General > General Technical Chat
Video on planned obsolescence.
Ground_Loop:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 04, 2021, 03:47:02 am ---
--- Quote from: Ground_Loop on April 04, 2021, 03:31:44 am ---I would argue that most of what is claimed to be planned obsolescence is actually marketers and engineers providing a product aligned with a price point that people are willing to buy it.
--- End quote ---
Not sure I get what you mean? - a cheaply made product breaks and isn't worth fixing... fine, we all get that.
A light bulb where a lot of work went into reducing its life so they could sell more... what do you call that? "Value engineering" from the perspective of the shareholders, perhaps? :D
--- End quote ---
I said 'most.' And having been an engineer involved with consumer products, we design and manufacture things that people are willing to buy based largely on marketing input. If we make it last forever it will be too expensive and no one will buy it. If we make it fail immediately we won't sell past the first few units. So much of what people decry as planned obsolescence is actually a result of trade offs to optimally support market demand.
SilverSolder:
The point about not confusing planned obsolescence with value engineering is reasonable enough.
The definition of planned obsolescence
Planned obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable.
The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle").
It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements.
JPortici:
I would then replace planned obsolescene with "cloud-based", or "connected service", or whatever other money trap.
SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: JPortici on April 04, 2021, 12:44:12 pm ---I would then replace planned obsolescene with "cloud-based", or "connected service", or whatever other money trap.
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LOL yes, the ultimate example - "shortening the replacement cycle" to just one month at a time! :D
cdev:
This kind of thinking is often applied to people. On another blog I recounted a story of how doctors discovered that low doses of a popular and inexpensive sleeping medication (zolpidem, or "Ambien" is one, there are several other"z-drugs" ) would bring some people in deep comas (who had been on the verge of being declared irreversibly brain dead, out of the comas for a brief period of time. And they would temporarily recover but then as the medication wore off they would lose them again.
See "Effect of Zolpidem in the Aftermath of Traumatic Brain Injury: An MEG Study."
and others..
linked at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=zolpidem%20coma
This discovery has led to a lot of new research on certain kinds of strokes, Write this down however in case any of your loved ones has serious stroke or other TBI and is in a coma..
One would think this story would make everybody happy that these people might be revived, but, no. Instead I got critical email from people who I now call Malthusians, who want old or sick people to die sooner. They really do.
Frankly, they scare the shit out of me.
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