Why Do Gadgets Break? 554
TurboTurnip writes "A post on the Crave blog at CNET asks: Why are modern consumer electronics so easily broken? It argues that the 21st Century is 'The Age of the Flimsy' where 'your gadgets will simply break within the year.' Post author Chris Stevens talks about how computers are fast enough for the average user, and the only way to make consumers upgrade is 'increasingly poor build quality ... Engineers have built obsolescence into mass-produced technology since the 1920s. There are two kinds of planned deterioration in a product: one is technical, the other is stylistic.' The writer compares the build quality of a 20 year-old IBM XT to the modern Motorola Razr phone and concludes that modern gadgets are 'delicate, beautiful supermodels that can't go the distance.'"
Re:SO YOU BUY MORE OF THEM... consumers (Score:3, Informative)
Very, very bad example. With flash prices, a 4GB iPod nano 7 years ago would have cost about as much as your car (a 16MB memory stick cost $66 in 1999, so $16,896 worth of flash parts alone). Flash density was dramatically lower, so it would have been significantly larger than a full size iPod (think "Newton" or maybe even "laptop"), would have cost orders of magnitude more than a full size iPod, and would have held 1 GB less than a full size iPod.
Why sell one player at an exorbitant price that almost no one can afford, then wait for the price to drop as technology improves when you can sell players at a reasonable price and improve the features as the technology improves instead?
Re:Because (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The funny part (Score:3, Informative)
yes, I do. It was caused by a typically reputable manufacturer stealing a [potentially deliberately] flawed recipe for capacitor electrolyte.
no way one could have seen it coming. lots of people were already using their parts and simply got burned when the next load came in with faulty electrolyte.
Re:Not just gadgets... (Score:3, Informative)
I have a Buick Park Avenue, 25-30mpg and a good 250.000 miles on the odometer. The only things I had to repair were the usual O2 sensors, lights and EGR valve and I am not an old-man's driver, I usually go 5-15mph over the speed limit for hours on end.
Then you have those 50-60mpg Japanese cars with 3 cylinders being sold here in this area, that is just laughable. Even 4-cylinder Japanese SUV's here are a joke. The USA is too spaced out and has too much hills and warm/cold areas to get a car built to drive in Tokyo. One of my friends has a 4-cylinder Japanese SUV with 7 seats and when it goes uphill on a 15% slope at 35mph it makes unhealthy noises (grinding in the engine) while traffic is building up behind them (the speed limits are 45mph).
Then you also have Chevy with the 4-cylinder cheap Japanese-modelled cars and my parents have those. They have all types of problems. A bicycle ran in the side on one of them - an 11 year old with a bicycle - and bent the hell out of the front fender, breaking a spring and the switch that controls the interior lighting when the door is open. I had my Blazer come to standstill hitting a pole while spinning out of control at 40mph (winter, ice) and I got a scratch. The front fender hit a tree while off-roading and only the rusted-out breakline pinched.
Re:Not just gadgets... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually everything but the body is much more durable, but auto body is much harder to repair today, at least in some ways. Back in the olden days people used to do metal finishing on cars, which means that there's no filler used whatsoever. This is still fairly common on show cars, but on nothing else. Basically any damaged metal is either beaten back into shape (stretching and shrinking as necessary) or cut out and a patch welded in. If the body man can't repair the damage with hammers, dollies, and a torch from that point, then if anything, lead is used to smooth out surfaces.
The new way to repair auto body is to get it within 1/8 to 1/4" (hopefully closer to 1/8") and then use body filler. Depending on who you talk to the filler is either spread over bare metal or primer. Either way it seals itself to the body in a way that lead doesn't. Then you prime the hell out of it because any non-plastic filler (plastic filler is expensive) is hygroscopic and attracts water.
Okay, so with all that said; modern automobiles are made of a much harder steel than old ones. I'm not sure when the first 100% high strength steel car was made, but I know Mercedes did it in 1981 if that's any help. Today basically every vehicle that is not a full size truck uses a unibody design consisting of 100% high strength steel. Besides its various other characteristics which are not very important right now, HSS is hard. The harder steel is, the harder it is to work, and the more brittle it is. It's also easier to push it past its elastic limit, which is the point at which deformation becomes permanent to some degree. This makes metal finishing of modern vehicles all but impossible which is why we have to use filler.
But on top of that, they're all unibody vehicles. If you get a chance to inspect a modern vehicle which ran into something fairly straight at high speed, open up the trunk and lift up the carpet. Odds are you'll see deformations in the floor of the trunk area. When a unibody vehicle takes a serious impact, the force is spread throughout the vehicle. This is what makes a unibody car so much safer than a full-frame vehicle like, for example, a 1963 Lincoln Continental. Oh sure, that continental might weigh 5000 pounds, but it won't crumple when it hits a wall unlike a 2000 pound honda civic; furthermore, the stress is not distributed throughout the car. These two things combine to make it as if YOU had simply hit the wall, in comparison to being in a unibody vehicle with crumple zones. The unibody is so successful at transmitting force that up to 40% of the force of a front-end collision can be transmitted to the back of the car through the windshield.
Anyway, repairing banged up sheet metal is literally twice as hard as it used to be, if not more. Repairing torn up plastic parts costs just as much as buying new ones - the plastic weld compound is quite spendy and you need to use a special primer to get anything to stick to a polyurethane part. This is not the problem. The reason it costs $5000 when you hit a deer is that the body shops are continually getting away with insurance fraud. For instance, I rear-ended someone (I know, I'm an idiot) with a silverado. I bent his bumper and the brackets. The body shop ordered a complete bumper kit instead of the bumper metal and the brackets. Because they bought all the plastic bits that weren't even damaged, this raised the price of the job by $400. They also charged four hours of work to replace a bumper. This is a job that would take me maybe half an hour.
I took two years of auto body and paint classes from a body man who has been in the business long enough to have repaired cars with lead back when it was simply the way things were done...
More rugged products are available. (Score:3, Informative)
There's good hardware out there. You can buy more rugged phones, especially for Nextel's network. The Motorola i530 [amazon.com] meets the MIL-STD-810F [army.mil] ruggedness specification. It has all the usual stuff (camera, Bluetooth, web browser, etc.), it's much tougher than most phones, it's about the same price as most phones, and it's not much thicker. Available in black or bright yellow.
Shuttle PCs [shuttle.com], the little breadbox units, are very well made mechanically, with good internal rigidity, support for cards on multiple sides, and a liquid cooling heat pipe system that really works in high ambient temperature environments.
You don't have to buy the crap.
Re:Not just gadgets... (Score:3, Informative)
My experience is the exact opposite. Here are the cars my wife and I have owned and approximately how many miles we had them before they were replaced:
1. 1989 Chevy Baretta. Traded it in at about 80,000 miles because we needed a "family car". It had frequent engine problems and needed repairs often.
2. 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix. About 30,000 miles. Absolute piece of junk, spent as much time in the shop as on the road.
3. 1993 Toyota Corolla. Lasted 190,000 miles. Was still running perfectly, when we got rid of it because it was too small for our needs. Never had anything done except routine maintenance (tires, brakes, oil changes, etc).
4. 1994 Pontiac Trans Sport. Needed to have the engine entirely rebuilt after about 30,000 miles (thank God it was still under warranty). Practically coasted it into the dealership at 70,000 miles to trade it in. Another piece of absolutely shit.
5. 1999 Toyota Sienna. Still going... at about 125,000 miles now and running perfectly. Nothing major done except some body work after hitting a deer.
6. 2002 Nissan Altima. Traded it in after 40,000 miles...not because of any problems, but because my wife didn't like the "feel" of it. Don't ask. My wife is picky.
7. 2006 Toyota Camry. Up to about 15,000 miles and still perfect.
Moral of this story? Don't buy GM cars... ever. 3 times we did, 3 times they sucked. Toyota has never failed us... we have a combined nearly 350,000 miles on Toyota vehicles and NEVER anything more than routine maintenance.
You can keep your Buick... your experience with that GM car is an anomaly, in my opinion.
Re:Mmmmm, valves! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Because (Score:3, Informative)
Re:People are cheap (Score:2, Informative)
What are you talking about?? As long as the standard regular consumables are maintained (oil, spark plugs, brakes, etc...), of all cars, Toyotas are the ones that will basically last forever. As will most cars if they are properly maintained (except TVRs - they're just awful for build quality).
And you can't go saying you shouldn't have to do maintenance on them - you use the analogy of aircraft - they have more maintenance than anything. If you serviced and THOROUGHLY inspected your car from tip to tail every 100 hours of use, I'm sure it would last a hell of a long time too. And I would disagree that a plane has a more punishing life than a car - 90% of its life is spent in a gentle cruise. The only stressful part of flight is really the takeoff and landing. A car is constantly in contact with the road surface, meaning more moving parts, and quite often more complexity. Your average automobile suspension & braking setup is A LOT more complex than the same systems on your average light aircraft. And the engine on a car has to work a lot harder, constantly moving through its rev range, whereas a light aircraft's engine is pretty much always sitting between 800-2500 rpm, or thereabouts. And don't forget that owners of cars very rarely treat them with the care and affection with which an aircraft owner treats his plane.
And when it comes to light bulbs, when you're paying 50c or less for a bulb that can easily last years, then I don't see your problem. The incandescent bulb by its nature will slowly deteriorate with use. And it has nothing to do with oxygen in the bulb. Inside the bulb is a vacuum. As the filament is heated by the current passing through it, slowly but surely, some of the tungsten on the surface of the filament will vapourise, then re-condense on the filament in a different place. This results in sections of the filament getting thinner over time, so that any spike in the current can cause one of those thin spots to overheat and break apart, killing the globe. Making the filament thicker wouldn't work, as the resistance of the filament would drop, and it would generate less light. It's just the nature of the design.
Re:Because (Score:5, Informative)
Also, for some very very odd reason, after around 18 months, the solder joints begin to somehow grow little spikes and cause pins to short out.
Ah, tin whiskers. [wikipedia.org] An extra-special gift [wikipedia.org] from our European friends.
Re:Keyboards (Score:2, Informative)
Digital TV forced "up"grade (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you Michael Powell (of the FCC). You did this!
Never Heard of Shear Pins? (Score:3, Informative)
Shear pins are common in machine tools for example, and are the mechanical equivalent of a fuse, which answers your point about electronics.
Re:Is this surprising? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Because (Score:3, Informative)