Author Topic: Video on planned obsolescence.  (Read 16866 times)

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Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #125 on: April 12, 2021, 09:54:43 pm »
I used to like MS Office, before they started messing with the user interface. All versions since 2003 seemed to have gone worse, rather than better. I haven't used 365 yet, but. 2016 is installed om my work's PC and I hate it. I wish I was allowed to install something better. They can't pay me to use it. If I need to do something using a word processor. I go home and do it. I would turn down a job, if it involved using MS Office too much, regardless of the pay. I've used all sorts of spreadsheets and word processors before and they've all been easier to use than the recent MS Office versions, so it's not me struggling to learn new things. It's just really bad.

At least the Mac version has retained the menu bar, because Apple mandates it, you can ignore the ribbon and use it more or less the way you're used to. I still have not forgiven them for removing the classic menu on the Windows version. It was already there, it already worked, there was no reason to force the ribbon on everyone and eliminate the menu bar. Especially when the menu bar still has to be developed and tested for the Mac version. Years and years later I still hate the ribbon. People always said I'd get used to it, I never did. It takes up more space and requires more clicks to do anything, I hate it.
 

Offline BrokenYugo

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #126 on: April 12, 2021, 10:29:57 pm »
I've always thought whoever pushed for that ribbon crap should have, at minimum, been permanently imprisoned.

Speaking of MS office, software as a service could certainly be argued as a form of genuine planned obsolescence.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #127 on: April 12, 2021, 10:32:01 pm »
I've always thought whoever pushed for that ribbon crap should have, at minimum, been permanently imprisoned.

Speaking of MS office, software as a service could certainly be argued as a form of genuine planned obsolescence.

It was Julie Larson-Green. It was based on "usability studies" which obviously did not include me. I think they focused on non-technical people, at the expense of everyone who knew what they were doing. She was also a major player behind the "Metro" UI concept in Win8. Both total disasters if you ask me.
 

Offline JohnnyMalaria

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #128 on: April 12, 2021, 10:41:07 pm »
The vast majority of Office users aren't technical.
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #129 on: April 12, 2021, 10:55:17 pm »
The vast majority of Office users aren't technical.

But a lot of them are technical, or at least technical enough to figure out a menu. Adding the ribbon to make it more discoverable was fine, removing the menu was inexcusable.
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #130 on: April 12, 2021, 11:13:45 pm »

The funny thing is, the newest version of Office has a "reduced Ribbon" mode that looks a lot like the toolbars we used to have in the older versions...  we have almost come full circle!  (we are just missing the textual menus now.)
 

Offline JohnnyMalaria

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #131 on: April 13, 2021, 12:24:26 am »
My two main gripes with Office 365 are:

1. The File "menu" and trying to defeat automatically saving to OneDrive (rather than the local repository)
2. A general Windows 10 thing - system modal menus hidden behind the desktop. The number of times I've killed an unresponsive Office app in Task Manager only to discover a system modal dialog buried at the bottom of the pile escapes me. More recently, this annoyance occurs with the MS Authenticator for Outlook.

But I can live with the ribbon. It's been there for 14 years...
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #132 on: April 13, 2021, 12:44:54 am »
[...]  A general Windows 10 thing - system modal menus hidden behind the desktop. [...]

Yes, that is incompetence on an intergalactic level...  you feel like the app has frozen, and all that's wrong is that the Windows 10 crew has broken something that worked in Windows v1.0 - makes you wonder about the quality of the code that you can't directly see working...
 

Offline jonovid

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #133 on: April 13, 2021, 04:58:42 am »
planned obsolescence  >:D
I have found that if you run LED at a lower voltage it will quadruple it's life
in a desk lamp that had failing LED's in it's ring after just one year of it's operation
with this mod I see barely any noticeable dimming in its light output on many of my projects

 found this yt video about
Hacking an extra trashy Poundland LED lamp with schematic

this video by show how maybe you can mod a bolb for a longer life!  by a  resistor on its pcb that controls the driver ic
Hobbyist with a basic knowledge of electronics
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #134 on: April 14, 2021, 12:28:33 am »
planned obsolescence  >:D
I have found that if you run LED at a lower voltage it will quadruple it's life
in a desk lamp that had failing LED's in it's ring after just one year of it's operation
with this mod I see barely any noticeable dimming in its light output on many of my projects

 found this yt video about
Hacking an extra trashy Poundland LED lamp with schematic

this video by show how maybe you can mod a bolb for a longer life!  by a  resistor on its pcb that controls the driver ic

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"...
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #135 on: April 14, 2021, 03:49:15 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"...

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.
 
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Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #136 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.
Cryptocurrency has taught me to love math and at the same time be baffled by it.

Cryptocurrency lesson 0: Altcoins and Bitcoin are not the same thing.
 
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Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #137 on: April 14, 2021, 02:02:44 pm »
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"...

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.

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?

 

Offline madires

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #138 on: April 14, 2021, 02:34:46 pm »
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.

Osram offers special LED bulbs for fridges. Anyhow, they need to be designed for many on/off cycles which is another important parameter.
 

Offline andy2000

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #139 on: April 14, 2021, 03:23:41 pm »
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. 
« Last Edit: April 14, 2021, 03:27:11 pm by andy2000 »
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #140 on: April 14, 2021, 06:59:24 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?


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.
 
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Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #141 on: April 14, 2021, 07:38:29 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?


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.

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.)
« Last Edit: April 14, 2021, 07:40:29 pm by SilverSolder »
 

Offline BrokenYugo

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #142 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. 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.
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #143 on: April 14, 2021, 09:23:01 pm »
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.
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #144 on: April 15, 2021, 03:03:08 pm »
I think any functional test for the presence of "planned obsolescence" has to include an intent to deliberately limit a product's lifespan. [...]

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?
 

Offline BrokenYugo

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #145 on: April 15, 2021, 05:42:05 pm »
I think any functional test for the presence of "planned obsolescence" has to include an intent to deliberately limit a product's lifespan. [...]

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?

Fully potting a set of wireless earbuds increases water resistantance and means you can just shove the biggest lipo pouch possible in there, rather than a smaller lower capacity one in a consumer friendly package. There are fine reasons to do it besides screwing the consumer.

I guess that would count, but it would almost certainly be ineffective and doesn't seem feasible to me. It is not uncommon in automotive to see otherwise serviceable things (like ball joints in the front end) riveted in, you just grind/drill the rivets, pound em out, and bolt the new part in with the included hardware. That's arguably a cost thing though. I can't think of how such a thing would be implemented for brake pads. The way that stuff goes together and works requires a bolted joint somewhere and the pads to more or less float, at most you'd be changing out a whole loaded caliper/bracket assembly, but it wouldn't take long for a workaround to be developed. Something like an aftermarket caliper bracket to use some other caliper and pads from the parts bin. There are companies who primarily exist to develop such improved aftermarket parts.
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #146 on: April 15, 2021, 07:27:02 pm »
What would you think of a car where the brake pads were not replaceable, but instead required changing the front suspension?

I would want to know the rationale behind that decision. It would strike me as a very unusual way of getting someone to buy another car from that company so I would start by looking for another explanation, is there something very unique about the design of the front suspension that makes it a consumable wear item? Is it likely to wear out at about the same rate as a set of brake pads? It's hard with a hypothetical situation like this because I've never heard of such a car, but at the same time planned obsolescence wouldn't be my first thought because it would be such an unusual way of going about that.

In my mind "planned obsolescence" is a deliberate attempt at limiting useful lifespan without achieving any savings in cost or improvement in the product. It involves engineering effort specifically for the purpose of causing predictable failure, or making something completely dependent on some outside system despite no real need for that to be, as in the case of some of the cloud based hardware in recent years. In many cases there is a gray area where there is potentially some advantage to the approach they took, but it also results in guaranteed obsolescence. In those cases it may be impossible to know what the true motivation behind it was, and there may have been multiple motivations.
 
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Offline tooki

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #147 on: April 15, 2021, 08:41:21 pm »
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.
Yes! This. So much this!

That’s exactly why I say that 99% of the accusations of planned obsolescence actually aren’t: value engineering is not planned obsolescence.

The criterion people forget is that planned obsolescence means artificially reducing a product’s lifespan to less than its inherent lifespan. Engineering tradeoffs do not count!

But indeed, people end up crying “planned obsolescence!” any time they disagree with an engineering decision. It doesn’t matter to them whether they are actually aware of what the actual design rationale was, or if they are aware, they dismiss it. There’s never, ever any “oh, yeah, I guess that does make sense”.
 
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Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #148 on: April 15, 2021, 11:19:15 pm »
[...] artificially reducing a product’s lifespan to less than its inherent lifespan. [...]

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?
 

Offline David Hess

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Re: Video on planned obsolescence.
« Reply #149 on: April 16, 2021, 04:15:27 am »
I could make the same statement about electronically commutated motors which replaced shaded pole motors in refrigerator evaporators because of EPA requirements.  I have never had one of these shaded pole motors fail, but I have had to replace the electronically commutated motor in my new refrigerator 6 times now in 10 years, and they cost $30 each.

Just bodge in a computer type ball bearing fan? Maybe even try with a variable speed fan and see what speed yields the best overall efficiency.

I may just install the old style shaded pole motor next time.
 


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