Less questionable and more a different quality of immortality. That would put them on par with elves. /With/ proper maintenance, and barring accidents or physical trauma, immortal. Ie best case scenario.

The only reason I keep a question mark next to it is that the theoretical immortality of droids raises some questions. Mainly, where are all the ancient droids? Droids are mass produced across the galaxy, with millions (if not billions) rolling off the assembly line each month. We're talking about mass-produced sentient machines with a potentially indefinite service life, so why aren't there more droids that have been passed down as heirlooms through the centuries in families? It implies that droids have an astronomical mortality rate, which suggests to me that either droids are far less durable than we've assumed, or obsolescence is still a significant factor despite the technological stagnation of the Star Wars universe.

As a real-life computer tech I can say that it's very common for it to be more cost-effective to buy a new PC than to upgrade/repair an old PC. Droids are probably the same.

So you have a J3 astromech droid. It's about 20 years old and has served faithfully but it has a bad motivator. Dynamic Droids stopped manufacturing the J3 series 10 years ago and the J4 motivators are not compatible. There are J3 motivators out there, but the unused models are held by collectors charging thousands of credits for them because they're rare. You can dig through a scrapyard to find a used one, or scavenge one out of a different J3 droid, but who knows how long that motivator will last?

Meanwhile, for only 1,000 credits more than the cost of an unused J3 motivator you can buy a J4 droid. It comes with a 5 year warranty, can calculate hyperspace routes in half the time, and has a patented new plasma torch that can weld with less smoke and scorch marks. And Manny's Droid Shop has them on sale! Sorry J3, you're going to the junker who will give me a handful of credits for the scrap value.

Planned obsolescence isn't necessarily tech dependent, but just because it's a factor in the business model doesn't necessarily mean it's a factor in strict survival terms.

I don't think those can be so easily separated. Planned obsolescence means that droids of the same model are continually going out of service, which means that eventually there won't be enough around to sustain a market for replacement parts. Once the supply of proprietary replacement parts for its model dries up, it has to resort to jury-rigging newer parts to serve the same purpose, potentially leading to an ever-worsening backwards compatibility problem. Arguably, the further away you get from the droid's build date, the more untenable it becomes to maintain its body, no matter how motivated you are to keep it functional.

Planned obsolescence means that droids of the same model are continually going out of service, which means that eventually there won't be enough around to sustain a market for replacement parts. Once the supply of proprietary replacement parts for its model dries up, it has to resort to jury-rigging newer parts to serve the same purpose, potentially leading to an ever-worsening backwards compatibility problem. Arguably, the further away you get from the droid's build date, the more untenable it becomes to maintain its body, no matter how motivated you are to keep it functional.

Again, you're assuming (without much in the way of evidence) that the business model is to keep it cost-effective to repair rather than replace, implying that you either didn't read, or didn't understand the post. I'm not saying that there's definitely no repair market, just that it's not something you can just assume, go on to assume how and why it works, and use those assumptions to make declarations about The Way Things Work.

In an extreme example of the case I outlined, it'd also be completely possible that a droid manufacturer sees no economic incentive to offer repair parts and components for sale at all. They've got their factories dialed in to the point that they are making part A at a rate where every single one that passes inspection has a droid waiting to install it on. Offering spares of this part for sale would mean another branch of the assembly and distribution and ultimately a net loss of efficiency, so they just don't do it. You want to repair the droid? Either you're totally on your own, you send it to one of their authorized repair facilities (who will likely scrap it, do a memory transfer, and tell you the issue couldn't be fixed), or you take their suggestion and scrap it yourself.

This, naturally would be less practical way out on the rim, which is, interestingly enough, where we see a thriving business model in scavenging old droids for parts.

I think your position on this is fundamentally flawed by your base assumptions that 1) the business model is what you want it to be (with planned obsolescence, thriving repair aftermarket business, and regular, speedy, and accepted wear and replacement of critical components) and 2) that because it has to be what you want it to be, certain things *must* be true (like droids being unable to survive very long at all without an extensive infrastructure network delivering a constant supply of consumable parts on par with a human requirement for air, food, and water). While not necessarily contradicted in the lore, neither is such a condition spelled out or supported, so it's somewhat circular logic to say, essentially, "A droid can't function for long without replacement parts because a droid needs a regular supply of replacement parts to continue to function."

Planned obsolescence may or may not exist, that's an assumption on your part based on real world tech markets, and as we can see, the tech situation is drastically different in the SW setting. We see plenty of old droids still in service, which implies that they're able to do the job passably well compared to a newer droid and that they're able to remain serviceable for a long time. This implies one (or more) of a few things:

1. Perhaps droids are, well, just that durable. Maybe the tech is old enough and stable enough that they just build them to last, and last they do. This would suggest that the market is simply not at or near a saturation point and that, even after many decades, demand still outpaces supply to an extent that the droid manufacturers are still striving to produce as many droids as the possibly can, because they know they'll sell. They don't need the aftermarket of parts and supplies because the new droids are their big money maker and they last a long time anyway. Incremental product improvements are a fact of life, but there's no incentive to stop making a previous model or to build any sort of obsolescence into it.
2. Perhaps new droids are prohibitively expensive, creating a thriving used & refurbished market. These old droids we see are rebuilds that can be cobbled together, rewired, and flashed, and earn a droid tech decent pay. This doesn't necessarily disagree with point #1 either, as "too expensive for the average Joe" isn't the same as "too expensive to sell at all". It's certainly possible that, even a galactic droid company can only fill 20% of the demand for new droids, making used resale, refurb, and repair a very lucrative spin-off business. In this scenario, once again, there's no incentive for the manufacturer to market OEM parts.
3. Planned obsolescence simply isn't a thing. We know that tech in SW is comparatively stable when stacked against Earth's, so there's not as much, if any, drastic improvements in a linear product line (beyond eliminating flaws, a la the R5). Without significant improvements, there's a far bigger demographic in their markets that has an older piece of technology that is in no practical way inferior to a newer offering. The new model isn't necessarily better, it's just different. Innovation from the droid manufacturers comes in the form of very small improvements on the process end, not the product end, that are multiplied out based on their scale of production.
4. Similar to point #1, maybe even if droids are not so durable as they might seem, perhaps the market is simply so bullish on the galactic scale that the droids we see on the outer rim are the rare few that made it out that far, with the core, colonies, and inner rim gobbling up all the production that the manufacturers can throw at them. They don't last, but a new one isn't too expensive, so it's more practical to scrap it and buy new. Since this is the state of that coreward economy, there's zero market for the old droids, and most are simply junked. This is an opportunity for freighter captains to set up to take holds full of scrapped droids out to outlying rim worlds to sell to scrappers who use the core's trash to supply their stock in trade. This may very well happen, but the details would be down to economics: how much does the run cost compared to how much they can sell a hold for...and what, if anything, does said rim world offer as a return cargo that a core world would want?

I feel like we're talking past each other and getting confused about each other's positions, so let me go back to my basic assumptions.

1) Droid bodies/parts deteriorate over time as a result of wear and tear in normal use or environmental factors.

2) Eventually this deterioration will interfere with the continued operation of the droid if it is not addressed.

3) While sometimes repair will be sufficient, in other cases, parts will need to be replaced.

And then we go off into the weeds because those parts need to come from somewhere and it's not clear how industrialized manufacturing works in the Star Wars galaxy. Does a droid necessarily need factory-made parts? Probably not. Can someone with mechanical expertise go into a junkyard and build any possible part needed to repair any given droid? I don't know. Will the turnover in droid models and mechanics mean that eventually there is no one left familiar with the model of a particular droid? I would argue yes, but maybe a sufficiently skilled mechanic can still look inside the chassis and handcraft a necessary part.

(ETA: Actually, there's an assumption buried there that's worth stating explicitly:

A) Over time, droid models are supplanted or fall out of favor and production ceases. This assumption is based on how we see different kinds of droids at different eras in Star Wars.)

Either way, if we think of immortality as a spectrum, I would argue based on this that while droids are more immortal than humans and most other biological entities, they are less immortal than Elves (or Gen'Dai if you want to keep it Star Wars-y). Elves do not age, and thus can maintain their bodies with simple energy inputs like food and water. Droids deteriorate, and so they require additional conditions to keep functioning beyond an energy source. Deterioration is much more easily reversed than aging, but it still requires a more complex infrastructure than that needed to provide the basic inputs an Elf needs to keep living.

Hydrospanner, are you using some sort of client that scrubs the name of the person you're replying to?

1) Over the course of a human lifespan in a similar environment?

2) How long does that take? Is a droid going to fall apart without routine maintenance quicker than a human will die without air, water, and food?

3) Are these repairs normally done? By the owners? Or do they just get a new one? If you're going to consider these parts as a failure of continued unassisted existence, should you not also count food, air, and clean water? Also, what's the minimum threshold of functionality? If an arm breaks down, the droid can still continue functioning with its core intact. If a human's arm is crushed, cut off, or infected, this jeopardizes the rest of the system.

4) How long does that take? If it's over the course of many decades (R2 units were at least popular enough for royalty by 40 BBY and still in their heyday by 3 ABY at a bare minimum), then you're back to the "same ship" side of the Ship of Thesus spectrum. If you change out 1 or 2 major parts per decade and 300 years later the droid is entirely different parts than it started with, how is it any less the same droid compared to a human whose cells naturally age, die, and are replace by new ones?

Ultimately, the only way that an argument that a human is more robust than a droid will hold water is if you either stack the deck in the human's favor or move the goalposts to a specific position where the criteria for success are defined by the human's strengths. You've already said that a persistent, transferable programming doesn't count because the parts are different...and that parts will need to be replaced. Is the implication that the moment you replace a wire or gasket or servo that the droid is no longer the same droid? If so, the human loses the contest within moments, as cells die. Are we talking major parts that are essential to core function? If so, a droid needs only power and an undamaged core. Are we talking some arbitrary middle sized part that will be fine with regular maintenance...but that we're denying that maintenance while giving our hypothetical human air, food, and water whenever they need it?

I think your whole argument rests in your assumption that droids are fragile, sensitive, failure-prone objects, when all of the information we have in the setting suggests otherwise. Even giving you a lot of assumption ground, there's still no evidence that even a fairly fragile droid, in the same environment and with equivalent resources to a human, would cease to function before the human. It's just not so. Human beings are far, far more resource intensive than a droid, and it's plain to see. Certainly, the biological human body provides it's owner with plenty of unique advantages in exchange for all those resources, but in survival terms, that resource demand is a huge liability.

And then we go off into the weeds because those parts need to come from somewhere and it's not clear how industrialized manufacturing works in the Star Wars galaxy. Does a droid necessarily need factory-made parts? Probably not. Can someone with mechanical expertise go into a junkyard and build any possible part needed to repair any given droid? I don't know. Will the turnover in droid models and mechanics mean that eventually there is no one left familiar with the model of a particular droid? I would argue yes, but maybe a sufficiently skilled mechanic can still look inside the chassis and handcraft a necessary part.

Of course he had The Force guiding him. And the fact that he was Lucas's Mary Sue character in Episode I filled with unstoppable "gee whiz" power that could accomplish just about anything by accident.

unstoppable "gee whiz" power

I'm stealing this.

Hydrospanner, are you using some sort of client that scrubs the name of the person you're replying to?

He's using the "quote" option in the reply box, not the quote button on the post he's referring back to, as I did above this quote. It's useful when you only want to quote part of a quote because you can copy/paste into it what you want. Also useful when breaking a large quote into many little quotes for the same reason. Of course its downside is it doesn't tag the person being quoted, so no one actually knows who said the quote, as you've mentioned.

Ultimately, the only way that an argument that a human is more robust than a droid will hold water is if you either stack the deck in the human's favor or move the goalposts to a specific position where the criteria for success are defined by the human's strengths.

Either way, if we think of immortality as a spectrum, I would argue based on this that while droids are more immortal than humans and most other biological entities, they are less immortal than Elves (or Gen'Dai if you want to keep it Star Wars-y).

I would argue...droids are more immortal than humans and most other biological entities.

The only point I'm trying to make at this point is that since droids are subject to deterioration, it is a stretch to say that they have immortality on par with beings that are ageless.

Just in case I'm still not being clear You are right. Droids are definitely more durable and long-lived than humans, all things being equal. If it comes down to whether a droid or a Gen'Dai will live longer, though, my money's on the Gen'Dai.

unstoppable "gee whiz" power

I'm stealing this.

Hydrospanner, are you using some sort of client that scrubs the name of the person you're replying to?

He's using the "quote" option in the reply box, not the quote button on the post he's referring back to, as I did above this quote. It's useful when you only want to quote part of a quote because you can copy/paste into it what you want. Also useful when breaking a large quote into many little quotes for the same reason. Of course its downside is it doesn't tag the person being quoted, so no one actually knows who said the quote, as you've mentioned.

Bummer, it makes it very difficult to follow a conversation. Thanks for taking the time to respond in his stead!