I practice on a Yamaha YPP-200 digital piano, but in general, what is the cycle life of a well-taken-care-of digital piano these days?

My Casio CPS-700 is about 11 years old. I bought it used, and have no idea of it's previous history. It works fine, even though it's out of date.

Someone had advised not to buy digital pianos if one can afford the space and money for an accoustic, and one of the reasons they gave was because digital pianos are short-lived. 11 Years and still works fine, that is not short-lived. I am guessing most digitals can last as long as the accoustic, but of course, the price relationship/proportion is reciprocal with age for digitals, and direct for accoustics.

Digitals are short-lived because of obsolescence. A 11-year-old Mac (don't know about PCs!) will still work and allow you to do your basic word processing, but you do not get the advantage of new technology. A 11-year-old keyboard may have inferior action and/or sound compared to today's keyboards, but it will still work.

Those who learn exclusively on a keyboard would not need to worry too much about breaking the mechanical parts too easily, since their fingers would usually not be as strong as pianists who learn on acoustics.

Our Roland HP 3000S was 13 years old before we switched to acoustic. Still worked fine, but was obsolete in terms of technology. One way to beat that is with peripheral modules that have all the new bells and whistles, and can run from your old digital's MIDI interface.

Jamie

What's the life cycle of a personal computer? Anything with a computer chip in it is going to obsolesce and depreciate rapidly due to advancing electronic, computer, and software technology.

Think of your digital piano as a keyboard with a lap-top computer inside. The motherboard, memory, and the processor are not upgradeable. If you need the latest software and MIDI features, then you have to replace it periodically with a newer one (planned obsolescence). As long as your current one is useful to you, then play it as if it were an accoustical piano.

While I don't have a life cycle schedule, an 11 year old digital is pretty close to worthless when selling. People prefer to buy the latest and greatest when it comes to electronics.