Real world life expectancy of a high end cartridge?

I'm going to be the creep again. Stylast like Last is nothing but freon. A great solvent for non polar substances like oil but nothing more. You can prove this to yourself. Put a drop on a glass slide and let it evaporate. Do it again in the same spot. Do it a thousand times and what you will be left with is absolutely nothing on the slide. Zip. Zero. Nada. If there is a positive gain it is just from keeping your stylus clean. But, you can get freon a lot cheaper. We are easy targets for crap like this. By all means keep your stylus clean. The best way to determine stylus life is looking for wear under magnification. Everything else is just guessing.
Click away Elizabeth. 

Mike

Oh Uberwaltz there is absolutely nothing funny about Freon. In making comments like that you just demonstrate your ignorance on the topic. 
Freon is a large molecule. All you have to do is keep the top on and very little will escape. If you want to have fun just leave the top off over night and see what happens:) Let us know about the results. 
Millercarbon, you ever use brake cleaner? It costs maybe $2.50 a can.

Benjie, Freon is now a very loose term. There are many types that have different vapor pressures. Chlorofluorocarbons are also used as solvents not just refrigerants. They have a unique smell, the smell of Last products and cleaning agents like brake cleaner. They are excellent solvents, evaporate very quickly and are electrically neutral. So, you can spill the stuff in your amp and nothing will happen unlike water or alcohol. There only major problem is that they deplete the ozone layer. Chlorofluorocarbons will not chemically change anything. They are inert. There is nothing in Last products that does not evaporate. Anyone can prove this to themselves with a microscope slide. Don't believe me! 
Last products are great but extraordinarily expensive cleaning agents but nothing else. Keeping your stylus and records clean is important and it will allow them to last longer. I have never worn out a stylus and I watch them under my office microscope. All the cartridges that have failed on me have done so electrically.  

Benjie, You see the cat eyes when you look straight down on the stylus. The eyes will be adjacent to the very tip, one on each side, not 1/2 way down unless you have a stylus that is smaller than anyone knows how to make. The Windfeld is a great cartridge. You would have to spend a lot more to get anything that sounds appreciably better. In terms of tracking you can not find a better tracking cartridge at any price. Send it back to Ortofon and have them re-manufacture it. 

When I was in high school I worked for DBx in Waltham. I constructed the chassis for 32 channel noise reduction units. We had a large bath that cleaned the flux off of circuit boards. We filled it every morning with a Freon. I lived with that smell for a year. Most Chlorofluorocarbons smell pretty much alike. I did not say brake cleaner was Freon. It is another Chlorofluorocarbon that smells pretty much like a Freon. Last is a Freon and nothing else. Its your money. 
Neither Iso propyl or Ethyl alcohols will attack the adhesive used to fix styli in place. You can use Ethyl (denatured) alcohol to clean up uncured epoxy but once the epoxy has cured the alcohols won't touch it.