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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

It may be better for the environment to not own stuff, but instead use services.

For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".

However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.

EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:

- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a service costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more transparent market leads to better competition.

- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.

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I got burned by "buying a product and not knowing when it will fail".

Samsung made the largest fridge available. I got the $2500 model: stainless steel, no IoT but digital, double doors over drawer freezer. It looked really solid and durable. It failed in so many distinct and interesting ways!

The door shelves constantly shattered, at $50 each. The structure had been compromised by artistic design, with two kinds of plastic joined together. The ice maker died. The main shelves broke a couple times. The temperature display (blue 7-segment numbers) became nonsense. The drawer handle had a hinge made from plastic which broke and non-stainless steel which rusted out. The compressor went out, as we determined by diagnostic codes. The tech sent to fix that ignored us, never checked diagnostic codes, didn't look at the compressor, insisted that our problem was the ice maker (which was indeed broken but not our complaint), charged us $75 for nothing, and fought us when we did a credit card charge-back.

I cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying.

The replacement is a pair of smaller fridges that were about $400 each. One of them even has old-style wire shelves that seem unlikely to shatter. We've only had two broken shelves so far, in the other one.

Famously, there was a "lemons and cherries" paper on the economics of used cars. I think it also somewhat applies to new goods. There is information asymmetry here. I can't know that the hinges are fragile plastic and non-stainless steel. The fridge looks nice, and it says "stainless steel". I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.

How do you keep breaking so many refrigerator shelves..? I've never broken one in my entire life..

Samsung fridges are hot garbage and imo should be avoided at all costs.

I had a not-so-drastic experience with a high-end samsung fridge: A design flaw where the recirculation fan would accrue ice, and symptoms were that it sounded like a chainsaw every time it turned on, and eventually the fan would freeze over. The only way to "fix" it was to thaw it out every few weeks, and any attempt to replace parts was futile since it was a design flaw, not a mechanical failure.

Until I got a Samsung fridge I would have said the same thing. Now my fridge shelves are not strong enough to do the job.

Heat.

If the shelf is glass, and the glass is not resistant against wide temperature variations, the glass weakens and eventually will shatter.

I doubt it. I open the door of course, but I don't put hot things into the fridge.

My shelves are generally packed with large jugs. For example, on a main shelf I might have 4 gallons of milk and a half dozen half-gallon containers of juice and then more stuff to fill out the remaining space. Door shelves are similarly packed, with the ones in the Samsung being about 12x8 inches and thus big enough for gallons of milk.

The fridge is constantly used by kids. It needs to be mostly restocked every other day.

Glass shattered in one of the $400 fridges. The other $400 fridge is wire. Glass shelves in the Samsung would break around the edge, leaving me with an intact sheet of glass and some broken plastic. Door shelves are always plastic. Samsung snapped white and clear plastic together to make the shelves, with a fragile zig-zag at the joint. I got to wrapping the shelves with string-embedded packing tape before installing them, which increased the typical life from weeks to months.

Give me forged metal grates please, or at least something like rustproof storm drain covers.

I bet you he (or she) stores large heavy things in their fridge, like big pots of stew or heavy cuts of meat.

> I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.

Price does communicate some usable information. The problem is that most people naively assume that the more expensive item must be better, while the good items are actually fighting for an informed customer looking for a good cost/benefit. That means that most of the very low price stuff is crap, but also that if the value you can take from an item has a ceiling (limited comfort options, limited maintenance savings, limited "extra durability"), most of the very high price items are also crap.

"cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying."

So, Mr Customer, how do you really feel about our product?

Yeah, definitely satisfying. Well played.

> I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.

I don't agree. I think you can still buy quality things. The problem is that the market pushed the prices so low for "good enough" products, that it's difficult to justify paying much more. In the case of refrigerators, you'd have to pay at least three times more for a Sub-Zero fridge, for example.

I wouldn't trust the Sub-Zero fridge. I suppose I could feel somewhat safe with a refund/replace warranty (at my choice) with hefty payouts for downtime.

I went looking at high-end oven/range things one day, after having had the Samsung fridge experience. I noticed that underneath the fancy knobs they had the same crappy quarter-inch shafts as the low-end models. Some of the knobs looked like seriously impressive chunks of steel or brass... but that only put more weight and leverage on the standard-sized shafts.

I saw somebody take apart an older iPhone, maybe the 4. The phone had some really nice looking buttons on the side, machined out of stainless steel. Inside the phone it was a very different story: really flimsy crap.

> However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.

Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that will work".

Sometimes that's because the person paying to build the building is going to sell it once it's rented out, so they won't have to deal with the long term consequences. Sometimes it's just budget restrictions that won't permit the funds to buy the high-quality option. Sometimes it's just short-sightedness. It's rare to meet an owner who truly wants to invest in high quality, long-term solutions.

Or maybe it's because landlords know that it doesn't matter how long something is supposed to last in the hands of someone who has no willingness or incentive to preserve it

Exactly this. I'm a landlord, and I can't tell you how poorly some people will treat your appliances and other interior household components.

I'm not going to put a Bosch dishwasher in when someone is going to let their kid sit on the door while it's open, not maintain it properly (cleaning out the drain screen monthly), and so on. Maybe some tenants will, but most do not. I make sure to pay for the extended warranty, and my credit card tops the warranty up some more, because one service call is more expensive (and it's built into the cost of the rent). Something breaks? I file a warranty claim or service call, schedule it with the tenant, and move on with my day. My tenants are entitled to working appliances, not fancy appliances. If those appliances are durable and long lasting, bonus.

You have two options: pay a premium for a durable fridge that needs less/no maintenance or send out your staff to perform regular maintenance. It's more or less what the tenant is paying for when you rent your appliances.

It's also hard to gauge quality. Is a Samsung fridge 10% or 20% more durable than a no-name fridge? How much of a price premium to pay?

> Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that will work".

This is a great example, and it also has many parallels in—e.g. provision of online services.

The gp isn't wrong, service-providing companies are incentivised to optimise for low waste in certain areas, but it breaks down in other areas like this because service providers aren't optimising for QoS, they're optimising for perceived value.

For example (from the gp's comment):

> if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.

This depends. If the company is doing the above by leasing you a fridge you keep in your house and are responsible for maintaining, they getting you the worst fridge and replacing regularly may be better for them (see also ISP routers). Your statement only holds if they're running a large refrigeration warehouse where you keep your food at all times, in which case the logistics get a bit tricky.

The "perceived value" argument gets worse when you have large corporations with multiple offerings outside of their core: here the core competency can lend credence to less optimal/efficient/sustainability-friendly side-offerings.

It sounds like a nightmare to me.

A fridge service provider might run the hardware longer, but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features - if old phone monopolies, cable boxes and current isp's are any indicator.

And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...

Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.

> Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.

It's a lot easier to hold few companies accountable, than to hold millions of consumers accountable.

> And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...

That's also a problem when you buy a product.

> but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features

I suppose the market will do its job. Cost of ownership is transparent (monthly fee plus power use), so consumers can easily choose, and they can easily switch.

> It sounds like a nightmare to me.

I'm already having nightmares about the environment right now.

Consumers largely dispose of waste through municipal pickup which is already well overlooked. Setting up oversight for industrial disposal by a bazillion corporate entities in this theoretical shareconomy of appliances would be an enormous burden on the already undercapable county and state EPA offices. It would probably all just get shipped out of the country anyway.

If you think modern refrigerators are wasteful I'd ask you to prove it. The design choices they make are manufacturing trade offs—not simply cutting corners to make it break. A refrigerator might only last 10 years, but its a net gain if it cost 1/10 the energy to build, uses 50% of the power, never leaks refrigerant and uses a small ammount.

It's not just disposal. It's also the choices that are made when building/buying the product. Consumers are easily persuaded to choose based on different qualities than environmental-friendliness. Also, the recycling facilities may be optimized specifically for the type of fridge that a service-provider uses.

A fridge service provider would care just as much about your power bill as a fridge vendor.

Yeah I was trying to parse this too, if my fridge SP was awful in all the ways mentioned, wouldn't I be looking at the competition, especially now that it's easy to cancel a contract and get a better one so easily - instead of paying $1k for a new fridge.

You can rent fridges right now, few people elect to do it...

I rent my apartment, and it comes with a fridge, so I guess I'm renting the fridge too. IS this not common? Do people usually bring their own fridge in when they rent?

I think you mean "Few people elect to do the thing they barely know exists."

The model being peddled on TV/radio/etc isn't "Rent a fridge." is it?

This is just another "language war". The airwaves and communications channels are monopolized by discourse that protects the known way of doing business. It's not a law of physics it be that way.

Because it's more expensive over a relatively short period, perhaps?

I suspect for long term goods that are below some cost, it's just cheaper for people to own them vs renting over the lifetime of the device. A corporation will tend to finance the capital cost of the good if it's renting, then needs to pass on the interest costs of those goods to the renters. On top of that a rental corp also need to maintain techs to install/remove appliances. It all adds up to higher cost to rent than own in this area.

A company will also pay for and pass on the cost of non-paying customers in terms of repossession or loss of rented units.

Cable, certainly, but the phones you rented from Ma Bell were nearly indestructable. My uncle has a lake house with several phones that were originally provided by the phone company. They still work and will no doubt continue to do so as long as pulse dialing is supported.

Right, but it doesn't seem like a fridge vendor would be a monopoly. It would be a competitive market where power consumption would be an attribute consumers consider.

Sounds like some great things for fridge service providers to compete on:

"Our fridges are more power efficient!"

"Ours have advanced health monitoring!"

"We have the greenest recycling program!"

That’s a perspective that is common these days, but awful in practice. I don’t want to be a tenant, period — it’s almost never a better deal or value for me. I don’t need to pay a premium for the overhead and financing of a “cold food as a service” company while getting a level of service that meets the most minimum standard possible.

What we are missing today is meaningful competition. You can’t buy an appliance that isn’t a piece of garbage because we have a financial environment that encourages consolidation above all else. There’s only a few companies making anything, so there is no incentive to use quality as a differentiator.

I first started become aware of this when I started having trouble finding shoes. In many categories, all shoes are made by one manufacturer, often in one factory in Guangdong.

Eh, I just think this reflects changes in lifestyle and values. You can still buy shoes that are handmade in America and will last decades (like Alden and Allen Edmonds for mens dress shoes), they just cost a fortune and people don't wear those kinds of shoes nearly as much as they did 50 years ago. People today own more shoes, they wear fitness shoes as everyday shoes, styles change constantly, etc. Most people seem to want to buy hundreds of different styles of shoes over their lifetime, so they need to be cheap. There are people who want to own 5 pairs of shoes for their entire life and are willing to pay for the privilege, but they're a vanishingly small minority.

The only way you can possibly justify that sort of view point is the implicit hard cap on what you're willing to pay. You can't find "quality" (in appliances, in shoes, in just about anything) because you're not willing to pay for it.

No way. Price is all about market segmentation, there is little or no correlation with quality. The most expensive built-in refrigerators, for example, have very high failure rates.

After going through 3 washing machines in 9 years, i bought a Speed Queen commercial washer without a cashbox. It is not very pretty, and cost $50 more than the mid-range residential washer that it replaced, has a 5 year warranty, and an expected life of 10-15 years.

This is true for most categories of consumer products. Appliances, shoes, pants, furniture, etc.

You can easily spend 3000$ on a crap fridge.

The problem is optimization as energy efficiency and lifespan for example are often at odds. Further you can measure energy efficiency much easier than lifespan so the incentives get out of whack from what consumers want in favor of what they can measure.

Energy efficiency is one of the most noxious concepts in appliances.

We probably spend exponentially more energy manufacturing, distributing and delivering new appliances that fail due to pointless efficiency engineering than we shave off.

They really just have an incentive to make sure that on average you pay more than enough to make them a profit over the expected lifetime of your fridge. They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors.

You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience. The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down.

> They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors.

Sure, as long as you assume higher power consumption doesn't increase the cost of operating the fridge.

If you're not willing to assume that, then "regardless of power consumption" doesn't make a lot of sense.

If the buyer/owner of the of the fridge is the landlord but the user and power bill payer is the renter then the landlord has little incentive to care about power consumption.

> The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down

While this mentality definitely exists, this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation. Hence why personally I tend to stick with established companies for things like trades as in the absence of a personal relationship, knowing someone has a brand to protect (and history against it) improves my chance of receiving a quality good/service

> this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation

While the preservation of a brand might be rational for a corporation as a whole, it might be somewhat easy for executives that are paid quarterly and annual bonuses to temporarily goose profits by sacrificing long term reliability and brand (which only shows up with a long lag time, years down the road), then take their bonuses from investors before going somewhere else.

This theory of 'looting' by executives might leave both customers and long-term investors worse off, but is caused by the inability of customers and investors to perfectly incentivize (or monitor) long-term decisionmaking.

>For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence". However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.

You just described a grocery store...

They keep food and beverages at certain temperatures. When you are ready to consume that food or beverage, you can pick it up (or have it delivered). And best of all, you pay no subscription fee :) But in reality, that's not practical. Most families eat 3 meals a day, and consume multiple glasses of some drink a day. To make a trip to the grocery store (or fridge depot subscription place) every time you want to eat or have a cold drink is not practical (and increases environmental pollutants). So maybe you want to go once a day, you'll still need some device at home to keep your groceries and drinks cold until you want to consume, some device like a fridge :p

If you found a solution, that'd be great. But you'd probably just be a food delivery startup with some fancy marketing lingo. And we have plenty of those already.

>And best of all, you pay no subscription fee

The Prime-Member-only prices appearing at my local Whole Foods suggest that this may be increasingly untrue in the future.

I think you missed the point that in both situations there will be a fridge in your house. It's just that in the case of a service, you don't own it but a company does.

"All our customers live in rented flats above the cold storage unit as a service, and pick up the things they need on demand."

Fixed :)

Most people don't live particularly close to one.

Frankly, I deliberately avoid nearly everything with recurring revenue attached. It is hard to save, take risks, etc. where minimum payouts per month add up.

Fridge?

And I have three actually. One runs on propane, one standard power and one is a deep freeze, like what one would put in a garage.

All were cheap, all work well, all take modest to very liw resources to run.

The gas powered one works no matter what. That has saved me a time or two when there was no power. I may well get another. It is insane cheap to use.

Anyone selling me something that is planned to break gets the following:

Added to avoid list.

The product gets hacked wher it is posdible to untether it and or remedy the failure.

I tell others.

Now I realize all of that is contrary and toxic to many business models today. I rarely buy new.

I grew up poor, and had time which I invested in skills. Those have paid me off many, many times over.

I also think maximizing what has been produced makes good jobs, is better, with some qualifiers, for the environment, increases personal agency, lowers personal risk and cost.

Among many other good things.

Service models can make sense. For many basics, they just do not make sense.

I would much prefer we distribute repair, support modifications, upgrades and such across many enterprises as we used to do.

TV's were a good example. I grew up learning to repair them. Used to do it for date money. Offered in home service too.

Cars remain a good example. John Deere is the other extreme.

A blanket, "this way is good" makes little sense to me.

Would much rather have many local relationships than the same with big enterprises. More options, and if I do work, I get the immediate returns of lowered cost and risk.

An essentially never discussed option is also that the fridge could be open source. Now when it breaks there is both motive and opportunity for third party repair companies to offer upgrades and fixes.

Most fridges are repairable modulo buying one with a complex motherboard. Even then they're still fixable just spendy to do so. Also most aren't complex enough that you couldn't just reverse engineer the Mobo easily. People do this for cars and computers.

They could be much cheaper to repair if they used standard parts so repair places didn't have to order in custom pieces that they only use about 1 per year because every fridge has it's own version.

They might be more expensive to build, esp since customers may be more interested in having a tablet in their fridge than a repairable fridge.

Needing to make a fridge open sources screams at me that we really need to be simplifying the operation of a fridge.

I think component complication for planned obsolescence is much more of a thing than programming something in X years to kill itself.

Err it depends on your outlook. I’m such a hacker at heart I literally want everything I own to be open source.

Devices that are more efficient tend to be more complex, so that's another tradeoff to consider.

I.E. Internal Combustion Engine vs Electric Motor

I would much rather they build an Appliance that were design to last 10+ years, and with an warranty of 10 years for a higher price. Such design would means the company has an incentive for the fridge not to break in the 10 years, and extremely simple to fix within the 10 years.

There are things that I would like to buy for life. Kitchenwares, Desk, etc. There are things that are consumable and may be being a services would be better.

The world already has made a Subscription model for an Expensive and long last fridge and that is called installment plan.

I think Miele has ten year warranties for some appliances, and it wouldn't surprise me if Viking does. I know that Sub-Zero warranties some parts for up to 12 years. So, if you are really willing to spend big money on appliances, you can get lengthy warranties. Anecdotally, Viking, Miele, and Bosch appliances last a very, very long time.

We are quite offtopic already, so: in my experience, Liebherr fridges last decades.

I think you assume too much about which type of fridge represents the lowest cost. Countless enterprises have already embraced "cheap to buy, cheap to replace" products in favor of long lasting reliable products.

Now, the one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.

They will happily externalize as many costs as possible as well. Your electric bill is high? Oops, guess you should have negotiated that in the contract. Five hundred dollars of fresh groceries went bad because we gave you a shoddy refurb? We'll have a new unit out to you tomorrow, good luck with the rest.

> The one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.

Yes, so the market will ensure that this kind of company will prevail.

There are a lot of assumptions hidden in "the market always works" statements like that. In this case, there's the assumption that the line you're quoting represents a business model that's cheaper than "buy the cheapest fridge possible and replace it with another cheap-as-possible fridge when it breaks," especially when you factor in that you no longer need a repair crew on the payroll (because you don't repair things).

Here's another, more complicated problem: even if the math proves that, say, over a long enough horizon, you'll make more money with the longer-lived, repairable version of the product, that isn't necessarily the best way to maximize returns for shareholders/owners. If that concern overrides all others, then you may well be better off maximizing profits short-term, through any (hopefully legal!) means possible regardless of the effect on the long-term viability of the business, and investing them in other markets with higher returns.

Not necessarily, depending on all kinds of market factors, e.g. like stickyness of the transaction: how lazy would consumers be about changing out a fridge provider with poor service, or locking in the consumers with time boxed commitments. The slower and more inconvenient the transaction, the more the provider can wedge in rentier profits, and the poorer the market will respond.

Sure, but then that kind of company starts to look more like a fridge repair business than a "RaaS".

Something I'd suggest is being a parasite off the commercial businesses and pretend the retail market doesn't exist.

You can't buy a residential clothes washer designed to last longer than five years; laundromats won't tolerate that; solution, pretend Home Depot doesn't exist and buy a Speed Queen that your kids can probably inherit.

An interesting side effect is residential / contractors special type stuff has a very low initial cost of purchase but overall lifetime cost is always lower for commercial grade stuff; this makes sense, if it was cheaper to buy residential garbage the beancounters would force it to officially be commercial...

I think we just reached peak tech, ladies and gentlemen.

> If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years

They also have an incentive to make it last a long time so you're a loyal customer. Loyalty is extremely important if you only purchase a half dozen of something your entire life. Guess which incentive is stronger?

As a corollary, there is a big difference between being incentivized to do something and simply not being incentivized to do the opposite. The average full-size refrigerator lifespan is 17 years. The fact that Maytag doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a fridge that can last 30 years doesn't mean they're incentivized to make a shitty fridge, it just means people don't care enough about years 18-30 that they're willing to pay what it would cost to get that fridge.

Not to mention, if you buy from a company that makes a quality, reliable fridge, you'll recommend it to friends who need a new one; if they intentionally sell you a barely-qualified lemon, you'll steer everyone away from them where possible.

> If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".

Only if they don't have competitor for your business with a reputation for longer-lasting fridges that are otherwise of similar utility.

Another example I‘ve run into yesterday is that HP now sells ink subscriptions, eg €3 per month for max 50 pages (+50 pages rollover to following months). The printer orders new ink automatically when it runs low. I can imagine that those ink cartridges will not be half empty, as usually.

Instead of you owning the fridge, now the service company does. It'll just buy you a new fridge every time some little thing goes wrong; because it's cheaper to pay for delivery of a new one than to pay skilled labor to come and fix it (multiple times, usually).

It'll exchange you for a new one. But once you own thousands of fridges, I'm sure it's more economical to repair them afterwards with in-house technicians

I don't think replacing one bad thing with another is the right solution. Planned obsolescence should be illegal, plain and simple.

  Planned obsolescence should be illegal

Is there a clear line between planned obsolescence and just making a cheap, low-quality product?

Yes. The distinguishing feature of planned obsolescence is that the customer doesn't know the real design lifespan of the product. Just require companies to declare that and the problem goes away. Looks like the EU already does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Regulatio...

Thats kind of how warranty works only that usually the product lasts much longer than the warranty.

Definitely. A key example is phones whose batteries cannot be replaced by the end-user (and end-user repairability in general). Forcing users to update their phone's OS to newer versions which require more power from the newer models is another example. Printer ink cartridges often contain chips whose only purpose is to disable the cartridge - even if it's still got plenty of ink - after a certain amount of time passes. Also consider video games which require an internet connection to play, but do all of the logic on the client - when the servers disappear, well, time to buy this year's game instead.

Legislation against this practice isn't unheard of, there are fines and jail time for it in France.

Do you think that Apple will be fined for not making the battery replaceable? I don't see this happen, and certainly not in the US.

My guess is that Apple will simply claim that they can't make the phone as small/thin when the battery has to be replaceable.

350,000 phones were being into landfills every day in 2010. Fuck Apple's "thinnest phone ever", it's not worth the social cost. Dumb consumer vanity isn't the metric for optimization here.

I'm not sure Apple is the one to yell at here. The iPhone is one of the only phones that continues to get updates and is useful beyond 18-24 months. Short of destroying the motherboard, few iPhones are likely sent to landfills until they are many years old. They certainly do not end up in landfills because the lack of a user replaceable battery.

iPhone users either get the battery replaced, sell the phone, or they trade the phone in. The trade in then gets sold again, and likely again after that. The iPhones resale value makes sure it is a long time before any are simply thrown in the trash.

Apple will recycle any Apple product for free just by handing it to them in any of their stores. An Apple phone ending up in a landfill is the consumer's fault.

These recycled phones either end up as refurbished phones in other markets, or are taken apart by their special robots down to the individual pieces, which are then recycled themselves.

By recycling they likely mean burning the phone and getting about 10% of the valuable material back out of it.

Apple will pay you to not throw your old iPhone in the trash.

services have predictable longtime cost and that's why some people (especially businesses) favor this, but for me and many other people it's a different model: I NOW have a certain amount of money I am willing to spend on a fridge or other thing. Sure, it can break or something could happen, but that's another discussion. I have it, I paid for it, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to keep the mental burden in my head of "amount $x per month for thing $y" - and yes, I have a stable income but I guess for people without one it's a lot more financial security to not have running costs. (please ignore power costs for the fridge, I do think those are a lot more easily budgetable, like "power is 50 EUR per month, period")

>Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.

A responsible tax system could accomplish the same without causing people to pay 100x the value of a good product over their lifetime.

well one bad trend recently in HVAC services is companies trying to get people to lease the units for their homes. this then prevent easy sale as the HVAC leases usually allow the leasing company to require payment in full for the units or credit check the buyer to insure continuance of the lease.

So I disagree with your premise based on the example you gave. I would say it would be fine with items you only keep a few years and not long term appliances. I really do not think it encourages them to create units that fail because many companies still want their reputation to be built upon longevity. Simply put, the sales volumes are already great enough to not require shenanigans like what you suggest

> because many companies still want their reputation to be built upon longevity

History shows otherwise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

Interesting, but in your example how would the food be delivered to your home? But maybe a delivery service once a week or so is better than every individual taking their car to the supermarket? Interesting topic anyway.

They're only speaking of a service to keep food and beverages at a certain temperature. No delivery. That's another service.

And another line item on your revolving monthly expenses.

You seriously think that’s a good idea? I’m all for capitalism (until we have somrthing better) but creating that kind of dependency between people and a service will put too much power in the hands of businesses like Amazon.

People need to own, people need to be reaponsible with their decisions, and to think a business or corporation can do it better is dangerous.

That's a huge oversimplification. Who controls when the fridge stops working? Who has the right to end the contract and when? Who decides if the fridge has internet access or not?

Planned obsolescence is only an issue if there is a monopoly or significant collusion. The market incentives will sort this out.

The market can only sort it out if the lifespan of the product is made clear. If I buy a fridge today, I have no idea how long it will last. I can't see what standards the fridge was engineered to or what shortcuts they took and by the time it's known how long that model lasts it's already off the market and replaced with a new one.

It may be better for the environment to not own stuff, but instead have it produced by a socialistic society.

For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".

However, if I subscribe to a communistic society to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then this society has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.

EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:

- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a 4 years planned product costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more planned society leads to better resource distribution.

- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of one society.

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