A dried-out felt-tip marker and a snapped-off piece of molded black plastic sold for $857,600 at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday.

What otherwise might have been worthless bits of trash commanded the highest bids due to where the two items were 57 years ago—lifting off aboard NASA's Apollo 11 spacecraft on humanity's first mission to land astronauts on the Moon. More than flown odds and ends, one was the problem that almost stranded Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, and the other was the simple solution to saving the mission.

"Houston, Tranquility. Do you have a way of showing the configuration of the engine arm circuit breaker?" radioed Aldrin to Mission Control after realizing he or Armstrong had inadvertently broken off the top of the circuit breaker switch that would enable their ascent engine to ignite, beginning their trip back to Earth. "The reason I'm asking is because the end of it appears to be broken off. I think we can push it back in again. I'm not sure we could pull it out if we pushed it in, though."

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On Monday, Nintendo announced that it will stop selling the original Switch in Europe next February. That decision comes in response to European regulations that will soon require easily replaceable batteries in most consumer electronics. Rather than redesigning multiple original Switch models to comply with that regulation (as it is doing with the Switch 2), Nintendo has decided it will just stop selling the older console in the region.

Those new battery rules won't affect the availability of the Switch outside of Europe, of course. But the move got us wondering how much longer Nintendo might keep selling the 9-year-old Switch now that the Switch 2 is drawing the focus of both the company and the market.

An Ars analysis of Nintendo's recent history (as documented in its annual earnings releases) shows that sales for even the company's bestselling hardware tend to decline to zero after nine years on the market. But the data also shows the Switch being a relatively resilient market force that could sustain its commercial life well into its second decade on the market.

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