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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: it takes mental gymnastics to think that planned obsolescence is not fraud.

I personally like to call it "forced obsolescence."

Forced obsolescence is when the consumer always buys the cheapest product that checks their boxes, regardless of build quality. This forces you to either use cheap parts that you know will break, or leave the market entirely. The consumer may bitch at "planned obsolescence", but when push comes to shove and they're looking for what their next <thing> is going to be, they only look at the price and features, not quality and longevity.

We should be re-framing this in consumer's minds, and list "price divided by warranty" as an important dimension to evaluate a product on.

In Europe everything has a warranty of 2 years for private individuals and 1 year for businesses: it doesn't work as a useful metric: there's no device that I rely on that I expect to run for less than ~5 years, except maybe toothbrushes. That's great as a "it's illegal to make something attrociously low-quality", but I expect at least 5 years out of every electronic appliance I have, and there's no way to assure that, except private insurance, which is more expensive than rebuying the devices that end up being defected.

So, I buy the cheapest thing that ticks the other boxes. Not because I'm inherently cheap, but because I have no trust in the market. There's no way for me to know if I'd be paying extra for luxury features, brand premium, or reliability. Yes, I try to research things I buy, and avoid red-flags, but there's only so much you can learn that way, and most people don't have neither the experience, nor the know-how, nor the time to research everything properly to high exhaustion.

Depends how its planned. If its planned to fail but designed in a way thats cheap and easy to replace its ok. Because sometimes it can be the case that to much is spent over engineering a high use part when would be more practical to let it break and replace it every 2 years or so.

It's consumer fraud. It's shareholder fraud. It's environmental fraud.

Products like this simply shouldn't be allowed on the market. As if we need to destroy the planet so my Mother can enjoy looking at her 401k balance in the morning.

Sure, if it's truly planned. I think the tricky part tends to be that it's hard to distinguish between "planned obsolescence" and "incidental obsolescence".

Is there a bright line between cost reduction and planned obsolescence?

Obviously a small unreplaceable battery is not a good example for that discussion.

Going out of your way to make sure the gauge doesn't work after the battery is replaced surely is.

I wonder if the gauge is just a horrible design that uses the battery to keep some memory alive.

Microcontrollers with persistent memory are not expensive, so something like that would just be horrible design, not something you could even try to justify as a cost reduction.

Oh, I suppose it is using the battery to write after shutdown. Bleh.

I had an interesting situation where we had failure of a Thule bike trailer wheel and could see where the connection-to-the-trailer design had changed from an earlier version (from the company that Thule bought). The wheel functioned the same, but you could see a clear difference which fully explained the failure. I expect it was a cost optimisation, and we only encountered the failure because we used it very heavily.

Edit: they also failed to honour their warranty commitments, but that was secondary.

I think there is: It is the line between "not spending extra money to make sure it works" and "spending extra money to make sure it won't work".

There is a related problem with warranty: an inferior third-party replacement part may cause damage to higher-quality original parts. There is a line here between "making sure you don't have to deal with follow-up damage caused by inferior parts" and "preventing the use of inferior parts". This is a bit more blurry because most cases won't be clear-cut, and dealing with them will be a burden on the original manufacturer.

I think it is important that we reward the nice players as much as we punish the bad ones. A blanket "all companies bad" just means that no company has an incentive to be anything less than bad.

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