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Video on planned obsolescence.

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SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: tooki on April 18, 2021, 01:55:10 pm ---[...] I worked in sales at the fruit stand, so [runs numbers] I’ve spent about 200,000 minutes at Apple Stores interacting with customers

--- End quote ---

That might explain a lot!  :D



--- Quote from: tooki on April 18, 2021, 01:55:10 pm ---[...] 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. [...]

--- End quote ---

Back in the early days of the PC revolution, I worked as the IT manager for a well known corporation, which shall remain nameless to protect the innocent...

I implemented a clear "planned obsolescence" policy of replacing 1/3 of the company's PCs every year, with the idea being that no PC ever got to be more than 3 years old.  Back then, the speed of evolution in the space was so fast that 3 years was actually too long, but the oldest/slowest machines were always usable in some situations (typically, senior executives that were totally computer illiterate in those days, but liked the status of having a PC on their desks - they never knew the difference!).

At the end of the 3 years, I'd auction off the old PCs to staff, who lapped them up - it became an annual event in the company canteen!  :D

Today, things are a lot more uptight, of course, and I doubt I'd get away with this approach...




--- Quote from: tooki on April 18, 2021, 01:55:10 pm ---[...] what consumer gadget isn’t designed to be semi-disposable?!?  [...]

--- End quote ---

In the past, consumer items were actually often designed to be very durable,  like the 1971 Maytag clothes dryer that's still doing our family laundry after what...  50 years now? (It was standing in the house when we got it, abandoned by the previous owners.  I tried turning it on, it ran perfectly, so I decided - why not keep it?).  Hey, it is a round birthday this year!  It even measures the resistance of the clothes inside the drum to know that the humidity has dropped far enough to know to shut down automatically, based on what it senses!  Pretty hi-tech for 1971...  and it still works!

This thing is built of solid materials - a fairly serious gauge of sheet metal,  the bearings are big and over-dimensioned for the job, the motor is larger than it needs to be for its power output, the resistive heating element is bigger than it needs to be, etc. etc. etc. -  it all adds up to something that "just works" for 50 years, and ends up costing the consumer almost nothing to own per month.

It is just a completely different philosophy to modern products, it is so far away from modern products that it is probably difficult for a younger person to even imagine it today.  Back then, you expected a fridge, washer, dryer, freezer, whatever, to last at least 20 years and hopefully more....    today, not so much! 



--- Quote from: tooki on April 18, 2021, 02:35:10 pm ---
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 17, 2021, 11:27:35 am ---[...] 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).

--- End quote ---
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.

--- End quote ---

For products that people throw out for other reasons than the battery dying, I would agree...  but what if the battery dying is the reason it gets thrown out?   :-//

My phone (a Galaxy S5) is on its 5:th replacement battery (so far!).  The battery is a wear item that gets replaced when it gets worn, which takes me less than 2 years, typically (constant heavy use, phone gets hot, etc. etc.).  Other than the batteries wearing out, nothing else on the phone shows any signs of wear, it runs the apps I want at an "OK" speed...  so, how high on my list of priorities should a new phone be?   The day I get so old that I can't think of something more fun to spend my $$$ on than upgrading a phone that doesn't need upgrading, I will volunteer for euthanasia!  :D




--- Quote from: tooki on April 18, 2021, 02:35:10 pm ---Like... it used to be that a car was junk by 100K miles [...] 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.

--- End quote ---

At one point in my professional life, I worked in the automotive industry - as QA manager for a major component/subsystems maker.  Granted, this is long ago now, but things change very slowly in the auto industry.  Basically, all components are specced for a 10 year, 100K mile life, no matter who manufactures them.  No car maker uses a different spec.  If the car maker has to remove a component that has failed in service before its contractual expected life span, it is the component maker that has to "eat it", including the labour costs for replacing it...   so, QA gets taken very seriously and is a pretty exact science.

The way it plays out is that everything gets engineered to last the required time, but no more.  For example, metal components get subjected to salt spray tests to see how fast they corrode.  The thickness of the anti-corrosive coating is related to cost...  so the plating is applied only exactly as thick as needed to pass the tests...  and no thicker.   The same philosophy applies to every other design and manufacturing decision.

So you see how we don't actually take "good" parts and strategically weaken them -  what we do is make "good" parts that last exactly as long as they should, under the worst case use conditions specified by the customer (the car manufacturer).

What then happens in the real world is that our highly optimized 10 year life parts can last a lot longer if the operating conditions are more benign than the worst case they were designed for.  So, you can make a car last much longer than the 100,000 mile spec if adult driven and well taken care of, in a benign climate.  But in the worst case specified conditions - 10 years is all you can expect.

Moving on from how good engineers are at hitting a lifetime target (very good!), we also have the policies of the automakers, for example, they will rarely stock spare parts for much longer than 10 years - the best ones do 15 years, depending on the popularity of the model in question.  So, at some point, even a perfectly preserved car becomes literally obsolete due to no spares being available any longer...

Seen in the bigger picture, the whole concept of planned obsolescence is not actually evil.  It is always going to be a matter of striking a good balance overall, and how to strike that balance is worth a whole bunch of posts on its own...  this one is already long enough!  :D


james_s:

--- Quote from: madires on April 18, 2021, 03:32:30 pm ---
--- 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.

--- End quote ---

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. ;)

--- End quote ---

A car can last a very long time if you take care of it though, these days even a lot of cheap cars will last. The key is *IF* you take care of them, which most people don't. I'm consistently shocked at the number of <5 year old cars I see that are filthy, banged up, something gets broken or damaged and the owner just leaves it like that because "it's only cosmetic" or whatever and pretty soon the whole car looks like a piece of crap.

My Volvo 740 is 31 years old and is the newest car I've ever owned. It has 268k miles on it, runs strong and still looks good inside and out. Prior to this I had a 1987 model that had 330k on it and other than a spot where the clearcoat was beginning to fail it still looked good when a semi truck rear ended me and totaled it. Keep the oil changed and more importantly make sure there's always oil in there, change the other fluids and wear items on a reasonable schedule and fix minor problems before they become big problems and you can drive the same car for 15, 20 or even more years without resorting to heroics.

james_s:

--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 18, 2021, 04:12:34 pm ---In the past, consumer items were actually often designed to be very durable,  like the 1971 Maytag clothes dryer that's still doing our family laundry after what...  50 years now? (It was standing in the house when we got it, abandoned by the previous owners.  I tried turning it on, it ran perfectly, so I decided - why not keep it?).  Hey, it is a round birthday this year!  It even measures the resistance of the clothes inside the drum to know that the humidity has dropped far enough to know to shut down automatically, based on what it senses!  Pretty hi-tech for 1971...  and it still works!

This thing is built of solid materials - a fairly serious gauge of sheet metal,  the bearings are big and over-dimensioned for the job, the motor is larger than it needs to be for its power output, the resistive heating element is bigger than it needs to be, etc. etc. etc. -  it all adds up to something that "just works" for 50 years, and ends up costing the consumer almost nothing to own per month.

It is just a completely different philosophy to modern products, it is so far away from modern products that it is probably difficult for a younger person to even imagine it today.  Back then, you expected a fridge, washer, dryer, freezer, whatever, to last at least 20 years and hopefully more....    today, not so much! 

--- End quote ---


They were built much better back then, and they cost a LOT more. Being a substantial investment, people expected them to last a long time and paid to have them repaired when they broke. I was going through some boxes of paperwork recently and found the receipt for the 25" console TV my grandfather purchased in 1983. It was a floor model so he got $100 off but after tax and delivery and all that it was still almost $800 and that was a lot of money back then. I don't know how much a washing machine cost in 1971 but I bet if you adjusted for inflation it would be at least twice what a typical one costs today. It would last a lot longer and be more repairable, but put it side by side with a modern looking thing that has trendy styling, a touchscreen, WiFi, all that garbage consumers go nuts for and costs half as much and guess which one at least 9 out of 10 people are going to buy? People vote with their wallets and they have consistently voted for cheap over long lived and serviceable.

tom66:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 18, 2021, 06:36:35 pm ---They were built much better back then, and they cost a LOT more. Being a substantial investment, people expected them to last a long time and paid to have them repaired when they broke. I was going through some boxes of paperwork recently and found the receipt for the 25" console TV my grandfather purchased in 1983. It was a floor model so he got $100 off but after tax and delivery and all that it was still almost $800 and that was a lot of money back then. I don't know how much a washing machine cost in 1971 but I bet if you adjusted for inflation it would be at least twice what a typical one costs today. It would last a lot longer and be more repairable, but put it side by side with a modern looking thing that has trendy styling, a touchscreen, WiFi, all that garbage consumers go nuts for and costs half as much and guess which one at least 9 out of 10 people are going to buy? People vote with their wallets and they have consistently voted for cheap over long lived and serviceable.

--- End quote ---

I find modern washing machines to be easier to service.

They use mostly off-the-shelf parts which can be acquired for very little.  My mother's washing machine had its door lock fail recently.  A replacement was sourced for about £10 delivered next day.  It wasn't the easiest thing to replace,  but took only half an hour.  Similarly, I repaired our ice-maker.  The tray motor had failed - it was just a microwave turntable motor. Again, a pain to get out,  but once fitted back up and running.

If anything, the commoditisation of these components makes them *more* repairable, not less.

Miyuki:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 18, 2021, 06:36:35 pm ---
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on April 18, 2021, 04:12:34 pm ---In the past, consumer items were actually often designed to be very durable,  like the 1971 Maytag clothes dryer that's still doing our family laundry after what...  50 years now? (It was standing in the house when we got it, abandoned by the previous owners.  I tried turning it on, it ran perfectly, so I decided - why not keep it?).  Hey, it is a round birthday this year!  It even measures the resistance of the clothes inside the drum to know that the humidity has dropped far enough to know to shut down automatically, based on what it senses!  Pretty hi-tech for 1971...  and it still works!

This thing is built of solid materials - a fairly serious gauge of sheet metal,  the bearings are big and over-dimensioned for the job, the motor is larger than it needs to be for its power output, the resistive heating element is bigger than it needs to be, etc. etc. etc. -  it all adds up to something that "just works" for 50 years, and ends up costing the consumer almost nothing to own per month.

It is just a completely different philosophy to modern products, it is so far away from modern products that it is probably difficult for a younger person to even imagine it today.  Back then, you expected a fridge, washer, dryer, freezer, whatever, to last at least 20 years and hopefully more....    today, not so much! 

--- End quote ---


They were built much better back then, and they cost a LOT more. Being a substantial investment, people expected them to last a long time and paid to have them repaired when they broke. I was going through some boxes of paperwork recently and found the receipt for the 25" console TV my grandfather purchased in 1983. It was a floor model so he got $100 off but after tax and delivery and all that it was still almost $800 and that was a lot of money back then. I don't know how much a washing machine cost in 1971 but I bet if you adjusted for inflation it would be at least twice what a typical one costs today. It would last a lot longer and be more repairable, but put it side by side with a modern looking thing that has trendy styling, a touchscreen, WiFi, all that garbage consumers go nuts for and costs half as much and guess which one at least 9 out of 10 people are going to buy? People vote with their wallets and they have consistently voted for cheap over long lived and serviceable.

--- End quote ---

Exactly appliances used to cost a fortune back then plus the efficiency increases
Just recently I was replacing the dryer and washing machine a little over 20 years old
Both new has 10 years warranty and I don't see a reason it won't work again 20 years
And of course, both have much lower consumption

Same with the fridge. I think it will be about that 20 years soon and still works just make weird noises from time to time and have little rust at the bottom part. But again New unit will be more efficient. Just look what fridge used to take like 40 years ago. Some of them might still work. But the new unit will easy pays itself in electricity consumtyion.

Same with the car. Also about 20 years. So is it a coincidence or just natural evolution  :-//
It still somehow runs without big maintenance and I will keep it "until the wheels fall off", even automatic gearbox still shifts 
It is noisy, everything rattles and produce a terrible smell. But I can leave it anywhere even with keys in and no need to worry about it.
A newer car will be much more comfortable, safer, and cleaner.
Fuel consumption will be more or less equal as new cars trade fuel efficiency for lower emissions. (With diesel engines. Gasoline ones have lower consumption)

So I can see most things are engineered to about 10 years of useful life and 20 years to fall apart. But after that time everything evolved significantly.

Like with computers or any electronics after 10 years it will work and might be okay. After 20 years it still might work but won't be nice to use compared to the modern equivalent.
//edit: like trying to read this post on 20 year old computer  >:D

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