we've gotten used to the idea of most things having a lifespan whether it's
your own body that discount pack of chicken legs or that zesty New Meme that
will be dead all over again within a matter of weeks and your electronics are
no exception to this even keyboard key switches rated for 10 million presses or
military class motherboards won't last
forever but why I mean especially with
so many modern Electronics not having any moving Parts why can't they last
indefinitely just like how people can die from anything from lupus to a
Godzilla attack to a bad ham sandwich
Electronics have many points of failure that can lead to their untimely demise
let's start with a common one capacitor failure capacitors are those little
cylindrical things that look like water towers sticking out of your PCB City and
since their job is to store and release electric electricity which you can learn
more about up here they contain electrolytes that conduct current and
although many capacitors can last for decades without any problems some
especially cheaper ones and especially
ones that use Liquid electrolytic chemicals instead of solid ones can leak
or burst over time as happened during the infamous capacitor plague of the
early 2000s and while it didn't wipe out a third of of Europe's population it did
result in the untimely failure of thousands and thousands of devices but
even if your PCB city is functioning correctly heat can ultimately be the
undoing of your fancy gadgets you see
when temperatures fluctuate materials tend to expand and contract think about
how sidewalks crack when the weather changes certain things on a circuit
board can act similarly especially the soldering points which are crucial for
keeping everything physically connected
over time many cycles of heating up and cooling down as your electronics turn on
and turn off or go from idle to load can
cause these connections to weaken increasing resistance or break outright
heat can also result in nasty consequences on a microscopic level it
can cause silicon atoms in your GPU or CPU to actually relocate over time and
it also accelerates a naturally occurring phenomenon known as
electromigration that happens in the nanoscale copper traces that are found
on your processors you see I'm about to
blow your mind even though we often think of electricity as a form of energy
moving somehow through wires current is
actually the physical flow of electrons
that means that even though they're subatomic they still do have mass they
they don't visibly spin like a fan but even a wire has tiny moving parts that
means that over time they can displace or damage the copper or other metal that
they spread through resulting in cracks or voids that can inhibit performance or
even break a processor completely and although Electronics don't often die
this way as they become smaller and smaller mitigating electromigration has
become an increasingly important area of research now to be fair these problems
don't usually surface before you'd want to replace your device anyway but
misbehaving electrons can cause more pressing problems they have a tendency
to accumulate in certain materials and script the voltages they need to operate
this is why ssds not only don't have an infinite lifespan but they essentially
have a countdown timer on them electrons build up in the transistors inside them
that are used to store data so after enough read write Cycles enough
electrons get stuck in these transistors to decrease the required voltage to the
point where the data becomes stuck and
you can no longer right to that part of the drive now of course for the average
user things like corrosion factory defects mechanical wear on Parts like
USB ports and hard drives or user error
are much more likely to bring down your system than electron
Shenanigans but there's also planned
obsolescence where companies intentionally design products to fail
shortly after the warranty expires or they issue software updates that make
them less useful over time forcing us to
go buy new ones but our corporate overlords wouldn't do that mean stuff to
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bear.com Linus thanks for watching guys if you liked it liked it if you dislike
it dislike it let me know in the comments down below if there's other stuff you'd like us to cover check out
Channel Super Fun CU they do super cool things there but as for me I think my
capacitor has expired so I'm going to go get some uh maintenance done at the
local electronics shop