eli5: If modern computers and smartphones etc have no moving parts, then what causes their performance to steadily deteriorate as they age?
In: Technology
It’s primarily a software problem, or at least this is what you can most easily encounter first hand.
With game consoles for example, this is not a factor. There you’ll get the cooling clog up, thermal paste getting dry, capacitors failing, various connectors becoming brittle (if they’re plastic), as well as the heat cycling and the voltage degrading the chips very slowly over time. But these are on the order of decades. If you stored your PS1/PS2 in reasonable conditions, you can expect to be able to just plug it in, and the games will run on it just as fine as they did day 1 still.
For the software problem, the issues is that over time devices keep getting more and more capable, so software is coded in accordance with the expectation that people keep upgrading to those more capable pieces of hardware too.
There are also some edge cases, e.g. with iPhones and their batteries, but that’s not that widespread.
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