Early 2000s. My family used VHS until after the switch to digital TV. Not that we would buy one new, but if we found one at a garage sale for a couple bucks we would take it. Used to have a stock of 2 or 3 on hand at a time. They were all late 90's / early 2000s models that everyone was dropping in favor of DVDs, made as cheap as possible, and would quit working in about 8-10 months. Which meant I got to take apart the broken one - I recall taking apart around a dozen, but some of those were already broken and found in the trash.

Meanwhile, the "basement" VCR my dad bought new in '85 still works to this day, but that one was less programmable, so we always used the cheap ones to record off the air.

All of our VCRs lasted a very long time. My parents had a Toshiba VCR from the late 1980s as well as a Sony Hi-Fi model VCR from 1995, both of which lasted for years and years, even in spite of damage and neglect from use (and misuse) by young children.

That is unfortunately my experience. My household between ~2005 and ~2015 acquired a VCR every year or so, keeping pace with the rate at which they would pack up. These were second-hand machines at the end of their life, so although I wouldn't say we "didn't care" when disposing of them, it was with a sense of resignation as we knew that repairing them was beyond our collective skill and equipment.

At an ambient relative humidity of 90%, the tapes themselves would become mouldy at an alarming rate. We did therefore check for mould before playing them, as this could have rubbed off onto the VCRs and then might have spread to other tapes.

Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-channel system.

I think this is plausible as we got into the late 90s and they became cheap enough to not warrant repairs. Prior to that, though, it definitely was not the case. I had a neighbor who made quite a comfortable living repairing VCRs in the 80s and early 90s. I also saw the web for the first time in his shop in 93/94.

In the range of 1984-1992 ISTR my family went through around 4 VCRs, ISTR a Sharp, a Toshiba, and a couple of Sonys. I was particularly annoyed with one of the Sony failures because it was a fairly high end unit and it died with a particularly hard to find extended cut of Dune in it.

I’m you were a heavy user it wasn’t uncommon. I bought one in 2000 for $30. The thing had to be garbage at that price point.

I don't think that happened until Apex released sub-$50 DVD players where they were being placed in kid's rooms and people didn't mind if a PB&J was inserted into it. Then it was just another toy the kid broke to go along with the 10 copies of the same DVD that kept getting so scratched up that it couldn't play any more. As long as dad's player/TV were kept clean, the kid's DVD player could be replace at will.

Even VHS tapes were much more expensive than DVDs right up until DVDs.

Yeah, my family didn't even have one and I wasn't too sad about it, but what I remember from people who had them is that - whether it was an early expensive one or a late cheap one - they lasted long, like 5 to 10+ years.

It's all survivorship bias. Of course the top-of-the-line built-like-a-tank tech from 50 years ago still works. It doesn't mean the good enough tech from 50 years ago didn't last 20+ years

Same. It's either that the author had quiet a different life than us or they wrote it using an LLM

My grandparents had the same 3 VHS units in their house until they moved to digital tv.

We only ever replaced ours once.

A mate of mine had 4 in a stack for the purpose of duplicating and distributing VHS tapes illegally. I think 1 of them stopped working.

Another mate had one that wouldnt rewind faster than playback speed. But they just returned the tapes in dickhead mode rather than paying for a new VCR.

Yeah, any VCR purchased in the early 90s was still doing just fine when the late 90s and DVD players rolled around.

But I’ve never heard of a “VHS player” —- always a VCR or a VTP for a playback only unit as uncommon as they were.