A nice article from Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo about the use of gadgets and our expectations about them... I liked this part a lot:

"The temporary solution: Retrofit the old
The only good solution I've been able to come up with: Get old stuff in eBay and modernize them with new components. Or perhaps creating replicas from scratch. It feels a bit like cheating and bastardizing the originals, but it also feel like the only possible solution, now that the original cases are considered both rare and gorgeous and are made of lasting and romantic materials like steel and wood. There's a problem: It can get pretty expensive, like a Braun Atelier Speaker L1, Still, a lot cheaper than a super-high end AV component. And you can find lower cost gems, like this TS45 radio receiver, which could be a good base for a custom Pandora or Spotify radio. Maybe a company can do the retrofitting and sell the finished products at an affordable price. But they will likely end being a lot more expensive, so I'm afraid we will have to do it ourselves. The other problem with this solution is that design would lose its meaning. The pieces will look good, but they will be bastard hybrids in which buttons and dials lose their original meaning. Which may or may not help a piece's character."


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-joel