Built in Obsolescence

zv2

Have you noticed if you buy a plastic basin these days it cracks after a couple of months? I bought some clothes pegs from Dealz and they disintegrated within weeks. Saw a documentary on tv recently about how printers are set to stop printing after a certain number of prints so you'll have to buy more ink. One guy just reset the counter and started printing again.

This built in obsolescence is now so widespread I'm thinking of building a cabin in the woods and retreating from society altogether. It is one of the ugliest and most destructive aspects of capitalism. Do you have any stories such is these? Here's a link-

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-4-fall/material-world/built-not-last-how-overcome-planned-obsolescence

Apothic_Red

Plenty of anecdotal about car manufacturers de-engineering non critical parts for spares business.

I used work for a car trailer company that made a big selling flagship product. A consultant pointed out that we were own greatest competition as our builds were last lasting 20 years or longer.

Allinall

Your cabin will rot after a few years, and you’ll be back to square one.

jetsonx

alias no.9

Products are built to a price because customers are very price sensitive on most items and most retailers demand cheap products.

Where components are engineered to have a certain life, they're done so to make sure they will survive for at least a certain time span / usage within a confidence interval rather than to fail at a certain point, most will survive much longer.

In reality, cheap shite like your deals clothes pegs are not designed to fail, they don't undergo any worthwhile reliability testing at all, they're just designed to be cheap.

Deja Boo

Built in obsolesence is pure greed. My chromebook started informing me last year that by June 2022 it would expire. Nice.

FGR

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118617418#Comment_118617418

This. Android phones are similar. Although Google's own range has improved it since the introduction of the Tensor chip it's wrong to simply drop technology simply because the manufacturer wants to sell you the newer version. Especially when what you have would work perfectly if only for the fact it's no longer supported.

For all the grief Microsoft gets - my 11 year old laptop is still going strong on Windows 10 and will be updated for another two years. This is proper software support.

black & white

My iPhone 8 had it's 3rd birthday a couple of weeks ago and is noticeably slower to charge and quicker to discharge now, than it was a couple of months ago. Previous was an iPhone 6 and AFAIR the same thing happened.

Brid Hegarty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058232551/built-in-obsolescence

What documentary was that? I'd be more inclined to think of it as a lack of incentive for durability, rather than it being built-in obsolescence. The idea of built in obsolescence is very attention grabbing for a netflix documentary or something, but I wonder if it could really be true?!

I do know that I've had a lot of frustration with a modern printer I recently bought for a whole load of reasons.

Skerries

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118617576#Comment_118617576

Apple have been hit with loads of lawsuits for slowing down their phones after a few years

https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/01/apple-lawsuit-portugal-planned-obsolescence/

I am currently transferring off a 9 year thinkpad to a new one as my IT department simply won't allow me use it any more. I am upgrading most unwillingly.

My Chromebook is good until Jun 2026 and for the price I paid I can't complain.

zv2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118619914#Comment_118619914

This is the kind of thing that exasperates me. If there are problems in the system there is always the hope they can be fixed, but if the system is deliberately sabotaging itself, that is a sign it has gone mad.

zv2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118619986#Comment_118619986

I think you should complain. I still eat off the table my parents bought when they got married in their 20s!

zv2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118619896#Comment_118619896

I can't remember. It was a HP printer that had a limit of 1200 prints. All the user had to do was reset the counter and it started printing again. The global warming/environmental people are now getting wise to this and how it is affecting the planet. They used to ask if our demise would come with a bang or a whisper but the historians will say no, they just shot themselves in the brain.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058232551/built-in-obsolescence

yup, capitalism has gone rogue, its killing itself at this stage, we took the complete wrong turn with it a few decades ago, and now, nobody knows what to do about it. best of luck to you if you intent on retreating to the wilds, make sure you brush up on your bushcraft skills before though, its not an easy life......

Try updating to windows 11 and see how you get on..

FishOnABike

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118617543#Comment_118617543

What annoys me even more is the increasing use of secure bootloaders that can't be bypassed to load alternatives to the manufacturers operating system e.g. Lineage OS or Oxygen to keep phones up to date when the manufacturer drops support. Combined with some apps refusing to work with alternative operating systems phones end up being unusable while the hardware is still fine.

Brid Hegarty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118620309#Comment_118620309

I wonder how common is it though? Take cars like Toyota who are known for lasting forever... could they now be building planned obsolescence given that the name has been well established?

zv2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118621247#Comment_118621247

Hard to know. If they figure that planned obsolescence will make money they are likely to do it. This stuff has spread like a disease.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118617576#Comment_118617576

that's battery tech. big issues coming down the road with electric cars.. 10,000 euro to replace the batteries after 5 years type stuff

Capt'n Midnight

Meanwhile a 100 years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel all the big players reduced the life of light bulbs from 2,500 hours to 1,000 hours guaranteeing themselves lots of extra sales.

It's not a new thing.

Rket4000

My friend's grandmother identified this issue when watches started coming with batteries instead of just needing daily winding (yes, kids - that used to be a thing!). She was convinced they would change the type of batteries available so that everyone would have to buy a new watch. Don't think that actually happened but she was on the ball in respect of the concept of built in obsolescence!

Wibbs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118623250#Comment_118623250

True though as that example showed the cartel didn't last long.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118623529#Comment_118623529

It's still a thing, but these days the wind up watches are pushed into the 'authentic luxury' end of things. Though even there while a mechanical watch can last for centuries(I've a few myself that are over 100 years old) the current luxury brands servicing costs of those watches makes them expensive to keep going. They've also squeezed out independent watchmakers who were much cheaper by refusing to sell them parts. With quartz watches swapping out a five quid battery is a lot cheaper and if the movement of the watch dies you can swap out a brand new one for not a lot of money at all. I've got a few of the very early quartz watches that came out in 1970-75 and they all still work, though parts are getting much harder to get.

On the other hand you have the Apple watch. Apple sells more wristwatches than all of the Swiss brands combined. They're currently the world's biggest watch seller. They're worse than either the quartz and old style mechanical watches as each model only remains current and usuable for a few years, five at most, before the internal battery goes on the blink or the software and hardware advances it into uselessness. And good luck with trying to repair one. They're designed to be difficult to do so and require semtex to open them up. Annnnd... straight to landfill. This years production of Swiss watches of all sorts will likely still be around in ten, twenty, maybe fifty or more years, but this years production of Apple watches almost certainly won't be, save for a couple of non working examples in museums and the like.

Atlantic Dawn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118621247#Comment_118621247

A lot of the fancy coloured touch screens and batteries in the cars will not last, when they come to 10 years they may be needing replacing and so will be obsolete as cost will be unviable compared to buying new.

NIMAN

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118622883#Comment_118622883

Nonsense.

I just sold an 8yr old Nissan that had 130,000km on the clock, and its battery was just below 85% of its original capacity. It would easily handle the commute for most Irish people for another 5 or 6 years.

Afaik, there has been very few EVs wtih failing batteries since they became mainstream around 2010.

And I would guess battery tech is going to get even better as we go forward.

NIMAN

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118623529#Comment_118623529

Most quartz watches need a €5 battery change every 2 or 3 years, sometimes longer.

I did my own change for less than €2.

Hardly going to break the bank.

ednwireland

"Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10.

"Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

"But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

This was Capt. Samuel Vimes' boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

zv2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118625274#Comment_118625274

Strangely enough I have a calculator 20 years and never changed the battery. Must be one of those everlasting Willy Wonka batteries.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118623250#Comment_118623250

I wouldn't be surprised if this is going on right now with LED bulbs.

T|would be so easy to implement. Off the shelf 8-pin microcontroller to contol the power supply with a random number of hours to count down from programmed into the firmware. Once that runs out the bulb stops working. Firmware protected with DRM / blown JTAG fueses.

I have no-Name Chinese LED bulbs from 2007 that are still going and a lot more recent Osram/Philips one that gave up the ghost

astrofool

Anything that has a chip goes obsolete after a few years, the internet moves forward quickly.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118631267#Comment_118631267

Look up the Dubai bulbs from Phillips, they can last much longer just by undervolting them and including more but it's not as cost effective for the manufacturer.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118631537#Comment_118631537

Not necessarily. Stuff with chips in them can be still working grand after 30 years. It all depends on how evil the manufacturer was

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118631576#Comment_118631576

A windows 95 machine will still run, it's just not very useful, smartphones the same, apps will consume whatever is available and yes, they could be optimised, but the same is always true.

Just been watching white appliances which usually last for decades (if the manufacturer is decent), the new models functionality starts saving more and more time to the extent it's not worth keeping the (functioning fine) older model.

I can't remember the name of the magazine from years ago but they claimed that all hard drives had capacity of a tertabyte but a 500 GB drive for example had half of it not available to use .

It was when TB was considered a lot. Had other claims like that in relation to PC parts, that they all had same potential but part of cheaper smaller parts were actually 'there' but crippled

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118631890#Comment_118631890

That could be true, it could be a single platter but they only install reading heads for 1 side of it, the platter cost would be the same in both cases (more expensive to manufacture a half coated platter) but saves the cost of the reading heads, the cost of validating both sides of a platter and means a partly damaged platter can still be used (modern chips follow the same process with some cores disabled, in the past there were hacks to enable them and if you were lucky they worked just fine).

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118631610#Comment_118631610

It is still useful. Just web/html is gone too bloated now but a version of MS Office or wordperfect from back then would be ok for most jobs. You would just have to use the gopher version of boards instead of http.

CPUs are artificially crippled quite often. Cores disabled and sold cheaper. Intel are coming out with something that you can pay for more cores after you buy the CPU. Next it will be subscription model cores. Nobody wants to do an honest days work anymore just laze around endlessly off the rent from work they or their ancestors did decades ago

Mech1

http://www.bigclive.com/ledlmp.htm

astrofool

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118631973#Comment_118631973

web/html was bloated back then as well, a win95 machine wouldn't be able to run the decryption needed to securely use any modern sites.

Since the first 3d graphics card over 20 years ago, cut down cores have been sold, chips have been binned for speed since the beginning, again, the cost of manufacture is the same, the cost is saved by being able to reuse parts that fail at higher clocks or with more silicon deactivated.

zg3409

Cars are a great start. Force manufacturers to have 7 year no quibble warranties enforced by a regulator with fixed servicing costs or servicing included. The likes of Hyundai have 7 years, VW typically 3 years. Then there is pcp finance which encourages you to not own the car but replace it every 3 years. Definitely they include parts they know won't last and costs to repair older cars make them scrap. Regulations need to stop this. Same with washing machines etc. force 10 year warranties or even 15 years, why not? Ban single use items or tax the hell out of them.

Printers are sold with "demo" ink cartridges that last less than 100 pages, then the ink costs more than the printer.

Force phones and computers to have 10 year warranties with guaranteed bug fixes and updates for the full 10 years. This is the type of thing the EU could be good at.

As an engineer I know how these items are designed. I am designing a high end expensive medical system designed to last 7 years. Reliability teams run them 24/7 to last 7 years, but not much more. I doubt customer is told their product will be scrap in around 7 years.