General > General Technical Chat
Video on planned obsolescence.
james_s:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 15, 2021, 11:19:15 pm ---So potting the battery into a laptop, you would call an "Inherent life span" design decision, i.e. the customer shouldn't have bought it if they didn't think this design was acceptable?
--- End quote ---
That depends. Was it glued in there in order to make it uneconomical to replace the battery even though it wouldn't have been any harder to make it replaceable? Or is it glued in because it is an effective way of mounting a form-fitted pouch cell in an extremely thin laptop? Personally I care a lot more about having a replaceable battery than I care about a laptop being as thin as possible but a lot of consumers seem to prioritize extremely thin and don't care about user replacement because they'll pay to have it replaced or upgrade to the latest model by then.
So yes, the customer shouldn't have bought it if that design compromise did not fit their needs. Engineering is full of compromise, nothing is free. When it comes to laptops you can optimize for powerful, thin, serviceable, pick any two you want to optimize for, or compromise on a balance somewhere in the middle. I don't care about super thin, so I bought a Lenovo with user replaceable parts but I recognize that many people don't care about that, at all. They want super thin, sleek and sexy, and are willing to forego some other traits.
BrokenYugo:
Based on how even the high end business class laptops have gone to soldered ram and built in batteries I don't think anyone of any importance (i.e. large customer groups) cares that laptops aren't as user serviceable as they used to be.
SilverSolder:
The direction things are headed is that you don't really own products any longer... If you think about a modern electronic product with a potted battery that cannot be replaced when it wears out after 2-3 years, it looks a lot like you are just buying a service for 2-3 years rather than buying something that you can keep for as long as it serves your purposes.
This trend is married with easy monthly payments... sometimes with cloud service dependencies to keep you in check. You are literally paying for the service as you go.
I find it difficult to divorce these trends from the concept of "planned obsolescence", although I do appreciate there are subtle differences... too subtle for me? After all, the goal of planned obsolescence is the same - keep people coming back, keep them paying at regular intervals - by having the product fail fast, you can keep the payments lower and more acceptable...
As long as all the waste gets efficiently recycled, maybe it isn't a problem?
tooki:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 15, 2021, 11:19:15 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on April 15, 2021, 08:41:21 pm ---[...] artificially reducing a product’s lifespan to less than its inherent lifespan. [...]
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So potting the battery into a laptop, you would call an "Inherent life span" design decision, i.e. the customer shouldn't have bought it if they didn't think this design was acceptable?
--- End quote ---
Since Apple will install a new battery at the same price as they used to charge for a user-replaceable battery, and they do not charge for labor to install it, and this service remains available for the same number of years as user-replaceable batteries were, this is a complete non-argument.
I replaced the battery in my 2012 MacBook Air a year or two ago, just made an appointment, went in, sat around browsing the web on my iPad for half an hour and came out with the new battery installed, plus a free internal cleaning and hinge adjustment. At that point, it’s of zero importance to me whether they’ve used adhesives inside that make the job more difficult for the technician: they can replace it, and do so affordably and quickly.
An artificial lifespan limitation would be something like disabling the battery after a fixed number of charge cycles, regardless of its health.
A built-in battery for the purposes of thinness is a design decision. You can disagree with whether that should be their priority, but it is theirs, and that doesn’t make it planned obsolescence.
tooki:
--- Quote from: BrokenYugo on April 16, 2021, 05:02:06 am ---Based on how even the high end business class laptops have gone to soldered ram and built in batteries I don't think anyone of any importance (i.e. large customer groups) cares that laptops aren't as user serviceable as they used to be.
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Not to mention that laptops were never particularly serviceable to begin with, compared to desktops. So few laptop parts are interchangeable anyway (beyond RAM and storage, and occasionally GPUs) that they may as well be closed boxes anyway.
Another aspect to consider is whether modern laptops actually need as much service as old ones did. Back when I worked as a computer tech, hands down the most commonly replaced component in laptops was hard disks, some as upgrades, many to replace failed or failing drives. But we’ve reached a point where even base models have enough storage for a LOT of applications (especially in business, where data tends to be server based anyway), and SSDs are proving to be much better suited for portable devices, with their inevitable bumps, jostles, and drops.
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