Said farewell to an old friend today: the 14″ Sony KVM1400U TV that my parents bought for me when I left home in June 1993. (I well remember double-checking with the man in the shop that it had a SCART input, as I was desperate to get a better picture from my Commodore Amiga 500+ than the RF input I’d been using up to then gave me… and eschewing the slightly more expensive variant that had teletext, as that seemed like something I’d never use.)
It’s been used almost daily since then and was still working perfectly, and I hate replacing stuff that does. But if nothing else, it had been dropped so many times that the case was in several bits and I couldn’t really guarantee it was still electrically safe. So off to the great recycling plant in the sky (well, Argos) it went. Somehow I doubt that the 19″ LED TV we bought to replace it, for almost exactly the same price in numerical terms, will last another couple of decades.
(We aren’t a completely CRT-free household yet, though—we have a larger and equally well-used Sony warhorse in the dining room that’s probably still got a year or two left in it!)