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Comment by bluesquared | Hacker News Reader

As an embedded hardware engineer working on yearly quantities in the low thousands who doesn't have to focus on unit cost quite as much as Sony, maybe a bit naive in this area? I've been using supercapacitors instead of batteries for my RTCs. Mainly to avoid service calls for dead batteries in hard-to-service products. I haven't done the math, but my engineering sense tells me that the added cost of the supercapacitor is more than evened out by the cost of batteries over the life of the product + service calls. Not quite applicable to consumer electronics, I suppose.

This smacks of poor coordination/planning rather than planned obsolescence, though for some "suits" the side effect is a beneficial one?

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According to the specs, the supercaps may also fail within 10 to 20 years due to lifetime issues. They do not last forever and have a significantly lower lifetime than normal caps.

I've actually opted for batteries for very small currents (µA range) because the battery lifetime is about the same as supercap lifetime, so why bother with a charging circuit?

Two batteries would be nice. Or a battery plus a (normal) cap backup that lasts a week or so (or at least the time it takes to change the battery).

I had a phone system for a small office fail a few years back. We called a service company out and one of the first things he checked was a supercapacitor on one of the processing cards in the system that keeps some volatile memory stored through a power outage. Sure enough it had failed and in a few minutes he had it desoldered and replaced with a new supercap, he already had plenty on hand in the truck. I figured at the very least they would have swapped the card as a whole and maybe refurbish the failed one later on but due to the common failure of that supercapacitor they just always replaced it onsite. If that phone system had been designed to maintain that memory with a lithium primary battery instead it could have even been a user serviceable component.

> that the added cost of the supercapacitor

Anything made in the millions of units per year is value engineered to death. Even if the cost is only $0.10 more that will really add up. I’m not sure the cost is offset when the repairs are out of warranty.

Which is so frustrating, as nobody would check the box for a 0.02% discount to avoid having to change batteries.

True, but it's the difference between making a single product that's identical and consistent, versus a made-to-order item. Inevitably when making a single high volume product, engineering decisions are made which reduce the envelope of theoretical potential capability compared made-to-order.

Right now I can go to the store and grab a console. If I'm not alright with a car on the lot of a dealer, I'm selecting exactly what I want, paying a bunch more, and waiting many weeks to take delivery. It's hugely more complicated from a manufacturing and supply chain standpoint - simply a different operating model.

I'd love to know who would willingly pay $234.65 for a console with "value engineed" nickle and diming rather than paying $238.87 for a few decent components

You don't decide to buy an xbox rather than a playstation because it's 5 bucks cheaper.

This applied to every single parts/designs so finally accumulated to dozens of dollars. IMO they shouldn't rely on external reliable clock.

I think that consoles (at least in first few hardware revision of given generation) are in somewhat special category. The hardware strongly looks like the engineering was primarily optimized optimized for time to market (see for example the amount of EMC shielding in both Xbox One and Series, which strongly suggest that the design target was to minimize the time spent on EMC (pre)conformance testing while ignoring the price of the thing).

>This smacks of poor coordination/planning rather than planned obsolescence,

I expect they get super-special company plaques at the awards ceremony for pulling a machine screw out of the design so 'beneficial' will be driven by a spreadsheet showing the warranty end-date.

I bought a PS3 to do Cell development and got the BSOD a little over a year later, it's practically the only electronics product I've had outright fail on me so Sony is still on my enemies list.

Super capacitors seem to die as well. I have 4 dead capacitors out of the 8 DS3231 RTC modules that I have bought within the last 2-3 years.

I think the original xbox used a super capacitor that has a very high leak rate for earlier models.

I believe there are several consumer laptops such as MacBooks and Chromebooks now using supercapacitors instead of CMOS batteries

What about LTO batteries? They have massive cycle lifetimes, and seem to not cause any issues if they fail.

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