Modular Upgrades

As I was lamenting last week on the terrible service end-of-life policies rendering fully functional products useless, I was going through some important upgrades, breathing new life in some other devices.

When Android TV showed up in TV sets about 5 years ago I thought this was the best thing since the sliced bread. Finally the promise of a single remote and a TV set as an application platform capable of receiving terrestrial, satellite and Internet content, with a local storage for recording and pausing. I bought a 4k Android TV made by Philips and this was a huge disappointment. First it was very laggy. An ageing phone was snappier than this device. Then it was buggy, requiring a reset every now and then. But I was literally stuck with this 55 inch of a glorious 4k LCD screen bundled with a completely crappy computer inside. I could never decide on trashing it for the environmental reasons (and also because the LCD part of it has been quite good).

So just last week I decided to turn this smart TV into a dumb one, by plugging a Google TV Chromecast device into one of the HDMI ports. I even managed to configure it the way that the (new) Google remote was able to power it up and down (via the CEC protocol). So on the surface the remote has been the only visible change: the new white one replaced the old black. And of course the Chromecast does not receive terrestrial nor satellite, but in 2022 we no longer use them anyway. And the whole experience has stayed the same, except for being much snappier and much more stable. I can highly recommend the Google TV Chromecast to anyone who has an ageing TV set. It is a great example of a "module" that can breathe a whole new life into an ageing LCD display. Or even a CRT (but that is just for nerds and makers). All for $49.99.

The other upgrade I did last week has been a new battery in the (almost 4 years old) Blackberry phone. Initially I was stunned by the (typical) 4-day period it could last on a single charge. But recently it has gone down to less than two days. I was not sure if the drop was to be attributed to the new (heavier) apps or a different usage pattern. But I had a spare battery sitting around and I decided to swap it in. The result? I am on a 3rd day now and it still holds 35% of juce. Great upgrade. Same experience, no hassle, multiplied performance. Thanks to Blackberry for making this phone so easy serviceable.

Modularity is not a new concept - it has been around for years. Think of light bulbs - we were replacing them instead of replacing the entire luminaires. The iPhone era somehow has somehow dropped that concept, chasing the extremes of a cool design (and corporate profits) instead. And producing tons of waste. It is time to restore this, as one of the most environmentally-friendly concepts.