For example: one could assume that generally, with products that have several "teirs" of quality based on price point, the higher the price - the better the "quality" and therefore, presumably the greater the chance of that lasting longer. But with certain products that are considered high-end (for example, Apple macbooks), they are marketed towards those who have a higher disposable income and are more likely to "upgrade" or obtain the latest gadget, meaning the lifetime of their product - for that particular demographic - can be rather short. One could easily argue this is planned obsolescence, and perhaps it is, but is it a conspiracy?
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Planned obsolescence means deliberately designing things to last less long than they inherently could.
[...] Making a laptop without user-replaceable batteries in exchange for extreme thinness doesn’t count. [...]
The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence.
The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence.
The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence.
That one is a gray area. My first iPhone (yeah, I know, more Apple, but whatever, it's the phone I had) became unusably slow after various updates to the OS and apps. It didn't DO anything new as far as I could tell, not one of those updates gave me tangible improvements, they were just slower. It has been my experience that they push the OS updates about one version further on old devices than they should and it results in them being very sluggish at that point. Personally I want to buy a phone, set it up with everything I want and then essentially freeze the configuration and use it like that forever. There is so much software (and websites) that are not any more useful than similar stuff 10+ years ago, they're just more bloated and slow. Some of this is "hardware is so powerful now that who cares, we don't need to optimize!" but my cynical side suspects that companies keep adding features of dubious value fully knowing it will make devices slower so people will upgrade to the latest model. PCs became a mature commodity around 10 years ago and the need to upgrade regularly dropped sharply, people interpreted that as the death of the PC but it was really just that nobody needed a new one every year or two anymore. Smartphones and tablets were selling like hotcakes at the time but now those are mature commodities, there is not much the latest model can do that a flagship from 3-4 years ago can't and that period is gradually extending.
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.
I can see how it would be an issue for a freezer, but a refrigerator? The evaporator on my fridge doesn't stay below freezing for long enough to ice over. When the compressor turns off, it thaws, the water drains off through a sump, going to a small tray on top of the compressor, at the back, where it evaporates. If the fridge is icing up, then it will be because the thermostat is set too low.
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Planned obsolescence means deliberately designing things to last less long than they inherently could.
There is something called antitrust or competition laws, where lawmakers have found it necessary to outlaw collusion between "competitors" that silently agree to not compete too hard (for example, by agreeing not to make their products "too good for the price" or, in other words, "too cheap"). Almost like a capitalist version of a trade union! There are simply some situations that the "free market" can't fix.[...] Making a laptop without user-replaceable batteries in exchange for extreme thinness doesn’t count. [...]
I think it should count as planned obsolescence if the manufacturer doesn't offer a thicker alternative - and I think it edges into collusion and anti-competitive behaviour when no manufacturers offer it for love or money, all of a sudden, all at the same time...The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence.
It isn't as cut and dried as that... it can certainly be planned obsolescence. The physical equivalent is making a phone with a charge plug that doesn't fit the previous version for no particular reason other than increasing the sales of chargers (which has been made illegal in the EU, I believe). It is so easy to do the same kind of thing with software - make sure it doesn't run on the old model (and make sure the old stuff doesn't run on the new one) and you'll be good.
Finally, an examples of some scenarios that definitely don't qualify as planned obsolescence: you open up a really big graphics project in Photoshop on an older computer, and find it is barely able to cope with the image given its limited resources in terms of memory, CPU, bus, and disk speeds. Here, I would say that either your PC is obsolete, or, your PC is too slow, but faster/better ones were and are available, but you didn't want to pay for the performance to do what you want to do - so get out and get another one, either way, and don't blame the manufacturer for the scope of your projects growing in size!
2. I completely disagree. A company choosing to not make thick, cheap, and heavy laptops doesn’t mean it’s engaging in planned obsolescence!
The other thing people routinely misattribute to planned obsolescence is, well, plain old obsolescence. A computer getting bogged down with new software isn’t planned obsolescence, it’s plain old obsolescence.
That one is a gray area. My first iPhone (yeah, I know, more Apple, but whatever, it's the phone I had) became unusably slow after various updates to the OS and apps. It didn't DO anything new as far as I could tell, not one of those updates gave me tangible improvements, they were just slower. It has been my experience that they push the OS updates about one version further on old devices than they should and it results in them being very sluggish at that point. Personally I want to buy a phone, set it up with everything I want and then essentially freeze the configuration and use it like that forever. There is so much software (and websites) that are not any more useful than similar stuff 10+ years ago, they're just more bloated and slow. Some of this is "hardware is so powerful now that who cares, we don't need to optimize!" but my cynical side suspects that companies keep adding features of dubious value fully knowing it will make devices slower so people will upgrade to the latest model. PCs became a mature commodity around 10 years ago and the need to upgrade regularly dropped sharply, people interpreted that as the death of the PC but it was really just that nobody needed a new one every year or two anymore. Smartphones and tablets were selling like hotcakes at the time but now those are mature commodities, there is not much the latest model can do that a flagship from 3-4 years ago can't and that period is gradually extending.
2. I completely disagree. A company choosing to not make thick, cheap, and heavy laptops doesn’t mean it’s engaging in planned obsolescence!
There's a lot of middle ground. My Macbook is I think significantly thinner than it needs to be, it's so thin that it is not particularly comfortable to carry and it sacrifices a lot to be that thin. Laptops haven't been what I would consider "heavy" in probably 10 years, unless you look at the gigantic gaming laptops. Anything less than about 3/4" thick is just making a fashion statement IMO. My holy grail laptop would be something in a similar form factor as my X250 in a magnesium housing with a touchpad that has physical buttons below it. Even at 6 years old on the original battery I still get substantially longer run time out of this thing than I do with the Macbook, that thing can't even make it through an 8 hour work day without plugging it in. The Lenovo keyboard is far superior too, again because it does not make drastic compromises in the quest of unnecessary extreme thinness.
Ah, the “but the new version didn’t add anything!” trope... here’s the thing: we forget as little things get added.
Do I remember which version of Word added a specific feature? Of course not. And unless I happen to be authoring a document that needs that specific feature, I’m unlikely to even notice it’s missing if using a version one or two versions back. But put me on a version that’s many versions back and suddenly I notice there’s a lot missing. I’ll notice that it’s dumber about various behaviors.
I notice the same thing if I go to do something on my old iPhone 4S: there is tons of stuff missing.
Again, your argument boils down to “I don’t need it, therefore it’s not actually important”, literally brushing it off as vanity. That common argument that people just buy Apple as a “fashion statement” is IMHO rather callously dismissive of people like me who definitely, categorically do not buy things as fashion statements. I buy them because it’s the better tool for me. And it’s a tool. And since it’s a tool I use a lot, I need it to be the best tool for me.
Now, as someone whose spine issues also cause hand problems which make typing painful, I’m sensitive to keyboards, and in this regard, I’ve been annoyed with Apple for quite some time. I would indeed rather have the machine 2mm thicker in order to accommodate a better keyboard. At least they’re phasing out that butterfly keyboard.
Ah, the “but the new version didn’t add anything!” trope... here’s the thing: we forget as little things get added.
Do I remember which version of Word added a specific feature? Of course not. And unless I happen to be authoring a document that needs that specific feature, I’m unlikely to even notice it’s missing if using a version one or two versions back. But put me on a version that’s many versions back and suddenly I notice there’s a lot missing. I’ll notice that it’s dumber about various behaviors.
I notice the same thing if I go to do something on my old iPhone 4S: there is tons of stuff missing.
But I DO go back to older devices and software pretty frequently and I rarely notice anything missing, except apps I don't have because I didn't install it back when the current version was supported on that OS. Word? I have Word 2003 on my personal laptop and Office 365 on my work laptop and I've never noticed anything missing, except for the ribbon which is something that I would LOVE to get rid of on the newer versions, after years of using it at work I STILL hate the ribbon. Sometimes stuff does get fixed, like when I finally updated to iOS14 it fixed the reminders FINALLY which had been hopelessly broken for several versions but the thing is, reminders worked flawlessly way back in iOS6. Unfortunately it also killed my battery life, I used to easily get through an entire day on iOS10, now it's rare that I don't have to plug it in sometime in the afternoon. And then in the opposite direction, I find things missing on the newer devices because there are so many apps that get abandoned and never updated to run on the later OS and in several cases I've never found a decent replacement.
End result is kind of a wash, sometimes I can run an app that I couldn't run before, though that same app would have probably been just fine if written for the older platform. What usually overshadows that is the apps that used to work just fine which now no longer work. The perception is that iOS upgrades take away functionality, make my device slower and reduce the battery life, while adding very little and most of what it does add is just the ability to run apps that arbitrarily require a newer OS version. It would bother me a lot less if it was possible to roll back, I've been burned multiple times by updates that broke functionality with no way to roll back. That has trained me to go out of my way to avoid updating anything.
Again, your argument boils down to “I don’t need it, therefore it’s not actually important”, literally brushing it off as vanity. That common argument that people just buy Apple as a “fashion statement” is IMHO rather callously dismissive of people like me who definitely, categorically do not buy things as fashion statements. I buy them because it’s the better tool for me. And it’s a tool. And since it’s a tool I use a lot, I need it to be the best tool for me.
Now, as someone whose spine issues also cause hand problems which make typing painful, I’m sensitive to keyboards, and in this regard, I’ve been annoyed with Apple for quite some time. I would indeed rather have the machine 2mm thicker in order to accommodate a better keyboard. At least they’re phasing out that butterfly keyboard.
Again I'll say there is a lot of middle ground between a 10 lb 1.5" thick battleship and a 3/8" (or whatever) thick MBP. Apple has their "Air" models which are sleek and thin, that cater to the crowd that want extreme thinness and portability ad the expense of battery life, cooling, upgradeability, ports, keyboard quality and other sacrifices. The MBP is thinner than it needs to be and sacrifices far too much to achieve that, and I say that as a daily user of one for several years now. If thin was the most important metric I would get one of the Air models, but to call a machine "Pro" while giving it a terrible keyboard, pathetic battery life, ridiculously limited complement of ports, zero upgradeability, cooling that causes it to throttle regularly is kind of ridiculous. I'm not saying they shouldn't make thin lightweight machines but come on, offer at least one model worthy of being called "Pro". Something with enough battery life to get through a full work day or an overseas flight, something with a really good keyboard is suitable for typing big documents or writing code, that isn't too loud to type on while in a remote meeting. Something with sufficient cooling to compile or render something without throttling back.
But I DO go back to older devices and software pretty frequently and I rarely notice anything missing, except apps I don't have because I didn't install it back when the current version was supported on that OS. Word? I have Word 2003 on my personal laptop and Office 365 on my work laptop and I've never noticed anything missing, except for the ribbon which is something that I would LOVE to get rid of on the newer versions, after years of using it at work I STILL hate the ribbon.
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1. Collusion has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Planned obsolescence does not in any way require collusion between competitors.
2. I completely disagree. A company choosing to not make thick, cheap, and heavy laptops doesn’t mean it’s engaging in planned obsolescence! (Especially not when the company offers battery replacement service, including labor, for the same price as the user-replaceable batteries in prior models.)
3. No, changing a charger plug is not planned obsolescence unless it was done specifically to reduce lifespan
Basically, all you’ve done here is proven my point: that people expand the scope of “planned obsolescence” to mean “anything I don’t like” rather than what it actually means, which is to purposefully design a product to fail sooner than it inherently would have in order to promote sales of replacements. Because none of the things you describe in any way even distantly count.
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Now that they’ve added that feature in iOS that mostly keeps the battery charged at 80% until right before you begin your day [...]
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Now that they’ve added that feature in iOS that mostly keeps the battery charged at 80% until right before you begin your day [...]
That is a cool feature. I wish my laptops all had that, and that the %charge was user selectable - ideally 40% when not planning to use the battery...
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In other words, design tradeoffs aren’t planned obsolescence.
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Now that they’ve added that feature in iOS that mostly keeps the battery charged at 80% until right before you begin your day [...]
That is a cool feature. I wish my laptops all had that, and that the %charge was user selectable - ideally 40% when not planning to use the battery...
What brand laptop? Both my Win10 Lenovo laptops have configurable limits on charging.
[...]
Now that they’ve added that feature in iOS that mostly keeps the battery charged at 80% until right before you begin your day [...]
That is a cool feature. I wish my laptops all had that, and that the %charge was user selectable - ideally 40% when not planning to use the battery...
What brand laptop? Both my Win10 Lenovo laptops have configurable limits on charging.
I have some 10 year old Dells, on steroids with quad cores, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD, etc., that flatly refuse to die or become obsolete!
But they don't have the battery charging limit feature, so they tend to eat a battery every few years even if the battery is not used much.
I am actually a fan of Microsoft Office... I recall deploying Excel v1.0 back in the day (I was the young and radical IT manager trying new fangled stuff, exactly the kind of people I hate today, LOL) - it was just so much better than the DOS based stuff that went before.
I personally trained the users, too. I remember holding one accounting lady's hand over a mouse, guiding it across the mat and seeing her make the connection between what her hand was doing and the mouse cursor on the screen... She eventually became one of the most proficient users. Today, I'd probably be up on a human resources violation for touching her hand...
[...]
Now that they’ve added that feature in iOS that mostly keeps the battery charged at 80% until right before you begin your day [...]
That is a cool feature. I wish my laptops all had that, and that the %charge was user selectable - ideally 40% when not planning to use the battery...
What brand laptop? Both my Win10 Lenovo laptops have configurable limits on charging.
I have some 10 year old Dells, on steroids with quad cores, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD, etc., that flatly refuse to die or become obsolete!
But they don't have the battery charging limit feature, so they tend to eat a battery every few years even if the battery is not used much.
At least if they are that old you can readily change the battery (maybe?)
I am actually a fan of Microsoft Office... I recall deploying Excel v1.0 back in the day (I was the young and radical IT manager trying new fangled stuff, exactly the kind of people I hate today, LOL) - it was just so much better than the DOS based stuff that went before.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.QuoteI personally trained the users, too. I remember holding one accounting lady's hand over a mouse, guiding it across the mat and seeing her make the connection between what her hand was doing and the mouse cursor on the screen... She eventually became one of the most proficient users. Today, I'd probably be up on a human resources violation for touching her hand...I'm glad you had success. I couldn't train my mum to use a computer. She found double clicking hard work and it wasn't obvious to her to pick the mouse up and move it back to the middle of the mouse mat, when it went over the edge.