Just watched the video. Two thoughts come to mind.

First he seems to be complaining that Stern is doing what most every other company on this planet and the next is doing, trying to reduce their costs and maximize their profit. I'm not quite sure why he doesn't expect Stern or any company in existence to always strive for that, it's what companies do.

Second, he seems to be upset that repair jobs with spike are basically being shifted from guys like him, a tech guy with decades of experience repairing old hardware, to guys like me who don't know how to repair this old stuff and can now simply fix issues by swapping a board. Currently if I have an issue I have to call a repair guy, wait until he is finally free and pay him by the hour to fix these machines since they often exceed my ability to repair them on my own, I'm simply not that skilled at repairing pinball machines, I just play them. Seems like with spike repairs will be much easier for me since it amounts to just swapping a board. It's hard for me not to see this as a positive as it will save me time and money.

I dunno, both seem like positives to me. Once helps keep Stern alive and hence make more games while the other now makes it possible for me to quickly fix my own games.

In 5 years my local pinball tech will be retired, so what then? I can't fix these games on my own and many of the people that can and/or make house calls are getting older and retiring. Even for them it can take days to fix issues, like when my Theater of Magic had sound issues it took a few days for my decades of experiences tech dude to figure out what the issue was. Imagine me trying to sort that out! In that case I was lucky and the game was still on warranty but if it wasn't the bill would have been huge. Like I said I don't want to mess with the internals, I just want to play.

With spike it's mostly wires and a few node boards so I can finally fix them myself. I can handle removing and replacing a small board. Dealing with your point is very simple, I won't buy a used spike machine unless I can also buy node boards for it, problem solved. I've done the same with my arcade games, like my Baby Pacman has a problematic vidiot board so I bought a spare when I got it. My Robotron, Jr Pacman, etc machines all have spare boards as well. When I buy Elvira 3 I'll consider buying a spare set of node boards to go with it. Either way buying new node boards for someone like me is cheaper than paying a tech, and much less frustrating and time consuming than having to ship out boards for others to repair and hope that issues get fixed.

It's not a matter of laziness, it's a matter of ability. I had a flipper that would bounce around on one of my games, a quick google search said to replace the coil so I did that, basic part swap and fixed. The ship didn't work on my POTC so I took it apart, replaced some parts, reassembled it and it worked. Marquee light didn't work on one of my arcade machines even after replacing the starter and lbulb, so I replaced the ballast and done, it worked. I can do those types of fixes because they are purely mechanical and very isolated repairs, basically replace nearby broken part with new part, put back together, done.

Fixing boards though can be notoriously difficult. Some like to make it seem like it's always a simple part change and done, but often it can take many days to figure out wtf is going on, and if you don't have experience fixing boards then good luck. Case in point my aforementioned vidiot board on Baby Pacman. I called a few places and they all had no interest in repairing one of mine that was broken because they are a nightmare to deal with if you don't have experience with them, and that included one well known repair shop out east. I had to find a specialist dude on klov that focuses on just those boards and he fixed it. Same with pinball boards, the amount of time and effort it can take to fix one simply exceeds my abilities. Also you have to understand not everyone wants to spend their spare time fixing things, there's often other things I'd rather be doing. Life is short enough as it is to spend weekends diagnosing board errors. If you're into that sort of thing then cool, but not everyone is.

Cost wise, it's like anything else. If I can afford it then I'll buy it, if not then I won't. As I understand it node boards are $200 or so each, I didn't think they were $1000. But regardless if something is out of my price range then I just don't buy it. It's not like there aren't a million other ways to spend my money to be entertained.

Sure but that was back then when I could call Williams and buy a new board. They aren't available much now and more often than not they are sold as is meaning likely not working which doesn't help me a whole lot. If they were all repairable and easily available now then we wouldn't have Rottendog, Alltek, etc.

But that's applicable to all electronics be if laptops, phones or whatever. It's like car mechanics back in the late 80s that were complaining about the computerization of cars because now they can't repair them anymore. Things modernize, get smaller, etc, you can't stop that. E-Waste is pretty easy to deal with here, we have places specifically for electronics that you can bring boards, monitors, etc to. They take them apart because there is money in the materials that make the boards, so they don't just get tossed into a landfill but that's here, your city may vary.

It really depends to who you talk with. The old school pinball guys I talk with tell me these machines had plenty of issues back in the day, so who knows who to believe anymore.

I don't really believe they are always easy to fix either. It's like with Vegas, everyone seems to make money there because you never hear from the people that lost money, but you always hear from the people that won money. Likewise with board repair, you'll always hear from the guy that changed a cap and brought a board back to life, but you won't hear from the guy that spent a month trying to fix a board and gave up because he didn't see that slightly lifted trace that occurred sometime in the machines 30 year life when a previous repair guy applied too much heat to the board. Or you won't hear from the guy that couldn't figure out an intermittent problem after weeks of trying because some chip on the board has nand logic that decides to not work 15% of the time. The type of stuff I've seen is with old school repair guys sometimes giving up and just swapping a board from their large stash of boards they accumulated over the decades, when they can't figure out a fix in a reasonable amount of time. Presumably those defective boards then get sent to a specialist someplace for them to repair it whenever they get around to it, like I had to do with my vidiot board. That's just my experience, perhaps you have always been able to easily fix boards, but that's not what I've seen. Like I said with my Theater of Magic, it took two guys with 60+ years of pinball experience between them a long time to figure out the issue, and they were only able to do so by swapping lots of parts from a working Theatre of Magic they had around.

Plus the factory board aren't that cheap anymore. I mean what would it cost me to buy the 3 boards in the head of my Elvira and the Party Monsters? As I understand it three Stern node boards would cost what, around $600 brand new? So what would those three Elvira boards fully restored and refurbished cost me? People say they are cheap so cool, I'm interested in buying a spare cheap fully restored set.

I think if you account for inflation pricing isn't hugely different. I'll use my Elvira and the Party Monsters as the example again since it's one of my favorites that I own. $3000 in 1989 according to the interweb is around $6000 today, not too different from a modern Pro model even though a Stern pro will have more "toys" than my Elvira does.

As for longevity of the Stern boards, who knows. We'll have to wait a couple more decades to have that question answered.

Well it's just a dollar conversion. I imagine it may look even worse for early 80s games like Xenon, but maybe it looks better for later 90s games though like Scared Stiff. How much was Scared Stiff new in 1996 anyways? Can't seem to find data on that but I think I remember someone saying around $3699 in a Youtube video. If that's true that makes around $5800 in today's dollars which is similar to what say a Ghostbusters Pro sells for.

My best guess is that at some they re-evaluated their business and decided that the future is in home use, not in vending them, as such perhaps they decided going forwards they will be lower volume but higher price and have been quickly transitioning to that. They may have seen the retro resurgence coming and decided to position themselves to capitalize on that. As far as quality issues, it's possible they always had various qc issues but in the past vendors didn't care since the machines would be beat up on for a year in the field before being sold, and the second hand market would expect various issues with a used game anyways. Just a guess. Honestly I haven't seen any issues on the Stern machines I've played in various locations, so I haven't seen the cabinets and play fields falling apart as mentioned here, but maybe I've been lucky.

Think about though, how many buyers have both a desire to tinker and a skilled mentor at their beck and call? I can't imagine that many. We don't have kids and I have my own company hence I have lots of spare time, but to be honest I prefer to spend it walking at the beach or tearing around the local canyon roads. I've done some tinkering here and there, you can see it in some of my Youtube videos, I've desoldered chips, replaced caps, installed sockets, swapped ribbon cables, stuff like that, but it's not something I hugely enjoy, it was just something I had to do to bullet proof some of my arcade machines when local tech guys were simply not available. Honestly I'd rather they all just work which is why I may have fixed some on my own, but I bought some fully restored from elsewhere paying much more but having someone else do all the work. To each their own I guess, in my case I like that the newer machine will be easier for me to fix with a board swap but for you at least you have an endless supply of older pins to work on.

Already have and already do Those connectors are often burned on old arcade machines to where the boards don't get consistent 5v so I've had to change quite a few. It's simple to do, I figured it out how to do it from watching Youtube videos on it, tedious but easy. It's pcb repair that I can't figure out because while people love to claim that it's easy and it's just a 50 cent part, in the real world it's never that easy and almost always costs more. I know this first hand from buying pcb's at auction and unsuccessfully fixing any of them myself, and then from trying to get the same people that love to claim how Simple And Cheap (tm) they are to fix to help me fix them only to have them want nothing to do with what they now describe as "possibly complicated" repairs.

Having said that I'm not afraid of any of this, like I had said the people I know with Stern machines don't really have issues with them, it's only here where they are apparently laden with mass defects. And now worse case if I have an issue on a future Stern I'll just swap the node board myself, no more need to wait weeks for an expensive tech.

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