General > General Technical Chat
Video on planned obsolescence.
james_s:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 14, 2021, 12:28:33 am ---It is pretty clearly intentionally limiting the life of the "trashy" bulb, compared to the better one. I really don't understand how people can be so good-hearted as to think planned obsolescence isn't a "thing"...
--- End quote ---
Because it isn't designed to fail, it's designed to be *cheap* and they don't care if it fails. You don't gain repeat customers by making a product so bad that it fails quickly, but you can pick up a certain market segment by shaving every last fraction of a cent off the cost. Including a timer that causes the lamp to stop working after 10,000 hours would be planned obsolescence. Shaving 3 cents off the cost with the result being a lamp that craps out after 1,000 hours but not caring is just cost cutting.
NiHaoMike:
The cheaper bulbs would be good for things like closet and refrigerator lighting that is only turned on for short periods of time every once in a while. They won't have time to heat up or even accumulate very many hours of runtime.
SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 14, 2021, 03:49:15 am ---
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 14, 2021, 12:28:33 am ---It is pretty clearly intentionally limiting the life of the "trashy" bulb, compared to the better one. I really don't understand how people can be so good-hearted as to think planned obsolescence isn't a "thing"...
--- End quote ---
Because it isn't designed to fail, it's designed to be *cheap* and they don't care if it fails. You don't gain repeat customers by making a product so bad that it fails quickly, but you can pick up a certain market segment by shaving every last fraction of a cent off the cost. Including a timer that causes the lamp to stop working after 10,000 hours would be planned obsolescence. Shaving 3 cents off the cost with the result being a lamp that craps out after 1,000 hours but not caring is just cost cutting.
--- End quote ---
I guess this is a matter of definitions to some extent...
To my mind, if you design a product to last 1,000 hours, you have planned its lifetime...
Sticking with the specific example of these two bulbs: if the better one lasts 2,000 hours and the cheaper one lasts 1,000 hours... they both have a planned useful service life, not just the cheaper one!
Perhaps the real question is whether a planned/expected useful service life is the same as planned obsolescence... and if not, what is the difference?
madires:
--- Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 14, 2021, 04:13:28 am ---The cheaper bulbs would be good for things like closet and refrigerator lighting that is only turned on for short periods of time every once in a while. They won't have time to heat up or even accumulate very many hours of runtime.
--- End quote ---
Osram offers special LED bulbs for fridges. Anyhow, they need to be designed for many on/off cycles which is another important parameter.
andy2000:
I would argue that having a short support period is a form of planned obsolescence. People are forced to replace rather than repair when parts are no longer available, or when necessary software updates are artificially limited even though the hardware is still capable.
Apple won't sell parts to end users, and once they decide a product is "end of life" they won't fix it for any price. Thanks to their "innovative" designs, standard off the shelf parts won't fit, so you have to either replace the product, or find another way (like used, or aftermarket parts). Based on the high price people are paying for things like used power supplies, people still want to use their older Macs, but Apple would rather sell you a new Mac.
While Apple is better than many at providing software updates, I am annoyed by how they enforce a hard cutoff for OS upgrades. They often do this, even when a particular Mac is still technically capable of running the newer OS. While I'm sure part of this is not wanting to QA against older models, it's still frustrating. There are workarounds to bypass the model check which can often add years to the useful life. I would much rather they allowed you to continue at your own risk unless there is a real reason such as missing a required CPU feature, or not enough RAM.
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