Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

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Plenty of planned obsolescence. I won’t go into my rant but my brother is an engineer who is paid very handsomely to make sure that products outlast their warranty period but then fail predictably. He engineers special plastics that degrade rapidly after 5 or 6 years, gears that fail after 10th no later than 12 years, bearing assemblies that will leak but not fail between 4000 to 5500 hours, etc.

Often the components he designs cost more to manufacture that components that would last much, much longer. . To build a pump that will 99 percent make it to 3000 hours, that means half will make it to 9000 hours or more. Unless you really, really make sure that 90 percent will also fail by 4000 hours. It’s not easy to do.

Some products actually incorporate extra parts such as batteries that serve no other purpose than to cause the unit to degrade after a certain time (honeywell thermostats I’m looking at you … their round thermostat includes a lithium cell. When the lithium cell degrades, the at328p processor switches to a limping mode that regulates +/- 10 degrees, but never less than a little over freezing. The (soldered) battery just goes through a resistor to a GPIO pin. It’s just a chemical timer. It serves no other purpose than to make the unit need to be replaced.)

I could go on and on and on, but stuff is definitely designed to fail in predictable ways in a predermined timeframe. Considerable expense is invested in this behavior.

special plastics that degrade rapidly after 5 or 6 years

...so the company making parts with them can then extoll the virtues of "biodegradable" in their marketing...?

Also, for those who doubt the claim about the Honeywell thermostat having a battery, I did some further research, and it does appear to be true:

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/128526/honeywell-th...

https://www.amazon.com/review/R3V5R0MJGEFNXH

But then this video shows that it is relatively easy to replace, it's not soldered in place, although the comments there do mention that the presence of the battery isn't documented anywhere in the original instructions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VKowLXfERo

The first two links you've provided about the battery don't prove or even suggest that the battery is essentially intended as a chemical timer to disable the thermostat when it runs out, which is the gist of the claim.

We had a over a hundred deployed so I did pretty exhaustive analysis. There is no rtc or anything that needs power. The at328p chip used has nonvolatile storage, the battery does not supply power when the power to the thermostat is removed, and the battery keeps a gpio pin on the mcu high. It’s pretty plain.

Your brother should write a book.

when he retires?

It would be amazing to have a ranking of companies whose products actually work and don't break down after some years. Might be controversial, but I'd place Apple pretty high up there since (excluding the battery thing they did), they built really sturdy hardware that lasts and offer long software support.

I knew planned obsolescence was a thing, but this is just insane to me! At best, it's really disingenuous (which is bad enough). No wonder we have so many conspiracy theorists. They've somehow socially engineered this situation to be acceptable (and relatively unknown).

The subscription model is older than most people realize

But how can we be sure you are telling the truth about who your brother is?

Many people add ficituous evidence of their views because they are so sure they are right.

Have a look at the little plastic bars that connect heater vent louvers on 1994 Toyota 4 runners. You will find that the plastic of the louvers is fine, but the bar that makes them move as a unit if extremely fragile (now). It also is an individually part numbered part with date codes lol. This is how they tell you your car needs replaced without making it unreliable, so you go buy a new Toyota.

Also, the gears inside of refrigerator defrost timers in the 160 refrigerators we bought for an apartment complex. Shockingly, still mechanical. And one of the gears is date coded and has teeth made of a rubbery, disintegrating plastic around a regular nylon wheel. The vast majority of the timers failed in a two years window. At 7-8 years. The cheap replacement timers have no such nonsense and I’ve never seen one fail. Most people just would have replaced the cheap apartment fridge.

This is just some of what I’ve personally seen.

But you are right, I’m just some guy on the internet, I could be just making this up.

And corporations would never make things with life limitations to make more money. Surely. I mean, that would be like a subscription model! Ridiculous!

What kind of battery goes into the Honeywell thermostat you are talking about? Is it one you have to buy from Honeywell, or an off-the-shelf part?

If the latter, how does it help Honeywell that you have to replace it?

I'm curious too, but even if something is fairly easy to replace or repair a significant amount of people may still just buy new and not bother. (My own landlord is making this choice over a $100 logic board replacement for the garage door opener.)

I think the point is that you (or most people) will replace the entire unit because it's beyond warranty, stops functioning correctly, and a soldered (probably special) battery would be difficult to replace.

Yes, a soldered or special battery would be (weak) evidence of the tactic of planned obsolescence. A standard battery that you can just pop in and out, would not be.

There's no such thing as a special battery. No manufacturer is going to have some kind of custom battery manufactured just for one part; they always come in standard sizes and voltages. At the very worst, you could hack in a similar-sized battery with the right voltage.

The question is how much hacking would be required.

Probably not much, but that's still far more than the average consumer is willing or able to do.

There are batteries special enough that I can't pick one up at Walmart, and for the general public that may render the device kaput. I didn't say it's an unhackable design.

>There are batteries special enough that I can't pick one up at Walmart

You can't pick up a standard 18650 battery at Walmart either, but that doesn't make it some kind of special battery. It's bog-standard. Availability at Walmart has nothing to do with something is standard or even common. Brake pads for some random mass-market 2015 model year car (GM, Toyota, etc.) are nothing special or difficult to find either, but you're not going to find them at Walmart.

But perhaps BMS expect specific battery product. I don't want to take risk by replacing to random Li-ion that not matching original BMS.

My bicycle light begs to differ. It’s a standard 18650 cell with a protection PCB slapped on top, and both poles on the same end of the battery.

This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find. I can either get the 2 cells needed from the manufacturer at about 70% the cost of a new light, or get a new light. It’s technically repairable/user serviceable, it’s just not practical to do. Apple is playing a similar trick with their 80lbs iPhone repair kit to change the battery yourself: technically user repairable, practically not.

>My bicycle light begs to differ. It’s a standard 18650 cell with a protection PCB slapped on top, and both poles on the same end of the battery.

Huh? You seem to be contradicting yourself: you say it's a standard 18650 cell. That's not something custom, that's something you can buy from an electronics supplier quite easily. And no, having both poles on the same end isn't something custom either, that's just a variant you can buy. You should be able to find this exact part on digikey.com.

>This is exotic enough that replacements are very hard to find.

If you can buy something on digikey.com, it's not "exotic". They even ship small orders by USPS for cheap. It might be "exotic" to a typical consumer, but those people don't know how to use a soldering iron.

This entire thread is people talking about planned obsolescence for _consumer_ devices and you keep making the same rebuttals. Typical home owners who buy a thermostat at Home Depot or cyclists who buy a tail light at a bike shop are unlikely to even know what digikey is, let alone order a replacement (especially if you have to buy in bulk) and do their own soldering to replace it if it's soldered in.

We all know the typical HN reader thinks a fun weekend would be spending 6 hours researching part numbers and getting out the soldering iron, but we are atypical. Most people will assume their product is at the end of its life because the warranty has lapsed and it doesn't work anymore. Companies are apparently betting on that and it's an environmental travesty.

>Typical home owners who buy a thermostat at Home Depot or cyclists who buy a tail light at a bike shop are unlikely to even know what digikey is, let alone order a replacement

Yes, I know. I said this exact thing above.

The parent said these devices used "custom batteries", implying that Honeywell et al were custom-designing and manufacturing their own special nonstandard batteries just for these applications. This is incorrect, and needed to be corrected.

It’s standard in the sense that a 18650 with a protection PCB on top and both poles on the same end isn’t exclusive to this manufacturer and others use it. There is nothing proprietary about it. But it’s not run of the mill 18650 either.

But it’s rare enough that it’s hard to find. So much so that it actually doesn’t make economical sense to find this (rare, at a premium) variant because it would cost about as much or more than a new light (which includes new batteries, ironically)

It is an off the shelf part. It is (at least in the models I have worked with) possible, but not easy to replace, as the holder is blocked buy other components and the thermostat is not designed to be disassembled. The existence of the battery is undocumented.

Since we had over a hundred of these deployed in an apartment complex, when they started failing I carefully characterized their behavior. It just makes them go wonky when it is removed or dies. The at328p functions fine without it, there is no RTC or anything that needs a battery., and the chip is not powered by the battery when power is removed. In fact, there is no discharge from the battery when power is off. The at328p has nonvolatile eeprom and flash storage.

Interestingly, the wonky behavior it exhibits is the same (but doesn’t go below 40 degrees (f) ) as an old electromechanical one failing lol.

When I was in engineering school 35 years ago, the "joke" was that our job was to design a car that ran perfectly until its warranty expired, and then, poof!, turned into a pile of dust. I didn't realize this actually became a science. Good grief. Of COURSE it did. Someone should make an expose about this stuff, and sell it to a news program.

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