Must Buy New Refrigerator Due to a Broken $50 Part Thats No Longer Available!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Eichhörnchen

Out electric storage-heaters have always given us the same trouble but luckily the engineers have usually managed to find parts online or cannibalise old ones. Until now, that is, so we're having to address an entirely new set-up, as these things seem to be built with planned obsolescence.

A friend told me a couple of weeks ago that he knows of at least one washing-machine manufacturer who installs a computerised device with a timer that will cause the machine to fail after a pre-programmed number of washes. Now that sounds like an 'urban myth' I know, but this guy is very savvy and he's a mate, not just a bloke down the pub. I thought that topped everything for callous cynicism.

Certain Canon printers, anyone?

Planned obsolescence I take as a de facto fact. It gets implemented by using carefully selected cheap single components of inferior quality, wanting them to fail early, but not too early, usually in the electric controls. By choosing one tiny thing worth 12 cents instead of using a better version of it worth 16 cents, the fail is preprogrammed.

Filament light bulbs of the old style could burn multiple times as long as the usually claimed 1000 hours. When they entered market, they burnt for at least 5- 6 thousand hours. Once the market was saturated, producers sat together and thought about how they could keep sales number sup. The answer was to build thinner filaments that endured only 1 thousand hours. Meanwhile, in the company HQ of General Electrics they have a bulb from the time of Thomas Edison that burns since Edison's times, day in, night out, without interruption.

We see the same phenomenon with washing machines and dish washers, and many other household electronics. The living time goes down, not up.


Planned obsolescence is a fact. Until you do not want to know about it.

Replacement intervals also get shortened by pushing additional features and making people wanting them. Even if nobody missed them before.