Why did Tektronix stop making scopes like the venerable 2465 or 2465B? What changed?
For example that it's no longer 1986? No-one really wants to buy some large boat anchor with a fish glass and primitive functionality in 2014. Especially when the price equivalent in today's money can get you some really nice digital scopes.
With the recent EEVBLOG tear down exposing the solid build and ability it seems like Tek could have updated with a little modern tech and kept improving these things. Some may say that the rise of the digital caused the demise but I'm hearing all over the place just how great the analog scopes are and that the digital can't replace the feel and response.
Sounds like you spent too much listening to people stuck in yesteryear who have never really used a modern advanced scope.
The thing is that scopes no longer are devices for looking at waveforms. These days they have become complex signal analyzers. Often enough just staring at the screen doesn't really reveal anything, and only with advanced maths and measurement capabilities which are only available with a decent modern DSO culprits in complex signals can be found. And then there's stuff like bus decoding which is impossible with an analog scope.
Don't get me wrong, back in the days these scopes were great, and even today they still could be used for some simple tasks. And an analog scope can be a nice addition for any hobbyist shop if it's free or for a few bucks only. But apart from pure nostalgia the time of analog scopes has passed long ago.
So if they are so great then why doesn't Tek or someone else use modern tech, and cheap Chinese labor and grind out these scopes at one quarter the price?
The Chinese did exactly that, over a decade ago, along with several Eastern European manufacturers. The reason they stopped is that analog scopes were already a dead end 20 years ago. And because of the high integration which is possible with modern technology, simpler DSOs can be made at very low costs, and even those already vastly exceed the capabilities of most analog scopes.
Or were they really not that great and we are just like babying old English sportscars? You you? They're fun and we love them but the modern stuff is just more dependable and funtionable.
That's probably much closer to the truth. The build quality of these scopes may have been pretty solid overall but they still have mechanical switches that show wear and cause problems after all these years. And not all Tek scopes were that great, i.e. we had lots of issues with their 7000 Series and its flakey plugins back in the old days. These days, even a modern low end scope is very likely to exceed the time without repair of most analog scopes by a big margin.
The thing with Tek is that back in the old days they produced some really good and advanced scopes, but after the shift to DSOs Tek started to loose their edge against HP/Agilent and LeCroy. And when Danaher finally took over Tek in 2007 and introduced them to their Danaher Business System (DBS) (which is basically a system of micromanagement and extreme cost cutting) they essentially strangled the last bit of technological creativity left in Tektronix.
Today the only people buying new Tek scopes are either old-timers stuck in the old days or corporate buyers who have no real clue what they're buying. In terms of scope technology they are pretty much behind anyone else.