Houses are a great example. They absolutely crumble without constant maintenance. Water heater every 10 years, roof every 20, hardwood refinishing as needed, paint, GFCIs wear out, every type of appliance and HVAC item, repairing drywall, caulking bathrooms, and the list goes on and on.

Physical media wears out. Book pages get sun and moisture damage, wear from use, discs rot, vinyls get damaged just by being played. Film and printed photos fade.

In the case of textbooks and other non-fiction, information itself can become outdated.

Sure, the advent of digital technology should mean data doesn’t suffer from the woes of the physical realm, but that’s not even really half of the discussion.

Even those old boxed pieces of software, simply getting them to run usually isn’t always helpful. Is my tax software from 1999 going to have any functional purpose? Will I be able to get a job as a graphic designer anymore if my tools support 256 colors? If someone else made a better PDF than Acrobat Reader 1.0 would I have any desire to use the copy I already own?

Another analogy: if I could be given a brand new classic car but it needed leaded gasoline and got 10 MPG, is the fact that it lasted a lifetime relevant to me for the purposes of daily driving?

Basically, what I’m saying is that “surviving” and “maintaining value” are different things, and that putting things into the buckets of of “consumable” and “durable” good is a little too binary compared to the real world.

Sure, the smartphone distribution model means that old applications aren’t as resilient as WIN32 apps, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the current model isn’t acceptably durable.