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Comment on My refurbished ThinkPad (L390 Yoga) came with wrong rubber feet (too thick) not allowing it to turn into tablet mode.

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tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It’s of poor quality (the rubber of the cable on mine is turning into a sticky mess) and entirely passive.

Maybe ten years back, a whole ton of consumer electronics were made with some rubberized coating which felt great when new, but over the course of several years, degraded into an incredibly sticky mess.

I had a Grundig shortwave radio covered in the stuff.

Eventually, after I went to a lot of work with different substances, I discovered that isopropyl alcohol and some elbow grease could get it off. But if this is the same stuff and it’s just a cable, I’d probably just replace the cable.

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dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As somewhat of a retro '90’s-2000’s electronics collecting nerd, this stuff is the bane of my existence.

It seems like in the early 2000’s there were only three types of finishes applied to electronics products:

TPE “soft touch” coatings that turn into snot after a few years

Crappy metallized silver paint that starts flaking off immediately

White or Bondi Blue plastic under a clear acrylic layer trying to ape an early iMac or iPod, which gets dirt trapped between the layers and then turns yellow

You just can’t win.
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- tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Crappy metallized silver paint that starts flaking off immediately (basically every digital camera ever made from 1999-2006
  
  Oh, man, yeah, I’d forgotten about that.
  
  White or Bondi Blue plastic under a clear acrylic layer trying to ape an early iMac or iPod
  
  Hah, I avoided those. I think I had one translucent device at one point.
  
  That being said, from the 1970s and 1980s, you had all those light beige things that yellowed It wasn’t the worst kind of aging, and it was treatable, but there were so many items whose age was visible.
  
  henningludvigsen.com/…/sun-fading-old-yellowed-pl…
  
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