheap today, and so much better than the 1970s, it is beyond ridiculous, it is downright insane to claim things were better in the past. If you can't afford your life, then you are spending too much. Things are better now than ever in history.
Regardless fixing that TV was generally far cheaper than replacing it.
They were also built differently. I had a used 70s TV, in the 1990s when I was growing up. It was extremely heavy. Had wood panel siding. It was more like a bit of furniture, rather than a picture you hanged on the wall.
So from that aspect, it was more difficult to pay for, and physically replace a TV back then, than it is today.
Then you have the other side, which is a bit more technical.
In the past, fixing things like a TV was far simpler... and thus it was cheaper to fix things.
For example, you had things like parts that were in sockets.
In the 1970s and 80s even, many parts were installed in sockets. This is actually a board for a new product, using old technology. Sockets were normal back then.
(ignore the arrow) This is board from an Apple 2 Computer. You can see the empty socket on the right, and on the left they installed the chip. You could do this by hand, in a matter of seconds. Pull the old bad chip out, and push the new good chip in.
Today, no chips are installed in sockets. None. Finding a product with a part installed in a socket, is like finding a Unicorn eating the Easter Bunny on New Years Eve.
Why is that? Because putting in sockets added lots of cost. Additionally, the size of chips shrank to a very small size. That smaller size part, can't fit in a socket. And smaller parts are cheaper.
Again, you want a 4K TV for $400, or a 440i TV for $3,300? Smaller cheaper parts, is how you get more for less money.
So removing and replacing bad parts on a TV today, is extremely difficult, and if it is harder for me to fix, then I charge you more money to fix it. Of course you are not going to pay me a ton of money to fix your TV, if you can just buy a new one for $400.
Another problem is that some things in new products are simply put... unfixable.
So what I want to point out with this picture from an old TV, is that the circuit board is just.... a board, with circuits on it.
The board itself, is just a board. If you need to connect one thing to another, you ran a wire to it. Like on this board, they have just a wire running from one part of the board to another, because the board is just a bit of board. That's it.
Now if you go back an look at the Apple 2 board, there are wires INSIDE the board. You can see them. However, even with an Apple 2 board, you could see if those wires are broken, and then you could run an actual wire from one point to another and fix the board.
But you can't do that today. At least not generally. Because today nearly all electronics use mutli-layer boards.
What you see here, is the green on top, is the part of the board you can see with your eyes. The 4th layer you can see, because that's the bottom of the circuit board. You flip the board over, and you can see that.
However there are 2 full layers inside the board itself, that you have no ability to see. (some boards have more than 4 layers too). They have wires going through them, that you don't know where they go, and you don't know if they are melted, and you don't know if they are shorted out to other wires. You have no idea if there is corrosion inside the board itself.
And you have no ability to get into the board to fix it.
As a repair technician working at a repair bay, I was taught that the moment you find any clear evidence that there is a short or open (melted or shorted to another wire) inside the board itself, you scrap the board. Because even if you find a way to isolate the problem, and run wires around the problem to get the board to work, you don't know what damage is on the inside of the board. If it has a break that allows air into the board, those wires will corrode the wires inside the board, and eventually it will fail again.
You simply can't fix it. You would have to replace the whole board, and if you do that, you might as well get a board with parts already on it. And if you do that... you might as well buy a whole new TV, because it will cost you more to get the parts, than get the TV.
There is one last aspect, which is just the nature of the technology. Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs), what every TV was until the 1990s, as the name implies, you have a CRT... which is a gigantic vacuum sealed glass tube. If it worked, it would work almost forever. CRTs (the main part of the TV), sealed in glass, with a vacuum, rarely went bad. It was all the components around the CRT that went bad.
So the CRT is the big block up top. All the supporting components are on the boards below the CRT.
The point being, the CRT was the most expensive part of the TV, and it never went bad. It was a massive sealed glass block. (Typically speaking).
It was generally the components on the board that went bad, and most of them were cheap.
Today with LCD TVs, the situation is reversed. The components tend to last forever, but the most expensive part, the LCD itself is the part that goes bad. Too much heat, too much moisture in the air, too much flexing, to many shocks or something hitting it, and it will break and fail.
So all of this, is why stuff was fixed routinely in the past, and today you just buy a new one.
