Once I was working for a company having single Motorola 68K based design. They were selling their ancient design without changes for decades. Motorola 68K disap

Once I was working for a company having single Motorola 68K based design. They were selling their ancient design without changes for decades. Motorola 68K disappeared from market, they moved to Coldfire, but then peripheral chips got obsolete. It was a big problem. Junior boss started buying everything he could find in Chinese Internet stores. Everything was fake!!! Sometimes parts were empty shells, no silicon inside, some parts were rebadged modern parts, some parts had silicon inside, but weren’t functional. Solution was found using some shady brokers. They delivered parts at 50x price. Ancient real time clocks were bought for 100$ a piece. It was still better than not delivering products to final customers. Re-Design was started porting the design to Xilinx ZynQ, but I left. Lesson number 1: no Aliexpress parts in final products! Lesson number 2: obsolescence of parts is a big deal, it comes more often than one is prepared for. Lesson number 3: even for hobbyist Digikey or Mouser is a place to go. Free shipping to Germany buying for at least 50€. All parts worked as expected.