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.'"
Folks want them cheap. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I bought my DVD player, I got a *really* good deal, and spent $400 on it. I don't even know HOW many years it's been (10 or 11 years, if I recall), and it still works just fine.
These days, people spent $35 on one, and whine when it breaks in a year. C'est la vie.
Weight? (Score:5, Interesting)
To Serve Man (Score:3, Interesting)
Replacement for wearing out offers the chance to get a new one with some incremental features, and the newer styles that have so much social value.
The hidden cost remaining in these gadgets is discarding them. Either labor-intensive recycling, or environmental pollution plus increased scarcity of materials. The original seller doesn't pay most of that cost, so it doesn't show up in the sale price. But it costs the consumers in increased aftermarket costs and labor.
We should take the flimsiness that economics encourages to the next step: biodegradeablility. Make them flimsy not just to human mechanical use, but to our ecosystem, including bacteria. Or even feedable to our pets. That will cut the costs of discard way down. Which will leave us more money to buy new ones.
Until we can get those little buggers to reproduce themselves. Eventually, they'll be recycling us.
Re:I still have an XT - 3 of them! (Score:2, Interesting)
Flimsiness? It's more about cost pressure. (Score:5, Interesting)
The #1 reason that modern gadgets break is because market pricing pressure makes then that way. They are cheap cheap cheap. While a
I work in the hardware industry and pricing pressure causes manufacturers to do crazy/dangerous things to reduce the cost of every single component in a 1000 component product. Farm out calls for 1000 parts to the lowest bidder and you can pretty much guess what the total end result will be on the quality.
ISO 9000 has pretty much gone out the window in the last few years as being just too expensive to implement and manitain by the entire supply chain. Thus we are now constantly (Yes, still even today) dealing with capaciters that explode after 100 hours use, switches that break after 100 presses and an almost infinate variety of unplanned but inevitable hardware failures.
And in the end, if that means that someone has to buy a new phone and a new keyboard every year well, the companies that make them could have worse things happen than selling another product to the same customer. Even if the customer gets mad an never buys from that company again, it doesn't matter, pissed off customers of the competitor will come running back to THEM. As long as their quality is not significantly worse than their competitiors anyway.
But in the end, the age of the flimsy is mostly the end result of the age of extreme consumerism where everyone must have everything and it must all cost 12.95 or less.
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Walmart imports tons of Chinese goods because that's the country to where our manufacturing base has been transplanted by market forces for cheap labor. Customers do not buy Chinese goods because they are seeking them out. Even though I try to avoid Chinese stuff, most recently purchased stuff in my house was made in China because that's all they will sell you at the store. You almost can't buy anything else anymore.
Here's an eye-opener for you. Go to Google Suggest [google.com], which uses the popularity of various search terms to offer suggestions, and type "why is everything" into the box.
Re:Not just gadgets... (Score:3, Interesting)
Many engines that supposedly need a rebuild, actually don't, though, and taking the whole motor apart and "rebuilding" it can make things worse if the rebuilders isn't both skilled and obsessive. Case in point: 3 years ago, my Volvo 245 started making a clanking sound and running on 3 out of 4 cylinders. I took it to the mechanic: "probably threw a rod (broke one of the rods connecting a piston to the crankshaft). You'll need a new motor. We can swap you in a used motor for $2000."
I went home and removed the spark plug on the dead cylinder. Stuck a wire down there and cranked it over - the piston was still moving so the rod wasn't broken. Turns out a valve spring had fractured and wasn't letting the exhaust valve on that cylinder return to the closed position. Total cost in parts to fix - $250 including a new head gasket, various other gaskets, timing belt, spring, valve, and a case of beer. Time 8 hr - I did the job myself with a friend, but that would have come to about $560 assuming a rate of $70/hr. The engine is still running fine 30,000 miles later with 215,000 miles on it.
-b.
Re:Break By Design (Score:2, Interesting)
>2. Business decision to make the device fail. If I can't sell any more widgets, then how will I stay in business?
>3. No consumers want something to last for decades.
Aren't the first two of these points business decisions that got American auto manufacturers in trouble. Ever since the Japanese started taking the lead in quality, the market share has been going in their direction.
And doesn't this go against point 3 ? For many products consumers do want reliability.
Our cordless phone's "1" stopped working after two years, conveniently past the 1 year warranty period - I'd be happy if it lasted decades. Personally, I've never seen an AT&T rotary phone fail, nor even an older touchtone phone.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny you should mention it. I have made several repairs on my five year old washing machine. I also have a double folding golf umbrella I purchased in London nearly twenty years ago from James Smith & Sons, Umbrella Makers (est. 1830). The umbrella is quite complex; it is nearly golf size when extended but it has extra joints to fold down very small. Given the extra complexity this involves, the ubrella ought to be somewhat prone to break down, but it's in perfect shape. As for being blown inside out, I'd probably fly off like Mary Poppins before that happened.
The issue isn't a general decline in craftsmanship; its a decline in the willingness of people to pay a premium for well crafted items. I don't remember exactly, but I think I paid between £40-50 for mine, which in 2006 dollars would be aroun $150. Naturally, I expect a $150 umbrella to last longer than one I bought from a street hawker for $10 during a rain squall. On the other hand, I bought my wife an even more expensive Smith & Sons lady's umbrella, which I regretted because she left it on the subway a week later. But odds are somebody is still using it.
Re:Because (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, a lot of electronics break not due to a sudden surge, but through slow but continual wear. Heat and miniscule but damaging spikes slowly degrade ICs. And since modern electronics are pushing the limits of the technology, you can't use "tougher" materials (like the steel vs aluminum gear example) without using slower/larger/power-hungry components. Some equipment won't have a problem doing this, but in the case of portable electronics, these are the main areas of competition. Integrating all the components tightly reduces the size of a device, making it harder to replace a component. If you look at the circuit board of a new MP3 player, you'll see very few components, maybe a couple ICs and some tiny SMT parts, and that's it. It's difficult to come up with an similar example in the mechanical world, but imagine if you took a printing press and simplified it down to just 5 parts that somehow did everything that the hundreds of parts in it now do. There are no longer small, inexpensive pieces to replace, just large expensive components.
Re:Because (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of this is just good practice, some means more money must be spent, some means a lot more money must be spent.
In 1980, a new VCR cost $700 at a bargain store. It was heavy because it had a high quality machined cast-aluminum chassis. It was good until the heads wore out or the belts failed. Now, a new VCR costs $50 and has many more features. It's light because it's mostly plastic. Technology has advanced; what was transistorized in 1980 is now integrated. Recordings are better due to video processing tricks and better tape. The machine will last until the heads wear out or the belts fail.
Designing electronics so that cheap, easily replaceable parts fail is generally not an option, with the exception of adding fuses and circuit breakers.
How much quality can you afford to create? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a house full of PCs which will probably be the last MS OS code I ever buy. Buy the time it comes to replace the machines, which I'm in no hurry to do, the hardware costs for whatever is MS code current at that time will be too costly for my taste. So I will go with down level machines and run something else like Linux or perhaps just scrap them all and buy cheap mini-Macs. But if I was the kind of person who slavishly followed MS's lead and ran out and bought new machines just to run Vista, I'd find myself in an endless upgrade cycle to keep pace with all of the MS requirements. So it's entirely probable that my 'old' hardware would only have to work for 2 years or so. Given that most hardware lasts for more than two years and the vendor gambles that x% of their market churns their machinery every two years then the value I place on having that hardware last reliably longer than two years is almost zero. I can use cheaper parts, purchased on commodity market with little or no QA or standardization. I can assemble it in the cheapest factory I can find and I will make more money not less even if a large percentage of the product fails between 2 years and some arbitrary date but less than a 'reasonable' period of time.
I addressed this earlier in another post that was flamed when I suggested that MS be assessed a recycling tax for every turn of the OS version crank based on ever increasing hardware requirements that drive needless hardware sales. If they want to sell more software then they need to absorb the cost of churning the old hardware. If they want to pass that cost on to the consumer then we'll see just how receptive the consumer is to the real cost of bloated software. It's really the flip side of the same issue.
Same as in Textile Industry (Score:2, Interesting)
steel, nylon, plastics, and softer metals. The softer items like nylon was designed so
that if there was a jam it would break. The mill would typically have a box of these gears and simply
replace it when the teeth would break off. It is better to replace a smaller, cheaper, and easier
to reach item than have to tear down a whole machine.
better technology = more breakable? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if a similar thing has occurred with technology related devices? With better manufacturing systems and more experience in designing things like MP3 players and laptops, perhaps companies are now building these things to only take a specific amount of abuse that fits into their pricing scheme where before they were overbuilt to take into account unknown factors and manufacturing issues?
upgrading... (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice thing is that. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
A while ago, in my search for a small, dedicated word processor with a long battery life, a big screen and a proper keyboard, I bought an HP Jornada 820. It's a great little machine with no moving parts and a flashcard port rather than a hard drive. Awesome. I use it all the time for writing on the go in ways that make regular lap-top and palm users go, "Wow! I wish I had something which served me as well. How much did you spend? Really? Wow. . . If I gave you some money, could you get one for me also? eBay scares me."
The problem, and I was told to anticipate this, is that the screen on the Jornada 820 likes to break off after a period of use.
So when mine did, I pulled it apart to see why. It's pretty amazing! I discovered inside a set of re-enforced bolt holes in the chassis where some scrupulous engineer figured the screen hinging system ought to be attached. But somebody, somewhere, made the call to ignore those bolt holes and instead use these single, weenie screws in a rather less than strong part of the chassis. A ploy which was clearly designed to have HP's cute little Jorna break with ease. And they do. Thank you so very much, HP!
But since planned obsolescence is a given these days, I was overjoyed!
I simply drilled out the never-used re-enforced bolt holes and employed proper bolts to re-attached the screen. (And because I like to do a really good job, I used some spring-steel and washers to make the whole thing even more rugged. Barring accidents, the screen will never come off again.)
So now I have a computer which by design was supposed to be dead several years ago, but which works just fine for me. And unless the (evil) designers were able to sneak any other time-bomb flaws into the device, my little word processor should last me for a very long time. This makes me happy!
The moral of the story? Learn how to fix things or get used to spending hoards of cash because several somebodys over at HP and similar companies are spineless villains.
-FL
Re:Which makes it more expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Ditto. People drive twenty miles to save five dollars on a $500 TV. As such, too many companies compete on price, and buy the cheapest possible components to do so.
Oh, completely.
And consider the things we've lost as a result of that or "environmentalist" pressures to reduce consumption (which somehow completely ignores the consumption required by more frequent replacement thanks to shorter product lifespans):
They don't build 'em like they used to. And they can't: MTBF isn't a concept, printed in big pretty letters, that Joe Moron will understand.
The Shoe Event Horizon! (Score:3, Interesting)
From Wikipedia:
In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.
Re:Which makes it more expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank God they don't !
The thing is, most everything made 10, 25, 50 or 100 years ago was *also* crap. It's just that for obvious reasons people remember the item that still works 30 years later, but have forgotten about the item that died in its first year decades ago.
In actual fact, the average modern car goes significantly further with significantly less service needed than cars did only a few decades ago. Yes, there where a few exceptions. A few cars built in the 70ies still work fine today, a quarter million miles later. But most don't. A few cars built today are likely to survice the *next* 30 years too.
I remember the cars we used to have in the 70ies. Citroen BX. Refused starting on principal reasons at sub-zero temperatures. Had sucky comfort. Needed like a dozen miles before the heating would even *consider* starting to work. Actually came with a fucking *crank* for starting when the battery/starter/whatever was uncooperative, which happened aproximately 50 times in the 10 years we kept the sucker before we gave it up 10 years old and 80000miles used. It was considered perfectly normal service to need oil-change every 5000 miles. A new wussname-belt every 20000 miles. New tires every 10000 miles and lots of other wear-parts.
10 Years later my (now) wife got a Corsa. A sucky car as the standard of the times was. It still outstripped the BX without even trying. It ended up going twice as far as the BX with 1/3rd the services needed and 1/3rd as many wear-parts swapped. 2 or 3 breakdowns over 13 years. It still runs without a hitch today, with a new owner, we sold it after we married and needed a 5-door car.
12 year later we got a Skoda Fabia. That's about as dirt-cheap as you can go for something calling itself a "family" car. It's only 2 years old yet, so it's too early to judge the thing. But it's run around 40Kkm, and all it needed for it was having the oil changed. We had it looked over regularily, most repairs are on warranty anyway for the first 5 years, but -zip- was found. Ask me again in 10-15 years and I'll tell you how it worked out. I do however have every expectation it will CRUSH the BX and humiliate the Corsa in reliability.
Yes. Anectdotal evidence isn't. However statistics support this view. People use their cars on the average more and more. Despite this, the cars hold up atleast as many years as they used to, while at the same time having slashed maintenance-costs in half or more, with superior comfort and vastly superior reliability.
Electronics is a bit different. People don't *care* to pay even a single dollar more for a TV that will on the average work for 25 years instead of one that will on the average work for 15 years.
First, the things are dirt-cheap anyway. It's not that long ago that even a simple TV would cost more than an average person makes a month. Today you get a much better TV for a weeks salary at most, and if you *do* invest a months salary you get a huge flat-panel which frankly is hardly comparable in any way.
Secondly, technology advances quickly enough that a 15 year old machine lacks enough features that you'd more or less want to swap it anyway -- even if it was still working perfectly. Why pay extra to get 25 years if you're likely to toss the thing away when it's 10 years old anyway ?