I consider myself very lucky for the relationship I've had with my father. My father was an aircraft mechanic (and an existential hero*) and I was a god-damn fool the day I thought I'd end up anything better through hard work and education. In my youth my father taught me tools and how to fix various engines and to do automotive repair. Apart from his nagging after me about my clothes (I could wear a pair of jeans so eaten up by brake fluid that my testicles were hanging out and my dad would still ask me why I was ruining “good clothes” changing my oil in them) learning these skills has proved invaluable in my personal life. I cannot begin to estimate how much money I've been able to save repairing things myself; which is good because I am perpetually unemployed and always flat broke.
When in adulthood I returned to riding bikes I was lucky enough to have the skills to maintain them myself. One of the ways in which I do that is by taking apart, cleaning, and repacking the bearings at least once a year. I have not, as of yet, owned a bike with sealed bearings and to be completely honest I think I would miss being able to do this. I read time and again about how much smoother and longer lived sealed bearings are but I wonder if that is not due to the laziness of owners grown lax in their maintenance, for if there is one thing in this life you can always count on it is the laziness of man. I also wonder if anyone actually keeps a bike long enough anymore for the life span of loose bearings to be worn-out. Personally I'm not convinced. On a long enough time line the survival rate for every bearing drops to zero. Even your fancy sealed bearings will die a raspy grinding kind of death and you won't have had the pleasure of knowing them intimately inside and out. That being said I wouldn't kick a bike out of bed just for being equipped with sealed ones.
Recently I was lucky enough to witness the ravages of neglect on an unsealed bearing firsthand. I was invited to the house of a friend who I knew biked but had never seen her ride. I asked to see her bike and was informed that it was no longer in working order. I wanted to see it anyway and offered to fix it if I was able. Lead into the garage I found a cruiser roughly thirty years old that had been rescued from a trash heap. On her last outing there had been a catastrophic failure in the drive train portion of the bike. I don't know what failed first and precipitated its other problems but the chain had come off, a spoke had been broken, the arm of the coaster brake had broken free and lost its bracket that connected it to the frame, and the cones had come so loose that the wheel had about a half inch of play back and forth on the rear axle. After picking up some parts from my house I got to work and was able to fix it after an hour or so. Then I went for a test ride to make sure the chain tension was right and that the coaster brake was operating correctly (I didn't want her to smash her pretty little face). All of that checked out and I was amazed to discover the thing was almost completely un-steerable. She was apparently oblivious to this and said it had always been that way. So I offered to take a look at the headset too. After I got the grocery basket off the front end I got the headset out. The top races and bearing were fine but the bottom cage was ground flat and had only one ball bearing left that promptly fell and rolled away to the dark recesses of the floor. Luckily she had another (donor) bike from the trash that I was able to take the races and bearings off of. I doubt it will fare any better in this application though. I also doubt the longevity of a sealed bearing suffering the same amount of neglect.
This is what passes for a headset bearing in North Louisiana.
* The crowning achievement of my philosophy career was a paper I wrote in college all about how my father had awakened the nausea of ultimate responsibility in me by berating me for knocking a charcoal grill and some steaks over. I got a B on it.
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