Video on planned obsolescence.

[james_s]

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?

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]

[...] 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?

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]

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.

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.

[james_s]

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.

Hard disks, followed by RAM are the most common parts I've had to replace. Even in modern systems I've had to replace several failed SSDs and at least one RAM module so personally I would not spend my own money on a laptop that had soldered RAM and storage if there was any alternative.

[SilverSolder]

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.

Hard disks, followed by RAM are the most common parts I've had to replace. Even in modern systems I've had to replace several failed SSDs and at least one RAM module so personally I would not spend my own money on a laptop that had soldered RAM and storage if there was any alternative.

Funny you should say this:  today, a friend stopped by with a non-booting Dell laptop that I had helped purchase a while back.  It turned out to have a faulty RAM module.  It took something like 30 seconds to fix with another module that I had laying around -  because this laptop does not have soldered RAMs.   If it had...   it would likely have been junked, because it is too much hassle to replace, even on a cosmetically nice and still completely usable laptop that would still cost a lot to replace with a similar new one (16GB RAM, Quad core, 1TB SSD).

@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.  Apple has made the design decisions on their behalf, basically, and you know it!

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! 

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.   But that doesn't mean the potted device was not designed to be semi-disposable!

[amyk]

On the topic of laptop planned obolescence: a post in another thread reminded me of the infamous NEC Tokin "Proadlizer" CPU decoupling capacitor - rated for only 1000h at 105C, and placed right under the hot CPU. A search here and online shows the massive amount of failures that resulted.

[madires]

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?

[SilverSolder]

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).

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.

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.  Moreover, there is "collusion" between the car and component makers that they all build to the same standard.

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.   -  but even if you (correctly) argue that, we are still talking about "planned" obsolescence!

...

The example of cheap capacitors placed in a hot location were probably "manslaughter", reckless component selection and placement, whoever did the layout/selection were not doing it to a sufficiently professional level.  I doubt that was planned obsolescence, because the "murder" was simply so badly executed! 

[tooki]

@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. 

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.)

Apple has made the design decisions on their behalf, basically, and you know it!

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.

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! 

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.

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.

But that doesn't mean the potted device was not designed to be semi-disposable!

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]

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?

Yes, absolutely. Hence why it’s called planned obsolescence. It boggles my mind that people can’t understand this distinction.

[tooki]

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).

Exactly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moreover, there is "collusion" between the car and component makers that they all build to the same standard.

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? 

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.

Right!

but even if you (correctly) argue that, we are still talking about "planned" obsolescence!

No, then it definitely isn’t! The obsolescence is clearly external, you literally listed the externalities!!
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]

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.

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.

[SilverSolder]

[...] I worked in sales at the fruit stand, so [runs numbers] I’ve spent about 200,000 minutes at Apple Stores interacting with customers

That might explain a lot! 

[...] 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. [...]

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! 

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

[...] what consumer gadget isn’t designed to be semi-disposable?!?  [...]

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! 

[...] 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).

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.

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! 

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.

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! 

[james_s]

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.

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.

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]

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! 

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]

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.

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]

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! 

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.

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 

[SilverSolder]

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

There is still a difference between a product engineered for a 10 year life, and one engineered for a 25 year one.

According to a service technician that came to look at our fridge:

1) A fridge compressor used to come with a 10 year or more warranty.  Now they come with a 1 year warranty, so are they worth the effort to replace compared with just buying another fridge?

2) It used to be possible to change evaporators, condensers, etc., if they leaked.  Now they are so integrated ('potted') in the design that if they go, the amount of labour to change them can be crazy high -  again, is it worth it compared to just buying another fridge?

[james_s]

Technically it was possible to replace an evaporator or condenser, but I have never heard of somebody doing that with a domestic fridge. The vast majority of refrigerator problems have nothing to do with the hermetic system.

[BrokenYugo]

Yeah, they started embedding the condenser under the outer skin of consumer fridges and frezers decades ago. Seems problems in the electrical system (defrost or the thermostat) are usually what kills them anyway, or just general wear tear and filth triggers replacement.

I find techs in general are often the last people you want to ask about opinions on the design history of stuff, their main interest is making their job easier. That's not necessarily a consumer friendly bias. They often figure the older model as better, because they already knew all the common faults and procedural shortcuts for the old model.

[SilverSolder]

Yeah, they started embedding the condenser under the outer skin of consumer fridges and frezers decades ago. Seems problems in the electrical system (defrost or the thermostat) are usually what kills them anyway, or just general wear tear and filth triggers replacement.

I find techs in general are often the last people you want to ask about opinions on the design history of stuff, their main interest is making their job easier. That's not necessarily a consumer friendly bias. They often figure the older model as better, because they already knew all the common faults and procedural shortcuts for the old model.

They also know which models cause problems, and which are reliable...

E.g. the technicians that service the 40 year old furnace in this house, all unanimously say "Don't change it...  it will outlast anything new you put in its place"....  This is something like five different men, over the years, all with the same opinion about this brand of furnace.  You'd kind of have to take their views into account, it seems to me.  Certainly, I do.

[SilverSolder]

Technically it was possible to replace an evaporator or condenser, but I have never heard of somebody doing that with a domestic fridge. The vast majority of refrigerator problems have nothing to do with the hermetic system.

I think the issue in this case, was that he was worried that a bad compressor had spewed metal particles all over the place.

With the fridge declared uneconomical to repair, I had a go myself and changed the SSR that powers the compressor...   - the fridge is still working fine today!