I don't really understand this myself. My old Yamaha 2 ch receiver just celebrated it's 25th birthday, and it still looks new. With a very few exceptions, all my equipment looks great, no matter how old it is. Some of the items that don't/didn't look so great were painted silver over white, black, or grey plastic, and the silver paint gets worn off very easily. Portable scanners/radios tend to get scratched up over time, and if it's painted silver, it usually looks pretty bad after a couple of years.
Then there's a friend of mine, who has some kind of weird body chemistry that tends to destroy the finishes on electronics and even worse, on guns. In a couple of years, the "acid" or whatever he has in his fingerprints ate through the finish on the knobs of his receiver, and most of the labeling was gone, and eventually, the finish, whatever it is, is destroyed and bare metal or plastic shows through. The first place to show wear is the volume control and tuning up/down buttons on his receivers. If he handles a gun, it MUST be wiped down with some kind of oil immediatlely, or his prints will rust the gun. He got a Desert Eagle for Christmas one year, and forgot to wipe it down. Now there is a perfect thumbprint rusted into the slide on one side, and two of his fingers on the other side.
Then there are the "trashers", seemingly sane people who are just plain rough on stuff. I know someone like this, his stuff looks 10 years old within a year, and I have replaced volume controls on many items due to his rough handling. I have watched him, and he seems to turn the controls with way too much force, like he's angry or something. On one receiver, he pushed the buttons so hard that not only did he break the switches, he cracked the PC board behind them! What a mess that was to fix. Taking it apart was a puzzle in intself, as it sure wasn't made to be repaired, just replaced. All his audio and computer equipment, and cars, look terrible. His year old laptop PC looks like it was in a plane crash. He doesen't understand how anyone else keeps their stuff looking new.
