alt Hacker NewsEarly 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.
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The previous owners of my apartment left a VCR behind. I think it's from the mid-90s, but I'm not sure. It didn't work very reliably, taking time to turn on and sometimes shutting off when e.g. spinning up the video head. But my hands were itching to fix something, so, after all these years of putting it off, I replaced the capacitors in the power supply section, and now it works about 98% of the time. The remaining 2% is the mechanism sometimes locking up when switching between playing and rewinding. Still proud of myself, heh.
My own impressions after taking it completely apart (you have to, to get the main board out) and putting it back together, is that the engineers who made it definitely did so with repairability in mind (the service manual is very detailed and way above my level of understanding of electronics), but it was also made to a price point. A high one admittedly, but it's still not nearly "no expense spared" level of robustness.
I vividly remember the day when at age 10 my grandfather let me disassemble a broken VCR. It is the day I learned to treat electronics with large capacitors with respect.