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?
[...] 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?
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.
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.
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.
@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!
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?
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!
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.
[...] I worked in sales at the fruit stand, so [runs numbers] I’ve spent about 200,000 minutes at Apple Stores interacting with customers
[...] 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. [...]
[...] what consumer gadget isn’t designed to be semi-disposable?!? [...]
[...] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[...]
If anything, the commoditisation of these components makes them *more* repairable, not less.
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.
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.