The important thing is to design for longevity and change the attitudes about constantly buying a new one. Fortunately the market i work in wants longevity and robust designs so I don't have to cut corners to the degree that commercial product cut.
i once read of a guy returning 3 lexmark printers to the store after every single one stopped working after 16 pages were printed.
I have a hard drive that mysteriously stopped working. When I went searching I discovered that this was a common fault and happened after a certain time period and that the manufacturer was offering a firmware upgrade for those that had not reached this time or if the drive had stopped working they would take it back and sort it out. I sent mine back and it was returned to me in perfect working order. No explanation was ever given of why it stopped working in correlation to a particular number of hours. We all know what happened but the manufacturer (seagate) would never admit to having a time to fail in the firmware.
There are those who claim that planned obsolescence isn't a "thing". - It is definitely a "thing"... in fact, every product ever (competently) designed has had a specific defined design life... if you buy a car, everything is designed for 100K miles or 10 years... if you buy a cell phone where the battery can't be changed, you know you are buying a product with a 2-3 year design life... and so on.
Those 3 LexMarks all stopped printing because the "starter" cartridges had run out. They and HP got a huge black eye over that practice in the late 90s... yet here we are again a couple decades later and everybody just expects it.
For certain makes & models, I think 10y/100k is generous... however, that figure is still much higher mileage than used to be the case. Difference is that cars were once designed to be repaired, and core parts like a timing chain and oil seals and clutch were considered part of maintenance, not held against a vehicle's record in terms of longevity. Current designs, and the insane cost of dealership service has changed that. Such service nowadays, if not done under warranty, are now cause to get rid of the car.
A lot of this has to do with the Japanese invasion... newer ways of making smaller engines that burn leaner and cleaner resulted in import cars lasting a decade or more with nothing but oil, spark plug and battery changes. That forced American manufacturers to abandon big V8s and get smaller too.
But the upshot of this, and reluctance of parts houses to carry parts for imports well into the 80s, forced the development of "BIC Lighter Cars" by those overseas manufacturers; where a car lasted a decade or so then everything started to fall apart. That has become the norm now; but what it really means is higher precision engineering, and engineering that is "just strong enough" not "10x over-engineered" because "Who cares, it's just cheap iron, and the car can carry it..." which means the car isn't carrying a lot of mass it doesn't need to. And it also means that individual parts now have a lot longer MTBF.... because they're being designed to last the entire service life of a vehicle, not with the intent of being replaced at 50k or 60k intervals like a V8 timing chain.
Personally, while I do lament the decline of all that gorgeous old iron from the 40s through the 70s... I have to admit that purely from a daily transportation standpoint, cars are now exponentially better than they were back then.
mnem
