General > General Technical Chat
Video on planned obsolescence.
tooki:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 16, 2021, 06:49:49 pm ---@Tooki, I think you are giving too much benefit of the doubt to some manufacturers. Most consumers are not as knowledgeable as the people participating in this thread... they are going to buy the shiny looking product that they see in the showroom, and assume that it is state of the art and the best available if they pay a lot for it. Deep down you must know this is true... just stand in an Apple store for 20 minutes and you will see all the evidence of this that you could ever wish for.
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Huh, funny you mention that, with the tone implying I know nothing about retail customers... I worked in sales at the fruit stand, so [runs numbers] I’ve spent about 200,000 minutes at Apple Stores interacting with customers who were interested in buying. And I can say with absolute certainty that most customers aren’t there because of “ooh shiny”, but because their friends who switched have told them “I’ve been way happier with a Mac than with a PC”, that it’s worth the slightly higher upfront cost in order to have something that gives them less grief. Most customers are price sensitive, and definitely do not want to spend any more than they have to. (The exceptions are so rare they’re quite memorable.)
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 16, 2021, 06:49:49 pm ---Apple has made the design decisions on their behalf, basically, and you know it!
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You say that as if that were a bad thing! Of course they do, every manufacturer does! It’s their job. A mass-market manufacturer can’t expect its customers to be engineers. Many of the usability problems in Windows (and the Windows ecosystem) boil down to Microsoft (and those who follow their ethos) not having the balls to make a lot of design decisions, so they force end users (most of whom are technically clueless) to make them instead.
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 16, 2021, 06:49:49 pm ---So the real question is if Apple's decisions/tradeoffs on behalf of their average consumers are reasonable. I would say that by and large, for the average non-technical consumer, the decisions are indeed reasonable... not many n00b consumers will be able to keep any portable device working for more than 2-3 years without breaking things on it (ports, screens, wires, covers, etc.) so the idea of removing as much of that as possible and just replacing the whole thing periodically will work fine for those consumers just as much as it does for Apple. They deserve each other, basically! :D
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Well, more like 3-4 years on average for business users and 4-5 years average for home users, but yeah: by and large, Apple products will work for (and beyond) their full lifetime without trouble, and if trouble arises, Apple really is good about dealing with it. (The horror stories, while sadly a nonzero number, are wildly outnumbered by the success stories that never make the news. Apple could not sustain its pricing if its product reliability and after-sales support were subpar.)
Businesses are, in my experience, no less likely to replace whole systems (as opposed to upgrading) than consumers. If anything, businesses often have fixed replacement cycles that preclude upgrades, and happen whether the machines need replacing or not. (Many businesses simply lease, so as to turn computer purchasing into a fixed expense.)
The fact is, while people like you and me like to swap out parts and peripherals freely, the vast majority of users do not. Like when people complain of how silly all-in-one desktops are, since you can’t replace the computer without replacing the screen, but the fact is, by the time the iMac came around, the overwhelming share of computers were sold with an included display, so people replaced the whole system (including display) even though they absolutely could have kept using the old one in theory.
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 16, 2021, 06:49:49 pm ---If you are a customer for a Dell Precision laptop with a hex core Xeon and 32GB RAM, don't buy a potted tablet and complain that it isn't upgradable or even fixable, or doesn't have enough ports, etc. etc. - the potted device was not made for you. I get it! Truly, I do.
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:-+
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 16, 2021, 06:49:49 pm ---But that doesn't mean the potted device was not designed to be semi-disposable!
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Aside from that they’re not potted... what consumer gadget isn’t designed to be semi-disposable?!? Pretty much the only place where true long-term serviceability is a primary design concern is industrial and commercial machinery, where the device is expected to have a long service life with high reliability under heavy usage. But you pay for that up front, without even including the cost of said maintenance and repair. That’s why a consumer washing machine costs 1/8-1/4 of the price of a commercial one with the same specs.
It’s simply unreasonable to expect products to be built with the precision and repairability of a commercial jet airplane, but be priced like a paper plane. Yet that’s what consumers do, and then whine that their sleek, objectively insanely-cheap-for-what-it-is doodad cut some corners that impact its repairability. (I mean, objectively speaking, it’s insane how much computing technology we get for the price, considering the nutso crazy amounts of precision manufacturing that goes into them.)
So instead, we design things to be as cheap to manufacture as possible, while still being able to exceed the expected lifetime of the product. For example, there’s no point in designing a cellphone to last 10 years when we know that the average phone is replaced after, say, 2 years even though it’s still working fine. (Before smartphones took off, it was actually an industry average of just 18 months!) So you design it such that the overwhelming majority of failures occur after the 2 years, because warranty fulfillment is very expensive. Some will still fail sooner, but many more will far outlive the required 2 years. But there’s certainly no point in increasing the manufacturing cost (and thus product price) to target 10 year reliability, since statistically, that extra 8 years simply goes unused.
tooki:
--- Quote from: madires on April 17, 2021, 10:42:54 am ---I think that we interpret too much into 'planned obsolescence'. Are cheap no-name electrolytics planned obsolescence or a way to make the product cheaper or the profit larger? Or was an inexperienced youngster designing the circuit? Or is a greedy assembly house making some extra money by swapping parts with cheap no-name stuff? The result is the same in all cases, i.e. the product breaks early. Is it planned obsolescence only when there was the intention to design the product to fail early?
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Yes, absolutely. Hence why it’s called planned obsolescence. It boggles my mind that people can’t understand this distinction.
tooki:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am ---There isn't 100% agreement on what planned obsolescence actually is, but in order for it to be meaningful it has to involve intention... like the law: murder requires an intention / premeditation to kill the victim, otherwise it is called manslaughter (which in turn can be voluntary e.g. heat of the moment crime of passion, or involuntary e.g. reckless driving ending with the death of someone).
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Exactly.
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am ---Seen in this light, any product that has a "planned" lifetime (e.g. a product with a lithium ion battery that cannot be replaced) is an example of premeditated murder (planned obsolescence). A murder can take many forms - the victim can be shot, poisoned, stabbed, clubbed, etc. - in the same way, there are many ways to commit a pre-meditated product murder (planned obsolescence) too. Then there are the "clever" murderers that get away with a lot of killings before anyone notices or takes offence, and the "dumb" ones that get caught right after their bad deed, and all kinds in between.
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Ehhhh, no. A battery that can’t be replaced is where you expect the device to be gone sooner anyway. A human death analogy might be that someone starves to death because your ship ran out of food after 6 months at sea, even though the trip was only scheduled to last 3 months.
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am ---Against this, there is the fact that we all die, and all products die too. One source of confusion is, "what is the expected natural life of a product?". For cars, we know that all the components are designed for a life of 10 years / 100K miles, and we expect at least minor repairs to start becoming necessary when they get more than about 3 years old. - But there is nothing natural about 10 years / 100K miles. We could have chosen to build cars to a 20 years / 300K miles standard instead. But no car maker competes by claiming a significantly higher life than the standard figures. So, arguably, cars are designed with a planned obsolescence life of 10 years.
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Definitely not planned obsolescence. Not to mention being a terrible example, since the reliability and useful lifespans of cars have improved dramatically over the years. Reliability absolutely is one of the things car manufacturers boast about. (Less so now that the overall reliability has improved so much.)
Like... it used to be that a car was junk by 100K miles: the engine was shot, the body was rusted out, etc. Nowadays, rusting is practically never the reason for scrapping a car. Engines last far longer, and do so while requiring oil changes 1/3 as frequently. At the same time, fuel efficiency is higher, we have more creature comforts, and crash safety has dramatically improved.
Oh, and warranties are longer than they used to be.
Is 10 years the target lifespan? Probably. But they certainly aren’t taking parts that would last 20 or 30 years and then strategically weakening them to fail at 10 years.
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am ---Moreover, there is "collusion" between the car and component makers that they all build to the same standard.
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It’s “collusion” for car manufacturers to adhere to the same regulatory standards? It’s “collusion” for a car manufacturer to specify how they want their parts made? :palm:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am ---Obviously if we made cars last 100 years, they would become technologically obsolete and unsafe to drive compared to modern designs. So you could argue that there is a good reason not to make products last significantly longer than the speed of evolution/improvement in the industry.
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Right!
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am --- but even if you (correctly) argue that, we are still talking about "planned" obsolescence!
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No, then it definitely isn’t! The obsolescence is clearly external, you literally listed the externalities!!
|O This is literally my point from above: “ordinary” obsolescence absolutely does not count as planned obsolescence.
Again: If we know that the planned voyage is 3 months, why would you pack the ship with enough food for a year? Sure, you pack some extra, perhaps for 6 months. But there’s simply no point in packing more, as it simply won’t get eaten.
tom66:
For car makers, one of the most important factors in their business is the value of their used vehicles.
Why? Because this determines how much they can charge for leases. All lease vehicles get sent to auction at the end of their lease, and it is the (cost of manufacture - used sale price + interest) that determines how much they can lease their vehicles for. The sale of a used vehicle is based on how the market feels it is worth, and reliability factors into that. People would not pay as much for a second-hand vehicle if parts availability, serviceability and reliability were poor.
About 50% of cars sold nowadays are leased, for some it's an attractive way to own an expensive or new vehicle, for others it's just for vanity.
So you can get a rough idea for how people view vehicle reliability by looking at the price of a used vehicle. A 10-year-old Peugeot will cost about £4,000, whereas an equivalent Volkswagen will set you back about £10,000. This means despite a higher manufacturing cost, VW can lease their cars for a comparable rate to that of PSA.
I also suspect this is one reason car manufacturers have been reluctant to start making EVs en-masse -- battery reliability is very difficult to get right. Nissan's approach with the Leaf was tragic. Kia/Hyundai have a billion-dollar recall due to battery fires during fast charging. Tesla have capped charging and capacity limits for old Model S's. All of these things represent liabilities and reduction in long term residual value, which affects their ability to lease vehicles. The leasing companies are essentially hedging the market, following trends and estimating the future residual values for cars that haven't even left the factory yet. So there is a strong incentive for manufacturers to improve quality & reliability, and batteries will form part of that.
madires:
--- Quote from: tooki on April 18, 2021, 02:35:10 pm ---Is 10 years the target lifespan? Probably. But they certainly aren’t taking parts that would last 20 or 30 years and then strategically weakening them to fail at 10 years.
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They do it in a little bit different way. Let's say a car running on gasoline lasts 250,000 km on average. So it doesn't make sense to put unnecessarily expensive parts which last much longer into that car. So the engineers are looking for alternative solutions which are cheaper to produce and last 250,000 km. More profit for the car manufacturer. ;)
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