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

[kraznyi_oktjabr]

Originally Posted by Skybird

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.

Thats correct and manufacturer's estimates are often quite accurate. I have had two failed GPUs so far: one failed five days before end of warranty, another two weeks after.

Originally Posted by Skybird

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.

Primary reason for that is chemistry of the filament, not only its thickness. Original design was essentially self-repairing meaning that as long as the bulb remained intact the filament would never burn out. After change of materials the filament will eventually fail no matter what you do.

Originally Posted by Skybird

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.

Atleast in my university's ICT curriculum there is mandatory course which gives an overview of planned obsolescence including methods of creaing it. What you have posted were some examples discussed there.

These things also apply into software side where "new" functionalities and planned degradation of code are normal practices.

Think about one very popular text processing application: its primary function - text processing - has remained same since its introduction in 1983. What has changed repeatedly are layout of user interface, "new" file formats and some "refinements" in features. Most important change recently has been change from selling "product" to selling "service": instead of paying once for that text processing application you now have to pay every month. Granted file-hosting service is now included and you can edit file as group, but how many people actually need those features? I personally do but I believe that most users do not.

 

Just in case nobody figured it out yet: I'm talking about Microsoft Word.