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Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Hardware Lab Bench?
50000BTU_barbecue writes "I made a comment a few days ago in a story basically saying the oscilloscope is dead. While that's a bit dramatic, I've found that over the last 20 years my oscilloscopes have been 'on' less and less. Instead, I use a combination of judicious voltage measurements, a logic analyzer and a decent understanding of the documentation of the gadget I'm working on. Stuff is just more and more digital and microcontroller-based, or just so cheap yet incredibly integrated that there's no point in trying to work on it. (I'm thinking RC toys for example. Undocumented and very cheap. Doesn't work? Buy another.) While I still do old-school electronics like circuit-level troubleshooting (on old test gear), that's not where the majority of hobbyists seem to be. Yet one thing I keep hearing is how people want an oscilloscope to work on hardware. I think it's just not that necessary anymore. What I use most are two regulated DC lab supplies, a frequency counter, a USB logic analyzer, a USB I2C/SPI master, and a USB-RS-232 dongle. That covers a lot of modern electronics. I have two oscilloscopes, a 100MHz two-channel stand-alone USB unit and a 1960s analog plug-in-based mainframe that is a '70s hacker dream scope. But I rarely use them anymore. What equipment do hardware folks out there use the most? And would you tell someone trying to get into electronics that they need a scope?"
The OP is basically saying "I trust the documentation and that's good enough for me in my job to solve a majority of the problems I see"
So what the OP is really saying is he doesn't do anything groundbreaking, and he's ok with accepting the status quo of performance offered in consumer devices. He sees no value in understanding fundamental concepts that everything is built upon because as far as he's concerned, IC technology has been perfected. If there is something going on that isn't documented, well it's probably best that he doesn't dig into it.
Or to state it from another perspective, OP just doesn't care anymore, he's sick of dealing with problems that shouldn't even be manifested at his level in the tech food chain, yet here is with a fucking oscilloscope trying to debug IR interference from a misaligned coil or something, or what may presumably be a hardware failure with some hidden DRM enforcement IC that can't legally be documented due to DCMA restrictions around Intelectual Property that is of national security interest.