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| Video on planned obsolescence. |
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| james_s:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on April 11, 2021, 01:51:12 pm ---I can see how it would be an issue for a freezer, but a refrigerator? The evaporator on my fridge doesn't stay below freezing for long enough to ice over. When the compressor turns off, it thaws, the water drains off through a sump, going to a small tray on top of the compressor, at the back, where it evaporates. If the fridge is icing up, then it will be because the thermostat is set too low. --- End quote --- There's only one evaporator in the conventional American style frost-free fridge. It's in the back of the freezer behind a cover panel and the fan is in the middle circulating the air. A portion of air is ducted down into the refrigerator compartment to cool that, the thermostat controls the temperature of the refrigerator compartment because that needs to be cold but not quite freezing and the freezer is always much colder due to the evaporator being located there, freezer temperature is less critical as long as it's always below freezing. This is a picture of the cabin fridge from when I was working on it several years ago, this is the evaporator and fan in the freezer compartment with the cover panel removed. You can see the calrod defrost heater going around the perimeter on 3 sides and the termination thermostat at the top left. This fridge is from the early 70s but I don't think the modern ones are all that different. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 11, 2021, 08:02:37 pm --- --- Quote from: tooki on April 11, 2021, 06:07:09 pm ---[...] Planned obsolescence means deliberately designing things to last less long than they inherently could. --- End quote --- There is something called antitrust or competition laws, where lawmakers have found it necessary to outlaw collusion between "competitors" that silently agree to not compete too hard (for example, by agreeing not to make their products "too good for the price" or, in other words, "too cheap"). Almost like a capitalist version of a trade union! There are simply some situations that the "free market" can't fix. --- Quote from: tooki on April 11, 2021, 06:07:09 pm ---[...] Making a laptop without user-replaceable batteries in exchange for extreme thinness doesn’t count. [...] --- End quote --- I think it should count as planned obsolescence if the manufacturer doesn't offer a thicker alternative - and I think it edges into collusion and anti-competitive behaviour when no manufacturers offer it for love or money, all of a sudden, all at the same time... --- Quote from: tooki on April 11, 2021, 06:07:09 pm ---The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence. --- End quote --- It isn't as cut and dried as that... it can certainly be planned obsolescence. The physical equivalent is making a phone with a charge plug that doesn't fit the previous version for no particular reason other than increasing the sales of chargers (which has been made illegal in the EU, I believe). It is so easy to do the same kind of thing with software - make sure it doesn't run on the old model (and make sure the old stuff doesn't run on the new one) and you'll be good. Finally, an examples of some scenarios that definitely don't qualify as planned obsolescence: you open up a really big graphics project in Photoshop on an older computer, and find it is barely able to cope with the image given its limited resources in terms of memory, CPU, bus, and disk speeds. Here, I would say that either your PC is obsolete, or, your PC is too slow, but faster/better ones were and are available, but you didn't want to pay for the performance to do what you want to do - so get out and get another one, either way, and don't blame the manufacturer for the scope of your projects growing in size! --- End quote --- 1. Collusion has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Planned obsolescence does not in any way require collusion between competitors. 2. I completely disagree. A company choosing to not make thick, cheap, and heavy laptops doesn’t mean it’s engaging in planned obsolescence! :palm: (Especially not when the company offers battery replacement service, including labor, for the same price as the user-replaceable batteries in prior models.) 3. No, changing a charger plug is not planned obsolescence unless it was done specifically to reduce lifespan, which doesn’t make a damned bit of sense, since a new model using a different plug doesn’t stop your old phone from charging with its existing charger. Don’t conflate this with the EU rule’s reason: it’s to reduce e-waste. (But until last year, yeeeears after that rule went into effect, no manufacturer actually dared do what the law’s actual intent was, which is for manufacturers to stop including a new charger with every new phone.) Basically, all you’ve done here is proven my point: that people expand the scope of “planned obsolescence” to mean “anything I don’t like” rather than what it actually means, which is to purposefully design a product to fail sooner than it inherently would have in order to promote sales of replacements. Because none of the things you describe in any way even distantly count. Choosing what types of products you sell? Not planned obsolescence. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: tooki on April 12, 2021, 03:59:46 am ---2. I completely disagree. A company choosing to not make thick, cheap, and heavy laptops doesn’t mean it’s engaging in planned obsolescence! :palm: --- End quote --- There's a lot of middle ground. My Macbook is I think significantly thinner than it needs to be, it's so thin that it is not particularly comfortable to carry and it sacrifices a lot to be that thin. Laptops haven't been what I would consider "heavy" in probably 10 years, unless you look at the gigantic gaming laptops. Anything less than about 3/4" thick is just making a fashion statement IMO. My holy grail laptop would be something in a similar form factor as my X250 in a magnesium housing with a touchpad that has physical buttons below it. Even at 6 years old on the original battery I still get substantially longer run time out of this thing than I do with the Macbook, that thing can't even make it through an 8 hour work day without plugging it in. The Lenovo keyboard is far superior too, again because it does not make drastic compromises in the quest of unnecessary extreme thinness. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 12, 2021, 02:17:23 am --- --- Quote from: tooki on April 11, 2021, 06:07:09 pm ---The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence. --- End quote --- That one is a gray area. My first iPhone (yeah, I know, more Apple, but whatever, it's the phone I had) became unusably slow after various updates to the OS and apps. It didn't DO anything new as far as I could tell, not one of those updates gave me tangible improvements, they were just slower. It has been my experience that they push the OS updates about one version further on old devices than they should and it results in them being very sluggish at that point. Personally I want to buy a phone, set it up with everything I want and then essentially freeze the configuration and use it like that forever. There is so much software (and websites) that are not any more useful than similar stuff 10+ years ago, they're just more bloated and slow. Some of this is "hardware is so powerful now that who cares, we don't need to optimize!" but my cynical side suspects that companies keep adding features of dubious value fully knowing it will make devices slower so people will upgrade to the latest model. PCs became a mature commodity around 10 years ago and the need to upgrade regularly dropped sharply, people interpreted that as the death of the PC but it was really just that nobody needed a new one every year or two anymore. Smartphones and tablets were selling like hotcakes at the time but now those are mature commodities, there is not much the latest model can do that a flagship from 3-4 years ago can't and that period is gradually extending. --- End quote --- Ah, the “but the new version didn’t add anything!” trope... here’s the thing: we forget as little things get added. Do I remember which version of Word added a specific feature? Of course not. And unless I happen to be authoring a document that needs that specific feature, I’m unlikely to even notice it’s missing if using a version one or two versions back. But put me on a version that’s many versions back and suddenly I notice there’s a lot missing. I’ll notice that it’s dumber about various behaviors. I notice the same thing if I go to do something on my old iPhone 4S: there is tons of stuff missing. Don’t get me wrong, I also hate how a lot of software, and definitely the web (so very much) has gotten slower without adding anything substantial. However, “of no tangible value” is a very loaded claim, because what it really means is “of no tangible value to me”. But just because something isn’t of value to you doesn’t mean it’s not really important to someone else. That’s why, for example, Word is such a beast: it has gazillions of features that most users don’t need, but which are critical to certain users. Years ago, when working on what would become Office 2007, Microsoft used the telemetry from Office 2003 to evaluate the usage patterns of millions of users. What they discovered is that while any given user uses just 20% of the features 80% of the time, the remaining 80% of rarely used features were practically all used regularly. So they couldn’t just say “Nah, nobody uses that anyway” and jettison a feature to streamline the interface. A ton of the “bloat” in modern software is added abstraction and automation to make it easier to use. For example: Does it add “bloat” to, for example, have code for an email program to auto configure its server settings based on the email address? Yes. But it solves a very real problem, namely, that (speaking from years of experience in tech support) email client setup is one of the most difficult for non-expert users to perform. I don’t know what version of iOS added automatic background indexing of photos, but goddamned do I love it. (I can type “dog” in the search field and it’ll show me my photos of dogs, without me ever having tagged them.) I don’t remember which version added the ability for keyboards to allow two autocorrect languages simultaneously (without switching) but that fixed something that had been a thorn in my side the entire time prior. What about all the code added to support thorough accessibility for the disabled? In iOS, which has very extensive accessibility features (including an entire alternate interaction model for the blind), that cannot be trivial. Does it benefit me directly? No. But it deserves to be there. I’m writing this on an iPad Air 2, a model introduced in late 2014. It’s running the latest version of iOS, and it only rarely shows its age. (And when it does, it’s mostly in third party apps whose RAM requirements have gotten to the point that this iPad’s memory becomes the constraint.) Yes, there have been some versions of iOS that really did bring their respective minimum hardware to its knees. But they really put a ton of effort into that for many years now, hence this iPad (which is the minimum hardware for the current iPad OS) running very well with it. There’s a lot I hate about current software and web design, like the giant amounts of whitespace with gigantic text, obliterating the entire point of the big screens we have. (Why have a 27” computer display? Why have a 6.5” phablet screen?) And it annoys the living hell out of me that websites take longer to load now than they did 20 years ago, and that 90% of page load time is ads and tracking, if you don’t use an ad blocker to stop that BS. But it doesn’t mean all progress, and the costs that comes with it, is pointless. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 12, 2021, 04:12:14 am --- --- Quote from: tooki on April 12, 2021, 03:59:46 am ---2. I completely disagree. A company choosing to not make thick, cheap, and heavy laptops doesn’t mean it’s engaging in planned obsolescence! :palm: --- End quote --- There's a lot of middle ground. My Macbook is I think significantly thinner than it needs to be, it's so thin that it is not particularly comfortable to carry and it sacrifices a lot to be that thin. Laptops haven't been what I would consider "heavy" in probably 10 years, unless you look at the gigantic gaming laptops. Anything less than about 3/4" thick is just making a fashion statement IMO. My holy grail laptop would be something in a similar form factor as my X250 in a magnesium housing with a touchpad that has physical buttons below it. Even at 6 years old on the original battery I still get substantially longer run time out of this thing than I do with the Macbook, that thing can't even make it through an 8 hour work day without plugging it in. The Lenovo keyboard is far superior too, again because it does not make drastic compromises in the quest of unnecessary extreme thinness. --- End quote --- As someone whose back is highly sensitive to weight, to me, the weight of the 13” MacBooks, for example, dropping from ~5lbs to just 3lbs has been a noticeable quality of life improvement. (The thinness also means not having to use a gigantic, heavier backpack to fit it in with other stuff for class or when traveling.) Again, your argument boils down to “I don’t need it, therefore it’s not actually important”, literally brushing it off as vanity. That common argument that people just buy Apple as a “fashion statement” is IMHO rather callously dismissive of people like me who definitely, categorically do not buy things as fashion statements. I buy them because it’s the better tool for me. And it’s a tool. And since it’s a tool I use a lot, I need it to be the best tool for me. Now, as someone whose spine issues also cause hand problems which make typing painful, I’m sensitive to keyboards, and in this regard, I’ve been annoyed with Apple for quite some time. I would indeed rather have the machine 2mm thicker in order to accommodate a better keyboard. At least they’re phasing out that butterfly keyboard. |
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