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| Video on planned obsolescence. |
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| james_s:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 14, 2021, 02:02:44 pm ---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? --- End quote --- I would argue no, it is not the same. With virtually any consumer product, one of the design parameters is the expected service life, you decide the minimum amount of useful life a product needs to have, and then you engineer the cost down as low as possible without cutting the useful life below that minimum threshold. If it was free to make it last twice as long you're not going to engineer the life to be shorter, but in the real world it is almost never free to make something last longer and cost is absolutely king in the capitalist consumer market. It is the single most important aspect because for better or worse most people shop based primarily on price. Reduce the cost of making something by 1 cent per unit and if you sell millions of units that starts to add up to serious money. Reduce it too far and quality suffers to the point that people stop buying it, but there's a sweet spot where something lasts "long enough" while the cost is as low as it can be without compromising that. Then there are things like aviation where an airframe is designed to last a specific number of cycles after which it must either be scrapped or extensively overhauled. One could argue that this is planned obsolescence since the number of pressurization cycles before end of life is defined from the start. The goal is not to limit the number of cycles though, the goal is to get the right balance of weight and cost while having an acceptable lifespan during which the chance of catastrophic failure is acceptably low. If they could build a plane that would last twice as long without making it prohibitively heavy or expensive they would, but in the real world engineering is full of compromises. An improvement in one aspect comes with a cost in some other aspect. |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: james_s on April 14, 2021, 06:59:24 pm --- --- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 14, 2021, 02:02:44 pm ---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? --- End quote --- I would argue no, it is not the same. With virtually any consumer product, one of the design parameters is the expected service life, you decide the minimum amount of useful life a product needs to have, and then you engineer the cost down as low as possible without cutting the useful life below that minimum threshold. If it was free to make it last twice as long you're not going to engineer the life to be shorter, but in the real world it is almost never free to make something last longer and cost is absolutely king in the capitalist consumer market. It is the single most important aspect because for better or worse most people shop based primarily on price. Reduce the cost of making something by 1 cent per unit and if you sell millions of units that starts to add up to serious money. Reduce it too far and quality suffers to the point that people stop buying it, but there's a sweet spot where something lasts "long enough" while the cost is as low as it can be without compromising that. Then there are things like aviation where an airframe is designed to last a specific number of cycles after which it must either be scrapped or extensively overhauled. One could argue that this is planned obsolescence since the number of pressurization cycles before end of life is defined from the start. The goal is not to limit the number of cycles though, the goal is to get the right balance of weight and cost while having an acceptable lifespan during which the chance of catastrophic failure is acceptably low. If they could build a plane that would last twice as long without making it prohibitively heavy or expensive they would, but in the real world engineering is full of compromises. An improvement in one aspect comes with a cost in some other aspect. --- End quote --- Let's do a thought experiment: We want to make cheap LED bulbs. The bulb has an IC that controls the current. Marketing decides that the cheap bulb should last 500h, and the expensive bulb 2000h. In Engineering, we work out that the cheapest way to do this overall is to put a run counter in the IC that controls the current, so all the bulbs can be made with the same machines and the same parts, and we prove to the management that we will save money overall by doing it this way. In another company, they achieve the same results by using a completely different design for the cheap bulb, with terrible quality LEDs - and soon run into problems with some of them failing before the 500h mark while others live far longer - the marketing department is now calling for the resignation of the chief engineer who "just doesn't seem get what we are trying to do"... Is either or both of these planned obsolescence? - is the honest "you pay for 500 hours and get 500 hours" better, worse, or no different from "we make garbage lamps and you may get 500 hours, give or take"? (Edit: Both are of course sold at the same price, which is whatever the market will bear.) |
| BrokenYugo:
I think any functional test for the presence of "planned obsolescence" has to include an intent to deliberately limit a product's lifespan. Engineering choices made that reduce lifespan and have no other plausible explanation. Otherwise everything built to a price point is planned obsolescence, and the term becomes meaningless. Like these overdriven led bulbs aren't planned obsolescence, because while you can turn down the current and increase lifespan, you won't be getting 800+ lumens out of it doing that. You can't fit that much led and driver in the requisite A19 shaped package like people want, and have it run cool as would be ideal, and have it be cheap. Making the whole thing a big heatsink would likely require a more expensive isolated driver design, the better higher power ones line the inside with aluminum, but that puts the filter cap in even more of an oven. As I said near the beginning it's a lot like "entrapment", where (under US law) it only applies if law enforcement convinces someone to commit a crime they would not have otherwise committed. Buying contraband from an undercover cop is not entrapment, being coerced to do so is. The fact that the police were involved, or something was built in such a way it doesn't last forever, is not in and of itself a problem. |
| james_s:
The first is planned obsolescence, the second is not. The first is deliberately trying to limit lifespan in order to prevent someone who paid for the cheaper product from using it for a longer period of time than they paid for even if product quality is sufficient to allow it. The second is cutting costs to the bare minimum, while hoping that the vast majority of the bulbs will last at least as long as claimed, they do not care that some last much longer, they already saved the money on the manufacturing end and if some people get some bonus life that reflects positively on the company. If too many people pay for 1000 hours and only get 500 hours that is a disaster, but if 99% of the people who pay for 1000 hours get between 1000 and say 3000 hours you're doing really well. If a large percentage of people who paid for 1000 hours are getting 10,000 hours then you were too conservative in your cost engineering, or you should talk to marketing about increasing the rated life. A tangent related to lighting, many HID lamps, particularly mercury vapor and metal halide lamps don't really "burn out" like incandescent. Instead the lumen output gradually depreciates over time until they reach a point referred to as L70, which is 70% of initial rated lumens at which point they are considered worn out. Power consumption remains constant or actually increases with many so the result is the lamps become dimmer and less efficient as they age and will often burn out the ballast in the process. Eventually they will fail completely, occasionally, especially in the case of metal halide, that failure comes in the form of a rupture of the pressurized arc tube. In a few cases it gets even more exciting and the rupture shatters the outer envelope spraying out red hot shards of quartz, an event referred to as a "non-passive" failure. The problem is people see a light that is still lighting up and they say it's still good, it hasn't burned out yet! They may claim the advice of replacing these lamps as planned obsolescence because in their mind the lamps haven't burned out yet, nevermind the fact that they are only producing half or less as much light as they are designed to while consuming the full rated power or more, and the risk of a dangerous failure mode is steadily increasing, as is the chance of needing an expensive ballast replacement. LEDs have pretty much made this moot though, HID is dead for all practical purposes, all development and marketing has ceased and the quality of currently available lamps is dropping. |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: BrokenYugo on April 14, 2021, 09:09:39 pm --- I think any functional test for the presence of "planned obsolescence" has to include an intent to deliberately limit a product's lifespan. [...] --- End quote --- That seems as good a definition as any, but games can be played with this too... For example: is potting a pair of batteries into a set of earbuds "planned obsolescence" when conceivably, the batteries could have been made replaceable? What would you think of a car where the brake pads were not replaceable, but instead required changing the front suspension? |
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