I can't stop posting pictures of poop, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Level: 5
CS Original
| I read everything on cyborgjesus reddit.com link. Thanks you Jim and cyborgjesus for the links I never really looked into this much before now. It's totally understandable why Planned obsolesce does not make any sense from a business standpoint as the consumer can choose to purchase a different product rather than a inferior product. I also read a very good comment that stood out as it basically said that, ok sure you could do planned obsolesce but that doesn't make any sense because why would you want for example to have a expensive N64 that lasts for 50 years, when you could get a N64 made cheaper then eventually move onto a Wii which is a newer more updated product or insert better product here.
I was talking to Jim about this for a bit and he makes a very good point that there is no honor among thieves, meaning a business will not withhold a product that may be in demand in the market. It makes no sense why a business should withhold a particular manufactured good that's in high demand. Planned obsolescence just doesn't make good sense to do at all in a business sense. Planned obsolesce is definitely used more in a conspiratorial sense, that companies and or government are out to keep down the poor then anything else. Reading the reddit comments I could tell when a TVP and or TZM believer came along even if they did not reference the material I could tell where they got the canned responses from.
Some people on the reddit planned obsolescence topic started referencing past products as being better made versus newer similar products (anecdotal evidence) that they or another had bought. Another commenter shot down the compare newer to older products comments with the fact that people tend to remember more the good products as they still have them around versus the bad products which they had thrown out, at which they gave the analogy as why why music of today is worse than the past as nobody rebemers bad bands in the 60's. This individual also mentioned a consumer report magazine article that said appliances from the past are not breaking down anymore frequently than the new appliances are now, in spite of the fact that appliances themsevles are more complex. The referenced article in consumer report magazine http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/august/shopping/repair-or-replace-it/overview/index.htm
If your really upset at a product breaking then fix it. It's not entirely impossible to fix a broken product, I do it all the time. It just depends on if it's economically feasible to fix it as for instance something that broke that cost $10.00 may require you buy a $25.00 part to repair it (not including your time), therefore maybe it is more economically feasible to throw away the product and buy a new one than trying to repair it. Then again it might make more sense to fix the product than buy a new one if the cost of that part does not outweigh the cost of the product. I use a site to fix a lot of my broken stuff it's called http://www.ifixit.com/ .
Planned obsolescence is entirely debunked notion for me, and anything that appeared to be Planned obsolescence is not really such. Most people who advocate Planned obsolescence have to base their reasoning behind anecdotal evidence and or wrapped around with conspiracy theories. Ultimately if a consumer wants a longer lasting product they should be willing to pay a higher price for it, or buy a cheaper product but be willing to learn how to repair the cheaper product when it breaks.
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Good comments on the reddit.com site of why planned obsolescence doesn't make any sense for a business practice, as well as debunks notions about specific manufacture goods raised. I got lazy with giving credit to the people who wrote the comments but the content within the text is what matters (it's on reddit somewhere, I may go back through and attach names to comments).
http://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/19xmd3/for_80_years_or_so_planned_obsolescence_has_been/c8sc7nq
http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/19y6qg/fenwick23_explains_why_planned_obsolescence_is/
By Fenwick23
I grow weary of this repeated conspiratorial usage of the phrase "planned obsolescence". They would have you believe that there are engineers out there designing products with the intent of causing them to break down sooner. Ridiculous. People just don't understand how competition in manufacturing has shaped consumer product design. One of the oft-cited examples is the venerable Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer. Back in the early 90's if you bought a low-end HP laser printer, you got a printer built like a tank. The damn things were slow, but they never wore out. Contrast with the low-end now, which are flimsy, come with 3/4 empty toner cartridges, and certainly won't be functional in 10 years. "Planned obsolescence", the conspiracy theorists conclude smugly. But wait... how much did you pay for that LaserJet 4 in 1993? Yeah, it was over $2000... in 1993 dollars. How much did that shitty HP P1600 printer you're complaining about cost? Yeah, it was $200. If you spend the equivalent of two grand in 1993 dollars, which is over $3000 today, you get something like the HP M575c, which prints, copies, and faxes in color, and it's built like a tank.
What people don't realize is that in the "good old days" of a given product, a cheap version simply did not exist, so all products of that kind of that vintage were well built. This happens in every industry, at various rates. Engineers are under constant pressure to reduce manufacturing costs to widen the consumer base. Those $200 printers sell at far more than 10x the rate of $2000 printers, because every college freshman is buying one. To that end, certain parts must by necessity be less durable. Ikea isn't making bookshelves out of particle board to sell more bookshelves when they break, they're using particle board because not enough people can afford $500 oak book shelves to keep all those Ikea stores in business.
"But Fenwick23", you ask, "What about that inkjet printer that had an expiration date coded into the inkjet cartridges?" Well, that one's sadly all too easy to explain. Engineers, under the aforementioned pressure to cut costs, came up with a way to make inkjet systems for much cheaper. The only tradeoff was that they had limited useful life before the ink dried out and clogged the nozzles. No big deal, just add an expiration system to the all-in-one nozzle-head-ink-tank package that lets the customer know that they need to buy a new one. This design is so much cheaper than the old design, they won't mind buying it more often. But as so often happens in big corporations run by non-engineers, between the engineering department and the store shelves some upper-middle-manager looked at these cheaper ink jet cartridges and said "WOW WE CAN MAKE MOR PROFITZ IF WE SELL THEM SAME PRICE AS THE OLD KIND!" As a result, the anticipated reasonable tradeoff intended by the engineers disappeared in a puff of pointy-haired logic, and six months later HP is stuck with a PR nightmare that looked like planned/programmed obsolescence, but which was in reality the result of managerial idiocy.
There are, of course, some real examples of planned obsolescence. The canonical example, from which the phrase was popularized, was Brooks Stevens use of it to describe 1950's automotive marketing strategy. Brooks wasn't talking about the cars breaking down, though. He was talking about aggressively marketing styling changes. The idea was to make last years model seem obsolete by changing the body designs. In essence, Brooks' notion of planned obsolescence was nothing more than adopting the same strategy as the high fashion clothing industry. Sure, your car and your jacket work fine, but don't you know that this year the cool people have wider lapels and round taillights?
The one place where planned obsolescence is a conspiracy to make you throw away perfectly serviceable items and buy new ones in order to prop up an industry is college textbooks. Renumbering pages and shifting end of chapter questions around is exactly the sort of sinister behavior people accuse HP of. The reasons educational publishers stoop to such tactics is quite clear, though. Their customer base is not expandable by making the product cheaper, so in order to maintain profits they have to make their otherwise durable product "expire" somehow. It's evil, but understandable.
I applaud people repairing serviceable goods. Heck, I make a living repairing broken things. I just get sick of idiot "journalists" from places like Wired parroting the tired notion that the obsolescence of products in our cheap consumer society is the result of sinsiter motives, rather than the fact that we're all fucking cheapskates.
By youwillengineedme
Engineer here. I agree with much of what you had to say but wanted to add to it. In engineering we (working with marketing) determine a design life for anything that we want to manufacture. This starts with a market analysis of what people are willing to pay for an item, frequency of use and how long they expect to use it and other items. Taking this data, product specs are established that make up the primary goal engineering will work towards when design the product.
I am not in the consumer electronics industry so I'm just going to ignore the printer example and use a lawn mower. Company A determines that there is a market for a $250 (maximum) consumer mower that includes electric start and is self propelled. They have also determined that an average household will mow their lawn once a week, start the mower 4 times and based on the average lawn size of their target consumer it will take 1.25 hours each time. From research they also find that most people will expect a lawn mower at that price point to last 5 years. This works out to be 325 hours and 1040 starts of the engine (I'm assuming this whole example is probably simplified quite a bit for the lawn care industry but is easy to understand).
As I am selecting my components I am using these design life values to ensure I am picking components that will all last approximately the same amount of time. Keep in mind not all components, such as the frame, are designed according to this design life and will obviously last much longer than say the engine. The classic example is bearings. We can very accurately predict bearing life and there are so many different material/quality combinations you can select bearings for nearly any design life at the given loading conditions. Though sometimes the load on a bearing is so light that it reaches an infinite life cycle, so you do have some components that will outlast others by far.
Back to the lawn mower though, I am going to pick bearings, components for the self propel unit, a starter, etc that can meet my design criteria. I would also be looking at the statistical variances of each part and the mower as a whole to ensure that a statistically acceptable percentage of the units make it to the design life. Realistically, many units will keep trucking along past the design life but as far the company is concerned most people will be perfectly happy if their mower makes it this long.
When you want something of higher quality, commercial grade products are just those designed to different marketing specifications (more use per day, more days per week, more years in service, etc.) and generally more servicable than consumer models because businesses don't want to buy new as often. Servicablity is another issue in itself; consumer products are less servicable because designing for servicablity raises costs as does needing to stock parts in a warehouse and have people on hand to handle the parts.
In summary, while we are not designing products that break down sooner to make more money, we are designing products that will break down in acceptable time frame based on what you are willing to spend.
By Nerfi
Always do research! The area of manufacture can tell you a lot (though not all) about the quality of the product you're going to get. It's really hard to find stuff not made in China, and be prepared to pay at least 4x as much. I finally sprung for a $400 pair of US made boots, and they're still waterproof after a year and a half of being kicked to shit. For comparison, this is the first time I've had a pair of shoes/boots not fail/leak/break after two months maximum.
There's a thing called "premium pricing" in which the same shitty China products are sold at slightly less than the well built counterpart (if it even exists). Be really careful and never go by price alone.
By andrews89
I'm glad to finally see someone actually talk about how if you buy something of quality, it will last longer than something cheap. I've got a higher-end leather bag (not naming brands here) that cost me a fortune, but I've been using it every day for almost 3 years and it still looks brand new. Oil it up every 6 months to a year and it looks exactly like it did when I got it. A friend of mine couldn't understand why his more budget-minded leather bag only lasted about 6 months before completely falling apart, even though his was about 1/10 the price of mine. He still doesn't get how if you invest money in a truly good product and take care of it well, it will last you damn near forever.
TL;DR: Buying 1 thing of quality instead of 15 cheap ones actually pays off!
Even then, if you really want to take it that way, there's nothing inherently un-free going on here. Lets look at the chain of coercion here.
The publisher makes products to fill a demand in the Market, in accordance with the demands of that market. This is pure free enterprise - they make whatever they want, and charge whatever they want, and people are free to buy it or not.
Now we come to the next segment: professors who prescribe books. Great, fine. You can say that THEY are imposing coercion on the market. But are they? That depends really. See, the professor is engaging in free market behaviour himself. He is exchanging his education (services( in accordance with his conditions (price).
He says "I will teach you this thing. In exchange, you obey these conditions".
Free market contract.
If you have an objection to the conditions imposed by the professor (namely, required texts), then you are JUST as free to decline the contract and not receive services.
That's free market practices all the way. What you propose is to coercively take away the right of self-determination from EVERYONE involved - the right to operate their business as they see fit, the right to set one's own price for one's labour, and the right to freely enter any contract.
So thusfar you are claiming that something is fraudulent (when it's not) and opposed to free market principles (when it's not), and in order to correct a coercive distortion of the market (of which there is none), you propose to apply unilateral coercion to a fairly large market segment, both producers and consumers.
And remember. Information may be cheap, but collating, editing, laying out, organizing, correlating, indexing, referencing, producing, illustrating and organizing that information is legitimate labour, with a real cost that must be borne. And it's not just any labour, it is specialized with required uncommon skills, and carries a commensurate cost.
I could take any given text and re-sort it alphabetically. Your document would be useless, appearing as it were like
A a a a a an an an an an am am am am and and and and... (and so forth).
Mathematically speaking, it would contain all the same information, and cheaply at that. That doesn't mean it's useful to anyone, and thus is not of economic value. Someone needs to do the value-added work, and they need to get paid, and the value of the information must reflect that added-value. Otherwise it truly IS a scam - a scam on the worker who added that value, not the consumer.
As someone who works in a company that is competitor to Apple, their reasons for a non replaceable battery are the following:
cheaper (connectors are not cheap)
lighter (can make the battery as a pouch)
thinner (z height is a big deal)
more reliable (drop tests etc)
I seriously doubt they care about the battery being the obsoleting factor.
Thank you SO much for this.
I don't mind the concept but as an engineer, I could not upvote because of the ignorant article and title.
The ironic part is that OP and other planned obsolescence conspiracy theorists are actually the ones creating the demand for the cheaper and shorter living products which they so loathe. Want longer service life? THEN SHELL OUT SOME CASH.
You are being overly naive here. Yes, cheapness drives quality down--this is a known fact, and it's not what "planned obsolescence" is. That term specifically refers to the real practice of cutting corners not to sell more units by being competitive, but to sell more units by being more short-lived.
Take for example the use of low-end capacitors in monitors and TVs. Bad caps are by far the leading reason such things design and for many it would have taken literally cents to go with caps that would almost never break. Shitty caps are used in even non-bargain products where people are doing their best to pay for quality.
Just as the economics of competition drive product design, so do the economics for forced replacement. There are literally things out there that count uses then start working. It's naive or deceptive to act like all the reason stuff breaks so much is driven by lowering quality to lower cost.
"Just an example, the iPhone 4 was a pretty nice piece of hardware. Then a few months later they convinced a good percentage of Apple people to upgrade to the 4S. A few more months later and they had the next upgrade out, with updates that the 4 and 4S were incompatible with. This just does not strike me as well-intentioned behavior."
"A few" is generally considered by most people to be somewhere between 3 and 9. The reality:
The iPhone 4S came out 17 months after the iPhone 4.
The iPhone 5 came out 11 months after the iPhone 4S, and ended compatibility with the dock connector, which had only been around for... over 9 years. It's only 5 younger than USB 1.1, the first spec to gain traction. There were sound design justifications for the change - robustness, size, reversibility, and flexibility among them.
They waited until the last possible second, until it was impossible to advance without breaking compatibility. That's hardly malicious.
Technology gets better. Period.
If Apple doesn't innovate at a high rate, they'll get passed by another company that does. In a highly competitive market, the only way to stay on top is to move quickly.
Apple introducing a new phone doesn't break your old phone. It doesn't make your old phone worse in any way at all. With the current rate of improvement, expecting that your phone (from ANY company) will remain the latest and greatest for >6 months is delusional.
You just need to get past the mentality of always needing the latest thing. My 3rd gen iPod is still chugging away just fine...
You can get those features if you jailbreak, but you sacrifice battery life and stability by using said features. I'm sure apple could've released it if they wanted to, but they'd then be inundated with people bitching about how the new software "broke" their phone.
You now have a damaged brand perception, a product that ran fine but is now experiencing issues due to an update, a ruined end user experience, and a drop in stock price.
The existence of these new features doesn't somehow break your old phone, it's just perceived that way.
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Old Refrigerator debunk
Can you buy a good, house-sized refrigerator for 40 years? You can't, they don't exist. It's not possible to buy a refrigerator that's going to last more than 10-15 years no matter how much you pay. The luxury segment of the market just looks different, the insides are identical to cheaper models.
I still have an old refrigerator made in the 1974. It sounds like it is, but it's not crap. The refrigerator technology is basically the same since ~1950. The main difference is, it was DESIGNED for 50+ years.
The only real drawback is, it uses 150% of energy per volume compared to newer ones (I measured it with a meter), but the electricity savings are smaller than the yearly interest on the price of a new one if you factor in the expected 14 years life. In other words, it doesn't make financial sense to buy a new one, as the alternative of investing the money in a risk-free asset yields more.
This is a colossal failure of capitalism, a result of planned obsolescence.
Based on what I can find on the internet about historical prices, it cost about 90 1974 dollars -> $430 today.
First of all, you didn't source any of your shit.
Second of all, you ignore all the Dept of Energy standards that fridge makers had to comply with over the years to lower energy usage.
Third, you assume a linear increase in cost for the extra energy. You're talking about a difference of 1400kWh versus 300kWh. Cost of energy would increase non-linearly.
But let's walk through your example anyway. I buy a fridge for $700, you buy one for $400 (let's ignore the fact that your fridge used to be that cheap b/c raw materials were way cheaper back then as well). You put the extra $300 to work for 6%. With electricity at $0.10/kWh, you spend $110 more on electricity and earn $20 in interest. Over 14 years, I spend $1540 less than you, while you earn something like $680 (compounded annually), +$700 for my new fridge and I'm still spending less. This doesn't even address the fact that if everyone was trying to use 1400kWh the price of electricity would be way above $0.10/kWh (already is for me).
In closing, you're wrong.
Even if all your unsourced conspiracy nonsense was right, capitalism hasn't failed. Products are designed to last as long as consumers want them. No one wants a fridge that lasts 40 years. Most people would probably like to replace their fridge due to style changes and new tech within 5 years most likely but hold out until 10 years on average just due to the costs.
The market is giving people what they want and you're just an outlier.
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Old printer debunk.
We're all fucking cheapskates? Cool. Or, with the changes in cost of living, inflation and the lack of changes to wages I think most of us cannot afford a $3,000 printer. Because it's a fucking printer. Call me cheap all you want, I absolutely do not make enough money to buy a "good printer" that is "built like a tank" especially if it is going to cost me more money than I make in a month. I could buy a used fucking car.
Why do you need a printer? If you can't afford a quality one then print your documents at a business where they will charge you per page. How much are you really printing? Wouldn't that be the more affordable option for someone on a low income? You insist on having a printer at home for the cheapest possible price, then probably complain when its not of the best quality and fails after a year or two.
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Great read! I'm fascinated by manufacturing (I have a 2 year degree in manufacturing engineering) and love correcting people when they complain about the current state of the marketplace. For example, plastic is one of the most misunderstood materials around. It's cheap to make items from it and that drives down the price to the consumer but it's also not as durable as a more expensive material. Even saying plastic is not as durable as something else is not universally true. The spectrum of plastics is as wider than other materials thus leaving durability up to the specific blend or source plastic.
Thank you! It's ALWAYS about trade-offs. If markets really wanted longer life, they'd be preferring that over performance in other areas including price.
Even Moore's Law carries such a trade-off. Did people think getting higher densities and faster clock rates was free??? No it wasn't/isn't!!!
The trade-off that comes with that is lower reliability at a transistor level. The lifetime (the metric of reliability) of an IC transistor in the 1960s was 10,000 years! This based on accelerated lifetime testing.
Today with a nanometer transistor the lifetime is 5-15 years. This is simply because there are fewer atoms providing redundancy to the physical structure that is the basis of reliability. Physical transistor dimensions today at 20 nm to 30 nm with a silicon atom being 0.234 nm, compared to the late 1960s with 100,000 nm (100 micron) transistor sizes.
The simple fact is that trading reliability for performance is what people prefer to pay for; it is what customers want and prefer. They DO NOT want 10,000 year lifetime products because that would mean having 1960s performance (pre-microprocessor, TTL-implemented computers - which are mainframes and minicomputers!).
Say you wanted a computer that would last your whole life: what technology level would that be? Something around a 200 MHz 486 actually. Are you ready to live with that level of performance?
The margin that we operate on now is that customers prefer style changes sooner than products will spontaneously start breaking! That actually is coming closer to an end with microelectronics.
Nanoelectronics with graphene or whatever won't alter this actually. Nano will only continue to shorten lifetimes. We are entering the era where electronics simply won't last as long as the market/style would like for the performance level the want or expect.
If you are looking for a historical analogy of this we are about to re-enter the vacuum tube era where you had to replace most of the key active value components many times over the life of a product.
Another analogy is changing oil and various components in your car.
But the difference is that the parts being replaced are of a physical size comparable to the cells in your body. The only existing "technology" that has ever existed to do that kind of replacement well and reliably are biological systems.
Something to think about. Especially when you think about the nonsense of "Singularity".
I got into the habit of fixing things from getting into vintage audio equipment. I bought an old receiver at a thrift shop and when I got it home it produced no audio. I figured out the fuses were out and replaced them and a habit was born. Since then I learned how to clean electrical components. I plan on getting a soldering iron soon and replacing some bulbs and capacitors. I bought a ten dollar pair of speakers that were falling apart and learned how to re-foam them and will soon reupholster the grills.
It has also led me to try some of my own auto repairs. I think that in the last year it has probably saved me a few hundred dollars over buying brand new audio equipment and trips to the mechanic. On top of that I have a new way to entertain myself that is useful and engaging, I love it.
I'm an engineer so I'll give you some insight. Most materials have something called fatigue limit. When you stress a part cyclically there is a statistical number of cycles it can take before failing. The lower the stress the more cycles you get before breaking. But to lower stresses you have to add material or perform more detailed analysis both of which cost money. Engineering is all about trading conflicting requirements.
Take a shovel. You want it to be cheap, easy to use, light, and long lasting. Well most of those conflict. Thicker heavier steel spade will dig easier and last longer but be heavier and more expensive. There is no perfect solution. That's why you can go to the store and see shovels from $10 to over $60. Pick up the $60 one. Usually heavy steel head with heavy fiberglass handle. It will last 50 years but if you aren't string it will tire you out quickly.
Actually, they are often built to burn out. This was a huge complaint in the kitchenaid stand mixer. They started installing a single nylon gear, and a lot of people were furious about it.
The thing is, they were designed to break because they provided a safe failure point. If there was a problem somewhere in the mechanism, it would break the cheap, easily fixed nylon gear rather than something more important.
"My camera has an estimated 10,000 picture lifespan. After that, it's supposed to fail."
Supposed to fail or expected to fail? Nothing lasts forever regardless of quality, and higher quality parts cost a lot of money. When buying something, most people will go for one of the cheaper models, even if those aren't nearly the same quality as the more expensive models. It's less about planned obsolescence and more about people wanting cheap stuff.
Different people may mean different things, but the way I think of it, most parts have a Mean Time Before Failure analysis done, and those parts are designed to be the cheapest possible given an acceptable MTBF. It's just that people would probably interpret that as "being designed to fail", rather than "being designed to be affordable". But in reality, nothing is designed to last forever.
This is correct. Electrical products such as kitchen appliances go through product lifecycle testing during development and prior to production. These products are designed to meet a minimum standard that is a legal or buyer requirement.
So long as the product can reach the minimum standard it is considered acceptable.
Like you said, all products will eventually fail and there's a strong correlation to the quality of components used. Unfortunately, over the years the market has shifted towards cheaper products that have a shorter lifespan as that's what people choose to buy.
I'm a design engineer. The US government actually encourages innovation by taxing the first 5 years of new product revenue at a lower rate than your older products.
Hence, if a company produces a solid product and sells it for years, they pay higher taxes than a company that comes out with new models.
It's not deferral of taxes, it's deferral of the R&D credit (reduction) to taxes owed. And it's only a partial credit, not a reduction of the entire amount.
A simplified example... Company XYZ conducts $1m in R&D in year 1. There is a tax credit equal to $200k, but because of the investment in R&D conducted in the first year the company made little/no profit and therefore has minimal/no tax on which to apply the credit. Without this policy the credit would be useless.
However, 5 years later the company is now earning a lot of money from the initial R&D investment and generating profits from which it pays a significant amount of taxes. With a deferral the company can apply the R&D tax credit from year 1 onto taxes in year 5 and reduce its tax burden.
So in summary it allows a company to apply the credit during a year when the company can actually use it.
Encouraging R&D is a good thing as it helps keeps companies strong against competition. Whether or not products last a long or short time is a market issue and not related to these incentives. The reason products are significantly cheaper than they were before and they don't last very long is because that's what consumers choose to buy.
It varies by product. With things like automobiles people will pay a premium for higher quality. But with stuff that people use occasionally, like toasters or a snowblower, people often buy the cheapest things they can find. Shoes I think fall somewhere in-between... some people buy the cheapest options whereas others will spend a lot more for footwear that lasts longer.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/august/shopping/repair-or-replace-it/overview/index.htm
OK, talking about the old toaster that still works is very common misinterpreted by people make with respect to the reliability of old things.
Every toaster still around from the 60s has been working for 50 years, which is amazing, but that doesn't mean every toaster made in the 60s is still working now. If 1% of them still worked there would be millions of them around, but the 99% that broken and were replaced have been forgotten.
Consumer Reports says appliances aren't failing any more frequently than they used to despite getting more complex.
And some things, like automobiles, have become much more reliable.
The problem is the good stuff from the past gets remembered better than the bad stuff (since the good stuff is still around and the bad was thrown away years ago). It's the same reason music from today is worse than the past, no body remembers the shitty bands from the 60s.
I repair my stuff when it breaks. The only thing stopping you is the perception that things aren't repairable.
As far as the part costing almost much as the item... You're taking that as the parts have a huge markup, when really it's that the item is being sold for so cheap compared to the parts it took to make.
Do I think many of the things I have now will be working in 50 years? Honestly I can say yes I would expect several of the items to continue to work with the occasional repair. Would I want the same toaster or vacuum in 50 years? No.
It's foolish when technology improves everything all the time. My vacuum folds up, has an automatic retracting cord, an easily removed and dumped canister, etc. If I was still using the first vacuum I bought I wouldn't have any of those extremely convenient features.
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Nice old vacuum debunk.
Well, to be fair, it seems like your article is focused on high dollar items. Refrigerators, Riding-mowers, computers. The complexity has increased with all those things over time, but toasters and (bagged) vacuums seem like they're much the same as they've always been, except for they're made with much more plastic these days. Also, the expectation of quality is obviously much higher...sell a $500 fridge that keeps breaking, and people will stop buying your shit, but you can sell the same piece of shit $20 toaster for years and people will keep buying it, because it's only $20.
And obviously there is bias in the fact that we remember the things that lasted versus the things that didn't, but let me ask you, do you think any of the shit we use today will be working in 50 years? I can't even get a vacuum cleaner that lasts more than 3 or 4, and it's not like that's a "cheap" appliance. I work in retail management, and we get a fair number of small appliance returns that literally do not work right out of the fucking box. Toaster ovens, toasters, coffee makers, waffle-irons, vacuums/carpet shampooers...it's literally half of our returns to vendor.
Now, maybe that's because most people aren't going to throw their brand new oven in the back of their care and take it back to Lowes when it breaks, whereas a toaster or other small appliance is a simple matter to shove back in the box and bring back to the store. I don't know. But I can tell you, with a few small repairs over the years, those appliances lasted over a lifetime. What can you even repair these days when it comes to small appliances? I called our local vacuum repair shop after my last vacuum died, trying to save some money, and the quote for the repair was more than I paid for the damn vacuum.
Maybe it is all based on rose colored glasses, I don't know. I guess we'll find out in 50 years whether or not any of our modern day devices were worth a shit. I'm not gonna get my hopes up...
I repair my stuff when it breaks. The only thing stopping you is the perception that things aren't repairable.
As far as the part costing almost much as the item... You're taking that as the parts have a huge markup, when really it's that the item is being sold for so cheap compared to the parts it took to make.
Do I think many of the things I have now will be working in 50 years? Honestly I can say yes I would expect several of the items to continue to work with the occasional repair. Would I want the same toaster or vacuum in 50 years? No.
It's foolish when technology improves everything all the time. My vacuum folds up, has an automatic retracting cord, an easily removed and dumped canister, etc. If I was still using the first vacuum I bought I wouldn't have any of those extremely convenient features.
Oh, I totally understand that it's the economics of the situation that preclude their repair; why fix something when it's cheaper to buy new? Why spend $100 to have a $150 vacuum repaired? That's idiotic.
At the same time, though...if the quality of the item were there, then the money would be worth it. Who is going to spend close to the cost of an item in a repair for an entirely plastic, made in China, piece of shit? My grandmother's Kirby works better than any vacuum I've used these days (outside of ridiculously expensive commercial units, but who spends $2000 on a vacuum for the home, anyway?), and even adjusting for inflation, she paid about the same price I do these days for my plastic piece of shit ones. It weighs more, but I'm not an invalid and have the muscle tone to push a vacuum around (it actually rolls easier, due to the real wheels with ball-bearings, as opposed to the plastic discs that we call wheels on modern vacuums, despite the weight). The cord doesn't retract, but I'll trade the extra 10 seconds spent manually wrapping it whenever I use it for 50 years of realistic product life.
And what the hell is the difference between a toaster from the 60s and one from today? Outside of the fact that they're made out of plastic these days, in terms of functionality they're identical. If you'd said vacuum or toaster oven or microwave or something, okay, but a toaster is a horrible example of a product that's improved much over the years...
My first vacuum cleaner and toaster work exactly the same as the ones I have now do. If I wouldn't have had to replace them due to them dying I wouldn't have.
If you want a Kirby go buy a Kirby. No one is making you buy the $70 WalMart special. If you're buying the WalMart special how is that an indicator that nothing is made to last anymore? How many times has your grandma had the vacuum repaired? My guess is "more than zero". Did you factor those repair costs over 50 years?
I wouldn't call a toaster a horrible example, and in any case you brought toasters into the discussion -- not me. The difference between my toaster and a 50 year old toaster is mine has a digital display that tells me the toast level and time (in minutes) remaining, an audible 'toast done' chime that is louder than the spring release sound of a regular toaster, increased safety features, and doesn't look like this so it goes better with my kitchen. Sure, small differences, but it's also a small cost item. If none of that stuff mattered everyone would just make toast on the stove or in the oven.
It really sounds like you buy the cheapest piece of junk you can find, and when it inevitably breaks you chalk it up to things being built to fail. The things you list as being a pro for the old vacuum are found in modern vacuums and it's your fault for not checking out options when purchasing.
For the record, a vacuum in 1954 was around $84. That's about $750 today. When you're dropping close to a grand on a vacuum then I think you have a more reasonable comparison between your grandma's 1950s vacuum and your current one.
You're also deluding yourself. The functional suction power of a vacuum's motor degrades over time. This applies to vacuums in stores now, and vacuums bought 50 years ago. It's just a fact of mechanics. Without regular maintenance and repairs (read: money spent) the 50 year old vacuum will not have as much suction and cleaning power as a similar vacuum bought today.
But hey, if you're so dead set on having an antique vacuum because it's the bees-knees go buy one and stop buying a new vacuum every year.
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How are cellphones a good example? I know plenty of people that still use a first (!) generation android phone or a 3G and it works perfectly fine. Your example for software obsolescence is also really bad, because there are huge technical reasons for newer Direct X versions not being available on WinXP. It would require a complete rewrite of large portions of the OS, which they did more than 10 years later with Vista. How is that planned obsolescence?
None of this is true, except maybe parts pricing. Cars are complicated and hard to service because they have to balance cost, weight, performance, efficiency, reliability, and crash safety. This means you can't have lots of extra space in the engine bay, you have to have crazy numbers of sensors and actuators, and everything needs to be extremely cheap and lightweight. Given that nobody cares about ease of servicing and the manufacturer doesn't pay for it outside of the warranty period, this metric is pretty far down on the priority list.
Parts are priced by the dealers selling them. That's where most of the markup comes in. Obviously, they cost quite a bit more than their manufacturing cost, but that's true of anything. It costs a lot of money to produce, stock, and distribute tens of thousands of obscure parts for hundreds of different model-year-color combinations.
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Old microwave debunk
i can't believe this guy's post got bestof. they should've posted my retort to him in bestof then. planned obsolescence does exist, it just doesn't exist for every product. i've seen first hand in products that are simply designed to break after a certain period. what's he's referring to is build quality. nobody is contending that something that cost 70% less should work just as well or last as long. a new microwave now is about 40 bucks and it fucking sucks. the $200 microwave my family bought in 1990 still works better than the new one we bought 2 years ago.
The microwave your family bought in 1990 is less efficient, and likely more expensive to manufacture. New microwaves use significantly different electronics. No more MOTs, they use inverter technology that's not only more efficient, it can be paired with electronics that makes them cook food more evenly. The inverters also use significantly less aluminum and copper - hell they use less steel, too. They're lighter, so easier to move around, and cheaper to ship.
I repair appliances, BTW, and I'm not as impressed by old microwaves as you are. Not impressed by coatings used, door latch hardware, or how sanitary they were constructed.
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