Will Planned Obsolescence Kill Silicon Valley? [video]
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http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/dec/14/to...
But besides the 800 lb gorilla in the room, what worries me more than planned obsolescence is an entire ecosystem primarily composed of glorified MVPs rather than refined products. And that is doing more to disenchant me with technology and applications than any other force, one crash to the desktop at a time.
As I understand it, the original academic paper introducing the concept of planned obsolescence, described it as an economic boon -- essentially a form of stimulus. At the time, the intent was not to sabotage the lifetime of products, but to keep introducing desirable new features.
Now, anecdotally, I think that I've witnessed planned obsolescence of a sort, in some kinds of products. I remember the home appliances in my house when I was a kid, being much more reliable than those sold today. I've had to repair literally every appliance in my house over the past decade, in some cases two or even three times. We're already on our second fridge. The cause may simply be due to relentlessly driving the cost out of those products while keeping an eye on the one-year warranty.
Is that a result of appliances becoming more reliable, or just cheaper to replace (disposable)?
Apple is the perfect example, from using glue everywhere (have fun replacing screens/batteries/keyboards #1) to actively sabotaging servicing by booby-trapping products (screw holes over critical pcb section + carefully selected screw lenght to destroy said pcd section). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833205
#1 replacing non splash/liquid proof apple keyboard means ripping out about 70 alu rivets! And we all know nobody ever spilled any liquid on a keyboard, right? Its not like it was designed to make you go out and pay $750 directly to Apple for replacement. Its not like its a solved problem and you could go out and but IBM/Lenovo T410 lapto .. oh wait.
Show me a spreadsheet or a something.
Fridges used to be made out of metal (plumbing, freezer etc). Now they are made out of plastic that cracks after ~2 years, perfect time for warranty to run out and force you to buy new one.
Solid washing machines used good quality stainless metal for the Drum Support/Spider. Nowadays they use specially designed alloy that DISSOLVES in washing powder:
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=corroded+spider+was...
Drum spider corrodes and falls apart, incidentally it is often the ONLY internal part not covered with anti corrosion paint :).
Car manufacturers also jumped on this bandwagon. VW group 2.0 TDI BLB Engine is made to fail at ~200K no matter what you do, from oil pump to head micro fractures. crankshaft sprocket after 200K http://lh6.ggpht.com/_m_33vQTtsxM/SyuSlFIeSXI/AAAAAAAAG9o/rt... http://lh3.ggpht.com/_m_33vQTtsxM/SyuSn5YALLI/AAAAAAAAG9s/ul... http://lh3.ggpht.com/_m_33vQTtsxM/SyuSp1yUs4I/AAAAAAAAG9w/mO...
VW answer: this part is non serviceable, whole crankshaft needs to be replaced :D Why is it made out of putty while smaller sprocket (the one taking more force) is still 'working'? Why is it designed not to be replaceable? Good 'old timer/not by the book' mechanic is still able to replace it (heat whole crankshaft, use big hammer).
All computers?
An iPhone 4S is a great phone compared to everything except newer phones.
The 4S is another example of an older device that competes really well with modern hardware.
Which would be fine if the device still did what you want it to do. But in fact connected electronic devices do go obsolete as soon as vendors stop providing security updates.
I want a good quality screen, a good quality sound system, and enough connectivity to get signals to them at the highest quality they can use. Updates to where those signals come from should not require physically swapping large and extremely expensive equipment. That is just crazy.
And yet today my TV can hang while showing broadcast TV because someone changed a compression algorithm and caused the decoding software to glitch, and when I put a Blu-Ray in my player often the first thing I see is a warning that I might have to update the firmware in the device just to watch the movie.
This is not progress, and the sooner we go back to separating communications devices/protocols/software from the main hardware in this sort of situation and then using appropriate safeguards and updates on the things that actually need them with everything else properly isolated, the better the world will be.
No, they aren't. That hasn't been even close to true for many years.
For example, I work with some very high-end PC workstations (think multimedia, 3D modelling, that kind of thing). Sure, the new spec ones are a bit faster, but if you look back those 4 years you mentioned, there really isn't that much difference.
The price/performance sweet spot back then was probably an i7 2600K. Are modern CPUs faster? Sure. Are they an order of magnitude faster? Not even close. The main emphasis in recent years has been on lower power/heat and to some extent on increasing core count particularly at the high end. Actual per-core speeds or instruction processing has improved only modestly. And in most applications, they were already so powerful that you wouldn't even notice the difference.
Graphics cards are a similar story. Of course modern cards are somewhat faster than their counterparts from a generation ago, but unless you use the most demanding software, the card in that i7 2600K machine probably still works just fine with today's applications. Again, most people wouldn't even notice the difference, because the baseline level was already high enough.
The amount of RAM typically supplied in modern PCs hasn't much changed, so no huge jumps in capability there either. In fact, I'd say storage and networking are probably the only major areas where speeds are dramatically better today than they were four years ago in most western economies. This is largely because it has become cost-effective at mainstream levels to use things like SSDs, fibre broadband and 4G mobile networks where the previous generation of devices at a similar price point would have used spinning platters, old phone lines and 3G. These changes really do render the previous generation of devices obsolete at a similar price point and really do make a substantial difference to what an average user can do with the new equipment.
The only other area where there have been dramatic improvements, not in performance but in capability, are displays. The 200+ ppi devices previously reserved for high-end and physically small mobile devices are now widely available in laptops. Your new 48" TV might show 4K material natively. But again, this only helps if you have content to look at that can take advantage of the finer details, which a lot of people won't, so I'd hardly say it makes a good display from the previous generation obsolete.
You might in theory be able to run it on an iPad of the same generation as well, but ask a few people who upgraded their iPad to iOS7 or above how well it worked afterwards and you'll hear plenty of complaints, particularly about performance being much worse on the older hardware.
For example, if users buy the more-expensive longer-lasting product, then that's a sign that those users feel they need it. (For example, "ruggedized" laptops sold for military and educational uses.)
What would be the basis for predicting the life span of a new design anyway?
Dehumidifier: Defective potentiometer. Repaired, then it ultimately wore out and stopped cooling. Folklore is that the seals in the compressors are short lived, system loses the ability to compress the refrigerant sufficiently. This also causes a gradually rising power consumption until it can no longer hold temperature.
Chest freezer: Starting relay / capacitor failed. Replaced with unit bought online. Currently idle, as we have nothing to freeze.
Microwave: Failed, tried to repair, to no avail.
Cooking range: Loose connection in heating element caused wiring to burn up. Repaired by silver-brazing new wire to Nichrome element material.
Dryer: Repaired twice. First time was an over-temperature sensor. Second time, the motor bearings failed, and the unit was squeaking like crazy.
Waffle iron: Repaired once due to heating of loose connection, second time it was unrepairable.
I've also repaired the furnace, but it was a pretty old unit.
One basis for predicting life span of new design is to base it on known performance of old design. Of course this can't happen if cost reduction results in multiple, radical design changes, including use of lower cost materials.
On the plus side, the Internet has opened up a bonanza of repair information and spare parts, so I have saved a boat load of money by being self sufficient for repairs.
That's in a place with two kitchens, plus a chest freezer, two washer/dryers, and numerous small appliances, plus most of the items were old when we bought the place. I'm sure I'm averaging less than a repair per major appliance per decade.
I don't doubt your contrary experience, but it seems to skew on the unlucky side IME.
It's like, the last time I bought a DVD player, it cost $26. They tried to sell me an extended warranty on it, and I laughed, because I didn't expect to actually need a DVD player longer than a year or two. I was right. It lasted a bit over a year, and then I got a bluray player. That's all I needed or wanted for my $26, and I'm glad that there was a cheap little DVD player that could provide it.
If the manufacturer comes out with version +1 and +2 of their OS that still do run on your device, but coincidentally run only badly enough to make it really annoying to use, how can you protect against that? Even if you mandate that any future version of the OS released during the warranty of your device must run on it, you can't mandate that it runs as well as the original.
When new releases come out the manufacturer will just say that "due to all these new features we can't keep the same level of performance on the older devices" and the software ecosystem being incentivized towards moving to these +1 and +2 versions makes holding onto them even more difficult.
Perhaps we should call obsolescence over time as the market changes as natural obsolescence?
Is this just a theoretical consideration or is there good reason to believe legislation is moving in this direction?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
"When I was a kid, there were radio and TV servicers in many neighborhoods. If something broke, you dropped it off at your local electronics repair shop, which was as much a part of ordinary life as the corner automotive service garage. These days, those shops have all but disappeared as rising labor costs and device complexity have driven consumer electronics into the age of the disposable machine. When it stops working, you toss it out and get a new one."
He makes some other points too from a deep technician perspective citing how companies began to view and deal with complexity and liability of having their products be user servicable...
"..."No user-serviceable parts inside. Refer service to qualified personnel," replaced the [repair/service] diagrams. Is it any wonder they call today's gadgetry "consumer electronics"? Service manuals were cheap and plentiful, and shops kept huge rows of filing cabinets bursting with them. In addition to manuals generated by the products' makers, the Howard W Sams company produced its own comprehensive line of Photofact schematics for just about everything out there. If you couldn't get a schematic from Zenith, you could get a Sams easily enough for a buck or two. As products got still more complex, manuals grew from a few pages to a few hundred, with large, fold-out schematics and very detailed, color pictorials. Producing these big books became quite expensive, so their prices skyrocketed. Shops continue to buy them--they had little choice--but no consumer would spend more for a manual than the product cost in the first place! Companies gradually reduced and finally abandoned the infrastructure for selling manuals to the public, and today's age of "use it, wear it out and toss it" was in full swing. Many manufacturers will no longer sell schematics or service manuals to consumers, thanks in part to fear of potential lawsuits by injured tinkerers. Some companies won't even sell manuals to service shops unless they're factory-authorized warranty service providers. And, believe it or not, some even refuse to provide diagrams to those facilities! Secretive computer makers, in particular, only let authorized servicers swap boards; the techs work on their machines for years without ever seeing a schematic of one."
Give it a read, you'll come to realize that for any failure something has to break, some component, otherwise for a failure to occur every single component has to go at once simultaneously. I realized this concretely when I had repaired our garage door opener. I could see the designer using substandard material on the teeth of this horizontal slider cog that allowed it to fail first, and it happened to be an easy part to replace, rather than say having the corkscrew fail, which would be much more complicated to replace. I remember reading about the part in amazon reviews where people criticized it, but I felt it was a good choice and had a reasonable lifetime to it. If something has to break, let it be the more serviceable part!