Show me one customer who WANTS DRM in their air purifier.
I remember when manufacturers competed to make their products desirable, and appliances came with schematics.
I remember when manufacturers competed to make their products desirable, and appliances came with schematics.
Absolutely. cf. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/ind... as just one example of dozens, if not hundreds.
I have to say though, mine doesn't obey the DRM. It warns you if there is no sticker, but it works fine.
They just don't realize the tradeoff they're making until it's too late.
Why aren't people doing the most basic of research before buying things?
Fundamentally you can make more money by overcharging for consumables and undercharging for the product itself, than you can by "fairly" charging for both. In any product or industry with high entry costs (read: low risk of new competitor market entrant showing up), many businesses realistically are going to leave that kind of money on the table?
Be aware that at least some brother lasers you have to replace another part every 10,000 sheets, which is the duration of two to five toner replacements. I am unsure if it's the heater or the laser or what.
Haven’t replaced it in 10 years, haven’t reached the limit yet ;)
I'm a little disappointed, to say the least.
On the other hand, after putting it on the Wi-Fi, everything was able to print without the addition of any crapware drivers. Win some lose some?
Safety razors aren't a direct substitute for a modern standard shaving razor, even if it's arguably better.
Brother printers don't have DRM (yay!) but the toner cartridges are definitely being sold at a huge markup. That's OK because the price is fine with me, but they're still using the same "cheap product, expensive consumables" pricing model as everyone else. How could they not?
The market is flooded with DRM-free Air Purifiers.
It's unavoidable that if customers have behavior X, such as tending to go for the cheapest thing, sellers in the market will develop clever strategies to game that behavior. Retailers go so far as to research how the colors, shapes, and surface textures of packaging affect buying behavior, so of course they are also going to intensively study customer price sensitivity behavior too.
I've learned that with a lot of things such as appliances, tools, and some electronics it's actually cheaper to buy the higher-end model. It's cheaper to buy one good one than two or three pieces of junk that break easily.
I'd argue that this technique is borderline fraud. It plays against the common assumptions of what the product is without advertising it.
You can get an old school safety razor for under $20 and it will last forever. They are what double sided razor blades (the kind you normally see used in movies to split cocaine) were designed to fit into. Good razor blades can be found at a rate of about $0.05-$0.10 per, and last about 4-5 shaves - for me at least - before they start going dull and pulling. They also get me as clean of a shave as any other razor
Still not sure why people pay 10x more on cartridge systems, but maybe I'm just weird
Ultimately, electric razors are my favorite. You have to do a fair amount of work to get a close shave, but you also don't have to later up and you shove it in a charging base to clean it every day. I'm not sure it saves much money (when you replace the foils as recommended), but it is convenient and does a good enough job for me.
"sleek" "modern" "futuristic" "design"
I'm that close to do the same for my child's nightlight: just shunt power around whatever is opening the circuit and drive it with a Shelly plug.
(Okay the grand idea would be to ultimately put an ESP32 between the control unit and the three buttons, so that I can both operate it manually yet have full control of the thing; not the least because if you cut power it resets its state to a static white light. Never done that so that'd be nice way to acquire the skill without much risk to that super cheap device)
Thing should either be dumb and do everything you want with a button, or smart and then at least you get programmability.
For simple things like lights it’s usually better use of time to buy Yeelight nightlight and then you get to control it through HomeKit:home assistant/their app.
You mean the soft buttons? yeah it's nuts, not the least because since it's reacting to an impulse (either pull down to mass or pull up from mass) there's gotta be a constant power draw - however small (my Shelly plug measures it as non-zero <0.1~0.5W) - to the logic board to compare it against.
(warning: back of the envelope calculation)
At scale on a house one would have a bunch of such soft button devices†, cumulatively it might be on the 1~5W scale. Across a 1M city it's going to be 1~5MW.
It's made worse by these devices having cheap transformers or switched mode power supplies whose non-linearity drive the power factor down to 0.5~0.7, which means it's pumping real energy production to 2~8MVA (plus on the utility side electrical hardware needs to be scaled up because e.g loss doubles)
Which means for my town we're basically throwing 50~200MVAh a day right down the drain - or rather either burned up in the air or buried down "places that are not of honour" - because it doesn't make sense to have power factor correction economically (either on the device maker side, which would rise the BOM a few cents up, on the residential side where the cost is prohibitive, or on the individual size where people prefer buying cheap, electrically terrible, knockoff devices). Because yeah, in the EU passive PFC - which raises PF ~0.5 to ~0.85 - is mandated above >75W only.
Comparatively to the overall energy production and usage it's small, but in absolute terms it boggles the mind that as a society we're able to handwave such amounts of energy.
† I'm not counting stuff like powerbanks or chargers but again back of the envelope it should overall fold into the range, making the worst case conservative.
Automations allow me to run the purifier at Medium/High speed for certain times a day, even when I am not around. Other than that, they are always on Auto - so they produce minimal noise.
However, certain times a day for period of 15-30 mins or so, they run at Medium/High so they can do certain number of air changes in a room of x SQFT.
Having a 'computer' also allows them to detect when a room suddenly becomes less 'sanitized' and ramp up the 'automatic' to an appropriate level.
I've wanted to try building one myself, but unfortunately even the minimal woodworking required is a bit of a challenge for me.
I was building a DIY filter and took apart a purifier and was disappointed at it not having DC for me to connect my esp to for a sensor to check the purity.
No smarts, means no DRM.