I am a Computer Hardware professional. I started working with computer technology in the early eighties. I have seen the evolution of technology starting with closed platforms like the game console era and then the move toward open platforms like the Home Computer Golden Age. In the last 5 or 10 years, I have witnessed technology changes that are slowly moving away from open hardware designs towards hardware that is locked down and can’t be modified by the user.
NO! I JUST BOUGHT LIKE $600 WORTH OF DRIVES AND EQUIPMENT TO MAKE MY COMPUTER A FRONT LOADER!!! And I’m going to buy several 4TB drives in this form factor…just over the coarse of the next few years. Maybe like 10 of them in 5 years.
I don’t said your devices will stop working, you misunderstand the whole conversation. Form factors change all time, I have here a 5.25" 8 MB HDD next to me. “Planned obsolescence” that I can’t use a 30 years old component? You can hardly buy a motherboard with floppy or IDE/PATA ports. Do you also miss them?
I mean, it’s expected that new devices won’t have all the old ports, like USB killed all the serial and parallel and other terrible single use ports, thanks god. You can always buy dongles, like, I have IDE-USB converter so I can still use my old devices. I recently bought a laptop IDE-m.2 converter, so I can use m.2 sata SSD in a Win-98 era laptop. Where is this obsolescence, I could work it around easily. SATA won’t disappear, and 2.5" to 3.5" adapters are cheap as hell, as it’s just a plastic frame.
I’m still using the 5.25" drive bays in my computer…
spoiler
…to hold 3.5" drives, LOL