You presume much- it does have issues but it still plays music although I rarely turn it on these days. There's something loose in the antenna (an easy fix if I were inclined to look into it) and the LCD display is so dim you need a flashlight to see it in the daytime (which is no problem since I've got presets). The front speaker cones in the doors are falling to pieces which after 27 years is to be expected as they are paper. The engine-management computer is probably going bad too (which I'm still sorting out). Any my much newer still-dead minivan has an even worse radio in it along with a couple other electronics issues too.
Nothing lasts forever, especially today's consumer electronics which is no longer simple or made to be as robust as it once may have been made. The wonderful miniaturization of electronics we clamor for has that downside built into it. It's the way of the world whether we like it or not, and if things were all made only to that higher level I couldn't afford them, so maybe it's not so bad an approach after all. It's all in how you see things.
Phil
As I mentioned several posts ago, this isn't about ham radios, home stereos and especially not about your loose antenna, damaged 27 year old speakers, or a dimming LCD display in your ancient van. But FWIW, radios as a general product category tend to be quite reliable actually, especially car radios that survive the temperature extremes, vibrations and shocks of an automotive environment, literally for decades. Frankly though, the notion of conflating dead or dying ham radios or home stereo systems or a funky old car radio with poor dash cam product reliability and quality control is beyond me. It almost feels as if you are attempting to a distract from the original discussion here.
And honestly, I don't know what to make of your statement that,
"Nothing lasts forever". Such a comment within the context of the inherently problem prone nature of dash cams is so over-generalized and vague as to be literally meaningless.
The bottom line here is that dash cams as a product category are perhaps the most trouble prone, unreliable electronic devices I have ever encountered, even the better ones. And yet I look around my house and studio and I see numerous electronics products that have provided decades of 100% reliable service and are still in use. None of them have ever required any form of customer service and all have performed flawlessly the whole time. With dash cams, not so much. In fact, thinking about it I don't believe any of the dozens of dash cams I've had hands on experience with have ever been 100% problem free.
As for my assertion about the trouble prone nature of dash cams, I would invite everyone to have a good look around the DashCamTalk forum as a whole. One only has to take a cursory look to see that a vast percentage of the posts to this forum all across the board are complaints about or reports of problems and requests for help and assistance about a wide array of issues ranging from outright hardware failures to video glitches, focus problems, start-up issues, shut-down file saving failures, power supply issues, mounting problems, RFI annoyances, file errors, memory card compatability, cable and plug issues, etc., etc., etc.
Jokiin, Street Guardian USA and Niko have a well deserved reputation for the amazing level of outstanding customer service they provide along with a very generous camera replacement policy (which is built into the price of your SG camera, btw.) but they don't do it out of the kindness of their hearts or only because it's good for business, they do it pretty much because they HAVE TO due to the problematic nature of this product category. They spend virtually all their time on this forum fielding questions, hand holding, troubleshooting a myriad of common issues and stamping out product flaw brush fires that might affect future sales (hot pixels, focus problems, exposure problems, RFI, cracked GPS modules, power supply flaws, etc.) simply because these things just come with the territory when it comes to dash cams, even the better ones like SG. The fact that they have to engage in such fanatic 24/7, OCD product support is indicative of what I'm getting at here.