WEBVTT

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we've gotten used to the idea of most things having a lifespan whether it's

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your own body that discount pack of chicken legs or that zesty New Meme that

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will be dead all over again within a matter of weeks and your electronics are

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no exception to this even keyboard key switches rated for 10 million presses or

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military class motherboards won't last

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forever but why I mean especially with

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so many modern Electronics not having any moving Parts why can't they last

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indefinitely just like how people can die from anything from lupus to a

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Godzilla attack to a bad ham sandwich

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Electronics have many points of failure that can lead to their untimely demise

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let's start with a common one capacitor failure capacitors are those little

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cylindrical things that look like water towers sticking out of your PCB City and

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since their job is to store and release electric electricity which you can learn

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more about up here they contain electrolytes that conduct current and

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although many capacitors can last for decades without any problems some

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especially cheaper ones and especially

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ones that use Liquid electrolytic chemicals instead of solid ones can leak

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or burst over time as happened during the infamous capacitor plague of the

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early 2000s and while it didn't wipe out a third of of Europe's population it did

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result in the untimely failure of thousands and thousands of devices but

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even if your PCB city is functioning correctly heat can ultimately be the

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undoing of your fancy gadgets you see

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when temperatures fluctuate materials tend to expand and contract think about

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how sidewalks crack when the weather changes certain things on a circuit

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board can act similarly especially the soldering points which are crucial for

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keeping everything physically connected

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over time many cycles of heating up and cooling down as your electronics turn on

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and turn off or go from idle to load can

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cause these connections to weaken increasing resistance or break outright

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heat can also result in nasty consequences on a microscopic level it

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can cause silicon atoms in your GPU or CPU to actually relocate over time and

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it also accelerates a naturally occurring phenomenon known as

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electromigration that happens in the nanoscale copper traces that are found

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on your processors you see I'm about to

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blow your mind even though we often think of electricity as a form of energy

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moving somehow through wires current is

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actually the physical flow of electrons

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that means that even though they're subatomic they still do have mass they

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they don't visibly spin like a fan but even a wire has tiny moving parts that

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means that over time they can displace or damage the copper or other metal that

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they spread through resulting in cracks or voids that can inhibit performance or

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even break a processor completely and although Electronics don't often die

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this way as they become smaller and smaller mitigating electromigration has

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become an increasingly important area of research now to be fair these problems

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don't usually surface before you'd want to replace your device anyway but

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misbehaving electrons can cause more pressing problems they have a tendency

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to accumulate in certain materials and script the voltages they need to operate

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this is why ssds not only don't have an infinite lifespan but they essentially

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have a countdown timer on them electrons build up in the transistors inside them

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that are used to store data so after enough read write Cycles enough

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electrons get stuck in these transistors to decrease the required voltage to the

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point where the data becomes stuck and

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you can no longer right to that part of the drive now of course for the average

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user things like corrosion factory defects mechanical wear on Parts like

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USB ports and hard drives or user error

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are much more likely to bring down your system than electron

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Shenanigans but there's also planned

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obsolescence where companies intentionally design products to fail

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shortly after the warranty expires or they issue software updates that make

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them less useful over time forcing us to

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go buy new ones but our corporate overlords wouldn't do that mean stuff to

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us right speaking of non-mean stuff

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bear.com Linus thanks for watching guys if you liked it liked it if you dislike

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it dislike it let me know in the comments down below if there's other stuff you'd like us to cover check out

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Channel Super Fun CU they do super cool things there but as for me I think my

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capacitor has expired so I'm going to go get some uh maintenance done at the

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local electronics shop