If you Could only have one Electronic Device, what would it be?

If you Could only have one Electronic Device, what would it be?

I am going to wait for all the other answers before revealing mine.

hmm guess it would be my garage radio, i enjoy music and play a better radio, than the piano.

My box fan.

I have had it almost ten years now and it hasn't given up on me so I don't plan on giving up on it. A guy needs a little breeze to sleep, you know?

I am sympathetic with Tim’s choice; but, I might as well go for broke … air conditioner.   I had considered an e-truck, but I don’t know of any with an air conditioner that I could easily cool a house with.

Anne Miller wrote:If you Could only have one Electronic Device, what would it be?

Military-grade Gen 3 Thermal / NIR night vision goggles.

"Why" should be pretty self-explanatory. (to find out Who / What's eating my Garden, of course!    

The challenge is that essentially everything is an electronic device now. Everything has printed circuits. My car, my phone, my flashlights, my power tools, my battery chargers, my Linux laptops that let me log into Permies. I can't choose -- I need all this stuff!

However: I don't have a pacemaker, but if I did that would be the one device I would prefer to keep.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:The challenge is that essentially everything is an electronic device now. Everything has printed circuits. My car, my phone, my flashlights, my power tools, my battery chargers, my Linux laptops that let me log into Permies. I can't choose -- I need all this stuff!

I can understand why you can't choose.

If all electronic devises went away except the one I choose it would have to be my car.  We live too far from everything to walk.

I hope dear hubby chooses air conditioning.

I think Id pick my fence energizer. Iv chased to many pigs and delt with to many predators to go without it anymore. My deep freezer would be a close second. If there's no fans or AC I need ice cream!

I don't know the OP's original intent, but I think "Electronic" and "Electrical" are somewhat different devices. An old box fan with a physical switch that keeps your bedroom cool is simple electrical; a fancy box fan with Bluetooth that talks to your refrigerator and toaster and can be activated through your phone is electronic.

There seems to be a bit of blurry line separating 'electric' and 'electronic'.  

My little electric fan just has an on-off switch so I'm keeping that. The 'new' washing machine has electronics, though my previous one didn't. But for me, it would be a toss up between my laptop and my phone. My laptop would probably win because I use it as my way of communicating with the world and keeping in touch with people, but the phone is also my camera, my audio-book player at night, and my emergency help-line. I suspect there are ways to make emergency phone calls via the laptop though, and probably ways to make it play audiobooks at night without the screen on too. I think I'll keep my laptop!

For my other half, I think he'd be lost without transport. I thought his car would be safe, as it's a 1981 model, but it does have some electronic in it according to google.

The Citroën CX features several notable electronic innovations, including electric windows on all four doors, a semi-automatic gearbox, and transistorized electronic ignition. Additionally, it was equipped with speed-sensitive DIRAVI fully-powered steering for enhanced driving control.

Personally, I don't think electric windows count as electronic - it's just a motor and a switch.

Apparently ours doesn't have a semi-automatic gearbox. It's fully manual.

The transistorized electronic ignition doesn't apply to ours as it's diesel.

Our power steering is mechanical and hydraulic, no electronics in it.

So he can keep the car - woohoo!

Oh, and the radio, but we don't use that. Still has a rather stretched cassette in the player too of someone singing fado but it's never used. For the purposes of this exercise, I guess we just take it out.

There's also a cigarette lighter (it is a bit old...) but not only is it not used, it doesn't have electronics. It's just a push switch to a heating element with a springy thing that spits it out again.

Douglas said, "I don't know the OP's original intent, but I think "Electronic" and "Electrical" are somewhat different devices/

I was not talking about electric. Not toasters (unless fancy, if there are such things), light bulbs, or power cords, etc.

Electronic means something that will process, store, or transmit data and signals, etc.

My car can be hooked up to blue tooth (what ever that is) so very much electonic and even has GPS.

Probably any vehicle with air conditioning is an electronic device.

With a clearer definition now, I would say this phone, as much as I hate to admit it.
That's all we have for long distance communication...no landline, no wifi, just a bit of data and unlimited texts and calls .  Since I'm not part of any other social media other than permies and I actually enjoy texting and email this suits me.  
We've lived without all electronics and electric items in the past for over a decade and having a  phone was the one thing that we thought could have made a huge difference in many situations.

this would rule out our hybrid car, washing machine and dvd player but otherwise still have the turntable and tapedeck and window fans... I could live with that😊

edit to clarify:
a cell phone, not 'this' cell phone I'm typing on right now...it is an annoyance in many ways but I am sure there are more cooperative ones available.

Just for interest, here's my electric and electronic free summertime cooling and entertainment system.

It consists of a silk bedspread, a mister, a fan, a pink dragon full of mischief and ideas, and a recorder. Which is her latest idea...



The cooling is supplemented by paying very close attention to interior and exterior temperatures and closing the windows then the temperature outside is within a degree of room temperature. The blinds are also closed on the west side of the house in the afternoon. Then we open all the windows up again the moment the temperature outside drops to the same as it is inside. Even if the temperature is exactly the same, it still feels better for having more air-flow and it means we catch the very first wafts of cool air as they happen.

So far we have NOT been tempted by air-conditioning, but we do allow ourselves to adapt to the heat as much as possible. The heat here is dry heat though, not humid. Which I think makes a difference!

Of course we do cheat a bit as the only reason we know the outdoor temperature is that one of our very close neighbours has a weather-station which uploads data to weather underground every minute or so which we then check online.

Anne Miller wrote:

I was not talking about electric. Not toasters (unless fancy, if there are such things), light bulbs, or power cords, etc.

Electronic means something that will process, store, or transmit data and signals, etc.

My car can be hooked up to blue tooth (what ever that is) so very much electonic and even has GPS.

Probably any vehicle with air conditioning is an electronic device.

By these criteria air conditioning is still safe, it can be done with just mechanical temperature controlled switches, relays, and motors.

Vehicles could be too; I don't remember the cutoff year now, but I've read that vehicles from the mid '70s (I think) and before will still run after an EMP attack.

My one device would probably be some kind of computer, tablet, or E-reader: movie/video playback would be nice, but primarily for e-books. As a hoarder of information and entertainment with limited physical space for books, I've had to resort to digital storage.

I agree with everything Judith said.  The phone just does so many things that it’s an easy choice.

I am glad that this does not mean anything merely electric.


Eric

If question is about things that use electricity that would be my well pump, because manual pumping is not much fun, close second would be the refrigerator.

J. Syme wrote:If question is about things that use electricity that would be my well pump, because manual pumping is not much fun, close second would be the refrigerator.

No, I am asking for your favorite electronic device.

Google says, "hardware that controls the flow of electrical energy to process information or control a system. Common examples you can watch on YouTube include smartphones, computers, smart TVs, and digital cameras.s,

Common Electronic Devices, would have been unknown to our grandparents.  

Something that can transmit information.

My internet connected computer so I can see/reed about all the fantastic ideas i see on Permies

My laptop, because:

1. I do a lot of writing (and proofreading for other people), and writing on a phone is absolutely miserable. It's too slow (I type pretty fast on a keyboard), so I leave out words because my mind is going about ten times as fast as I can type on the phone. And

2. My favorite form of doodling is to design tiny houses on SketchUp, and can't do that on a phone's little screen. Also,

3. Because I use Brave for my browser, I can watch YouTube videos without any ads. I've been told that I can put Brave on my phone, too, but haven't tried to do that yet. I've tried to watch videos on the phone without any ad blocker, and it's an exercise in frustration. Another also,

4. I put videos on for my daughter to watch, and that works much better on the laptop screen than on the phone. And,

5. It's much, much easier to do research requiring multiple tabs to be open, on the larger screen of the laptop.

I could probably come up with more, but that's enough for now. I'm pretty sure there's an app for making and receiving phone calls on laptops, too. Harder to carry it with me, but we used to live without cell phones - managed just fine with a wired-in land line. Just need a wifi box (I'm using my phone as a hotspot for internet right now, so don't need a wifi box.)

you can get a propane chest freezer - no reason to burn up one electrical device allowance on that one.

carl gibson wrote:you can get a propane chest freezer - no reason to burn up one electrical device allowance on that one.

Does it not have an electronically controlled thermostat?

I'm having trouble interpreting the OP question...does it refer to anything with any electrical circuits running in it at all, or does it refer to the stuff people normally think of as "electronic devices", i.e. where the "electronic" part is the main attraction: phones, tablets, gaming devices, GPS, etc.?

EDIT: I now see my confusion has already been addressed. Yeah for me, in an ideal world where I could chuck away my phone, it'd be my laptop, which was kinda sorta my only electronic device for a long time.

EDIT #2, having thought a bit more about it: I try to, like to, ponder and scrutinize my relationship with technology--not just electronic devices but any object, method, or system manifested from the application of intention to formerly inert or passively received inputs. Intention, as I see it, is central to technology usage; without intention you don't have technology, you just have the received environment. The question in the OP feels like it's prompting me to audit my technology choices: what electronic devices am I so dependent on or attached to that I couldn't give it up?

Trivially, the answer is nothing. In fact, I can go much further: I feel like if tomorrow I had to go live in a hut in the jungle, I could; it would be jarring but I would accept it and get used to it, and if I had experienced people to learn from and who could help look out for me I'd do fine living that way for a long while.

If on the other hand you kept me here in the world of cars and cities and products and jobs, and merely subtracted all but one of my electronic devices and forbade me to get any more, it would be terribly inconvenient, I would not be able to meet my professional obligations, and it would be sad too because I'd lose some of my hobbies and some of my ways of learning. Alas, electronic devices have a way of ratcheting into our lives.

But as long as I am being intentional about using them, and a flame of nonattachment to them is kept burning somewhere deep down, I think having electronic devices is fine.

How to have your cake and eat it.

A fan! Where I live, the average temperature is between 37 degrees Celsius or 98.6 degrees Firenight.