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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

> For whatever reason (I suspect some sort of storage failure) everyone’s tablets die around the same time.

What a fun, completely coincidental quirk that that time appears to fall outside the warranty window, hey?

Very convenient for them and also easy to accomplish by buying the cheapest parts. It's probably eMMC-based and writing a logfile constantly. Source: every Android that has ever died on me in this exact way (four and counting)

Yep this is nearly guaranteed. Kills so many IoT things, logging the world and eMMC write limits being garbage.

I feel this may be natural selection at play.

With bottom-of-the-barrel (and/or "value add") IoT garbage, hardware suppliers are a commodity, and under competitive pressure, the winners will be ones that can make cheapest hardware that just about outlasts a typical warranty period of their customers' products. Shorter-lived parts will not bring repeat business; longer-lived parts will get value-optimized further. Failing just after warranty period is Just Right.

Depending on the particular consumer group, this could also backfire in the long term. With consumer warranty being ridiculously short. They will increasingly notice the pattern, that devices from brand X always brick shortly after warranty is over. And maybe moving to more trusting, but pricey brands.

Unfortunately, there are almost no "pricey brands" left that serve the middle range of price/quality. Most of them sold out to or just became replaced by bottom-of-the-barrel shit sellers, that are happy to continuously cycle through dozens of fly-by-night brands. It's still possible to get quality work done, but that's one of the few very premium brands and/or bespoke work; if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

(Just look at Amazon marketplace if you think I’m exaggerating.)

Customers have been "noticing" this pattern for couple decades now; it's not just in tech, but everywhere across the board - from foodstuffs, through appliances, sports equipment, clothing, hygiene, all the way to computing. Unfortunately, this is a pattern in the same sense a tsunami is - you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.

> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.

Depends. For some product lines there's the "commercial grade" stuff available - for TVs, look into Digital Signage product lines and add some sort of TV stick (or an rpi) to them for the brains, for power tools look at what the tradespeople use (it's probably Bosch blue series, Makita or DeWalt), for kitchen equipment ask your nearest restaurant. For computing, I'd go to Apple (if your ecosystem supports it), Lenovo/Dell/HPs business line stuff (you don't need to buy the next day on-site package, but you want the models that do have that as an option because that's the ones that are both made for easy repair and have better components in the first place) or Framework. You pay quite the hefty premium over Chinesium stuff, but it's worth it.

Only thing I'd stay far away from if you're not trained on how to use them is cleaning supplies of all kinds, hair and body shampoo as the commercial ones are way stronger concentrated and you can do serious damage to your (or your loved ones) bodies if you, say, leave them on too long.

> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.

In terms of online shopping, if the distributor cooperates with the consumer then there is something to do about it. One of the largest Swiss online shop started to share warranty statistics of all products. That information is quite useful to avoid the cheap and soon to break stuff. Of course it's not perfect, since it only tracks faults within the 2 year warranty period. But it provides a proxy signal for quality. But maybe that only works in smaller markets with less incentives to game the statistics.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34536344

I think its worse than that because they don't actually have to log so much. This is choice a developer made, but it would cost nothing (except salary for competent staff) to make the correct choice.

SDs and eMMC also usually have the same feature as the famous IBM “DeathStar” HDDs from the 00's: the thing gets completely hosed when it loses power when write is in progress.

I do not have exact statistics but I believe that this is the most common failure mode of SD cards in embedded systems that we supply (but a friend who works for certain ARM and PowerPC SoC vendor told me that he has statistics that disprove my theory, so take that with a grain of salt).

I recently had to fix the radio in my car for the same reason. Pioneer installed the firmware onto a cheap SD card that they have hidden inside the radio and requires disassembly to replace. Of course they don't offer the original firmware anywhere, luckily someone online has backed it up and I found the file on reddit.

It's been a big pain for Tesla as well, where their tiny 8GB emmc on the center screen would fail since they logged to it too much... 134,000 vehicles recalled eventually after they denied it was an issue.

https://www.tesla.com/support/8gb-emmc-recall-frequently-ask...

Jesus Christ are they amateurs? These are steel boxes on wheels and we're dealing with the same issues as shitty 200 dollars android tablets from 10 years ago.

That's because all who gets hired at these hyper-fast startups are fresh graduates who can do leetcode by heart.

The people who have been in the field for a decade or more can't be arsed putting up with all that and so you get stupid issues which were solved years ago but the devs were not aware of them.

So where do those people go to work instead? I want to work with them.

Defense companies.

That affects the infotainment computer only so driving is unaffected. You just wont be able to check your speed etc. But yeah, it's way too common of a mistake.

I don't know how their cars' UI is designed (and I hope I never have to) but if it's the only way to determine car speed or battery capacity, then this goes well beyond infotainment. No wonder they were forced to do a recall.

Surely it can't cost much more to go for a larger eMMC chip and have it massively over-provisioned with plenty of space for wear levelling?

The underlying flash memory is trash and the controller already does a ton of heavy lifting to keep the data coherent.

But then you are not only making your build price higher, you also have less revenue as year pass. And its hard to market.

It's a $1,700 bottom barrel android tablet, there is plenty of profit margin available.

I don't think the problem is necessarily space, but rather write-limits being used by superfluous logging

If I remember correctly it's also about eMMC having a much shorter life than UFS or similar storage. Though yes, unnecessary logging isn't helpful either. (Quick post-googling edit: apparently both use NAND, it's more about wear leveling apparently that makes the differences.)

That's where the wear levelling comes in, still expose 8GB of space to the host device, but internally have I dunno, twice that in cell capacity that you can move bits to as other cells wear out.

Its a shame mobile devices don't have a SMART equivalent, would be nice to have some warning as something approaches the end of its life.

Do you even have to limit the exposed space?

It’s not going to write at twice the rate just because more space is available.

You do, most SSD controllers already implement this. Have you ever wondered why most SSD's come in slightly odd sizes like 100GB instead of 128GB? The extra space is put aside and used for wear levelling and other maintenance tasks.

You can find out a bit more here https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/blog/ssd-over-provisioning-and...

I also remember a guide a while ago on how to reprogram a SSD to operate in SLC mode instead of MLC. You lost disk capacity but gained a large performance boost and a reduced error rate.

Why do you want to spend money on hardware to solve a software problem? The software doesn't have to write the logs to the SD card.

I recently had an otherwise perfectly fine eMMC-based Samsung phone degraded to unusable floppy disk speeds.

My guess is that their "RAM Plus" feature (aka swap) combined with the memory hungry modern android apps turned out to be a nasty timebomb. Which has or still is bricking millions of smartphones after a few years of usage.

Sounds like fixing that would be really bad for Samsung’s bottom line. Higher cost of materials initially, less frequent upgrades, and only a very small subset of super technical users even realize what the problem is.

knowing a lot of these companies. it wouldn't really matter if it fell inside of the warranty. they would simply screw a lot of people over until there's a class action lawsuit (or whatever equivalent is in that country) where they get a slap on the wrist for not honoring warranty claims.

Carrier back in the 2000's had a problem with their heat exchangers in their gas furnaces failing far more often than they should. They were sued, settled, and part of the settlement was an extended warranty of the heat exchanger, including labor.

Great, right?

The local carrier dealer lied and said the unit wasn't under warranty. They lied again when reminded of the class-action settlement, claiming only part were included and said would cost a fortune in labor.

When I called Carrier and told them what their factory authorized gold/preferred/whatever-they're-called dealer was pulling, Carrier confirmed I was correct and even verified the unit's serial number and said that if the dealer had checked the SN, they would have found it was covered.

The dealer then said 'fine, but those parts are going to take weeks to get from the warehouse' knowing damn well I had no heat, in the winter. They had us over a barrel and they fucking knew it, and I didn't have any way to prove that claim wrong.

I'd have let the dealer do the install, and then only brought up the fact that it was under warranty afterwards.

My A/C unit is fairly new but there are signs the condenser unit fan is starting to go. Since it is still under warranty for parts (not labor) I thought I would be able to just get a replacement fan and install it myself. But no, the manufacturer will only deal with a "certified technician," who of course charges an outrageous amount of money (many hundreds of dollars) to replace the fan. When I asked the technician why the labor cost so much, they gave me some song and dance about how the prices were set by their central office (true) and that the cost also included filing the paperwork to make a warranty claim (seriously?).

At the end of the day, I could probably buy an aftermarket fan off the Internet and install it myself, spending far less than the certified technician would charge to install the "free" OEM replacement part.

This reads similarly to how with certain medical insurance you only pay a flat $5 (instead of the full price of $25+) for common meds that you can get for $1.50 outside of insurance...

Also, likely the technicians company paid big money to be an official provider (or pays a % of this job up)

At least Ponzi had style.

Just as a data point for those in Canada (maybe US, but I'm not sure if it's the same company), I have a Senville unit, bought from their website, and they sent a replacement plastic (yes, it's a plastic bead in a piece of rubber) bearing for the indoor fan for free with shipping free too a few years ago, after providing the unit's serial number and the original name on the receipt. The unit was in-warranty. They claim that you have to have the unit professionally installed to get the warranty, but nobody asked for this at any point (could have been due to triviality of the part). Either way I was pleasantly surprised by the willingness to provide parts, even though the documentation of part numbers and models/generations on their site isn't super clear.

It's now out of warranty, but most of these units are built by either Gree (some Trane, Tosot, Gree, some Lennox iirc) or Midea (MrCool, Eco-Air, Senville, Pioneer, Carrier), so searching for the "canonical name" of your system can be helpful in finding parts. (usually, its of a pattern like "M5OG-48HFN1-M", can be found with meticulous googling for catalogs). There is a lot of parts commonality between units. You have to be creative with finding parts on AliExpress as they go by any number of names that you wouldn't expect, and a lot of this stuff is bought by eye (or random dimensions, of which there are some canonical ones for each part) and not by part number unfortunately.

Component failures happen.

I had a Phillips 4K LED TV I purchased on sale in April 2021. The TV was glitchy, and I'd get all sorts of weird problems with it - but nothing really terrible.

Then two weeks into January this year, the picture suddenly becomes a jumbled mess of vertical stripes. One second it's fine, the next second it's broken.

Luckily we have a general 5 year warranty period here in Norway, and TVs are expected to last for at least 5 years. I called the shop, and they told me to just bring the TV.

When I get there with the TV, I notice two other identical TVs. I check out the note that hangs on them, and see that they are broken, with the same symptoms as mine. Both had purchase dates around March / April 2021.

I can only assume some component failure.

I wonder if it could be they are logging and not clearing the logs, filling up the storage - since its happening around the same time for everyone.

Maybe not filling up but wearing out the flash chip itself. If it was filling up, then a factory reset should've helped.

I wish he had poked around the Java code and looked for what might be triggering that.

> What a fun, completely coincidental quirk that that time appears to fall outside the warranty window, hey?

Isn't that the point of the warranty? They tell you they think the product will last for X years, and then it lasts about X years, just like they warranted.

HVAC systems are usually advertised as lasting at least a decade, but the warranty is usually only a year or two.

Honestly, I think something needs to be done so that companies are held liable for expensive products failing and needing expensive repairs after a year or two.

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