More or less all modern electronic devices have a limited lifespan

Something happened to me today:

Sadly it looks like my Wahoo Elemnt bike GPS computer (vintage 2016) has failed, not from the faltering battery that I expected (it's been less good at that for some time and I was dreading this winter) but from something that keeps it going through power/reboot cycles most of the time. This could be a flaky side power switch that keeps bouncing on and off, a circuit glitch elsewhere, or maybe failing flash/RAM/etc.

(I have a more recent unit for fun bike rides, this was my old/commute one.)

It used to be that straightforward electronic devices were potentially very long lived, even things like basic wired bike computers. Typically electronic circuits themselves have been quite reliable and didn't really wear out, so what brought on most failures was mechanical stress eventually breaking a solder joint or things like water getting into stuff. But famously, most everything these days is really a little computer instead of dedicated electronics, and for bigger things, electronics are more sophisticated and convenient than ever (also). But this comes with a little downside, because most of these electronic devices have some combination of LiIon batteries and flash memory for local storage (my bike GPS computer has both).

The problem with both of these is that they have a finite lifespan. Flash cells can only be erased so many times and LiIon batteries have limited charge cycles. Internal flash storage is almost never designed to be replaced, and while LiIon batteries may be designed to be replaced for a while, currently many batteries for devices are relatively custom things where you're probably not going to be able to buy an off the shelf replacement a decade or two or three later. When too much of the internal flash goes bad or the battery won't hold a charge well enough (or has another problem), that's it for that device. The circuits and the mechanical buttons and switches may still be fine, but that doesn't help much.

This is the modern reality of life, but I find it a bit sad, partly because I'm the kind of person who likes to find something that works for me and then stick with it. But today, even with a well built electronic device I may be lucky to get ten years of active service out of it, and certainly I can't expect decades.

(I expect this to complicate preservation of electronic devices and long term hobbies, including for old computer equipment. Today we have operable electronic games and other devices from the 1970s and 1980s, if they've been carefully preserved and treated well. In the future, there may not be any still working examples of common devices from, say, the 2010s because they've all suffered from flash and battery wear-out. Plus of course they may depend on cloud services that have long since been shut down, or want to interact with long obsolete apps that don't run on future smartphones or devices. I don't envy the historians and museum-keepers; they have an "exciting" time either ahead of them or already here.)